Aessinus & Zaknafein on Mask of the Betrayer

Aessinus and his son were able to catch Obsidian's presentation of the upcoming expansion for NWN2, Mask of the Betrayer, at A-KON last weekend, and have filed a report at NWVault. Interesting tidbits about the expansion from their report:

• 4 new character races will be available for player characters, the elemental Genasi (Fire, Water, Air, & Earth).
  
• A new base class, the Favored Soul, which is essentially a sorcerer-like class using the cleric spell list. It sounds really interesting. As far as I can tell (based on that link), these are the major differences between a Favored Soul and a Cleric:
• Spontaneous casting of a limited repertoire of divine spells (no spell book), much like sorcerers do for arcane spells.
• Emphasis on Charisma, rather than Wisdom. Clerics usually need high scores in both attributes to be effective, especially when it comes to turning and other divine abilities.
  
• Limited to Medium Armor instead of Heavy Armor.
• Better reflex saves, while still good will and fortitude saves.
  
• Weapon Focus & Specialization for their diety's favored weapon, even if it's a martial weapon.
• Innate energy resistance against a chosen elemental type.
• Wings at lv. 17...
  
• Damage resistance at lv. 20 (either cold iron or silver).
• Not sure on this one: Perhaps no turn undead ability.
  
• A Red Wizard of Thay prestige class will be added (non-good, specialist wizards required), and one of the companions in the OC will be one of these Red Wizards. I don't think he'll get along with my PC. :)
• Apparently there will also be some sort of celestial/fiend called "One of Many" as a companion.
  
• The official campaign will feature random encounters during resting, which should help increase the suspense considerably...and hopefully make for less instances of repetitive dungeon clearing like we saw in the OC (e.g. the warehouse raids).

Update:
According to Kunikos, there have been two other base classes added to the game: the spirit shaman and the duskblade. I haven't seen references for this information yet, but I haven't been following the MotB news that closely. But I added some links to D&D source info on the classes. Both look intriguing. I'll comment more on them later.