The Ironborn

By Mike Mearls

Welcome to the second installment of The Book of Iron Might design diaries. In this column, I talk about the thought and ideas behind different portions of the book. Hopefully, these insights will help you understand why this combat sourcebook turned out the way it did and perhaps help you in creating new rules and material for your own campaign. This installment covers the ironborn, a race of constructs usable as player characters.

A Flexible Class

From early on the ironborn's defining trait, its flexibility at character creation, stood at the heart of my design process. If someone went through the effort to build an intelligent, humanoid construct, they would probably design it for a specific task or craft it to reflect their personality or prejudices. A big, brawny barbarian wizard would likely craft a construct that reflected his culture's values, while a spellcaster who needed a faithful spy might create one designed for espionage. Considering the arcane knowledge and talent needed to create a living construct, it made sense to me that a creator could tinker with the basic formula to fill specific needs.

Given that I wanted the ironborn to be easily configured, I now had to figure out whether I wanted them to be as strong as the core classes or weaker. There's a good argument that a race with such flexibility should pay for those options by making them weaker when compared to a half-orc or dwarf. However, that argument didn't hold water for me. Each of the races is designed to cater to a stereotypical role. Dwarves make great fighters, while halflings and gnomes are excellent rogues. Half-orcs, with their great strength, excel as barbarians, fighters, and clerics who focus on whacking monsters rather than turning undead. The ironborn could, in theory, excel at any class.

The key consideration is that compared to an optimal race-class match, the ironborn doesn't have an advantage. Usually, a poor match (like a half-orc wizard) serves as a fun roleplaying challenge. Players in search of an optimized character aren't likely to select a race and combine it with a class that can't take advantage of its strength. In the ironborn's case, you simply need to match an ability package with the class that it's meant to synch with. The ironborn are not better, they simply allow you to choose them as a race and not worry about restricting them to a specific set of classes.

More importantly, if you look at the question from the opposite end, it makes even more sense to balance each ironborn options package against the core races. If an ironborn fighter is weaker than the optimal fighter-race combinations, why b0ther playing one? If the ironborn is weaker in all possible combinations -- in other words, all of the packages are weaker than the optimal class-race matches -- why bother playing an ironborn in any situation? Thus, for the race to follow my core mechanical concept, it was necessary to balance all of the options against the core races.

Playing Ironborn

While the ironborn mechanics were fun to design, I really enjoyed tinkering with the roleplaying elements of the race. Every ironborn has a burden, or an innate drive to fulfill the task for which it was crafted. It occurred to me that someone who took the time to build an ironborn would want some assurances that it would take to the task set before it. It would be vexing, to say the least, if your shiny new assassin became a pacifist, or if your newly minted apprentice decided he wanted to become an actor rather than a wizard. In The Book of Iron Might I emphasized that the ironborn's burden was included purely for roleplaying purposes to make DMs aware that the burden could play as big or as small a role in their games as they wanted. It played no role in balancing the mechanics, so it would be cruel to rigidly enforce it on a player who simply wanted to stomp on orcs rather than explore his character's personality.

As an aside, I really like explaining rules in those sorts of practical, direct terms. Too many roleplaying books are written like arcane texts that a gamer must decode to truly understand. I try to think of the reader as a fellow game designer who has to alter his game to use my house rules. Realistically, every DM is a roleplaying game designer. Maybe not a professional one, since there's a tremendous difference between designing stuff for a campaign and for publication, but a designer nonetheless.

Building Ironborn

Finally, I think the limitation on how many ironborn a person can construct bears some discussion. Under the rules as written, you can only build one ironborn. Thus, an evil wizard couldn't hope to construct an army of them unless he kept ordering the ironborn he built to create new lackeys for him. Even then, the process is slow and, in a world where orc mercenaries are always looking for work, probably not worth it.

I had two factors in mind with this decision. First, and most importantly, I wanted to give PCs the opportunity to make ironborn cohorts. It seemed logical that, if the ironborn are constructs built by their masters, the PCs should be able to learn and use that lore. In many campaigns, the characters become powerful wizards and skilled warriors. It seemed silly to insist that even a 15th-level PC wizard couldn't create an ironborn just to keep that ability out of their hands. On the other hand, I wanted to ensure that a DM would never have to deal with the headache of a player who abuses a faithful servant. One group's valued ironborn cohort could be another's reliable trapspringer.

On the other hand, I also wanted to give DMs a convenient excuse as to why the ironborn were only recently added to the campaign and why they couldn't spread too quickly. I had a basic aim -- make the ironborn easy to add to the campaign and easy to control in terms of numbers and influence -- and I used it to guide the story material I wrote for them. In many ways, the "fluff" portions of roleplaying material must undergo the same examination and conscious design as rules. Just because background material can't be added, subtracted, or measured using cold, hard numbers doesn't mean you shouldn't create it with a specific need in mind. Background material is just as much a tool for your game as a new prestige class or a feat. When I create "fluff," I try to sculpt it to fit a specific need in exactly the same way as a new spell or magic item.

So, that's the ironborn. In my next installment, I'll talk about the new feats found in The Book of Iron Might. See you then.

Related Articles