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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 9161083" data-attributes="member: 5948">The five new PC species are bogrin, farrow, pygmy trolls, Idrian marchfolk (humans, basically), and soulless.  The three new classes are the bone grinder (sort of an alchemist/hunter/spellcaster who collects bits of monsters to gather power), shaman, and warlock (this is the Iron Kingdoms warlock, focused on driving and controlling warbeasts, not the conventional D&D warlock)Borderlands and Beyond is mostly concerned with adding the Rhulic Dwarves and Ios elves to the setting and detailing their homelands, plus introducing warlocks and warbeasts to the setting, although it only really supports trollkin, Devourer, and farrowkin warlocks.  Gatormen warlocks are coming in an upcoming book, blackclad druids are available (in English) as a cheap download from the Privateer Press site.  There's no support for Skorne or Everblight yet.  The book contains a bunch of subclasses for regular D&D classes, and for the classes from Iron Kingdoms Requiem.  Ios in particular has undergone massive changes, if you're a follower of the Iron Kingdoms lore.  After [SPOILER="spoiler"]a cabal of Goreshade's Eldritch killed Scyrah and Nyssor, the last two remaining elven gods, elves are now either born soulless, or are turning into undead Eldritch themselves.  Ios is a literally dying nation and elves are a literally dying species.[/SPOILER]The blood witch class is in the later supplement, Nightmare Empire.  This book is almost entirely concerned with Cryx and surrounds, and is the standard PP mix of lore, background, game mechanics, new classes and races and subclasses.  There's a sub-supplement to this one dealing with the Scharde Islands too, for a less-evil Cryx-related campaign.There's been no coverage in the line of Skorne, or Zu (although we're told most of the Protectorate of Menoth have relocated here), or Alchiere, or of the Orgoth homelands (or, for that matter, of that part of the Iron Kingdoms that has recently been re-invaded by the Orgoth).  Neither has there been any coverage of the new Khymaera.From a review point of view, I mostly like the lore.  The books aren't as big and comprehensive as the old IKRPG books were, but they're solid.  They're a bit hamstrung by having to deal with the post-Claiming Iron Kingdoms where a whole bunch of really dumb writing happened, but it's a perfectly gameable setting if you don't dig too far into that.  It's a bit like the 5e Forgotten Realms, where a whole lot of dumb writing happened in the recent past but the 5e books largely try to ignore the implications of all that because even trying to make sense of it all is doomed to failure.  I'm not a massive fan of Privateer Press's overuse of entirely new core classes.  I understand that the Warcaster etc are worthy of new class mechanics since none of the existing D&D classes can really emulate them, but i think they overdo it with things like the Raider from Nightmare Empire, or even the Gunslinger from Requiem which both could have been Fighter subclasses.  And of course since it's based on a wargames setting, you have the factionalism problem - as DM you'd need to set some expectations about what sort of game you're running, otherwise you could have your players roll up a ruthlessly patriotic Khadorian Man-o-war, a Wurm warlock devoted to the destruction of civilisation, an iron lich, an undead elf who wants to murder all human spellcasters, and a benevolent Cygnarian gobber priest of Morrow, and good luck trying to find any group coherence or common goals with that lot.  I haven't been a fan of the adventures.  They're expensive for what you get, very railroady, and they artificially have very low-level PCs getting involved in events that should be far outside their power level and ability.Mechanically, it's varied.  Some good, some bad.  I don't think they're always as well playtested as they could be, but that's true for almost all 3pps.  I'm not going to write a complete page-by-page review here, but if there's any specific classes etc that you'd like me to take a look over, I'm more than happy to give you my impressions.</blockquote>

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