Total confusion of a lizardman cook being yelled at by the party for making bandit stew. And utter disapointment of the warlock after realising that his favorite stew is forever off the menu. That has to be my favorite D&D moment when it comes to food. Bard: You can't cook bandits, it's cannibalism! Ranger: Sssstrange, meat is meat. Warlock: I go for seconds. DM: Rest of the party stares at you. Warlock: I go for seconds, awkwardly.
@@voidwyrm6149Honestly, apart from the cannibalism, this is legitimately a position that some animist religions take, most notably Inuit animism, which pretty much states as a fact that all animals have souls, just like people, and thus proper thanks must be provided both for the deity in charge of the animal species in question (for allowing you to effectively eat one of their children!), but also to the particular animal in question, with a promise that no part of the animal will go to waste.
lizardfolk are so fun for this trait. mine once almost ate an unattended child but it walked off before he could swim closer. meat is meat, and a humanoid child is the same as a fawn or calf to him. it's a weird mindset to get into, but interesting for fantasy purposes.
Playing a goblin ranger/druid, I had a rule of don’t kill anything you aren’t going to eat. A 200 lbs orc warrior is a feast that will last for days, possibly weeks. Never waste what could provide you sustenance. Even the bones can be ground down to make cakes out of the marrow. Anything you don’t eat can feed mushroom patches, providing food later.
It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If we assume elves had the advantage early on, they would retain the best land for them. Same for dwarves. That leaves humans with lower quality land that they would have to adapt technology to make work.
Meat eating Elves and Druids just makes sense to me, as the natural connection with plants is thematically more powerful. I like your limitation suggestion, it reminds me of my own wood eld druid. However he did get seduced by the civilized peoples' farm raised bacon, was probably his biggest vice.
Under Speak with Plants it specifically says "you imbue plants with limited sentience" which means they didn't have it before so no I have no problem eating them after the spell ends because they won't have it after the spell ends. Casting Awaken on something is completely different because it says "the target must have no intelligence or an intelligence or 3 or less." Again not sentient before you cast. I wouldn't eat an awakened plant or animal. As for attacking wild shaped druids read Wild Shape. When you hit 0 HP you turn back to your natural form so if you did try to kill the pig it would turn back into a person before you could try to eat it.
Older sects of Buddhism did distinguish between eating plants where you pretty much had to kill them to eat them(stuff like carrrots or lettuce) vs stuff that would survive if you took from them(stuff like fruit trees or sweet potatoes). Something to think about.
I have a feeling that some intelligent plants might insist you eat their fruit. For instance, an intelligent strawberry bush might ask you to please eat their berries (but also to be sure to do “#2” outside a couple days after eating them).
That only really works if you don't chew up the seeds (which mammals, such as humans, categorically do). But then, a talking strawberry bush could just offer the berries and politely request that you scatter the seeds somewhere far away.
The thing is that fruit, specifically, is meant to be eaten. The entire point of plants producing fruit is so that animals will eat the fruit and disperse the seeds. In the case of humans, and presumably any other being that develops agriculture, the plant doesn't even have to rely on the person leaving the seeds in its...leavings. Its species gets furthered in is survival as a crop. Would a sentient strawberry bush know all that? Idk, depends on the worldbuilding I guess...
@@greatestcait Strawberry seeds are very much likely to pass through because they are so tiny. But you are right, a lot of plants try to avoid having their seeds eaten by mammals, to the point that peppers developed a toxin that hurts mammals specifically but does not affect birds which swallow fruits whole usually. But turns out humans like the way it hurts and started to eat more peppers and plant them, in a way the pepper socceeded but not the way anyone expected.
What if there's a theological justification; in many mythologies certain foodstuffs are given to mankind by the gods, like the corn kernels given to the Aztecs by Cinteotl. Would they not say to any worried corn-spirit "Fear not, for in nourishing me you do your duty to the gods and will be rewarded for it in the next life." And given that D&D gods tend to be eminently immanent, they're likely to be correct.
It would be funny if orcs had this same kind of logic in eating humans: "dont worry, i might bee cooking you for dinner, but my god will welcome you in afterlife as youve served your purpose as my food!
The reason we have different words for cow and cow meat, but not chicken and chicken meat, is because of their historical relative status. Only the rich could afford to eat beef or pork regularly. The peasants raised the livestock and the upper class ate the meat. This also explains the language difference. "Cow" is Germanic, while "Beef" is French, because thats what language each group spoke.
Yes, the distinction between words for animals and words for meat is a unique quirk of English, a side effect of the Norman conquest. Definitely not a common linguistic feature.
@@scottmartin5990 Indeed, in my country (Spain) we actually have the equivalent of the word "meat" and then have to say which animal is (like "pig meat" instead of pork). I think this is the norm for most people on the world.
Yeah he called "beef" a euphemism and I had to pause and come down to the comments to look for this because... no. No that's not why English has special words for some types of meat.
The same happens with vegetables that have two names, for example; aubergine and eggplant. They are a result of international influences through history.
I think you're forgetting one very simple thing: People actually believed in all of these things you describe in fantasy, but they still ate what they ate. Though, I suppose they didn't have to actually face them in their daily lives to worry as much about the ethics.
Exactly, and neither would people in D&D worlds: the number of druids going around and casting Speak with Animals on random livestock in order to promote starvation has got to be fairly low. What are the chances that one of them shows up at mealtime at your particular house, with a free spell slot to burn, and isn't knocked unconscious by people who just want to eat in peace? Close to nil.
His first example of what people would think was dismissal, he did acknowledge it also in the vegetarian? section that they would face a lot of pushback.
@@Hrafnskald Reminds me of story in Norse mythology, where Thor, Loki, and Odin are just walking about when they see a giant otter, and they hunt it, skin it, and eat it. Only to find out that it was someone's son who had transformed themselves. Even though they know that shapeshifters exist, they aren't something to bother thinking about in their culture except in the rare cases when it turns out that it mattered. They just deal with the consequences when it happens.
@@Hrafnskald I find it funny the assumption that Speak with Animals will make people like animals *more* . Instead I'd argue that it would force people not to anthropomorphize animals. I'd also argue that RAW most animals affected by Awaken would be somewhere between chaotic neutral and neutral evil, since it never states that the added intelligence comes with any new moral instincts. So the animals are still just as selfish and capable of empathy as they were before (altruism isn't exactly the norm for animals).
