Asking for some supplement advice!

[knightofround]

Hey, I'm new here to EN-World, this is really a great place you have here. My only complaint is that I wish it were easier to search these forums by keyword!

Anyway, to the meat of my post.

After a 3 year break of DMing, I'm going to give the job another go. I DMed a couple campaigns in high school. My module was a D&Dized version of pre-Imperial Rome. I wrote all of the material for it myself. It was great fun, but now I'm in college, and I have some more time constraints.

So! I'm looking for a few good supplements to help reduce DM-prep time.

Books I have already:
Player's Guide
Monster Manual I & II
Arms and Equipment
Book of Challanges
Stronghold Builder's Guidebook
Enemies and Allies
Cry Havok
Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil

I'm not 100% what "type" of campaign I will be running. A lot of that is going to depend on what the on-campus D&D club wants. So I'm looking for some good "generic" supplements. For example, I'd love it if there is another "Enemies and Allies" type book out there. I didn't think E&A was a great book, but I did think it was a great concept and I'd love to purchase something similar.

Any of you folks have some good suggestions? I've tried browsing through the EN-reviews section, but it is really difficult to separate the good from the crap.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

If you want a book to help you quickly stat NPCs (ala Enemies & Allies), you really can't do better than Spycraft 2.0, from AEG. It doesn't matter if you never use anything from the book other than the NPC charts, they'll save you hours of prep. They saved me at least an hour a week, and I used to just throw stats together on the fly!

Wizards of the Coast's d20 Modern Menace Manual also has a good selection of pre-statted characters compatible with core d20.

Most of Wizards of the Coast's 3.5 splat books (Complete Warrior, Frostburn, Races of Eberron, etc.) have sample NPCs. Some of them even have accurate stats!

If I recall, there were a few early d20 books chock full of Enemies & Allies style NPCs.

 

[Crothian]

Welcome aboard!!

Well, not generic but there is a nice rome book out by Green Ronin called Eternal Rome. Since you did a rome campaign it might be easy to go back to that if you get players that want that.

As for books like E&A there are not that much that really strike me as good and generic. If you like PDFs there is Ironics by EN Publishing and Shards of the Heart by Tabletop Games. Both can be found on RPGNow.com

Generic books that I use a lot are the En Route series of books by Atlas and the Foul Lcales by Mystic Eye Games. These are older d20 books and are minature adventures and encounters, but very creative.

For my own adventures I like to us the Deluxe book of templates now in 3.5 along with Advanced Beastiary. Both of these books are template books so it allows me to create really interesting and new monsters though familar to the players.

I like to create a lot of NPCs and I'm finding Experts 3.5 by Skirmisher to be a really cool book of more mundane people types. I also use a lot of feats so Feats by AEG is a book that's always in my gamer bag.

And lastly, I have to recomend Thieves World. Its a setting by Green Roinin and relatively new but its also old school since its based on novles first out in 79 but continue to this day. Very grim and low magic, lots of cool rules changes in there.

 

[knightofround]

I don't mind statting NPCs. What I really need is good concepts. I like the idea of anti-adventuring parties, and E&A did a good job of coming up with groups of monsters/adventures, detailing their battle tactics, and providing some of their motivations.

I've looked through those template books and they are great. I definitely think the template approach is > the Monster Manual approach. However, since I've already bought 2 MMs I might as well use them...

Yeah, I saw the Eternal Rome book but it doesn't appeal much to me. Am I the only one tired of seeing PrCs wasting space in sourcebooks?

Thieve's World sounds interesting, although I tend to perfer high-magic campaigns myself.