My players are about to be grilled by a war council in a "Who are you and why shouldn't we think you're enemy spies?" type situation.
One of them wants to use Divination as form of Diplomacy - "Pharasma says I'm cool."
As far as I can tell though it doesn't actually create audible sounds or images for others to hear so I feel like it's not really effective.
Thoughts?
Well, they'd have to be more specific about which spell they want to use. However, spells only allow for the caster to communicate with their god or the universe to learn things, other people do not hear them. So, casting a spell to talk to their god will not help them.
So no, divination spells employed in the manner you've described will not be helpful for diplomacy.
Unless they can use it to divine what they could say to the council to prove/convince them of their innocence(sp?).
So maybe not directly, but indirectly it could help them or at the least give them info leading to a +2 to +10 on their diplomacy (or bluff if they ARE spies) rolls to the council.
"High Priest, cast a commune spell. Are these adventurers telling the truth? Yes? Then we will consider their tidings. No? They're fined 5000 gp for wasting Our royal time."
"High Priest, cast a commune spell. Are these adventurers telling the truth? Yes? Then we will consider their tidings. No? They're fined 5000 gp for wasting Our royal time."
First the adventurers would need to convince the council that they deserve to be listened to at all to ask the council to try and commune with the casters god. Depending on the caster and the god, you first need at least a 9th level cleric (which isn't common in the standard Golarion setting), and then you have to ask a question that can be answered in a yes or no manner. And even then the deity may or may not have a suitabel answer. Deities are not all knowing in Pathfinder, they simply may not be aware of anything to pertianing to the party at all.
Besides, if the council wanted to know if they were telling the truth they should instead ask the cleric to cast zone of truth and have everyone in the party answer questions. If any of the questions receive different answer then someone passed the save and is lying and if they evade a question they're not telling the whole truth. If that were the case a suspicious council would probably say, "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!"