Siberian bear-hunting rituals include a prayer of thanks to the bear for providing its meat. Which is a bit of trivia that has somehow stuck with me from my doctoral studies in religion.
Honestly the practice of thanking the animals you kill for their meat seems like it wouldn't hold up to the existence of speak with animals, awaken, and cannibalistic humanoid races. Since people are going to know for a fact that the animals would feel about the same about being "thanked" like this, as a human would feel if an orc was giving them thanks for the meal they were about to provide lol.
@@vakusdrake3224ong thank you! Im so sick of people being like "i thank the food that i killed" it doesent matter! If the creature being killed doesent want to die they dont want to die!
In general, Siberian peoples have a respectful attitude towards bears. There are many beliefs about bears: Bears are almost human and understand human speech. In order not to attract the bear, people call it allegorically: the old one, the man in the fur coat, the woman with the children - about mama bear, etc. When meeting him by chance, people try to talk to him respectfully in order to leave peacefully. At the same time, hunting a bear is an act of valor of the hunter. During the hunt, you and the bear are putting your lives on the line, so it is considered like a fair duel. When a bear is killed on hunt, people apologize to it. If the bear attacked first, then there is probably no need to apologize. After a bear dies, its spirit can track what happens to its remains. When eating bear meat, you need to croak like a raven before doing so, so that the spirit of the bear thinks that it is being eaten by a raven, and does not bring a curse on people. Eating bear meat gives its strength to the eater. If the bear's skin was disturbed by strong shaking, this will cause bad weather - a storm or snowfall.
Computers. You can talk to them. In English, the difference in words between livestock and the meat is due to the influence of the French language upon the aristocracy in medieval England.
@@DBArtsCreators Just a tad more plastic in your diet than usual :) But really if I remember the video correctly I'm just referring to the fact that people can talk to computers but we don't see computers as people. It wasn't in reference to what people should eat, so much as his assertion that being able to talk to something means we should feel bad for not considering it people. In fact, in a lot of fantasy worlds, it's more common to encounter things you can interact with in a people-like way which aren't people, such as magic items, spell effects, and so on.
in the goodberry system: what happens when one of the compulsory casters of goodberry realizes they have full power over whether or not the 10 (or in the case of a higher level caster, maybe even more) people theyre in charge of feeding get to have a meal? they might accept that it is their duty to feed them, or they might realize how easy that power is to exploit, like what happens in the real world all too often: work for me or you dont get to eat
If the people eho create the goodberrys also has a monopoly on violince this would most likely happense. But if not they would properly be treated as the farmers in the middle ages
I think this hypothetical gets even more interesting if we are using dnds leveling system. A level 1 Druid, the weakest Druid with power, can feed 20 people a day. A level 2 30 (or 40 if they’re circle of the land, probably the most common type.) And by level 3, still a relatively weak druid, they can feed 60 people a day (80 if they’re circle of the land.) That’s an entire small village that can be fed by one circle of the land druid. It also would lead to these spellcasters being in incredibly high demand as most work pre Industrial Revolution was agricultural. So one person being able to feed 80 a day is levels of efficiency that is unheard of.
Druidic society already has a system of gatekeeping in place. One cannot become a Druid without a mentor. Sure the 20-80 people could rise up against their Druidic overlord. But then what? Without beasts of burden, livestock, crops, or well, what will they do? Leave their home and walk to the next village or town? Would or could that village take them in? The rationing of food and water can be a powerful motivator. With a group of people otherwise separated from the rest of society by several days travel through harsh terrain, I can see a Jim Jones/David Koresh type cult built around a Druidic overlord with high charisma and wisdom. Grab your ketchup and crunch away my friends.
It depends on how rare magic is. Any druid and most rangers would be able to cast goodberry. Would the magic initiate feat become a common thing for certain professions? Would a wand of goodberry become part of the traveler's kit for emergencies? Between all of this, I doubt it would be a means to coerce people, but rather a respected profession in a society so inclined.
It could get worse, what if all the goodberry casters got together and made a union. Given that they are by nature spell casters they are not nearly as defenseless as farmers would be so would be significantly less susceptible to coercion, and with no prior existing agricultural infrastructure or storage, if they say no food then you get no food until their demands are met. They are not like farmers where a military force could beat them up and take their crops, then replace them with new peasants next year. Their skill set takes too long to mature for them to be replaceable and, unless I am mistaken, goodberries are only good for the day they were made on and spoil if not eaten, so not reserve food would exist.
About Goodberries: I don't remember the name of the webnovel. However, settings was like this: Nobles of the world had Magic with which they could help common folk grow food, they afterwards collected crops and delivered to the nobles, etc. The problem was that no one new how crops needed to be planted and tended without Magic. So, if the noble was killed in the war or the territory was left unattended people would starve, because no one knew how to grow the plants and only nobles had magic. What Goodberries creates is monopoly and dependency, which if the industry is disrupted will result in global death from starvation.
This assumes that civilized = vegetarian, which is not historically the case, nor is there currently a vegetarian majority in the real world. Closeness to nature can just as easily justify "all animals and plants consume each other, therefore my eating animals and plants is no different from the hungry goblins or lions that want to eat me". Circle of life, and whoever wins, eats and lives on. Assuming that just because something can communicate with a creature means we will prioritize its wellbeing over our own is a big stretch. See: Whale, Dolphin, Squid.
If anything *Speak with Animals* should only reinforce this, as people find out that altruism towards non-family is not a very common animal trait. Realistically if you're being consistent with alignment then arguably most animals should actually be evil aligned: After all if a animal that behaves selfishly and has nothing we conceive as morality would be evil aligned were you to *Awaken* it, then it shouldn't just get a pass for having low intelligence. Or alternatively to be consistent they should allow you to play obviously evil characters who still register as true neutral/unaligned because they're extremely dumb.
What you are saying is might makes right. Its regrettably the way most people, regardless of if they live in a "civilized" or "non civilized" place think. But i think that just because we can doesent mean we should. And especially if we can choose the most empathetic option that will be the most altruistic while it not harming our own wellbeing we should always take it. Even if someone will never help you back, if you can save them without it being overly dangerous to your self you should!
