Beast Bond: Fury in Your Furry Friends
Spell Level: 1
School: Divination
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Duration: Concentration, up to 10 minutes
Components: V, S, M (a bit of fur wrapped in a cloth)
You establish a telepathic link with one beast you touch that is friendly to you or charmed by you. The spell fails if the beast’s Intelligence is 4 or higher. Until the spell ends, the link is active while you and the beast are within line of sight of each other. Through the link, the beast can understand your telepathic messages to it, and it can telepathically communicate simple emotions and concepts back to you. While the link is active, the beast gains advantage on attack rolls against any creature within 5 feet of you that you can see.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Have you ever found yourself itching to play a beastmaster ranger, but your pesky DM wants to start before 3rd level? Have you read the spell Find Familiar, but felt limited by having access to only the itty bittiest of creatures? Let me introduce you to a spell that stands in for what feels like half of a missing ranger class feature: Beast Bond!
Beast Bond has a lot of the right words. Telepathic communication can be useful; sometimes you don’t want enemies to hear you command your bear to eat them. Granting advantage on attack rolls is pretty great. Who wouldn’t want their panther friend to have advantage on their claw or bite? All of this feels like it should be excellent. In practice, I don’t see it being worth managing for what ends up being a menial upside the beast easily gets in other ways.
Out the gate, the purpose of this is enabling the beastmaster feeling before rangers get it at 3rd level. It functions as the return of the lost animal companion feature of old druids in many ways. Mechanically, though, what it offers is kind of lackluster. It lasts ten minutes and eats your concentration; for a spell dedicated to assisting the beastmaster fantasy, only getting the bonuses and telepathic bond for ten minutes leads to this feeling like a temporary prep spell more than anything else you can’t even cast at 1st level. If you ever cast this in combat, it’ll feel pretty bad unless you know you’re getting a couple attacks with your beast buddy that round. It helps that it doesn’t have to be your companion, opening up options to get multiple critters running around assisting you, and if you don’t need to command the creature at all, it can be all upside.
The limitations around communication based on sight also leave this feeling like a watered down version of Find Familiar that has a whole lot more hoops to jump through. You’ll have a pretty hard time using this for reconnaissance missions or otherwise weaponizing the telepathic bond utility. For a first level slot this should be solid, but practically does too little for me to like it. It definitely would benefit from not eating your concentration or at least have an hour long duration to lock it in as the fantasy you’re looking for.
If you have some beast friends you’re regularly fighting with, if it's acting on its own or using your bonus action to attack, granting said attacks advantage is fine. If your beast friend has any ways to grant itself advantage (pack tactics, dropping things prone, etc.) this spell probably isn’t doing anything meaningful a lot of the time; a 1st level slot for a handful or less of advantages isn’t worth it. For a lot of players this will feel good to use; for many others it’ll end up getting cast once or twice, they’ll realize they’re missing other forms of advantage by getting it here instead, and it will be forgotten upon the following level up.
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