I was excited to stumble across a book expanding the use of ritual magic for 5th Edition D&D. But, while this book makes the attempt to do this, the effort is really pretty middle of the road.

It lists new spells specifically intended to be used as rituals (rather than fast cast like most spells). These are generally fine. They are probably the best part of the book, and they didn't stand out as obviously bad to me. The book suggests using them as adventure seeds, and in fact the ritual to "Raise the Sky Citadel" seems specifically intended for this purpose.

But I also had hopes that this game would open ritual magic up to non-magicians. And it sort of does. It has a section on non-ritual casters (characters not trained to perform rituals). But the entire extent of those rules boil down to the idea that non-ritual casters will always screw things up in some way. There's a random roll table of consequences (with some potentially much worse than others), which are presumably intended for use with ritual spells from the standard D&D list. But also, each new ritual spell from this document comes with it's own specific consequence (I can only assume to be used instead of the random roll table) for non-ritual casters. These specific consequences are often so bad that there is really no point for a non-ritual caster to even attempt the spell. So, as an extension of the existing ritual rules this system seems not particularly useful to me.

This is a nice set of ideas and a good basis for expanding the otherwise limited set of Rituals that are available to PCs. They have smart, non-adventuring rituals like "Union of Two Souls" for marriage or "Assuming the Mantle" for crowning royalty. They have rituals for things like putting people into stasis or sanctifying ground or exorcising demons. They even provide some ideas of rituals as plot hooks, such as keeping a flying castle afloat.

There's also a section on rituals for non-spellcasters.

Overall I like the ideas and will likely be using a few of these in modified form for my own campaign.

If this book comes up short of 5 stars it's because it lacks professional polish.

• The layout is really poor. The Merry Respite spell splits across two pages with two lines on the first page.
• The Assume the Mantle spell splits across three pages even though it's less than a page of text because someone decided to put a picture of thief picking a lock in the middle of the paragraph. Yes, this significant 9th-level spell is split across multiple pages and highlighted by artwork that has nothing to do with the spell.
• The text includes 4 pieces of art and maybe one of them seems thematically relevant.
• The text is painfully difficult on the eyes. Some of the header fonts render with zero kerning, the spell titles are white on black with insufficient border, the header is really wide and completely empty.
• There are definitely pieces of the text that need another round of editing. For example, Magic Seal says that the imprisoned creature can attempt to break free, but then fails to describe how this happens. Instead it details that the caster has to re-cast the spell or the imprisoned creature automatically breaks free, which kind of negates the "attempt" because there is no such thing.