The companion piece. If you want the rules, the six rites, the 25 gold price tag, and where this spell came from, all of that is in the Ceremony explainer post. Go read that first, then come back, because this is the spell people quietly break by getting the whole party married before the boss fight.
Ceremony is the spell nobody prepares until somebody on the internet points out what the Wedding rite actually says. It’s a utility toolbox, so it doesn’t have forty combat combos like Catapult, but it has a small pile of very good real uses and a couple of genuinely cursed ones, so I sorted everything into four buckets. Real uses that lean on the rules. Cheeses that are clever and mostly legal. Questionable stuff that lives or dies by your DM. And the deviant stuff, because when you hand players a plus 2 AC wedding, they immediately start doing math no priest ever intended.
One thing up front, because it’s the single most misread line in the spell. The Wedding rite gives each married person plus 2 AC. It does not stack. Marrying seven people does not put plus 14 on anybody. Each individual creature gets plus 2 while they’re near the person they married, full stop. Keep that in your back pocket, because half the “Ceremony is busted” posts get it wrong. Let’s go.
REAL USES (rules-solid)
1. Coming of Age before a big skill-check day. This is the sleeper. Coming of Age gives one young-adult humanoid a d4 to add to every ability check for a full 24 hours. Not one check, every check, for a day. If you know the next session is a social gauntlet, an infiltration, or an exploration puzzle marathon, casting this the night before on the party face is a real edge. The catch is baked in, a creature can only benefit once ever, so you’re spending it on one person one time. Spend it on the right person before the right day. (Grounded in the RAW text, from the explainer.)
2. Dedication before a save-or-suck boss. Same engine as Coming of Age, but it hands the target a d4 on every saving throw for 24 hours instead of ability checks. If you’re walking into a dragon’s Frightful Presence, a mind flayer, or anything that leans on save-or-lose effects, a day of plus 1d4 to all saves on your most fragile party member is a quiet, strong buff. Same once-per-creature limit, and the target has to want to be dedicated to your god, so pick a believer. (Grounded in RAW.)
3. Funeral Rite to keep your dead from switching sides. This is the one you always wish you’d prepared. Funeral Rite locks a corpse against becoming undead for 7 days, short of a literal Wish. In a campaign with a necromancer villain, or against monsters that raise your fallen, that’s insurance. A whole thread worked through exactly this, whether Funeral Rite stops a shadow from spawning out of a slain villager, and the table landed on yes, it blocks the transformation rather than just delaying it. One sharp caveat from that thread, since the spell takes an hour to cast, there’s a real window where a fast-rising undead could come back before you finish. Cast it early. (r/mattcolville)
4. Clerics cast it for free as a ritual. Ceremony has the ritual tag, and the Cleric’s Ritual Casting feature lets you cast a prepared ritual spell without spending a slot. So a cleric performs any of these rites for just the 25 gold in silver, no slot burned. Worth knowing that Paladins do not have Ritual Casting, so a paladin performing Ceremony has to spend an actual 1st-level slot every time. If your party has both, the cleric is your ceremony guy. (Grounded in the class rules.)
5. Bless Water to stock radiant grenades before an undead arc. Holy water deals 2d6 radiant to fiends and undead when you splash or throw it, and Bless Water turns a vial of plain water into a flask of the stuff. Heading into a vampire crypt or a demon-heavy stretch? Spend a few downtime hours making holy water so the martials have something that bypasses saves entirely against the exact enemies you’re about to fight. It costs 25 gold a flask, so it’s a stock-up-for-a-reason move, not an every-day habit. (Grounded in RAW; economics discussed at r/DnD)
6. The pre-final-battle group wedding. The flagship legitimate use, and it’s genuinely sweet. Before the climactic fight, the party that’s been through everything together gets married, and everyone walks into the boss room with plus 2 AC for the week. The original write-up put it perfectly, a group of adventurers who don’t know if they’ll survive joining together in “holy adventure matrimony” for a little edge. Plus 2 AC on your whole front line for a boss fight is a real buff, and the flavor is a highlight-reel moment. (r/dndnext)
CHEESES (clever, mostly legal)
7. Marry the entire party at once. Here’s the engine behind the flagship use. The Wedding rite says “adult humanoids,” plural, with no number attached, so by a literal reading you can bond the whole group in one casting and every one of them gets plus 2 AC for 7 days as long as they cluster within 30 feet. That’s a party-wide armor buff off a 1st-level ritual. Remember the correction from the top of the video, it’s plus 2 for each person, not a stacking pile, but plus 2 AC on six or seven characters for a week is still a fantastic deal. One DM ran exactly this and called it the most busted spell pound for pound in the game. (r/DnD)
8. Wed the people who stand next to each other anyway. The 30-foot leash is the only real cost of the wedding buff, and your front line already fights shoulder to shoulder. Marry the fighter and the barbarian who are always in the thick of it, and the “stay within 30 feet” clause costs you nothing, because they were never leaving each other’s side. One player described a whole one-shot party doing this and enjoying the plus 2 while calling each other sweetheart. (r/dndnext)
9. The Bless Water rite is basically redundant, so skip it. Here’s a fun bit of rules trivia that saves you a spell prep. Clerics and paladins can already make holy water without Ceremony at all, because the holy water item entry itself says a Cleric or Paladin can create it with a 1-hour ritual, 25 gp of powdered silver, and a 1st-level slot. Same time, same cost, no Ceremony needed. A big thread pointed out that Bless Water just duplicates a hidden ability every cleric and paladin has had since the first Player’s Handbook. If holy water is all you want, you don’t need this spell. (r/dndnext)
