Speak With Animals: Dungeons & Dr. Doolittle
Usable By: Bard, Druid, Ranger
Spell Level: 1
School: Divination
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Self
Duration: 10 minutes
Components: V, S
You gain the ability to comprehend and verbally communicate with beasts for the duration. The knowledge and awareness of many beasts is limited by their intelligence, but at minimum, beasts can give you information about nearby locations and monsters, including whatever they can perceive or have perceived within the past day. You might be able to persuade a beast to perform a small favor for you, at the GM’s discretion.
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Few things give me as much joy in life as pretending to talk to squirrels and pigeons. I love those stupid cute little critters. For everyone one of you out there who have always wanted to call your cat an asshole and have them understand you, for all of you desperately wishing you could chat with your dog because they’re hilariously stupid, for anyone with an ounce of imagination in them: Speak with Animals is delightful. Good? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh, not really. But I love this spell so much.
Speak with Animals will range wildly table to table. Some DMs will lean on beasts being incomprehensible creatures who communicate in very different ways than people, leaning on instinct and direction to give out sparse information. Others will turn them into societies, cultures, and personalities that rival the most outlandish NPCs. I tend to DM towards the latter end of things, and love every second of it. What you get from those NPCs is probably going to be nearly the same: location information, creature sightings, other mundane scouting information, etc. But how you get it is what makes Speak with Animals so fun to use to me.
I love the image of a halfling bard sneaking through the brush, trying to convince a terrified rabbit that he means no harm and he’s just looking for directions. Imagine the rest of the party just staring at the halfling incomprehensible chirps and the tiny creature. It's delightful. It's silly. It's D&D. It being a ritual spell too means this information gathering tool isn’t eating your spell slots; it's something you probably only ever are casting as a ritual, and expanding your characters resources in the process. It's not a particularly POWERFUL new ability, especially as you climb in level and beasts start to become few and far between, but for how cheap a cost it is, I can’t recommend Speak with Animals enough. This spell is distilled whimsy.
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