Dungeons & Dragons introduces its first canonically autistic character
Wizards of the Coast is closing out the 10-year run of the original 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons ruleset with a bang, sending several highly anticipated new books into the world ahead of its planned 2024 revision. While Phandelver & Below: The Shattered Obeliskand Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverserepresent traditional world-expanding splatbooks, the company’s October release is something new for Wizards — a singular product based on a storied magical item called the Deck of Many Things.
TheDeck of Many Things set seems more like a prop at first glance. It includes a deck of tarot-sized cards to represent the magical item itself, which is a fantastically powerful collection of quirky magical spells and items. But the boxed set also contains a book called The Book of Many Things. Like many modern releases from the D&D team, it is written from the perspective of a fictional character. Asteria is described as “a princess turned paladin” and, like Xanathar, Mordenkainen, and Tasha, Asteria chimes in throughout her book with commentary, jokes, and other little flourishes meant to make it fun to read on its own. But the creation of this new character was a bit different from those that came before. That’s because Asteria is the first canonically autistic character added to D&D.
According to designer Makenzie De Armas, the choice to make Asteria autistic was the result of serendipity — a happy accident that evolved from an organic creative process. The idea of being friends with a Medusa is hard but, according to De Armas, could be easy if someone doesn’t want to make eye contact.
De Armas herself is autistic, and was able to incorporate a lot of her own experiences into the character. For instance, there’s text in
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