He took the time to give me an in-depth demo of the game, and I was very impressed. The characters start off after the old pool reactivates and starts exuding a wave of undeath. A new pool of radiance is connected to the old one. An experienced group is sent through to help contain and defeat the evil. As you arrive with your party, you meet up with what's left of them.
Characters are fully customizeable.
Gnomes are not available because they were taken out of the 3rd Edition during the phase when PoR was being developed and were put back into the handbook at a later time, but it was too late to add them to the game. New classes for 3rd Edition are monk, sorcerer and barbarian. Barbarians have Rage, which basically means he can get additional strength, constitution, and morale at the cost of a few points of armor class. Unfortunately, alignment does not affect one's character. Everybody usually plays their own kind of personality and what we didn't want to do is dictate how certain things should come across from a character point of view.