NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Windjammer" data-source="post: 5041563" data-attributes="member: 60075">4E MMs are just that - manuals, for direct table use. They fall flat for pretty much everything else. They are my favourite 4E books by a far shot, but that's because I've got shelves full of material on which to base the creatures' backgrounds. For newer DMs I guess the theme-heavy monster books on undead and dragons are a better place.  By the way, the OP's standard for background rich monster books shouldn't be Privateer - it should be Black Industry/FFG. The monster books for Warhammer Fantasy/40K (Old World Bestiary, Creatures Anathema) are a notch above the Monsternomicon's.4E published adventures diverge very little from the Dungeon Delve recipe - here's a collection of encounters, utilize them as you see fit. Again, it depends what you want from a published adventure. If intriguing NPCs and locales, not to mention a novel plot line with a good twist or two are imperative before you play a module - then you need to write these yourself. From scratch. 4E mods don't provide them, and sometimes the result is refreshingly (if a bit involuntarily) comic. In fact, I like Revenge of the Giants so much in that vein, that I'm going to play it soon with my group unmodified... shudder... and I've conveyed to them that they're in for the Kung-Fu Panda of D&D modules.Turning now - again - to the OP's point of comparison... I've run quite a few of Paizo's modules. And they can't be run out of the book either without a lot of prep work - I've often found I need at least a week's time (better: two weeks) to really get on top of the material before I can start running it. And that still involves doing lot of write-ups, adding in read-alout texts etc., make good use of cross-references (with post-it's etc) and so on. In the end then, I always find myself doing a lot of prep work on published material anyway. It's a bit hard to find stuff that suits that work process, since it basically means you need to look for stuff that serves as a good foundation. Name-dropping companies, or even product lines, doesn't really solve that matter. At all.</blockquote>

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