By means of this spell, you use an animal to deliver a message. Choose a Tiny beast you can see within range, such as a squirrel, a blue jay, or a bat. You specify a location, which you must have visited, and a recipient who matches a general description, such as "a man or woman dressed in the uniform of the town guard" or "a red-haired dwarf wearing a pointed hat." You also speak a message of up to twenty-five words. The target beast travels for the duration of the spell toward the specified location, covering about 50 miles per 24 hours for a flying messenger, or 25 miles for other animals.
When the messenger arrives, it delivers your message to the creature that you described, replicating the sound of your voice. The messenger speaks only to a creature matching the description you gave. If the messenger doesn't reach its destination before the spell ends, the message is lost, and the beast makes its way back to where you cast this spell.
At Higher Levels. If you cast this spell using a spell slot of 3rd level or higher, the duration of the spell increases by 48 hours for each slot level above 2nd.
* - (a morsel of food)
I made a convenient table for anyone who needs a quick-reference for how fast and far your flying messenger could go. Hope this helps someone.
ANIMAL MESSENGER MAX FLYING TRAVEL
LEVEL | DISTANCE | TIME
————————————————————
2nd 50 mi 24 hr / 1 day
3rd 150 mi 72 hours / 3 days
4th 250 mi 120 hours / 5 days
5th 350 mi 168 hours / 7 days
6th 450 mi 216 hours / 9 days
7th 550 mi 264 hours / 11 days
8th 650 mi 312 hours / 13 days
9th 750 mi 360 hours / 15 days
A crow travels at an average airspeed of about 50 miles/hour in real life, fyi. A squirrel has an average speed of about 20 mph. I get that having an easy, long-range communication at such a low level could cause balance issues, but, as written, you'd have much quicker and more effective communication if you just tied a letter to the leg of a trained bird. I'm personally adjusting the travel speed and distance covered to reflect the real world a bit better, as It won't cause too many issues with my campaign, and RAW I find this to be a touch on the useless end. If going this route, one might wish to scale the length of the message with spell level, increasing the word count by 25 (or 10, whatever works) per spell level.
TL:DR as written, a flying animal messenger travels at about 2.1 miles per hour. that's about the speed of a slow walk. that is... not... great. Feel free to change it if it won't break your game.
Edit: Also, if matching this spell up with more reasonable animal speeds, you might consider shortening the duration by half or more, and then scaling the higher level casting to the shortened duration.
I thought this would be a 1 Action elimination of familiars from combat with no attack roll or save. They could dismiss the familiar (1 Action) and make it reappear on their next turn (1 Action) but it would just start going to the destination again (travels for 24 hours or more in the direction of the specified location until it reaches it.) And to redo Find Familiar requires 1 hour, making it impractical for combat.
But alas, in Find Familiar it says, "...the familiar has the statistics of the chosen form, though it is a celestial, fey, or fiend (your choice) instead of a beast."
Can you cast a spell as a ritual at a higher level? Because that sounds not right to me. Edit:I just realized it says when using a spell slot of 3rd or higher, which I'm guessing means you have to use a spell slot and can't just ritualcast it at higher levels. Wouldn't mind anyone to clear this up or correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks in advance
That doesn't account for the biological necessities. The spell doesn't indicate that the creatures are under magical effects that allow them to persist without food, water, or sleep.
Even with biological necessities, that seems incredibly low distances. let's be incredibly pessimistic and say the animal only spends six hours traveling to deliver the message, spends 10 hours foraging and 8 hours of rest. So with the absolute minimum reasonable expectation that they only travel for SIX of the 24 hours, you get land animals traveling at 20 mph delivering up to 120 miles, and an average bird or bat traveling at 33-40 mph range, for 200-240 miles. And that is with the worst reasonable situation of them only investing 6 hours of travel time which is super low in my opinion.
additionally, these speeds are nowhere near the documented travel speed of things like a hummingbird and hawks, both of which have been found to regularly travel up 500-1000 miles in a day when motivated to cover ground like during migration.
So as DM I would probably be willing to for simplicities' sake extend the range to 200 miles for flying and 100 miles for ground, which is just over a week of a standard adventure travel speed of 24 miles per day. Also, remember the spell is somewhat risky as it requires the recipient to be at the determined location so As my campaigns cover quite a bit of distance I still want this spell to be viable.
Does anyone feel this is completely underwhelming when compared to the Sending spell, which is just one level higher? Even if you upcast this to 9th level it's still nowhere as good as Sending, which reaches anywhere in existence instantaneously. The only benefit over Sending is that you don't need to know the target, only have a description of them.
I feel like they should dramatically increase the range and duration on this, especially when upcasting.
*cast’s on a bird*
“Congrats, you’ve invented tweeting!”
My Wife's Elven Druid used it in our game and I said exactly that. Everyone was delighted.
Polymorph + Animal Messenger = Send the newly minted chickadee on a wander. Send the bad guy back to his boss with a message.
Also good for "to whom it may concern" mesaages like "Deliver to the first person you see riding an animal" or like "Deliver to the first person you see with a weapon."
Okay, so you're saying the air velocity of an unladen swallow is exactly 50 miles for 24 hours of travel? Now, is that African or European?
Just to throw my hat into the existing conversation about the travel speed and distances, for the record, real-life carrier pigeons are capable of flying over 600 miles in a single day.
In my campaign, I'm buffing the distances the messenger can cover sixfold: 300 mi/day for flying and 150 mi/day otherwise.
AKA the Vampire Ender. Vampire > polymorph into Pidgeon > Animal Messenger Deliver a message to the first person on a white cloud. one hour later 2 miles straight up as written within an hour of polymorph. reverts to a vampire in sunlight.
For added points have the vampire Pidgeon deliver a magic mouth message of disrespect when within proximity of a humanoid, triggered essentially when dropped as Polymorph ends.. "By Sun or Earth, I have cured you..." as they fall far from shelter from shade.
:D Love it.
Imagine being the Target of that spell...
You are just a Bird, doing Bird stuff, and suddendly you feel the unexplainable desire to fly acros the Ocean to a City, seek out a man in golden robes with a pointy head, do a specific set of noises and then fly back to where you started, it takes you 2 days in total and at the end you are like "What the f*ck did just happen?"
Deliver message
Refuse to elaborate further
Go back to bird stuff
And not to mention that they cannot always travel in a straight line, especially ground creatures.
The real purpose of this spell is psychological warfare. Unwanted sending is bad enough, but this is a Ritual spell.
A bluejay comes up, and tells you "I hate you". Ten minutes later, a chipmunk tells you "your an awful person". Ten minutes later, a raven tells you "I know what you did". This can continue all day.
I have been asked by one of my players if you can have the animals deliver small objects.
It doesn't really say.
Personally i don't see a reason why you wouldn't be able to tie a small gemstone or something to the leg of a bird.