Oh yeah, I'll definitely wait for nic either way. I was asking whether to wait for the new playtest document, as well!
I'll poke around for a good primer on Eberron. If you want to work on a background for Ortley, I'm game. Veterans of the Last War are pretty thick on the ground these days, so that's a possibility. He also could have gotten training at Morgrave University, the place that sponsors a lot of adventurers coming out of Sharn. It's like the University Indiana Jones worked at, but without the pretension of being a place focused on old-timey classroom learning. They believe in learning by tomb-raiding!
A lot of arcane types come up through the ranks of magewrights and artificers. While artificers are full-on gadgeteers (which may not fit with your character), magewrights are the magical equivalent of the workers on an old Model T assembly line. Your character could have been introduced to magic in a job like that, then expanded his skills through personal effort, a teacher, or anything else you could think of.
EDIT: oh, sorry. You can post the character sheet in the campaign wiki by going to the
campaign page and clicking "Add Campaign Wiki Page" in the top right. Then you just add a link to the character roster, and you're done! If for whatever reason you have trouble with that, you could also PM your sheet to me or post it in this thread, and I'll take care of adding it to the campaign page.