I've really liked most of the Rite Publishing stuff for PFRPG, keep it going guys! The Ironborn of Qwesthaven presents an alternative race that is not somewhat unlike the other race one might be familiar with that is a living construct. This will give many different building options to customize size and other attributes to suit ones preference. I find this to be in the true spirit of the PFRPG system. If one wishes to play a living construct in the PFRPG system, this is a great race option for you.

I like this product a lot as an alternate take on the Warforged from 3.5. It has a lot of flavor information specific to the Questhaven setting and is partially written in a first-person perspective from a member of the Ironborn, which honestly was less useful to me. However, if you ignore the fluff and focus on the crunch, what you have is a VERY flexible system for creating a variety of constructs, either as variations on a single race or as entirely different creatures. With rules for small, medium and large Ironborn, 20 or so Ability Packages ranging from Acrobat to Divine Mark to Mountain Design for a variety of abilities, and variable ability score modifiers, you can create nearly anything you want with Ironborn. In fact, that may be one failing - if your group is more focused on pure optimization than anything else, a player can probably find a way to make an Ironborn fill any role they like, but playing a living construct will not appeal to every player, so this probably isn't an issue. Some of the Ability Packages such as Secondbuilt even have options within options, allowing for a high degree of customization. In my game, an Ironborn with +2 Dex, +2 Int, -2 Str and the Acrobat Package is doing a great job filling in for a player who always wanted to play a Nimblewright PC.

When I first saw this, I did think that this was going to be a re-hash of the Eberron Warforged but made for Pathfinder. I must say that I was gladly surprised and that I was wrong. I liked the Ironborn pdf. I don't really know much about Questhaven being that this was my first pdf that I bought from Rite Publishing, but I decided to include the Ironborn as a race in future Pathfinder game that I am running. I liked the Constructed sorcerer bloodline, and the different traits that Ironborn get to choose from. I do think the Centurion trait might be a little overpowered (it allows the PC to start with Armor equal to plate mail), but I felt the others were interesting and brought background flavor to the Player Character. I think the Ironborn pdf is affordable and a great product.

Disclaimer: I HATED, HATED, HATED the Warforged. There are several reasons for this and it has, quite frankly, been the main reason for me not to buy this pdf for a long time. Until one of my players asked, whether it would be possible to play a gear-enhanced human and presented an excellent 4 page backstory. I dislike construct races for PCs, but his concept was cool.

To the review: The base race is VERY well-balanced and the ironborn-subtype features the construct-flair without making wilderness/starvation/environmental adventures a joke for the character. Kudos! The true strength is the versatility of the race, though. You choose a base-suit of abilities according to the purpose of the ironborn. The concept of the "burden", i.e. an instilled craving to do what it was created to do helps to easily drop them in any adventurer group and makes for nice roleplaying opportunities. The ability suits are well-balanced, with one possible exception: The Centurion Suite is, on low levels, the ULTIMATE tank. Plus, it hits a pet peeve of mine: It has a 25% chance to negate crits against the players. This is the only suite I'd exclude for my players, at least until they are level 5. My favorite was the Omenbuilt: I'm going to use the mini-token mechanic for other chars, too. Awesome!

The feats are well-designed and don't seem to be too overpowered, although two of them hit another pet peeve of mine: "Spring-loaded Reflexes" and "intricate joints" give Ironborn access to uncanny dodge, and improved uncanny dodge, respectively. These are class features for me, not something that other classes have readily access to without multi-classing.

While the prose is good, it's not as AWESOME as the prose in the "Wyrd"-pdf.

Due to the fact that it hit 2 pet-peeves of mine, I give it 4 stars. Highly recommended for any campaign and better designed than the warforged.

Ironborn of Questhaven is a 21-page PDF (16 pages if you remove the covers, OGL page and ads) for the Pathfinder RPG written by Steven D. Russell and published by Rite Publishing. This is part of Rite Publishing’s Questhaven line.

The layout is a standard double column design, clear and easy enough to read with a nice set of bookmarks to aid in easy navigation. The art is all black and white pieces and spare but conveys a solid view of the Ironborn.

The Ironborn are a created race, and each made for a specific purpose by powerful arcane magic. The Ironborn are amazingly flexible in design, ranging in size from small to large, with stat bonuses chosen by the creator and then further customized by selecting one of twenty-two ability packages which express exactly what the Ironborn was created to do ranging from acrobat to woodwalker, diabolic design to spellmaster. From a purely mechanical standpoint, this gives an almost unprecedented ability to build exactly the racial power set to optimize a character to be what you wish them to be. Now, Ironborn do have some limitations, they are vulnerable to magical rusting, and suffer penalties to most social skills. Additionally, as all Ironborn were built with a purpose, they are driven to perform that purpose on a daily basis or they slowly start to become unbalanced.

A selection of feats related to Ironborn are provided, ten in all including the Create Ironborn item creation feat, most of which involve modification to the physical structure of the Ironborn. A sorcerous bloodline specific to the Ironborn -constructed- is included along with a clockwork familiar template.

While I find the idea of the Ironborn very intriguing, their ability to be extremely focused and efficient at what they are designed to do risks over shadowing ‘normal’ races in those roles. However, an all Ironborn campaign could be a fun experiment and Ironborn as antagonists should be an interesting challenge. If you are interested in such races, you should give the Ironborn of Questhaven a look.

Disclosure: As a featured reviewer for RPGNow/DriveThroughRPG, I received my copy of this product for free from the publisher for the purpose of this review.