Speak with Plants targets ordinary flora, whereas the quoted passage explicitly says it's not talking about ordinary flora. This doesn't fully answer your question, though. Second, this is an example where the rules explicitly don't make a distinction between plants and fungus. First, you're just looking for trouble if you try to get too scientific about what words mean in D&D. A scientist would see a shambling mound or myconid and wonder, "How does it move? How does it make decisions?" Many research projects later, the scientific community would revise its definitions (with the details depending on what research revealed about how these creatures functioned). As we understand them in the real world, plants and fungi lack muscles and central nervous systems. I'll point out that, by a scientific definition, none of the monsters listed are plants or fungi. FungalĬreatures such as the gas spore and the myconid also fall into this Quintessential plants are the shambling mound and the treant. Most of them are ambulatory, and some are carnivorous. Plants in this context are vegetable creatures, not ordinary flora. MyconidsĬonsult the Monster Manual's definitions of creature types. Several things about the 5e rules point to an older, less-informed understanding of plants. It never says what definition of "plant" to use. The Player's Handbook is a non-scientific document. Spells like "Speak with Plants" don't say "members of the plant kingdom". They obsessed over the finer details of how things work, and they figured out that plants and fungi are governed by wholly different sets of mechanics, to the point where it's just wrong to call a fungus a plant or vice versa.īack up, though. Within the last several decades, the very intelligent people who make careers out of studying plants and fungi reached an overwhelming consensus that fungi are actually more closely related to animals than to plants. I enjoy D&D in part for the mechanics I like picking apart the details of how things work and figuring out whether a given mechanic applies in a given situation. The microscopic fungi responsible for certain diseases wouldn't have occurred to people as something that could exist until the germ theory of disease gained prominence (late 19th century). Historically, the word "plant" referred to both green plants and mushrooms. Yes, the D&D world identifies mushrooms as plants Given that we're in the Underdark and will be staying down here for the rest of the adventure and then some, we're not going to be seeing any plantlife for a long time, so I've ruled that it does work on mundane mushrooms as it would on mundane plants, since otherwise the spell is useless down in the Underdark, but I just wanted to see if this is RAW (or at least RAI) as well. The reason I ask is because I'm running OotA and one of my players is currently playing a deep gnome ranger who is very enthusiastic about mushrooms, and we hit level 11, at which point rangers can pick another 3rd level spell, and the player spotted speak with plants and wanted to use it to talk to mushrooms.
![spore servant 5e spore servant 5e](https://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/1/18/Quaggoth-5e.png)
![spore servant 5e spore servant 5e](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/a/a0/Quaggoth3e.jpg)
22) and whatever else is listed under that section of OotA. Here's a D&DBeyond search that lists all of these creatures.ĭoes this mean that speak with plants would work on a mushroom? Not a "creature" (since that's made explicit by the fact that it says "plant creature" and Fungi/Myconids are listed as plant type creatures), just a mundane mushroom, such as some Barrelstalk ( Out of the Abyss, p. 137) are both listed as plant type creatures under their stat blocks, and yet they are clearly fungi rather than plants from a narrative perspective. The spell repeatedly mentions plants, and also makes a mention of plant creatures at the end. If a plant creature is in the area, you can communicate with it as if you shared a common language, but you gain no magical ability to influence it. You imbue plants within 30 feet of you with limited sentience and animation. These organisms are classified as a kingdom, fungi, which is separate from the other eukaryotic life kingdoms of plants and animals. In real life, fungi are not plants they are their own separate kingdom (I'm no biologist, so here's a quote from Wikipedia, for what it's worth):