@@lillambilamb3345 Necessity makes right. The last sentence sums it up perfectly: "If you can save them without it being overly dangerous to yourself". Failing to eat will kill you. Failing to eat will not make them immortal. You cannot save every plant and animal, and attempting to do so will always result in your death.
@@lillambilamb3345 What I am describing are Darwin's theories on natural selection: organisms that are best adapted to their environment thrive. Those that are poorly adapted, die. Biology dictates outcomes: for an animal to live, it must consume plants and/or other animals. Kindness is possible, refusing to eat is suicidal.
Good video. I expected a side note about how speaking to trees would make wooden tools seem macabre, but that's not food. Also, with magic there are plenty of ways to explain creatures having detailed memory prior to a spell. Speak with Plants might summon a Fey spirit to read the xylum and chlorophyll and reverse engineer what happened to the plant recently.
Well if you can't reproduce with it while it is alive, it's not cannibalism. Because if you can reproduce with it, it's at least in some sense a subspecies of your own kind. Also, that does raise a strange question about dragons... But when it comes to trees and plants, a living entity that has never been able to commune with others before, might still take a long time just to realize that it can share its thoughts for the first time ever. Also, the spell Speak With Plants in D&D belongs to the school of transmutation, the same school as Polymorph that can drop an enemy's intelligence down to one. Also, a fun fact the horse that stomped out calculations utilized the expressions of people to know when to stop, and did not in fact learn arithmetic. So it was more like a fun trick really. :3
Moral questions like these lead me to believe that, if spells such as Detect Magic/Evil and Good/Poison and Disease exist, that someone would stand to benefit a lot by developing a "Detect Soul" spell. Obviously from a moral standpoint, one should probably respect the lives of everything, even the soulless, but it might ease a lot of moral quandries if you learn that this particular cow or stalk of corn isn't going to 'feel' the impact of being harvested in the same way. But that of course gets into the philosophy of, "What is a soul and what does it mean if you do or don't have one" so who knows
Would it be better to have psionic to use their power to detect though, sentient, Conscious and Conscience. To see if they have those traits or would it be like a jellyfish and seastar Maybe even text the spell talk to things and create experiments. To see if the magic granite those traits to those things and create my imbuing artificial, spirit or enhancing it. If you are unable to detect though from a tree or read it mind would that brings up questions about those magic
Arguably, isn't it more ethical to eat something that has a soul (and therefore can go to the afterlives that exist in most D&D settings) than to eat something that is snuffed out entirely the moment you kill it?
@@caseyw1288 Hard to say! If we're going off of Curse of Strahd logic, creatures without souls are basically living puppets without much thought or feeling to them and the module makes a point to (sorta) make you not feel bad for killing them since they're just empty vessels, but if a soulless creature has just as much emotion and individuality as one WITH a soul, THEN I think it starts getting extra fucky
@@evanunhinged5771 That will be questionable for some race in dnd like elves. Since their God doesn't create new souls but recycle them. Making a finite number of souls for elves and plus living so long too. That also would be a philosophical question about any extra elves being born or half elves are they soulless being walking around and living their life without knowing they don't have any soul. So how would you be able to differentiate between an elves with a soul and an elves without a soul. How would they be treated by their own people if they find out that an Elves was born soulless
@@majesticgothitelle1802 I'm mostly asking in the specific context of, "Does this boar have a soul and if it doesn't do I have to feel bad about killing and eating it," but that IS an interesting question, I'm not sure how a half-elf's soul would work if the elven gods aren't making any new souls. Maybe whatever God governs the other parent's half would make or recycle a different soul? Maybe some half-elves have elf souls and some don't? I dunno! Neat philosophical quandary
Another fascinating, thought-provoking video, Tom. As you point out, some plants do need to have their fruits and nuts eaten in order to reproduce. Thus, they probably have adapted to feel pleasure rather than pain if these parts are removed, pain being reserved for attacks on the roots, leaves, and other vital organs of the plant. This may not help humans, since as you say, we can’t live by just fruits and nuts, but many bird species do, and conceivably some fantasy races might also. And in fantasy, gods, priests or wizards might have tinkered with human biology to allow us to live that way also. About the “all goodberry diet” civilization, bear in mind that this civilization will be a more thoroughgoing theocracy than any known in history. A small elite of druids and rangers who can cast this spell literally controls whether everybody else in the land gets to eat or not. Excommunication doesn’t just mean a rotten afterlife; it means immediate starvation! Sure, an excommunicate might turn to “forbidden fruit” for sustenance, but the plants and animals will whisper to each other until word reaches the druids, and the “murderer” is hunted down. The word “lord” comes from the old Anglo-Saxon “hlaf-weard,” meaning “loaf guard”; the man who guards the loaves of bread is, very literally, the boss of you. How much more so the druids and rangers who not only guard but create the only food you can safely and legally eat!
It's actually not really only a post enlightenment period, strict vegetarianism was a thing in India for at least 2k years, and there was at least one philosopher during the Islamic Golden age that was a modern day vegan
Honestly I think Awaken animals would actually serve as a major reason *to feel okay about* eat animals: *Since it never states that they gain any new moral instincts* , which people always seem to miss when they anthropomorphize them. So not only would most animals behave shockingly selfishly, but most animals have a large number of offspring they treat as somewhat disposable. Which means that in all likelihood any awakened animal is not going to be seen sympathetically, since they'll be willing to sell out literally anyone to save their own skin (even if from starvation). After all relatively few animals will risk too much, or pay too much for any single offspring, since they're playing a numbers game (and plenty of animals will even eat their own young). Essentially most animals that have been subject to Awakening (since animals that display altruism clearly like great apes tend to have over 3 intelligence and so not being valid targets) would be neutral evil as soon as Awaken gives their behavior moral weight. After all what would you call someone who is totally indifferent to the suffering of strangers and willing to sell their own children into slavery, or just eat them if it gives them the resources to care for a larger number of children in the future? Honestly I don't think knowing that other people might view your selfish behavior as evil is as important as the rules thinks it is. So I tend to think that the concept of "unaligned" creatures is silly and that neutral evil is the "default" alignment for anything that hasn't evolved/been created with moral intuitions, honor, or the like. I think that even if animals aren't smart enough normally for their selfishness to count as evil, that the existence of Awakened animals might lead people to view regular animals as being for the most part essentially evil, with the Awakening having served to show their "true colors". Given the prevalence of cannibalism in human history I honestly have my doubts about a norm against cannibalism arising which includes any canonically evil humanoids. I think it would be more natural for people to decide what to eat based on how morally sympathetic the creature was, so people may be more ok with eating goblin/orc (depending on how intrinsically evil they are in cannon) than they are with say whale/elephant.
