I dig what they're trying to do with this product, and they go in some interesting directions with it. The idea of abstracting a monster's rank (Regular = 1, Elite = 2, Solo = 5) and making a few implementation decisions off of that is clever. There are a few choice bits of "be careful about doing X" that can be taken from here and blended together with the DMG's take on building monsters to very good effect. And the goal to make monsters scale at a rate that's a bit more in keeping with the rate of character progression level to level instead of a slow outpacing of same is a noble goal (though there are numbers yet to be crunched on that one to get me fully convinced).

At around ten pages, it's a decent $2 offering. I don't feel my money was wasted, even though I'm not sure the guidelines here would replace my current monster design methodology. It made me think.

This said, I do have some problems with some specifics of the product at first blush. When I first got this, I read the first page, which talks about the goals of the product and notes (fairly) that the D&D 4e designers haven't always followed their own guidelines when it comes to the monsters in the Monster Manual. With that in mind I eagerly pawed through it and raced for the last page. There, we find the Movie Zombie ... and there we find that this product doesn't follow its own guidelines too well either.

As a rank 2 monster (an elite level 6), it's listed with 2 action points -- the guidelines say it should have 1. Its AC is typoed, showing a whopping AC of 219 -- so obviously a typo it didn't really bug me that much, and I did have a chuckle over it (it's a case of two overlapping numbers -- a 19 that got adjusted to 21 by the Elite formula). A few of the other errors -- quite probably typos (I know them well myself) -- are a little harder to catch at first glance. The main attack of the creature is a +17 vs. AC. That's 6 too high -- by either the DMG or this product's guidelines, the attack should be +11. Its three non-AC defenses are all pitched a little too high -- the product's guidelines say they should start at 12 + 4/5ths of level + the monster's rank, which should leave us with 18.8, or 19. But that's what the lowest defense (Reflex) is set at, and the other two are at 2 to 4 above it. I'm also not too sure about a monster at level 6 having ongoing damage of more than 5, and this one has ongoing 10 damage in addition to the base damage the attack deals -- the accompanying text talking about building this particular monster does not shed much light on that.

At the end of the day all of this may simply be water under the bridge, though. While the example monster I've particularly paid attention to has a number of errors, that's only one page out of the ten, and the guidelines that it doesn't seem to pay attention to -- which make up over half of the product -- look to be pretty solid ones. These guidelines may be of particular use when designing monsters at the middle of the Paragon tier or higher (where I believe these guidelines and the DMG's begin to diverge most notably). So while it may be an entertaining faux pas to talk about the 4e core designers not following their own guidelines only to present new guidelines and an example that doesn't follow them, it's not TRULY a value-destroying mistake for this product.

The only true test will be actually putting the guidelines found here to use at the table, and this product's too new for me to have done that, so please do take all of this with a grain of salt. This product would be a solid 4 stars for me without the errors. I've knocked one off because of them. But at $2, this one was still worth the buy.