Not sure if this would be better here or in a 3.5 rules thread given the campaign specificity, but I thought I'd try my luck here first...
I'm playing a character who's a member of the Knight Phantoms, and my DM has been really bending over backwards with the plot (and rules in some cases) regarding the class' approach to things (I'm not a Citizen of Aundair per se, for instance, just a soldier who tended to work exclusively with Aundaire during the war and usually with the Order of the Knights Arcane.) He and I were looking over what it'll take to get into the class, but we're puzzled by how Lord Darro, the leader of the Knights Arcane and the Knight Phantoms, managed to qualify for the class. It requires proficiency with all martial weapons, but Darro somehow got in with six levels of Wizard instead of the more common Wizard 5/Fighter 1 route. (He's listed that way in Five Nations and The Forge Of War, the only two places where we've found his statistics so far.)
Now, we've not ruled out the possibility that this is just one of those "Sometimes NPCs Are Special" situations, or even the possibility that it was a mistake in one book that got copy/pasted into another, but we're wondering if there's some trick we're missing for gaining Proficiency with all martial weapons (a "region of origin" quirk, or some odd set of obscure feats or something along those lines.) Any thoughts?
I doubt this is the case for Lord Darro, but there is a feat that gives proficiency with all martial weapons - the Militia feat. The problem is, it's in a Faerun book. My guess is it's an editing mistake which will be skimmed over due to "NPCs sometimes are just special".
(There's also weird racial techniques to pull this off, but Darro is human.)
Tempest_Stormwind wrote:
CraterLabs wrote:
Wow. Yeah, the Phantom Rush thing seems fun, though likely not something I could get away with (especially since the campaign's been going for a while and I'm already at level 3).
I showed Militia to my GM, and he thinks that given my character backstory and the fact that regional feats can be changed when used in different settings, he's willing to handwave it a bit if I want to take the class for my next feat. That won't really speed up my entrance into the class since level 6 is when I was going to take a level of Fighter anyway, but I might well take it instead of giving up the caster level.
The other similarity between Phantom Rush and my build is that I'm also using Abjurant Champion, though I was mainly thinking about it as a two level dip. The classes seem to work pretty well together.
When building gishes in 3.5, Abjurant Champion is one of the go-to classes, and I would enter it as soon as possible. Knight Phantom is one of the "fillers", though it usually isn't used much due to high prerequisites - but that won't mean it won't serve. It's full BAB and 9/10 casting, and has a few other (small) goodies on the side, so it should be on the "consider" list, though often low priority unless you're in it for the organization.
With Phantom Rush, it's because if you're giving up full attack channelling on a duskblade anyway, there's almost no reason to not do Abjurant Champion there.
(You might find a few of the other tricks present in the builds in my signature useful. I annotate why we took each of them, so they make good learning tools. "Gish" is a generic term for warrior/mage, and it's the keyword you'll find for that specific type of build, although most gishes also benefit from main caster tricks as well.)
Tempest, I just looked over Phantom Rush and you're making me want to go back to 3.5 
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CraterLabs, it's unlikely that Darro has any special methods of entering the prestige class that were not listed in his entry. More than likely, it was a simple oversight.
The level requirements are weird. I think Five Nations says there were around 400 Knights Phantom at the height of the war, which is a lot of 6+ level characters. I was thinking of an encounter where they ride over the side of a flying airship to board it and take it over, but then realized that it would require CL 14, which is just unrealistic. (Though maybe if the 3rd edition spell was combined with the 4th edition ritual, one high level character, say a PC, could cast it for a group.) Oh well, I'm a fan of the Knights Phantom regardless (kind of bummed they can't really work in 5th edition).
What about Knight Phantoms'll make them hard, do you think?
Part of the problem with the Knight Phantom PrC is that is that it's a bit of a mess mechanically: You're a melee-centric dragoon riding a horse made of force, but have to sink 5-6 levels into a pure arcane casting class to meet the PrC prereqs, but the PrC itself gives you a SLA version of the prereq spell that necessitated the large number of arcane caster levels in the first place. My group's been playing in my Eberron game for the past...five years? And we've been in a fun post-3.x world for that whle time. If one of my players came to me and wanted to do a Knight Phantom, I'd just tell them to roll a variant duskblade and we'd kitbash the Quickcast ability into a phantom steed progerssion. It's what I've done when statting out the Knight Phantoms the PCs have run into.
But my game also features a space mutant party member who shoots healing lasers after being irradiated by the ambient magic in the Ring of Siberys when my party ventured to a derelict giant orbital platform. (That was also the prison of an Overlord.) So I am perhaps not the best person to listen to when it comes to discussing the letter of 3.x's mechanics.
Khan_the_Destroyer wrote:
There's a lot of things in Eberron that, I think, are sort of counter-intuitive to the whole "not many high levels NPCs" thing, this being one of them. That's actually why I think a lot of Eberron options will work better when translated to 5e. Backgrounds, for instance, feel like they have the potential to give players "starting prestige classes" of sorts. I've actually got a few 5e Eberron backgrounds that I've been toying with in some of my home games. The backgrounds themselves wouldn't be that powerful, of course (a Knights Arcane background, for instance, likely wouldn't give you much more that riding proficiencies and an association with the Knights Arcane, Phantom Knights and other groups related to Aundaire's army), but it could be used as a prerequisite for other things to unlock later in a character's career, so to speak.
And those feats... look very useful. If I wasn't already dedicated to playing through the prestige class for this campaign, I might petition my GM to let me use those. Thanks again!