The reason English differentiates between "meat from an animal" and "animal" is because right after the Norman conquest on England (by William the Conqueror in 1066), you had French-speaking nobility with the lower classes being English-speakers, and so words in Norman French started to creep into the language, and the chefs who prepared the (French) nobles' meals were among the first to learn some new terminology. Thus, boef (cattle) became beef, porc (pig) became pork, and so on. So it's not originally a matter of abstraction, though the chefs in question undoubtedly thought the words referred only to the meat, and not the animal it came from.
@@DanielMWJ I just imagine a world wide ban on conjuration magic. Since the elemental, fiend, celestial, spirit, jinn and other beings of other realms. They might see that as some form of adduction, crime against free will and enslaved. Forcing to do a task against their freedoms and other stuff. I laughed at the thought of a conjuration wizard going to court. due to the crime against summoned an other worldly being against their will and force labor
In a Spelljammer game, Brennan Lee Mulligan put a "psychic cuttlefish shot" on the rock of Bral. The cuttlefish would telepathically plead for its life before being consumed, but the vendor insisted that they weren't sapient.
What is socially acceptable to eat varies greatly across the world today, so I imagine the same would be true of a fantasy world. People tend to eat what is available and abundance of other options appears to be the reason we don't eat things. Let people really starve just a few days and the local population of pets will start getting thinner. You may not eat your dog (at first), but that unknown dog? *Everything is food when you're starving.* So abundance = specialized diets. While the less there is to eat the more the menue expands. In addition, a great deal of plants can be harvested without harming the plant. Or maybe each individual grain, fruit, and seed can be made sentient? At that point, does it even matter since it just makes the truth abundantly clear: life cannot exist without death, because life lives by feeding of other life (yes, even plants who photosynthesize because the soil is made from dead things). As the famous quote goes: "Life needs things to live." Things is other life, because nearly all life (except really simple ones) require organic matter as fuel. You literally cannot live without causing the death of other life, just as much other life cannot live without your death. Hence why I find "evil death cult" a bit overdone. Death is absolutely necessary for there to be complex life. 🤔💀👻 Seriously, give me more death druids. It's imperative things die and feed new life!
Then there's the pleasure of food to keep in mind too. Much of luxury foods today are simply so because people are willing to pay a lot for them. Shellfish and salmon for example, used to be peasant food. Lowly bottom feeding beasts? Fish from the local river? Hardly fit for the local lord, now is it, with how simple it was to procure. That still happens today, expensive "luxury foods" are simply whatever is difficult to get. Quality is a secondary concern when it comes to exclusivity! The wealthier you are in a fantasy world, the more fantastical your diet is likely to become as well as, most likely, unhealthier, because you eat more and more based on exclusivety. That means fat, sugar, rare and powerful monsters, and weird planar substances that are probably toxic and sometimes require magical antidotes, and every now and then things get a bit too rare and exclusive and now you have a gibbering mouther or worse as a surprise dinner guest! 🤣
This discussion reminds me a lot of "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", and I think many of you might enjoy it. Theres a passage where harry thinks about this conundrum after discovering he is a parselmouth 😂
I like the idea that entities not predisposed to speech don't have clear concepts of things like their own mortality, but when suddenly having the ability for coherent expression forced upon them gain all the other self-awareness baggage that goes with it, and are sometimes rather resentful about their 'rude awakening'.
The divide between food and animal names is a legacy of Norman conquest. "Beef" f.e. is derived from the Old French for "ox", so describing the meat as different from the animal dates only as far back as Middle English, and even then, it's only different because it derives from a different language. And the reason we didn't do that for chickens was because that term (poulette) got applied to _all_ farmed birds.
There would be major geopolitical impacts for sure. One can imagine that hunting would be heavily controlled due to the risk of accidental harm to a powerful or important creature. Conversely, I think farming livestock would probably be encouraged over allowing the common people to blunder into who-knows-what in the forest
Druids may end up as the one least woried about that question having experienced the perspective of most of the food chain wille wildshaped. After all, the only reason we are not woried about predators is because we build tools, cityes and society to protect us from nature. Being more in touch with nature druids may stil avoid eating anything they know is sapient out of principle, but it's worse to waste a kill than to eat an rabbit they did not know was awekened.
I follow a guy on Twitter who is making his own TTRPG, and he’s made a very interesting version of elves. They value nature so much they refuse to eat plants and only eat meat, and any meat.
The goodberry commune at the end sounds a lot like the good version of what Neckbeardia TTRPG coined burgerpunk. The fantasy version was that magic users had created consequence-free (for the caster) create food and drink guilds of Magic users that supplanted the agrarian economy. The big difference was in Burgerpunk all food was basically fast food if it was created by mages and the guilds basically ended up becoming like modern fast food companies with even more open power to manipulate governments.
I always liked the idea that Speak with Animals or Plants just enables the caster to understand the creature’s natural form of communication, like being able to comprehend birdsong in terms the brain can understand. One good point also is that insects are not animals and there’s no spell to speak with insects so maybe fantasy cultures would be more likely to eat diets heavy in insects for protein. Fruits and vegetables are also more like eating seed pods than the actual plant itself so enlightened cultures maybe actually favor eating vegan diets in order to facilitate seed dispersal in cooperation with the apple tree or acorn tree for instance. A culture that exclusively eats magically conjured food is so amazing though.
for goodberries, it doesn't even have to be infinite to be a major element of how the world works as long as it can last for a few decades, the civilisation that first invents it will have such drastic demographic, economic and logistical advantages over their neighbours they should easily conquer the whole world if they so chose and if it lasts for a few centuries instead, the majority of people might have entirely forgotten all other means of food production by the time it runs out, causing massive famines
I make it clear to my friends that if I were actually in the world of d&d, I’d be cooking up the weirdest shit. Everything that looks less human than a half-orc is up for grabs. I do not care, I wanna know what goblin tastes like 😂. Hell, I’d even go so far as to eat elves if I got permission.
