Beast Sense: Discount Find Familiar

Usable By: Druid, Ranger

Spell Level: 2

School: Divination

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: Touch

Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour

Components: S

You touch a willing beast. For the duration of the spell, you can use your action to see through the beast’s eyes and hear what it hears, and continue to do so until you use your action to return to your normal senses.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @KoboldCrier

Find Familiar is a game warping spell. You become a Pokemon Trainer that perfectly controls a magical critter, and get a massive suite of tools that help shape how you’ll interact with the world forever. Now, for one spell level more, you can make ANY friendly animal your familiar light!

It is a bit crazy to me that Beast Sense gets to be a 2nd level spell while the massively superior Find Familiar is a 1st level spell. That being said, Find Familiar is SO good I’d still recommend Beast Sense to people without it. It stings that you need to reach 5th level as a ranger to get half of the exploration tool wizards get out the gate, but alas, that’s the life of full versus half casters.

As a ritual, you don’t really incur any costs to take this spell. It can open up delightful moments where you’re trying to eavesdrop on some dark deal and have to figure out how to befriend the local shopkeeper's goat to listen in from the shadows. The situations rarely occur in crazy time sensitive environments, so spending ten minutes to get the effect will most often be exactly how this turns out.

Beast Sense is at its best with trained animals. Should you end up with a ranger Animal Companion or pick up a pet you manage to animal handle your way into obedience, you can comfortably use this spell all the time, and functionally build a worse version of a familiar. You functionally get an inconspicuous scout capable of blending seamlessly in organic environments. That’s really the practical extent of it, though, and you do suffer the downside of only being able to maintain the observation for an hour at the cost of your concentration. It's an information gathering tool, and doesn’t otherwise reach the flexibility and utility Find Familiar brings.

It does have the upside of working alongside Find Familiar, so if you want to run a menagerie, that’s a way to do it. You can set up surveillance cameras across varying parts of a city and maintain watch over areas spanning miles at a time, which is pretty nifty. This isn’t going to be a spell that radically powers you up, but it's one you’ll get some use for if you put some effort in. On its own, relying on wild random beasts, you won’t be getting far with it, though.

5e Spells

Beast Sense: Discount Find Familiar