Animal Friendship: You’ve Got a Friend in Meerkat
Usable By: Bard, Druid, Ranger
Spell Level: 1
School: Enchantment
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 30 feet
Duration: 24 hours
Components: V, S, M (a morsel of food)
This spell lets you convince a beast that you mean it no harm. Choose a beast that you can see within range. It must see and hear you. If the beast's Intelligence is 4 or higher, the spell fails. Otherwise, the beast must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or be charmed by you for the spell's duration. If you or one of your companions harms the target, the spells ends.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, you can affect one additional beast t level above 1st.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Have you ever been that person who despite all the signals KNOWS this cat will love them? The person that continues to pick them up, pet them, run after them? If that’s you, or a character you crave to embody in D&D, you can always take Animal Friendship. Does that wolf keep growling at you despite your offerings of tasty jerky? Have you been mauled one too many times by a momma bear when you just wanted to cuddle her cubs? Animal Friendship has your back.
That’s kind of it. The beast isn’t compelled to do anything; you just get advantage on social checks made with it (which can include handling it) and it can’t attack you. It doesn’t get charmed by your buddies or anything, so without DM intervention, this spell still can leave a hostile octopus thrashing your adventuring crew while you desperately try to convince it to stop.
With the practical applications being somewhat suspect, Animal Friendship lands in this weird area where if you’ve got a DM who views charms as more than the mechanical words, it can act more like a compulsion or tool for getting animal allies. Some tables can get this to wrangle up a group of wild critters to do your bidding; others can find it a struggle to get a single pigeon to cooperate even with the whole group jumping on board.
Animal Friendship isn’t ever something you’ll need. This is a spell for the druids out there who want to befriend every animal in the forest, and take it primarily as a flavor option. It can act as a recruitment tool, or can occasionally sway an animal to act a certain way for you, but at the end of the day a spell slot isn’t worth what Animal Handling checks already can do no problem. You probably don’t want this on your character sheets.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.