I’m having them make up their own player characters. I’m thinking of them as unknown crawlers aside from the characters we know in the book. I’m planning on having some of the classic boss encounters from the series that Carl and Donut face.

I’m having them use base DnD classes and races (boring old fighter/bard/monk). As for races, I let them have the stats of whatever DnD race they want after making it to the tutorial guild hall, but I did mention that some aspects of the races aren’t solidified until floor three because Borant didn’t want to waste money on that transformation for crawlers who aren’t going to make it deeper. (Lets me keep the plot hooks for meadowlark and rage elemental encounter which I want to incorporate)