Actually on my games we have the idea that eating intelligent life is cannibalism, which is an evil act. So eating a Griffon or a Manticore is an evil act because they are intelligent, despite being non-human monsters that would eat you without thinking it twice.
Implementing a goodberry system would be the equivalent of the local lord saying that "all living things in this region are subject to poaching law", peasants would lose access to any form of self-subsistence if the state wizard/druid can turn anything "legally sentient" on a whim. And it's not like peasants can even tell the difference between actual sentient creatures and "claimed" sentient ones.
I would see Speak with Plants as something similar to Speak with Dead: collecting information from the object/landscape and formulating it in the form of an answer to questions. Corpses (Speak with Dead specifically states that you speak with the corps, not with the soul of the dead person) don't have sentience of their own, so nothing about this situation proves that plants do. And if some fairy is a part of the landscape, you are probably breathing them in as well, so if you don't want part of them getting into you, you should either not be on the said landscape at all (which may not even be what this particular fairy would prefer), or you should isolate yourself from the landscape in any way available, including using the Air Bubble spell and so on.
this occurred to me while playing BG3 when using Speak with Animals was easy and fun to do... now I'm thinking of making a character with at least one level of druid and they will have goodberry and create water because they refuse to eat "their friends"
I once played a harpy monk. Part of contending with the chaotic innate nature of harpy vs the orderly nature of their monastic upbringing was avoiding casualties, but asking my GM "does it look tasty?" whenever something died.
1. I'm a firm believer that the spells PCs use are, largely, not things people whose job isn't "adventurer" could or would ever use. Like, if you've got a knack for magic and are a a wage laborer, is Speak With Plants really the most useful application of it in your day-to-day life? The philosophy of eating sentient plants and animals is far from the interests of your average D&D cooper or farmer or even low-level mage. 2. I could definitely see sapient plants striking up arrangements to survive while giving a portion of their fruit and edible leaves to humanoids interested in eating them. Planting the seeds somewhere nice or keeping them from the lumberjack's axe would seem pretty standard, but some plants could easily take it much much further. 3. Maybe they could take it in completely the opposite direction, sorta like how some people badly misunderstand the leftist aphorism that "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism" to mean "Fuck it. Go nuts!" If everything is potentially sapient, why have taboos about which living things you eat? Maybe the scruples we have in the real world about eating common pet animals are completely alien to the fantasy person; maybe another humanoid species is literally fair game, maybe even members of one's own species. Hell, with sentience, you could even throw cannibalism contracts into such a society. You could choose to be a meal the way we choose whether or not to be an organ donor.
In a world where most creatures that can talk want to kill and eat you, this would not happen. Someone living in a D&D world would regularly encounter sentient creatures able to communicate without magic who want to kill them, and freely say that. So the pig can talk? That makes it just like the horde of orcs who tried to kill and eat us, the dragon who tried to burn and eat us, the mindflayers who tried to transform and consume us, and the tribe of giants who want to smash and eat us. In our world, Sentience = Reasonable exists because humans have enough food and don't need to eat other humans to survive. Sentient monsters, in contrast, regularly prey on humans. To survive in a D&D world requires killing (or getting others to kill) those who want to kill you and cannot be reasoned with.
In dwarf fortress, elven ethics allow for the consumption of sentient creatures. I think this makes a bit of sense if theyre drawing less of a line between beasts and sentient creatures, if theyd eat a pig theyd eat a human
It depends on what kind of elf you have meat of. If it's carnivore/cannibal elf,like in Divinity OS, then it will likely have "bushmeat" Meat of a carnivore, which is tougher, less nutricious, and not at all pleasant to eat. But it can be quite good with a good amount of salt(long-cured) or made into a stew with traditional methods. It will soften the meat and give it better flavor. If it's a vegeterian high-elf, which for centuries and a lot of generations didn't eat a piece of meat, and weren't a subject for adrenaline or fear often. maybe they got more softer red meat, than what regular human has. ...but it's all a speculation. Not that i had a chance to experience it. Don't get me wrong... ;)
In some real life circumstances, people considered anything that was 'not them' okay to eat. During the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition, the local tribe whose area they passed through did seriously consider hunting and subsequently eating the expedition because they didn't recognize the members of the expedition as people. They definitely weren't of the tribe and apparently there was also some confusion based on prevalence of body hair that some members of the expedition were actually beasts.
There are peoples in Africa who farm cows, but rather than slaughter cows for meat the preference is bloodletting and milk. The cow can recover its blood within weeks, which preserves the food source as well as letting the cow live. In the plant world, herbs, berries, and fruit trees all benefit from being harvested and, in the case of fruits and berries, this is done while causing zero damage to the plant. There are also plants that clone and spread, such as the sweet potato. You could harvest the cloned sweet potatoes from the runners while leaving the original tuber intact, thus leaving the whole of the original plant. Considering so many plants are adapted to being trampled, grazed, or otherwise damaged by daily weather, I think it’s reasonable to say that the pain they’d endure from a harvest would be minimal. And that’s without even getting into fire adapted plants, potentially even able to withstand grilling before their sentience has fully faded from their cells.
I have a non-DnD based magic system I write in with a friend, and in that system are some mages who have an... affinity with life, both human and animal. And if they're strong mages or more highly attuned (which are separate things), they can feels the life and sometimes emotions of animals nearby, especially if they concentrate on them. It's not hearing animals in their language, but it is awareness of their feelings and inner selves. My general concept is that mages with this "life" affinity, tend to skew strongly towards BOTH ends of the debate on whether animals should be eaten. Both coming from different angles of "people and animals aren't so different". The anti-meat eating side using arguments we're all well familiar with, and the pro-meat side arguing that we're all part of nature and a person eating meat is no more ethically compromised than a wolf doing the same. As long as you don't cause unnecessary suffering in the process. (Even the pro-meat life mages have very strong feelings about animal welfare in general and ethical slaughtering). So there's lots on both sides, but fewer that are the sort of "eh I just eat what everyone else in my community eats and don't think too hard about it" neutral that we see a lot in out world. They're sort of forced to confront the issue and pick a side, unless they actively choose to ignore it. ...not that this comes up a lot in our writing. We only have one character who's always a life mage in our stories, and one who sometimes is, depending on circumstances. And we don't discuss the full-time one's diet much. And the part-time one we're mostly discussing his enormous sweet tooth. Discussing our characters' philosophies on food ethics is... not one of our normal priorities.
in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy at the restaurant at the end of the universe there was a scene where there was a cow? server? I think that talked to the main character and suggested which part of itself that the character might want to order to eat. and this video reminded me of that scene.
