Quote from: MonkeyWrench;408365The Tome books and Realms of Sorcery are must haves.  Full stop.
The "monster manual" is excellent and a real fun read.
Career Compendium is invaluable as it collects every career in v2, and has expanded character gen tables.
Night's Dark Masters and Children of the Horned Rat as good if you plan on using vampires or Skaven in your games.  CotHR include rules for playing Skaven.
Old World Armory (if you ignore costs) and the setting books (Empire, Bretonnia, Dwarfs, etc) are non-essential, but nice to have.

*sigh* I wish I bought the Career Compendium when I had the chance. Now it's stupid expensive!

The WFRP Companion is also a good book to have. It's really just a collection of articles expanding something in the universe, but some of it is really useful. Heck, the monsters and the organizations alone were worth it for me. Ignore the trade rules.

Speaking of organizations, being new to the Empire you might want to grab Shades of Empire or whatever it's called. It's a book on several organizations within the Empire and while I didn't use it nonstop I got good use out of the Roadwarden, Hedgefolk, and Knights of Magritta sections. Also used the Brothers of Handrich section for an adventure I never got to run, so it was used a lot less, but used nonetheless. If you can get it cheap on eBay, go for it. I wouldn't pay full price for it though.

Actually, if given the chance I wouldn't have paid full price for the Companion either. Both are good to have, but not critical.

I really wish I had that Career Compendium. Perhaps I'll break down and get the .pdf? It still seems so expensive for such an ephemeral thing...

-=Grim=-

Makes me happy that I got the Tome of Corruption when I did!

I never even heard of the Career Compendium until now.. that must have been one of their final products before 3e?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;408495I never even heard of the Career Compendium until now.. that must have been one of their final products before 3e?

RPGPundit

Sadly, the last.

Yeah, it's very handy to have.  Too bad the binding on mine sucks.

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;408577Yeah, it's very handy to have.  Too bad the binding on mine sucks.

Yeah, mine started to disintegrate after two weeks. Although in part that's probably because it gets used so much.