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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vanuslux" data-source="post: 2009055" data-attributes="member: 937">Essentially a big, fat book about magic in the Scarred Lands setting, Relics & Rituals is almost entirely crunchy stuff.Appearances - Weighing in at 224 pages, Relics and Rituals is hardbound with a simplistic, yet still nice and distictive, black cover with arcane symbols on it.  The interior art is decent but doesn't make much of an impression on me.  Content - After a brief introduction to the Scarred Lands setting, the book dives right into the crunchy stuff.    Chapter 1 - Prestige Classes: Here we get seven new prestige classes.  The Blood Witch is intersting and reasonably balanced.  The Crypt Lord is good, though a touch powerful for how low the requirements are.  The Incarnate is an interesting direction for a druid character.  The Penumbral Lord is also an interesting concept, but has deceptively stiff requirements and most people probably won't appreciate the non-stacking spell progression.  The Sea Witch doesn't seem handled very well, despite it being a fairly archetypical concept.  The Summoner probably should have had a less generic name, but the class seems reasonable enough.  The Vigilant is probably my favorite of the Prestige classes, though the rangerish class seems a bit out of place in a book whose focus is decidedly magic oriented.    Chapter 2 - Spells: This chapter starts off with a few pages about magic in the Scarred Lands setting, a couple of metamagic feats, the missionary domain which all gods offer (and is pretty lame in my opinion) and a rule about arcane magic generating heat which gives a both penalties and benefits, not the least of which is encouragement to go about "extremely scantily clad", as the rules text says.  After that is 20 pages of spell lists, which would have been much, much short if they hadn't been compelled to include all the PHB spells on the spell lists.  They also represent all the PHB cleric domains, but most of them have had spells out of this book swapped into them, so that's okay.  The only new domain is the Missionary Domain, mentioned before, which could have been a good idea if they had chosen spells a little differently.  Then there's 80 pages of new spells, which were the main reason I bought the book.  Most of them are decent enough and the variety definately fills some gaps in the PHB spell selection.  However, there are a lot of spells here that seem either redundant or unbalanced.  Not so much, however, that it's a serious problem.    Chapters 3 & 4 - Ritual Magic & True Rituals: I love the concept of ritualistic magic, so I was really disappointed that these chapters were barely 20 pages long all together.  All in all, this system for cooperative magic doesn't look too shabby, though I would have liked to have seen at least twice the number of "true rituals".  Definately not bad though.    Chapter 5 - Magic Items: No book about magic would be complete without a selection of magic items.  I don't personally have much interest in magic items, but it's nice to have a good selection around for when you need them.  Most of the ones in this book aren't very inspired.  There's also a brief chapter on Tatoo Magic, which seems horribly unbalanced.  Gain a +4 bonus to both Strength and Dexterity for a number of hours each day, for a bargain price of 3,500 gp, or a one use "Get Out Of Death free" card for a meager 1,400 gp?  You won't be seeing these used in my game.  One serious flaw in this chapter, however, is that they left out the Market Prices of all items except the tatoos.  Regardless of these being available online, I consider this a major mark against the book.      Chapter 6 - Relics: The final chapter of the book offers up a nice collection of artifacts, both major and minor.  They're much more interesting than the items presented in the previous chapter, but less useful because of their power level.  Especially since many of them lack any significant drawback that comes with their power.  Even so, I really like this chapter.In Conclusion - This book is a big grabbag of hit and miss crunchy bits.  It's worth having, but I wouldn't miss it too much if it somehow got lost or annihilated.  If you want a high dose injection of spells and a decent system for ritual magic along with sprinkles of other stuff, this wouldn't be a bad choice.  If you're looking for much more, you'd probably have better luck elsewhere.</blockquote>

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