What about create food and water? I guess this deserves a part two, focusing not so much on what people eat, but if and how societies will produce and procure food sources.
I once turned a DM’s stomach because I had access to a wagon and eleven orc corpses while I was playing a goblin ranger/druid. The other players were complaining about the lack of treasure while I was planning a feast for the tribe I built using the downtime system in Pathfinder first edition. A goblin with access to a tannery gets leather from pretty much anything. A goblin with a butcher shop gets meats and sausages from organs. A goblin with access to a mill can crush bones into a a fine paste to bake into calcium & protein rich siege bread by adding it to a bit of ground wheat flour. The DM never considered that I would be looking at the possible value of the bodies as a feast for my tribe or something I could use to cement alliances with the other tribe living in the flooded portion of Absalom. That’s probably why his game was such a depressing failure. It stifled the creativity of players who thought in terms of building tribes and kingdoms over beating the big bad guy and taking treasure. I made my character for the wrong game. Meat is meat. If you start questioning that, you go hungry.
Dogs and cats are also directly beneficial to us as something other than food. Dogs help us survive Mostar by helping us hunt and cats help keep disease-causing pests under control.
Fun fact about pork, mutton and beef. It runs a bit against your point, but their words comme from french, after England had lost a war. The animals themselves kept their Anglo-Saxon roots, but then, when it was served to the newly instaured french nobility, it was the french names that was used, porc, moutton et boeuf.
Perhaps in a more ascetic situation the holy days are observed with the use of the goodberry spell. Rather than having to deprive themselves of food they simply forgo the work of harvesting and preparation to better focus on their meditations for the duration of the observance. Normal labor may still continue, maintanence of fields and such, but perhaps a week long absence of prepared foods.
i usually love adding my own thoughts and how i do it in my world but i can't add anything to this, the only insight i can give is that people do what they need to to survive and they only care about thair in groups. kind of what you were talking about at the 3 min mark, nothing except magical food is objectively moral to eat
Depending on how easy it is to create food with magic it would just be easier to use it even if you don't care about the whole ethics thing. Why do all the work of raising livestock, farming plants, hunting or gathering if you can just use magic instead?
In my setting there is actually a race of talking fairytale animals called Skovkin. They can typically be any animal but most commonly take the form of cats, toads, bears, foxes, and wolves. They are indistinguishable from regular animals except for the fact that they stand upright and wear clothing. Skovkin generally do not eat other Skovkin but they have no problem eating non sentient animals. A Skovkin mouse could watch a Skovkin cat eat a normal mouse right in front of him and see no problem with it. Not saying that Skovkin haven't tried to eat eachother before but mostly its seen as extremely taboo and wrong.
In my world magic has stopped famine, but not by having one magic berry. Nothing goes to waste and no crops fail because hailstorms and such are prevented, so food is quite cheap. This allows it to be fun instead of stressful. So magic has entered cooking and it's there to stay. When harvested or caught, ingredients can be kept at peek freshness with magic. Then, you can use magic to set the temperature and humidity just right for what you want. Be it wine, bread or ice cream. Culinary magic is a form of art that combines cooking, science, biology and magic. I wish we had this in our world.
I treat plants as effectively little more than the hair/nerves of the planet in D&D. No inherent soul; at most they may host a fey spirit. Eating plants is more like eating hair shaved off after a trip to the barber. There's no concern unless you try to eat the source of that plant/hair (in the case of plants, that's the entire planet. In the case of hair, it would be the creature you shaved). And honestly, if something is attempting (or even considering) eating your planet, you have an entirely different, more dangerous situation going on.
The topic of food is one I"ve thought on a lot for my world of buge, Entopia. Point 1 - All "animals" are plant or fungus based. Actual bugs are all fully sapient Point 2 - Many bugs are exclusively carnivorous. Conclusion - Cannibalism *must* exist. Of course murder isn't okay. However, something you might notice on a visit to the world is a complete lack of cemeteries. The bodies of the dead are cannibalized to sustain the living I've considered having an alternate metbod too, involving regeneration. Chopping off an arm, serving it to someone, then regrowing it. I'm not sure how to or if I should implement that solution
Interesting thing id like to point out. Halflings are known for their appetites and love of food, but this trait has a history of taken on darker aspects in tbe history of DnD. Halflings are often targeted most fiercely by man-eating creatures because many of these creatures find they taste the best. However, Halflings are on of the races with the highest propensity to resorting to canibalism when falling onto dire straights, or when losing touch with civilized ways of living. This includes other humanoids, but also other halflimgs. It really puts the supposed good taste of halfling meat into a darker context. This isnt even including settings like ebberon or dark sun where more primitive contingents of halflings are more common. More interestingly is thst in 3rd edition, the primary Halfling god Yondalla gained the sin of gluttony domain when that domain was published. This is a domain she shares with Yeenoghu and includes a spell that allows the caster to eat a target alive. Halflings have a facinating relashonship with food outside of their cottagecore aesthetic.
It makes a lot of sense for druids to become Jain monks. Even if goodberry was not a sustainable food source. It is possible to live without causing a significant amount of harm or death to other living beings (strictly following ahisma), though it’s obviously not easy.
I play a druid in my group's main campaign and I've been playing her as a vegetarian. Not so much from an "I'm not eating anything I can talk to" perspective but more a "why kill if I don't have to?" point of view. We also treat Goodberry from the perspective of: Sure, it covers all the nutritional needs but it's not satisfying. Too many days of straight Goodberry meals and you're cranky and willing to eat the backend of a dead skunk.
I just finished the Seven Kenning trilogy. With the discovery of the sixth, the power over and communication with animals, the character that discovered it, when he came back to his original city, he asked where he can find a restaurant with a vegetarian menu(even before being blessed, he didn't like to kill animal and eat meat despite being from a family of hunters). He is answered that now most(if not all) offer vegetarian options, as to not seem inhospitable to the Beast Callers(those blessed by the sixth).
