As it turns out, I play in the same evening game that Bruce and Logan do, so I’ll try to talk about different parts of the game session than they have.
We’ve been playing in Dave’s Eberron game for several months now, and the party’s reached 6th–8th level with a fair bit of turnover due to mortality and players coming and going. Our current mission is to destroy Castle Smolderthorn, a huge fortress floating high in the air. It’s tethered to the ground by several long cables or chains made of pure elemental fire, and there’s a bound elemental that holds the castle in place. Release the key elemental, and the whole evil place soars up into the cold dark reaches of space and we heroically abandon hundreds of evil minions to their icy, airless doom—justly deserved, of course.
My character is Karhun. In the 3E incarnation of our game, Karhun was an illumian warblade/warmage, mixing up Nine Swords stuff with a decent amount of arcane firepower. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet gotten to illumians, warblades, or warmages, so I was faced with a pretty tough translation for my character. I eventually settled on making Karhun into a human warlord, and then using our multiclass system to dip into some wizardly bits. I’ve been tanking a lot for the party anyway, so converting to a melee-competent base class seemed pretty reasonable, and multiclassing wizard means that I can get more out of my character’s outstanding Intelligence score. The wizard abilities I gained give Karhun a couple of decent ranged area attacks each encounter, something warlords otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of. That means I’ve got lots of flexibility. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll just have to get hopping and design the swordmage class we’ve been talking about.
After we fought the flame priest and his minions (see Bruce’s and Logan’s entries if you don’t know what I’m talking about) we eventually found ourselves confronting a chamber very ominously named the Tomb of the Black Host. We explored other rooms around it to see if there were a different way to go, but no dice—we had to go through. The walls were burial niches chock full of old corpses, and there were three big golden sarcophagi in the middle of the room. We tried to quietly file through without disturbing anything, but you can imagine how that worked out. In the blink of an eye a dozen vampires poured out of their hiding places in the walls, and mummies starting climbing out of those big sarcophagi. It seemed like every square in the room had something dead standing in it.
Our first instinct was to begin blowing things up. Logan’s warlock laid down a Mire of Minauros on one side of the room, dissolving a couple of vampires and creating a nice acidic bog to guard our right flank. Infandous, Bruce’s “psion,” blasted another bunch of vampires with an area-effect attack. Then Karhun got his turn; I used one of those multiclass abilities I was talking about, and used a wand attack on more of the vampires. We discovered, much to our relief, that we were facing vampire minions—dangerous if they mob you, but otherwise easy prey for some big AoE attacks like the sort we were throwing out.
On my next round I saw several bad guys lined up in a row, so Karhun dashed a few squares over and used another wizard ability—my once-per-day scorch, a powerful fire attack. Karhun blasted two mummies and a hapless vampire minion for a pile of fire damage. After that, we were down to just a couple of monsters left, so Karhun switched over to melee attacks and spent the rest of the fight laying about him with his sword. I rolled pretty badly from that point on and managed to miss for the next three swings. Fortunately, the other players picked me up, and we finished off the mummies without too much trouble.
As it turns out, Toby’s warforged paladin is essentially indestructible under the current rules. I suppose a warforged ought to be tough, but the really odd thing is that his damage resistance (any DR, really) ignores psychic damage and poison damage. I’m not sure things ought to work that way; it seems to me that some sorts of damage ought to bypass DR by their very nature.