Well, both the 4e DM Screen and the 13th issue of Pathfinder were waiting for me in my mailbox today. There’s a bunch of other stuff that’s on its way, but those are the products that actually found me.

The DM Screen is cool; really, really thick cardstock, and a bunch of useful tables. Well, that’s my initial impression; we’ll see how it stacks up in actual play. I’ll have to do some repair work (as Wizards have errata to it due to changing skill DCs), but that’ll be easy enough.

The Pathfinder AP issue is going to to take some time to digest. It’s the first part of the Second Darkness adventure path, and I have to both adjust to the 3e way of doing things again, whilst digesting the new (to me) campaign setting it’s in. There’s a few things I’ve noticed just to begin with that irritate me, and a few cool things as well:

• Bonuses to attacks of opportunity. I really, really hate these. They’re in 4e as well. They rely on your DM being a poor tactitian for the most part. By the time you get “+1 trait bonus to attacks of opportunity when unarmed”… arggh!!!!
• Statblocks that break across a pageturn. During 3e, I wasn’t using the delve format yet (despite owning all the adventures that used it), but I’ve really, really grown to appreciate it in Keep on the Shadowfell, where it’s used to good effect (as opposed to a few of the 3e products, where it is more of a hindrance). It’s still not perfect, and more details to describe rooms would be great, but I’ll take it any day than an encounter that is constantly having me flip between pages.
• Entries for morale and tactics for the monsters/NPCs are really cool.
• The pregens in Shadow in the Sky are nicely presented. Glad I have the pdf as well, because otherwise they’d be a pain to extract… and they deserve to be printed in colour and handed to the players. Not that I expect to use them, but hey, they still look very nice!

I’ll spend more of this afternoon reading Shadow in the Sky, and seeing what I might use in my games.