It will cover most of your basic needs. The only thing we find it's not great at is referencing monster powers. It has a limited list of those, and mostly exists to show how the monster building system works. But aside from that, it's got all the basic rules, character creation stuff, and everything you need to reference at the table. (The monster powers just take up an ENORMOUS amount of space, so I didn't want to replicate them and double the page count.)