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We all have our own opinions about which WotC products are the best to use. Some of us love various products, other of us hate them, but it seems to me there's precious little time given to some of the better third-party products out there. That, plus the sheer, staggering volume of such products means that I think a lot of us GMs have some cool little gems in their collection that they love. Why don't we start sharing some of those that fit particularly well with Pathfinder and enhance the experience for all of us?
Since I'm starting this exercise, I'll go first.
Path of the Sword, Path of Faith, Path of Magic, and Path of Shadow
Fantasy Flight Games
These used to be about $25 each, but they can now be had in PDF form for $5 apiece at RPGnow.com. They were fairly solid 3.0 "complete" style books, but the real gems in these were the legendary classes. Legendary classes are 5-level prestige class-eque classes with extremely high requirements (mechanically, they can't be entered by characters of less than 13th level) and (and this is the important bit) at least two quests, detailed enough to be impressive but vague enough to fit into pretty much any campaign world (and heavily open to GM interpretation; things like slaying demons, finding lost tomes of lore, and taking all comers from a local thieves' guild in knife fights) that the character must fulfill to get in. Once those are accomplished, the character is locked into the legendary class until they finish it, but the legendary classes are massively worth it. They each have a menu of powers that you pick, and the longer you wait to take a power, the better it is. For instance, a couple of the roguish legendary classes have an increased sneak attack power. You get an extra number of sneak attack dice equal to the level of the class you take it at. That leaves you with an interesting choice. Do you want one extra die of sneak attack NOW, or do you want to wait until the fifth level of the class and get a whopping extra 5d6 of sneak attack? Somewhere in between? Want to pass that up entirely for some other ability? I love that mechanic for a number of reasons. It gives players something to shoot for, but it also gives GMs some great fodder for adventures AND if all the characters are going for a legendary class, it guarantees everybody some screen time. That's a lot of coolness packed into a five-level class. As an added bonus, there are evil legendary classes that the GM can use to make truly memorable villains. A great creative resource for GMs.
The Tome of Horrors Series (Revised, II, and III)
Necromancer Games
Some of the best monster books ever. The first one, as I'm sure many of you know, updates all kinds of old, previous-edition monsters to 3.5. The other two volumes are original material from the Necromancer Games staff. I think of the three, the second volume is my favorite (some of the coolest undead I've ever seen), but they're all fantastic.
That's seven books already, but I'll have more later in the thread.
The Book of Fiends
Green Ronin
I know this book was a bit dark for some folks' taste but I loved it and the two earlier books it was based on. You'll recognize at least one author's name, Erik Mona too. I thought the cover didn't quite work but I'm probably being nit picky. If you like using demonic powers as antagonists in your games I definitely recommend it. I can see some branching paths in Rise of the Runelords that could make use of this book and may do so when I start up my Runelords campaign next month.
Iron Kingdoms
Now, if you don't like steam punk as a style you won't like the IK books but I love the production and sytle of these books. Unfortunately they're mostly out of print and expensive as heck to acquire via auction sites and such. I really wish they'd put these out via PDF. The Monsternomicons are especially good for a wide variety of settings.
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Well, The Bibliophile took two of my recommendations, so here's another one:
Advanced Bestiary
Green Ronin
A huge, hardcover monster book filled with templates, including more powerful version of every undead creature in the MM and rules for making any type of undead a template rather than just a creature with hit dice. But even if you don't much care for undead, there's plenty in here to get you inspired. I made two major campaign villains using the contents of that book in my last campaign, and the players loved them.
I'll be back with more this afternoon, but real life demands my attention.