Relics and Rituals is the second book in the hardback Scarred Lands series produced by Sword and Sorcery Studios (of White Wolf). The first harback, Creature Catalog, was a rather impressive effort for a 3rd party product that actually beat the official Monster Manual to the stores. Likewise, Relics and Rituals does for spellcasters and magic what older second edition books such as the Tome of Magic (and Unearthed Arcana before it) were meant to do.
Because this is officially a book in the Scarred Lands series, most of the material contained within is supplemented by interesting flavor text that hints at the depth of development with which SSS is attempting to bring their principle campaign world to life. Until an official campaign book is released later this year, I would hesitate to say that the campaign-specific information is all that useful, but it does allow for some interesting ideas. Certainly, the Scarred Lands are shaping up to be a more interesting and distinctive campaign offering than some of the other worlds now being portrayed in various lisenced products.
Since I prefer to use my own campaign constructs (and occasionally Ravenloft), it was important for me that this book be useful for any fantasy game. In fact, the material is flexible enough to provide plenty of material for anyone with little or no conversion necessary. It probably does help a little bit if your campaign world has a darker, harsher tone to it (ala Dark Sun, or something Hyperborian), but the actual game-related text and detail-specific information for this book is sufficiently generic to be useful for anyone. My players found the new arcane and divine magic a welcome addition to the somewhat limited spell lists of the Players Handbook.
The new magic items, artifacts, and relic rules include some interesting additions to the game, including the idea of Tattoo magic, which while brief, is a novel concept that can be tantalizing to players.
The new prestige classes include such things as blood witches, penumbral lords, and incarnates. All of these prestige classes are seemingly balanced (although I have yet to see a player take one up, so take this notion with a grain of salt), and while they do seem to reflect the flavor of the enigmatic Scarred Lands campaign, their text is presented in a sufficiently generic format that they can be used as-is. In fact, I felt that these particular pretige classes were presented in an even more generic and useful fashion than those seen in the Iron and Fist resource from WotC, which focused an excessive amount of detail on the Greyhawk-connections of such classes at the expense of more generic material.
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