Best products from the 4th edition era?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, there were MANY. I liked the Draconomicon: Chromatic Dragons too, it has a lot of fun stuff in terms of dragon lairs, motives, rituals, and etc. Most of it is collected from other earlier edition sources, but it was nicely done overall.

Honestly, there weren't any BAD 4e books in terms of flavor and such. There's not enough meat in the player-oriented books to be really useful outside of running 4e itself of course, but honestly the DSG was about the most Meh! of all the books and it wasn't really bad, just seemed a bit flat to me, nothing really new or unexpected there.

I REALLY liked Demonomicon though, the 4e Abyss is a place where you can do some adventuring. Its horribly lethal, but like all the 4e cosmology, you can go there and do stuff and its interesting.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Regarding Madness at Garmore Abbey you asked:

Sounds cool, I'm guessing it's a boxed set?

Well, sort of... It comes with a lot of stuff like four books, poster maps, monster and effect tokens, some additional dungeon tiles, and even a complete Deck of Many Things so you can hand out cards to the players as they find them.

Alas, all the stuff is contained in what WotC calls a "box" nowadays. Which means it flimsy, only held together by some cardoard insert and not fit to withstand any strain.

Being a boardgamer and having lots of old boxed sets in my collection, calling it "boxed" set" plainly sound wrong.

 

[Will Doyle]

I flipped through the Neverwinter campaign setting yesterday at my FLGS and it seemed nice but also very full of 4E stat blocks.

Don't be put off, it's really very good. Like Gloomwrought, it has lots of encounter hooks that are actually useful at the table, as opposed to pages of background that's never likely to come up.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Were there any gems produced during the 4th Edition era that I should know about? I was thinking of maybe picking up another book or two if it has enough interesting fluff in it.

All I have right now are the the three core books for 4th Edition, the DM screen, the Slaying Stone adventure and the PHB Races: Tieflings thing.

Any suggestions?

If you're looking to fill out your collection of useable/worthwhile rules & options:

PH 2
PH 3, iff you really want to add psionics to your game
Any/all of the ________ Power books
Rules Compendium (convenient little softbound thing)
Adventurer's Vault 2
MM3
Monster Vault, and the supplemental Nentir Vale monster set.
DMG2

If you're looking for ideas, then, depending on where your interests lie, the following are good choices:
Open Grave
Plane Above/Below, Manual of the Planes
Draconomicons (there's two of 'em)
Heroes of the Feywild
Heroes of the Elemental Chaos

I'm not really into settings and premade adventures so much, but Ebberon looked pretty good this time around, and includes the rather nifty Artificer class. Dark Sun worked well in 4e. Forgotten Realms, OTOH, didn't seem to go over that well.

 

[SirAntoine]

The power cards are very nice for the game. So many of the books are well written and usable for new ideas even if you don't play the game. New monsters, new powers for monsters, and so many new magic items.

 

[amerigoV]

I'm not really into settings and premade adventures so much, but Ebberon looked pretty good this time around, and includes the rather nifty Artificer class. Dark Sun worked well in 4e. Forgotten Realms, OTOH, didn't seem to go over that well.

If you are looking for fluff and not 4e crunch, be wary of Dark Sun. The book is upwards of 40% 4e crunch (pages upon pages of class charts). As one who just wanted the setting, I was extremely disappointed. I expected to be some crunch, but no where near that much. It ticked me off to the point that I went through some of my other setting books and looked at crunch to fluff ratio. DS was the worst by a mile. The 3.x Greyhawk Gazetter was the best as it basically had no crunch). The 3.x Eberron and FR were very good in that regards.

So if you get the DS for 1/2 price or less, you might be actually paying the appropriate price for the material (if it were brand new).

I'll not opine on DS in 4e as I did not play it.

 

[D'karr]

If you are looking for fluff and not 4e crunch, be wary of Dark Sun. [snip].

So if you get the DS for 1/2 price or less, you might be actually paying the appropriate price for the material (if it were brand new).

I'll not opine on DS in 4e as I did not play it.

There is a good reason why that particular book has such a ratio. DS is not a generic high fantasy world. The base assumptions have to be skewed for the new campaign setting. The DSCG does a great job of providing the players and DM the tools to run a 4e campaign specifically in Athas.

It is helpful if you have never seen Athas, and if you plan to run 4e games there. If you already have the original 2e Athas material, not much of the flavor is changed, though the timeline is moved after the death of a Sorceror King.

 

[Balesir]

If you are looking for fluff and not 4e crunch, be wary of Dark Sun. The book is upwards of 40% 4e crunch (pages upon pages of class charts). As one who just wanted the setting, I was extremely disappointed. I expected to be some crunch, but no where near that much. It ticked me off to the point that I went through some of my other setting books and looked at crunch to fluff ratio.

In addition to what D'karr said, I think you might find this to be a general tendency among 4E background material, because 4E had very much a philosophy of "show, don't tell". A great deal of the flavour is in the crunch. Monsters, items, features of the land are not flavourful because of their description - they are flavourful because of what they actually do in the game.

 

[graves3141]

If you are looking for fluff and not 4e crunch, be wary of Dark Sun. The book is upwards of 40% 4e crunch (pages upon pages of class charts). As one who just wanted the setting, I was extremely disappointed. I expected to be some crunch, but no where near that much. It ticked me off to the point that I went through some of my other setting books and looked at crunch to fluff ratio. DS was the worst by a mile. The 3.x Greyhawk Gazetter was the best as it basically had no crunch). The 3.x Eberron and FR were very good in that regards.

So if you get the DS for 1/2 price or less, you might be actually paying the appropriate price for the material (if it were brand new).

I'll not opine on DS in 4e as I did not play it.

I was initially excited about the 4E Dark Sun setting book but I remember flipping through it at the store and thinking that it had way too much crunch to make it worth my while, so I skipped it and I'm glad I did. It's even doubly disappointing since I doubt we'll see a 5E DS setting. Oh well, such is life.

 

[Jhaelen]

I was initially excited about the 4E Dark Sun setting book but I remember flipping through it at the store and thinking that it had way too much crunch to make it worth my while, so I skipped it and I'm glad I did.

Well, what did you want to use it for? The 4e Dark Sun book was created to allow you to play Dark Sun using 4e rules. It also features some of the best crunch that 4e has to offer, e.g. it was the first book with character themes.

If you are just looking for background material about the setting you are better off getting pdfs of the original 2e setting supplements or reading the Dark Sun novels.