Do you only do official D&D content, or any fantasy stuff? If the latter , maybe a video about Dungeon Cores in the world. If you aren’t familiar with that, basically dungeons as living, sapient beings making monsters, traps, loot, digging down, etc, either getting mana passively from the environment, from people fighting in them, and/or killing people inside of it. If the former, then maybe a video on mimics, or the lords of madness (mind flayers, aboliths, neogi, beholders, etc).
As an old DM of d&d 3.5 My player eat rabbit and vegetables they found in the forest or buy in villages. Many times a player take skill point into cuisine (I'am french XD) So no, goblins is not for everyday, and with me as DM, you can take corruption point by eating an aligned evil meat. Goblin do not camp at 300m of any village, they live in the profund forest (5km is agrssivly close... The hunters can encounter), it's not the goblin slayers world. But you find a little diablotin at each crossroads at midnight (Like the legend).
In 1st through 3rd edition, the Stonetell spell negates this whole discussion. The divination spell lets you speak with a rock about its past experiences, proving that EVERYTHING in the world has some amount of cognition, not just organic natural macroscopic matter. In my world this has led druids to act in some peculiar ways, but they still gather and hunt and eat. Some are vegetarian, others purely carnivores, often based on whether they've made a deep personal connection with one kind of food source or another
also my druid on some level is kinda cruel, she calls animals by normal people names and will also kill and eat them. obviously spent too much time talking to predators.
how universally understood are animal languages? we have seen domestic animals be able to communicate across species, and have had examples of wild animals banding together across species, i believe is crows and wolves that have been seen hunting together. therefore its conceivable that all animals are able to communicate with all other animals. now following this chain of logic, the solution is simple: hunting > husbandry. Now even if this is not the case, we still have to deal with the fact that cannibalism is fairly common among animals, notable examples are bears, lions and chimpanzees. so perhaps the idea goes the other way and the eating of the dead becomes a common death rite. now when you get into plants the problem becomes a matter of harm and death. is a seed alive and if we eat that or the fruit that contained it have we killed that seed or is it not alive until it has germinated. and does removal of edible parts in a nondestructive way harm a plant or is a non-harmful process, akin to the cutting of hair
>therefore its conceivable that all animals are able to communicate with all other animals. You're confusing a few things. Firstly most animals don't have language, their communication is genetically hard coded. Whereas crows and many highly intelligent animals do have proper language, which we know because it has to be learned and differs by region (within the same species). So you confusing a few different things: Firstly smart animals recognizing the hard coded communication of less smart animals and learning too cooperate based on mostly body language. Secondly you have smart animals with language who actually learn each others language and use that to communicate (or to manipulate them by say giving fake alarm calls). This level of communication seems to mostly be restricted to birds. Lastly you have examples like among felines, where the animal has a hardcoded instinct that causes it to mimic the hardcoded sounds produced by their prey (you ever had a cat start making chirping sounds).
@@vakusdrake3224 however for D&D, the speak with animals spell targets the person casting the spell, this strongly implies that any animals the caster speaks to afterwards already had its own language that ordinary people can't perceive.
This really doesn't change the dynamics of what people will eat. Any animal or plant that's been awakened will know that either you make yourself an oddity that humans would preserve out of their greed and/or fear or get out of dodge if they are in a prime hunting area. Any Druid that gets an inkling that they are being hunted would or should know to shapeshift to their humanoid form or wear some clearly visible indicator that they are a druid. Local Rangers or Scouts could search and find the Dryad homes or Treants or any other sentient plant and mark them or the area. Because these things are are exceptions, not rules. Not even a quarter of every woodland animal is going to be awakened, it's more like 1% of them. Not every plant is potentially awakened, it'd also be 1% or considering how many plants have to exist in a world, it's closer to 0.1% of plants would be awakened. For most of these things unless there is something special going on, sentience is not something standard animals or plants just have off the jump. In fact I would argue that any organism that achieves this will be very aware of their position in the food change and seek safety than to risk running into predators and competition, Humans are included in this. Because they would be both smart enough and aware enough with sentience that moving would be the best solution to that kind of danger.
My table generally has a "rule of culture" when it comes to food. It's basically "when in Rome, do as the Romans do". We base our food resources based on what the locals eat unless it is either poisonous to the race we're playing as, or if it falls under cannibalism.
To be a bit pedantic [and a true quote from one of my earlier games] : "Cannibalism is only eating of your own species." So disposing of Kobold corpses by eating them is a valid way to avoid attracting scavengers.
In the Narnia Book "The Silver Chair" the characters accidently eat the meat of a talking deer, that they thought was a normal deer. To them it's cannibalism.
Okay, so some other people have argued your interpretation of these spells is wrong, but I think it's more interesting to engage with these concepts as you describe them. So the way I see it, if it becomes common knowledge that animals and even plants can be intelligibly communicated with via spells - and it becomes commonly accepted that these spells merely imbue animals/plants with the ability to intelligibly communicate thoughts and emotions they already have - *it may lead societies to one of two conclusions: 1) A society might conclude that the only ethical way to consume food is to consume magically conjured food or subsist off of some form of magical sustenance. *2) A society might come to the rather morbid conclusion that, since all pants and animals consumed are sapient and sentient beings, there is no moral difference between consuming livestock or farm yields and consuming people, thus the concept of cannibalism is effectively erased as all meat, including that of people, is seen as just food and nothing more. (* Addendum at bottom of comment) I'd postulate that either the former would be more common, or that most people would find some arbitrary ad hawk justification for consuming animals and plants - with magical sustenance more popular among progressives, and ad hawk justification more popular among moderates, possibly with a slight general bias towards magical sustenance, also furthermore this would very much primarily be an issue in an equivalent to our contemporary age right now as veganism only really took off in recent decades, although there are notable vegetarian traditions in Hindu faiths which notably deviate from this trend as they rose to prominence much earlier, which would likely be a pattern replicated among faiths that preach non-violence in a hypothetical fantasy world with spells that allow intelligible communication with non-humanoid animals and plants. (Edit) * Addendum: as someone else pointed out in the replies, there's health reasons for why people generally shun cannibalism, this is something I did not consider and as such my analysis is flawed. While I think the proposal is an interesting world building concept it should be taken with a grain of salt. Credit to @anvos for pointing this out, see their reply for a more detailed explanation.
