After some fluff we get to a reiteration of the Android racial traits along with some extra alternate racial traits and regular ole traits. The 5 alternate racial traits are pretty good to me. There's a bit of difficulty with the wording on the divine racial trait but they do diversify the Android in terms of flavor. The same can be said for the fluff both before and after the racial traits. Between their entry in Pathfinder Player Companion: People of the Stars and their first appearance androids don't have that much flavor text so this was sorely needed. Beyond that the alternate racial traits opens up doors for classes that are generally hard to use with an android.
As I moved on to the archetypes and class features I noticed that this is the second BoHR I've looked at so far to support Psionics with a Cryptic and Psion archetype. The archetypes themselves are somewhat the highlight of the book for me as they take some classes and really make them a part of the race, more so than a lot of other archetypes that could be tacked on to any race without consequence. Same goes for the racial class features.
From there it's mostly the same as previous Book of Heroic Races. There are new racial feats, a new philosophy (as opposed to deity), spells and psionic powers, another archetype (weirdly in the religion section rather than the racial archetype section.) and android NPCs.
Like the previous BoHR this expands quite a bit but I think a lot of fun was had on the crunch on this one in a way that goes a bit beyond the previous entries I've reviewed so far. That doesn't mean the fluff is lacking either. A lot of space is put into describing how androids work in a world. Overall I think that it's a bit more far reaching and flavorful that the android options in People of the Stars, a book that I was very happy to get so I think this one deserves a full 5 out of 5 stars and I'm putting it on my list of potential favorites for this year.
You can find this product over on Paizo.com here.
In the Infinity Matrix campaign I plan to downplay Paizo classes so I'm a bit unlucky that there is so much to support those classes. But it also supports Psionic classes which I plan to push for the campaign and there is enough that is class agnostic to give it to my players for use. I had my own plans for the fluff of Androids since they were basically summed up as 'of mysterious origins' because they were mostly just lost machine-people found on Golarion, but here there's a lot about how they think and interact with others and each other so I'm definitely making this the baseline for how androids work in addition to adding an actual origin.
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