Tongues
Tongues turns an otherwise impossible language barrier into a conversation. It is valuable to diplomats, explorers, merchants, interrogators and adventurers precisely because understanding the words does not guarantee trust, honesty or agreement.
Quick answer: Tongues is for live communication across languages. It does not decipher unknown writing, break codes, reveal hidden meanings or make the people involved friendly.
Game Mechanics
Tongues
Touch one creature. For the next hour, that creature can understand any spoken language it hears and any signed language it sees.
When the affected creature communicates by speaking or signing, another creature that knows at least one language can understand the communication if it can hear the speech or see the signing.
Practical Rulings
- Spoken and signed language: both are covered. This is an important part of the spell rather than a house rule.
- Writing: the spell does not grant the ability to read or write an unknown language. Use a spell such as Comprehend Languages when written material is the obstacle.
- Codes and ciphers: understanding the language does not automatically reveal a deliberately encoded message, private cipher, thieves’ cant-like convention or concealed meaning.
- Attitude: translation is not persuasion. A hostile guard, suspicious envoy or frightened prisoner remains free to react according to the situation.
- Physical ability still matters: the spell translates speech and signing; it does not create a voice, hands or other anatomy that a creature lacks.
- Hearing and sight matter: another creature must be able to hear the affected creature’s speech or see its signing to receive the outgoing communication.
- No Concentration: once cast, the spell can remain active for the full hour without occupying Concentration.
- Verbal casting: Tongues itself has a Verbal component, so an effect that prevents the caster from supplying verbal components prevents the spell from being cast.
- Hallow interaction: Hallow has its own Tongues option that can allow chosen creature types within the hallowed area to communicate despite lacking a shared language. That is an effect of Hallow, not an extension of this spell’s normal range.
- Permanency: there is no normal Permanency procedure for this version of Tongues.
Tongues
The touched creature can speak and understand the languages of intelligent creatures, including racial languages and regional dialects. It can speak only one language at a time, although it can understand several.
The spell does not allow the subject to converse verbally with a creature that does not speak. The subject can make itself understood only as far as its voice carries, and the magic does not alter the attitude of anyone addressed.
Practical Rulings
- Speech rather than universal communication: the spell works through languages spoken by intelligent creatures. Do not import the signed-language rule from another ruleset.
- One spoken language at a time: the subject may understand several languages simultaneously but speaks only one at any given moment.
- Writing: Tongues does not say that the subject can read or write unfamiliar scripts.
- Codes and hidden meaning: knowing what the words mean does not automatically solve a cipher or reveal information deliberately concealed behind code.
- No reaction adjustment: the spell does not make an NPC helpful, friendly, cooperative or truthful.
- Material or divine focus: an arcane caster uses the clay ziggurat material component; a divine caster uses the appropriate divine focus.
- Permanency: Tongues can be made permanent on the caster themself at minimum caster level 11 by spending 7,500 gp of diamond dust. This application cannot normally be placed on another creature.
Tongues
The touched creature gains the ability to speak and understand the language of any intelligent creature, including racial languages and regional dialects. The subject can understand several languages but can speak only one language at a time.
Tongues does not enable verbal conversation with creatures that do not speak. Communication extends only as far as the subject’s voice carries, and the spell does not alter the attitude of any creature addressed.
Arcane material component: a small clay model of a ziggurat. For an arcane casting, the model shatters as the verbal component is completed.
Practical Rulings
- Intelligent creatures: the language must belong to an intelligent creature. Tongues is not a substitute for magic specifically designed to communicate with animals, plants or other beings that do not use spoken language.
- One spoken language at a time: understanding several languages does not allow the subject to speak several simultaneously.
- Writing: Tongues does not grant the ability to read or write an unfamiliar script.
- Codes: literal linguistic understanding does not automatically decipher secret codes or reveal deliberately concealed meaning.
- Attitude: a creature can understand the subject perfectly and still refuse, lie, threaten, bargain or attack.
- Permanency: Tongues can be made permanent on the caster themself at minimum caster level 11 for a cost of 1,500 XP. It cannot normally be made permanent on another creature through this entry of Permanency.
Using Tongues
Tongues is strongest when the obstacle is not distance or secrecy but the simple fact that two people cannot understand one another. It can turn a dead-end encounter into negotiation without deciding what either side chooses to do next.
Negotiation
Use Tongues when treaties, surrender terms, ransoms, tolls, trade agreements or warnings must be understood exactly. Translation removes one source of misunderstanding; it does not remove conflicting interests.
Exploration
A traveller can question guides, inhabitants, prisoners or newly encountered peoples without first identifying their language. That makes the spell especially valuable when the party has crossed a cultural or planar frontier.
Hostile Encounters
Communication can create options other than immediate combat. Threats, demands, challenges and offers of surrender become meaningful once both sides can understand them.
What Translation Cannot Do
Tongues does not reveal whether a speaker is sincere, explain unfamiliar law or etiquette, supply missing cultural knowledge, identify technical jargon automatically or prevent deliberate deception.
Tongues or Comprehend Languages?
Choose Tongues when someone needs to participate in a conversation. Choose Comprehend Languages when the immediate problem is interpreting unfamiliar language or writing. Check the mechanics on each spell for the exact capabilities used by your campaign.
Related Spells
Browse the wider Magic library or the Sorcerer/Wizard spell catalogue for further communication, divination and utility magic.
Tongues in 1454
There is no single universal Common language waiting behind every conversation. Travellers move through a world of local speech, court languages, trade languages, scholarly languages, regional dialects and the languages of nonhuman peoples. A journey of only a few hundred miles can cross several linguistic boundaries; a voyage or planar expedition can cross far more.
Tongues therefore has practical value far beyond adventuring. Courts employ it when receiving foreign embassies. Merchant houses reserve it for negotiations where a mistranslated measure, price or oath could ruin a venture. Universities use it when visiting scholars cannot share a working language. Commanders value it when dealing with mercenaries, prisoners, scouts and allied contingents drawn from distant lands.
The spell does not make interpreters obsolete. A trained interpreter understands titles, customs, insults, legal formulas, technical vocabulary and what a speaker is implying rather than merely saying. Magic can make the words intelligible while leaving every problem of politics, culture and trust intact.
The Ziggurat Component
Ziggurats are monumental stepped structures associated with the ancient cities of Mesopotamia. A miniature ziggurat gives the spell an image of cities, scholarship, trade and peoples meeting across linguistic boundaries without requiring the magic to depend upon a single religious explanation for the existence of different languages.
In magical workshops, clay versions may be simple disposable models, carefully marked teaching pieces or finely made objects carried by professional interpreters and travelling spellcasters. The exact treatment depends on the casting tradition and the rules being used.
Sources & Licensing
Rules Sources
- System Reference Document 5.2.1 — current Tongues mechanics and the Hallow communication option.
- Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Reference Document — Tongues — core Pathfinder spell mechanics.
- Archives of Nethys — Permanency — minimum caster level and diamond-dust cost for permanent Tongues.
- Revised d20 SRD — Tongues — D&D 3.5e mechanics and arcane material component.
- Revised d20 SRD — Permanency — minimum caster level and XP cost for permanent Tongues.
Creative Commons Material
This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 (“SRD 5.2.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
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