You may assign up to 2 non-unique minor items to your starting characters (i.e., 2 items, not 2 to each character). These items must come from cards that you have not already committed to your play deck.

Starting characters will be determined by draft as per the guidelines printed on page
55 of the Middle-earth: The Wizards Companion. and page 68 of the Middle-earth:
The Lidless Eye Companion.This method is called the Character Draft (and is
detailed below).
Each Player selects up to 10 characters to put into his or her pool of potential starting
characters. This happens before characters are selected for the play deck. Certain
cards may be revealed as thought they were starting characters. These cards are
included in the pool of starting characters, but do not count against the 10 character
maximum. Each player reveals his or her first choice for a starting character
simultaneously with opponent. If a unique character is duplicated by opponent's
selection, bothcharacters are set aside (this character may not appear in either player's
starting company).

Deck Construction

Only Ringwraith players may include minion characters, resources, and sites in their decks, while only Wizard players may include hero characters, resources, and sites in their decks.

However, there is an exception to this: a Ringwraith player may use any hero item resource card as if it were a minion item resource card. Similarly, a Wizard player may use any minion item resource card as if it were a hero item resource card. The following apply:
[...]

You may use both hero and minion characters. However, you may only use a
character if his mind attribute is 5 or less. All of your non-Orc/Troll characters are
considered to be hero characters. You may only use up to two of each non-unique
character.