Stonechild Druid 7 / Earth Dreamer 5

[Adumbration]

So I'm looking at ECL 18 on a one-shot, and I'd like some advice on build. At the moment I'm think about Stonechild Druid 7 (UA no wildshape variant) / Earth Dreamer 5, going for the whole stony look. Any advice on it? I know that it's a bit underpowered - losing spell levels and all - but I can compensate some of it with Practised Spellcaster and, to be honest, I'm mostly going to use the spells for buffing and summoning, and make it pretty melee type of guy.

One of the other players is going for a rogue/sorceror "in Kaito-Kid style", whatever it means, so it's not going to be that optimised game anyway.

Any advice for building this character? I'm not really dead-set on anything, so suggestions would be welcome.

[Talya]

If you really want to go melee druid with the same flavor as stonechild, Goliaths have melee-flavored substitution levels for druid and lose fewer caster levels, as I recall. (Heck, with buyoff, goliaths don't lose ANY caster levels.)

[Adumbration]

If you really want to go melee druid with the same flavor as stonechild, Goliaths have melee-flavored substitution levels for druid and lose fewer caster levels, as I recall. (Heck, with buyoff, goliaths don't lose ANY caster levels.)

The melee side came more automatically from Stonechild side, due to +8 to Str and Con - if I decide to with something else, it's likely to be a full caster. I was just trying to figure out if Stonechild is a playable race as such.