You can read all writing.
Eyes of the Runekeeper: Text Only Babelfish
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Language has a tremendous amount of potential in a world full of diverse creatures and cultures, from the signs in a foregin market to tombs detailing the history of an ancient cult lost to time. Eyes of the Runekeeper hypothetically opens up these doors to you, letting your warlock become a universal translator of the written word. Here’s the problem: varied spoken languages just don’t come up all that often in D&D. Common exists. To then need the text to be written for this invocation to have any value puts it in a category of nearly unusable.
It's a shame because the decipherer of ancient scripts plays well with the warlock fantasy; a person stumbles across an ancient entity they don’t understand. The kind of character that would do that would be exploring the unknown, unearthing forbidden knowledge and piecing together parts of history to draw power from. In a world with infernal scripture detailing how demon summoning works, where all magic related to the fey is written strictly in poetic prose and in sylvan, then this feature means something. But in most games, that’s simply not going to be the case. A DM has enough to worry about when it comes to getting their ideas across clearly and accessibly to the players; adding layers of language barriers doesn’t really help with that, and when most tables have no real way of reading through it anyway, can make it feel inaccessible for an arbitrary reason. Instead of dealing with that hassle, most DMs opt to just work in common across the board.
Even at tables that do really lean into the forgotten language scripts and ancient runes of the giants of old, Comprehend Languages is a 1st level ritual spell for bards, sorcerers, and wizards. It does functionally what Eyes of the Runekeeper does as a ritual spell, and IN ADDITION lets you comprehend spoken language. The only upside Eyes has is not needing to touch what you want to read: helpful when reading “DO NOT TOUCH” signs, but not much else.
If your character's fantasy includes decoding ancient tongues to uncover magical secrets, I’m sorry, but this just isn’t worth it. You can get access to Detect Magic through a few different invocations, and that will feel similar in scope to this as far as conveying the fantasy you're looking for while also having some real benefits aiding exploration at most tables. Pact of the Tome in combination with Book of Ancient Secrets can give you access to Comprehend Languages in addition to another reasonable ritual spell of your choice, the ritual casting feature, and a way to get more ritual spells out of the books you want to be digging through for magic. There are better ways to get this fantasy at a cheaper rate that also do more for your character. You don’t ever want Eyes of the Runekeeper.
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