Within the last...five days I've made a new character, and it went without a hitch.
But this morning, when the game is slow I went to the test server to experiment with builds, and the game crashes every time it loads portraits during character creation. Tested on surface server, does the same thing. I disabled enhanced portrait pack from the steam workshop, and the character creation worked fine, so it seems something in the mod pack is causing issues.
Horrified this is gonna be another one of those instances where we have to overload DMs with manually fixing each of our character's portraits after a fix. :C