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Hello all! I am trying to build a Courtly Hunter for Society play. Since the Courtly Hunter's companion has an Intelligence score progression just like a familiar, I believe that it gains the following benefits:
1 language known (from gaining intelligence of 3+)
Ability to learn additional languages (by putting skill ranks into Linguistics)
I could be wrong on that, it may be that it can only gain languages by putting ranks into Linguistics, or maybe it knows a number of languages that the Hunter speaks? But, regardless, if it has a familiar's int, I believe it should be able to learn languages.
Obviously, with a few exceptions that someone could probably argue based on real life (which I don't think is really a kind of argument I want to bring to a table), an animal companion still can't actually speak. For an example of what I mean, the rules say raven familiars speak supernaturally, so I'm not going to try to argue about something like a Giant Raven or other creature that's capable of mimicking voices in real life. I want to do fun stuff, but I don't want to grind the table to a screeching halt for stuff that probably only I would enjoy.
However, I wanted to ask about a couple of alternative communication methods I'd thought of. Is Sign Language for one or more specific dialects a legal choice for Linguistics? If so, I could potentially take a bethumbed companion such as a chimpanzee or ape and communicate with it that way. The other question was, would the Prehensile Tail feat for a betailed creature allow the creature to write? I don't want to get my hopes up about that one.
I know that if an animal companion knows a language, that they can understand anyone speaking it, but I was really hoping there could be a way for the companion to communicate back, especially when it gets more intelligent over time and has the potential to use things like Knowledge skills or have other reasons to impart information to its adventuring party.
Sorry if this is a weird question!
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Ring of Eloquence solves all the issues and is available at a reasonably low level.
The beastspeak spell also works for a reasonably long duration
<aside>
One of my favourite characters was a cat with a human sidekick :-). And the cat could turn into a leopard if he wanted to. Mechanically, of course, it was the companion of a courtly hunter. But neither the player nor cat accepted that interpretation :-) :-)
Once you can afford an agile amulet of mighty fists the cat (NOT leopard, the actual cat) was a quite effective combat character. Commoners beware :-) :-).
And having the actual hunter JUST be the cats support character lets spells like beastspeak be a lot more palatable :-)
</aside>