10. The Imprisonment necklace, for a portable spouse. This is where it turns dark and clever. Somebody worked out that if you marry a person and then hit them with the 9th-level Imprisonment spell’s Minimus Containment, shrinking them into a gemstone you wear around your neck, your spouse is now permanently within 30 feet of you, which means a permanent plus 2 AC that walks around with you. It needs a 9th-level caster and a very willing (or very unlucky) partner, and the thread’s own author noted it’s “a perfect method to get on someone’s smiting list.” Extremely legal on paper, extremely cursed in practice. (r/dndnext, “Horrible Spell combo (Ceremony + Imprisonment)”, r/dndnext)
QUESTIONABLE (ask your DM)
11. How many people can one Wedding marry? This is the core argument, so know both sides. The rules-as-written camp reads “adult humanoids” as any number and marries the whole party. The other camp, which is most DMs, reads a wedding as two people and caps it there. It’s a genuine ambiguity in the text, and one DM who allowed the unlimited reading admitted 9 out of 10 DMs simply won’t. Settle it with your table before you buy seven engagement rings, not after. (r/DnD)
12. Can you Enlarge the vial to make double holy water? Somebody tried to beat the 25-gold cost by having a sorcerer cast Enlarge on the water vial mid-ceremony to end up with twice the holy water for one casting. The thread shot it down with the correct read, Enlarge grows the object, the vial, but not the water inside it, so you’d have a bigger bottle holding the same amount of water. No free doubling. File it under nice try. (r/DnD)
13. Can Atonement flip an enemy, or redeem a vampire? Careful with this one, because it reads more powerful than it is. Atonement only works on a willing creature, and only restores an alignment that has already changed from the original. So you cannot point it at a villain to brainwash them good, because a villain who likes being evil is not willing. The interesting edge case the internet loves is the vampire, whose alignment forcibly flips to Lawful Evil on turning. If a vampire were willing, could Ceremony restore its original alignment? Tables are split, and even the ones who allow it usually rule the blood thirst and corruption stay behind while only the alignment tag changes. It’s a great story hook and a total DM call. (r/DnD)
14. Does Atonement change the character, or just the sheet? The other Atonement argument. When it “restores original alignment,” does the person’s personality actually revert, or does it only rewrite the two letters on the character sheet while their habits stay the same? The community read is that it’s designed to undo a real character-arc drift caused by trauma or outside forces, a confessional that genuinely works, but that the roleplay change is on the player, not automatic. Do not expect it to hard-reset an NPC’s behavior unless your DM says so. (r/dndnext ; and r/DnD, “How does Ceremony Atonement work?”, r/DnD)
15. Does Funeral Rite permanently kill the undead transformation, or just delay it? Back to the corpse question, because there’s a wrinkle. If a monster’s raise-as-undead effect would trigger during the 7-day protection, does the corpse get permanently freed, or does it just rise the moment the week ends? The thread leaned toward permanent, the rite sends off whatever would have animated, but it’s not spelled out, and a stingy DM could rule it only delays. Given the spell already costs 25 gold and does one narrow thing, most people rule in the caster’s favor. Confirm which way your DM leans. (r/mattcolville)
16. Can a Zealot Barbarian be a polygamist? A real question somebody asked, and it’s more legit than it sounds. The Wedding rite says you can only be married again “if widowed.” So if you’re functionally hard to keep dead, does outliving spouse after spouse let you rack up marriages? It’s a rules quirk hanging off a single word, and it’s pure DM adjudication, but it opens the door to some very dark accounting. (r/dndnext)
DEVIANT, FUNNY, AND CURSED
17. The serial-marriage AC farm. The logical endpoint of the widowed clause, and the reason DMs get twitchy. Marry a spouse, get your week of plus 2 AC, then, uh, become widowed, and marry a new one next week. Congratulations, you’ve built a permanent armor bonus out of a body count. One commenter suggested the party just get themselves killed and revived by Withers every seven days to reroll partners. This is the darkest possible reading of a wedding spell, and people arrive at it almost instantly. (r/BaldursGate3)
18. The drow matron anglerfish marriage. In the Imprisonment thread, somebody reframed the whole gem-necklace spouse trick as a perfect Lolth-approved drow tradition, marry a man, use him, shrink him into a jewel so he can’t cause trouble, and dispose of him when he stops being useful. Another commenter just called it “the anglerfish maneuver,” which is exactly what it is. Deeply, thematically cursed, and the internet loved it. (r/dndnext, “Horrible Spell combo (Ceremony + Imprisonment)”, r/dndnext)
19. The Hunger Games mass wedding. When the party-wide wedding thread got going, the comments spiraled into the logistics of marrying eight adventurers at once, all sneaking off to the same jeweler to buy engagement rings without their “adventure boyfriends” noticing, and a wedding in the round where all the brides and grooms rush the altar at the same time like the Hunger Games. Somebody suggested resolving the seating chart by having every guest roll for initiative. This is the spell’s real soul, a solemn sacred rite that a table of murderhobos turns into a group armor buff and a bit. (r/dndnext)
20. Baldur’s Gate 3 players openly begging for it. And proof the meme has legs beyond the tabletop, there’s a popular post asking the BG3 devs to add Ceremony specifically so you can marry your companion and pick up the plus 2 AC, complete with people gaming out which cleric NPC would officiate a wedding between you and an illithid. When players want a spell added to a video game purely for the flavor and the armor, you know the wedding rite landed. (r/BaldursGate3)
So that’s the pile. Ceremony is a spell that does almost nothing in a fight and quietly does six useful things around it, and the community found the one line, the wedding, and ran to the end of the earth with it. The honest takeaway is that Coming of Age, Dedication, and Funeral Rite are the genuinely smart preps, and the party wedding is the fun one you’ll actually remember. What did your table do with it, and be honest, did anybody get imprisoned in a necklace? Let me know in the comments below, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous.
