Going through the levelling up process for Lanharath, my kalashtar ardent in Martin’s Eberron campaign, I first began by looking at multiclass feats to retrain Martyr’s Surge into. (Martyr’s Surge is a great feat, but I’m not getting bloodied enough – that’s Adam’s job). Eventually, I settled on a bard multiclass feat, although – just to be fun – I took the Heroes of the Feywild one which gives me a skald’s aura and the minor action to use the healing surge is taken by the character being healed, not me.
Then I went a little deeper, because I’ve been getting interested in alchemical items. How about taking the Alchemist feat? I did a search on the D&D Compendium, and in addition to Alchemist, turned up the Mark of Making feat.
It’s a really impressive feat: Alchemist at 2 levels higher, Enchant Magic Item at 2 levels higher, and counts as Ritual Caster for Creation-type rituals. Ooh. Nice.
It changes Lanharath into more of a Fiddler-type character (from Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen), which I’m quite happy with. It’ll also give him ranged and area attacks, which will be very nice given how much he’s failed to get into melee recently. Of course, it’s unlikely he’ll find the reagents in the middle of this swamp, but it won’t be that long before we head back to civilization and he can start using the Mark.
So, in addition to giving him orange skin, the mutating effect of the pyramid seems to have given him the Mark of Making! At his next level – 10th – he’ll take the multiclass bard feat (which will give him training in Arcana).
It seems like a fun thing to do with the character, and this is the right time to do it.