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When my home game decided to move from Pathfinder to 5e several years ago, I wasn't exactly subtle in my complaint that we were throwing away a lot of years of quality content to change the rule system. Even after years and a couple Whoever's Guide to Whatever books, 5e still doesn't have anything like the breadth and depth of options in Pathfinder. I've made my peace with this; I'd rather play an RPG based on a musical based on the Twilight series than not play with my group but I am nonetheless grateful for 3rd Party Publishers that add good, balanced content to the game.
That was a weird digression.
So, The Libram of Lost Spells! Twenty new spells spread out between all the casting classes in the game in a range of levels. Let’s talk about a few!
Accelerated Healing is a second level spell for druids and clerics that makes the target's hit dice heal for max when you rest and lets the target recover all their expended dice after a long rest. That's a big bucket of out of combat healing, especially at higher levels when you're up to your eyeballs in hit dice. A flavorful spell that can have a big impact.
Bone Spurs (2nd level wizard) and Circle of Serpents (2nd level cleric, druid and ranger) are both neat spells that hamper movement, the former by making it painful to move and halving speed and the latter by making a bunch of snakes eat your face if you leave their circle.
Clutch the Heart (6th level cleric, sorcerer, wizard, or warlock) and Kiss of the Vargouille (5th level warlock or wizard) are both nasty spells. Clutch deals a boatload of necrotic damage and keeps it coming if the target continues to fail its save. If it dies, its heart flies out if its chest and into your hand. That’s some real Kali Maa juju. Kiss is downright creepy and yanks the head off a humanoid target and turns it into a bat-winged chomping machine to gnaw on your enemies. When the spell ends because of a passed save the head comes back to its body and the normal head of the creature is restored. The spell text specifies that reducing the body or the head to zero hit points sends the head back and “the target creature is returned to normal.” One assumes that that means that the body is somehow healed to whatever its hit points were before the spell since it later says that damage to the vargouille doesn’t affect the target but the lack of clarity there isn’t great. If my reading is right, it's extra cool because you could cast it on a friend who was near death and give them a few rounds where their body couldn't be hurt. If you directed the varguille to flee instead of fight, you could have the full minute of duration to clear up the danger and then heal up your buddy.
The highest level spell is Glassteel (8th level sorcerer or wizard). It lets you turn a piece of transparent material into something like glass but with a higher AC than steel and a boatload of hit points as well as some resistance to damage. It’s neat and I can certainly see it used by a big bad or an NPC but I hardly see this coming up much for PC’s. That’s a little disappointing because when I GM I frankly don’t need a spell for my big bad or NPC to have super strong glass. I can just do that. This is too situational for players to have much interest in it and I wish the highest level spell in this book had a bit more appeal.
My total review score would be four and some fraction of stars. I dislike the ambiguity of Kiss of the Vargouille even as I love how cool of a spell it is. Glassteel is dissatisfying. I'm going to round up to five stars, though because 18 out of 20 is still a 90% good book and all the other spells really are great and range from cantrip to 6th level and there's something for every spellcasting class.
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