Tongue of the Sun and Moon question

[Barachiel Shina]

Does this ability work on any living creature such as trees or does the creature need an intelligence score for it to work? A tree is both living but in PF it counts as an object so I assume a monk cannot talk to trees with this?

[LazarX]

The ability is nothing more than a poetic way of saying the monk has a permanent tongues effect. If the creature does not have a language, then there's no effect.

[Fuzzy-Wuzzy]

I've always assumed it acts on plants like speak with plants:

Speak With Plants wrote:

You can communicate with normal plants and plant creatures, and can ask questions of and receive answers from them. A normal plant's sense of its surroundings is limited, so it won't be able to give (or recognize) detailed descriptions of creatures or answer questions about events outside its immediate vicinity. The spell doesn't make plant creatures any more friendly or cooperative than normal. Furthermore, wary and cunning plant creatures are likely to be terse and evasive, while the more stupid ones may make inane comments. If a plant creature is friendly, it may do some favor or service for you.

So you should be able to talk to trees just fine. That they're objects doesn't factor into it.

(Also, tongues let you talk with any intelligent creature, whereas tongue of the sun and moon won't let you talk to, for instance, intelligent undead whose languages you don't know.)

[Jeraa]

Quote:

Tongue of the Sun and Moon (Ex): A monk of 17th level or higher can speak with any living creature.

The ability only functions with living creatures. Normal plants (like trees) are living, but are not creatures.

[Fuzzy-Wuzzy]

Jeraa wrote:

Quote:

Tongue of the Sun and Moon (Ex): A monk of 17th level or higher can speak with any living creature.

The ability only functions with living creatures. Normal plants (like trees) are living, but are not creatures.

Whoops, I guess their object-ness does factor into it. I wonder which way the writer intended it? Not that it matters, you're certainly right, RAW are clear.

But I stand by my point on intelligent undead :-)

[Dave Justus]

This is probably more flavor then mechanics. Whether you can talk to a tree or not is probably not going to change game balance anyway, as I can imagine almost no circumstances where there would be trees to talk to but not insects and other things that would definitely be creatures and would have the same information.

So whether or not the ability works or trees, it mechanically provides the same benefit.

Thus, if you want your monk to be able to talk to the trees, it probably doesn't hurt anything.