You can cast Speak with Animals at will, without expending a spell slot.
Beast Speech: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
We’ve all wondered at some point in our lives what our pets would say back to us, what the pigeons on the street thought of us, what the lions in the zoo mean when they let out a lazy roar. Beast Speech is for all of us who are ready to hear what they’ve got to say, and opens up a whole can of worms of internal crises every time meat is on the menu!
Speak with Animals is a simple, lovely little spell. You get a tool that translates a beast's senses, feelings, and environmental awareness into “language”. Sometimes, you can also get little favors from the beasts, who can understand you on some level. What level that is exactly is going to range wildly DM to DM; sometimes you’ll cast Speak with Animals and the squirrels will start talking in a posh British accent about their rude neighbor pilfering acorns from their territory. Others will present them as bags of near emotionless senses, looking to do simple, primal activities with little concern outside of fear and survival.
Beast Speech isn’t going to be particularly powerful. Druid’s can already basically get this invocation if they’ve got time to ritual cast Speak with Animals, and with the Book of Ancient Secrets invocation, you can get access to Speak with Animals as a ritual. You probably don’t need to be able to cast Speak with Animals at will.
But I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I love being able to spontaneously talk to whatever falcon or stag I come across. I adore the world building it spurs. It's a perfectly serviceable exploration tool that turns mundane background critters like rats in a tavern into robust NPCs with insider knowledge of niche topics like the foundations of a building, networks and passages around the underbelly of a city, and the very finest cheeses money can buy.
If you’re planning on getting access to ritual casting down the road, or have it from some other feature, you definitely don’t need Beast Speech. It costs you a lot less to prepare or learn a 1st level spell than spending an invocation on fundamentally the same spell. If your goal is to get a powerful tool to engage with in combat or exploration, Beast Speech probably doesn’t quite hit that mark. But if ritual casting isn’t something you’re planning on getting on your sheet, and you want a fun, uncanny tool for birthing a bunch of varied, whimsical NPCs into existence, Beast Speech is a really fun way to do it.
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