I think you missed the possibility that people are only ok with eating evil creatures, but that RAW the Awaken spell would convince people that animals are almost all essentially neutral evil. Since most animals only care about their direct loved ones, and treat even their own children as being potentially disposable. After all most animals have a large number of offspring who it makes evolutionary sense for them to treat as replaceable. However this means that say an awakened gerbil is going to be perfectly willing to consider selling their own children into slavery, after all they can just make more (and it already takes very little for gerbils to decide to eat their young). Honestly I think if the alignment system was logically consistent then it would be forced to say that neutral evil is essentially the default alignment unless a creature has reason to evolve/be created with a moral compass like that of humans or other highly social species (though the moral compass of say a eusocial species would likely be pretty horrifying to our own sensibilities).
Keep in mind that it isn't purely societal, as humans part of the issue we know is cannibalism is bad for human health from a diseases standpoint. Thus many of the most human races probably have something similar that would make cannibalism taboo.
I guess a lot of it would be whatever the gods say is right, if you worship a god of hunting or the natural order you're likely to eat only what you can hunt, whereas someone worshiping Chauntea will eat what they can grow and say a prayer for their livestock to be well treated in the afterlife. One slight rework to Speak With Animals etc to avoid this ethical conundrum would be to have it summon a spirit to inhabit the body of the animal and it's the spirit that's doing the communicating, interpreting the memories etc of the animal it is possessing.
There are some interesting parallels here with the undead servitude discussion - what conditions make the death of a sentient being ethical to re-use their body? I would definitely want to consent to it before it happens - in real life we get past that step for animals by using consciences as a requirement, so if the animal is not conscience and unable to feel pain when it happens... What if that applied to undead servitude as well... if the person was unconscious and not able to feel pain, would that be acceptable for a necromancer to kill and turn into a zombie? That sounds like very anti-social behavior
Alright, so let's get this up front: I've been vegetarian for 20 years, so I'm not unfamiliar with, nor resistant to, the idea of voluntary abstinence from specific foods. However, I feel that this discussion needs to be a lot, lot longer. A few points stand out: 1. How does the magic work: I've never played in a game where a speak with animals and/or plants spell enabled the being to communicate in a human language. Rather, it allowed the caster to understand and interpret the existing communication methods used by that being, and to approximate them in return, enabling rudimentary communication. Some GMs have run it that you can speak normally, in the magic interprets that into something the being understands. These interpretations of the spell lead to a different outlook on the issue. If different beings have drastically different levels of cognitive ability, it's more than possible that you don't get much engaging conversation from most animals. That issue of perceived sentience would take centre stage, I think. Eating an animal that merely replied with an expression of the natural instinct to continue existing is going to be far less contentious than eating one which was able to reason with you as to why you shouldn't eat it, or to react angrily at your presumption that it should be treated as food. Even if we accept Peter Singer's assertion that the only important criteria for deciding how to treat animals is their capacity to feel, there are almost certainly different levels of emotional capacity within the natural world too. Different criteria, same result. 2. Scale: Awakened animals and plants truly do represent a hazard here, but surely such creatures are more than able to communicate their uniqueness. Furthermore, they are likely very rare. The chance that most people would ever encounter one is vanishingly small. I would imagine it would simply be accepted wisdom not to kill animals or plants that communicate with you. If a wizard awakens a cow in your field, you'll probably know long before you take that cow to the abattoir. Unless there is a tradition of sadistic wizard awakening livestock in secret just that have an excuse to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting farmer in "revenge", I don't think it would be a the forefront of most of their minds. Since lower level magic allows much more rudimentary communication, I don't see it causing the same issues, even if it available at scale. 3. As to eating sapient beings, it's probably a safe bet that if it makes tools, even poor ones, it's not for eating. Any one that does engage in such activities would be treated similarly to cannibals IRL. A goblin house might suck, but it's still better than a cow. And if the creature can pick up weapons it or its kin made and use them to fight back, it's going to put a lot of people off. 4. As others have noted, the divide between meat and the animals is not universal to all language. Some have it and some don't. In Chinese, for example, the name of most meats is just "animal-meat": for example: pig-meat, cow-meat, chicken-meat. And in many cultures, eating things that still have eyes, feet, or other feature clearly linking it to its animal origins is or was a luxury activity. Sheep's eyes, pig's trotters, chicken feet etc. You're probably onto something that the perceived distance between us and the animal matters to a lot of people, but not quite as concretely as you might assume from a 21st century Western standard. 5. An important thing that should be considered is the capacity for magic to accelerate the development of lab-grown meat and other nutritional sources that simply don't involve a living, potentially sentient being at any point. IRL this is only now becoming a tangible reality, albeit not yet for the masses, In a fantasy world, with magical eccentrics on the loose, I can imagine the moment an magical industrial revolution happens, this would be an inevitability.
To be fair, most vegetables and fruits aren’t actually the plant itself but what the plant provides. We don’t eat the apple tree, we eat the apple it grows. We’re basically eating its… uhhh… how to put this lightly. The fruit of the plant is like the seed of a person.
I assume most people eat anything they could, because they need to survive, be it ape goblin or trees awakened animals and druids who maitain the natural order, arent against this, they partake in the hunt and eat any creature
To be fair, many people in ancient times believed in animism, that any living thing could be a spirit, thst animals were just the forms sapient spirits sometimes took in the physical world. So they likely thought it possible to converse with the things they ate.
It could simply be the case that, in the face of everything being arguably sentient, perhaps the only way for the common man to proceed is to simply be less squeamish about eating sentient creatures. Does it make much sense for our modern standards to be projected onto a different culture of people? Even in our own history, people from other cultures have delicacies which would appal someone of another culture. Also, the number of vegetarians in a population has been historically miniscule and the luxury of choice is a relatively new phenomenon for most people. If the common man struggles to get by, then it's unlikely he'd have much resistance to eating sentient creatures. Yes they probably won't eat members of their own race but, as you say, the distance from their own race is probably the key factor in this judgement. I think that morals would play a large part in this. The extent of the morals which the two creatures could agree upon is probably the most important factor, after appearance, as it's a resemblance of sentience, of a fashion. If an evil dragon is morally opposed to me, I feel justified in killing it, and may therefore feel morally justified in eating it. To take an ogre as another example, it is clearly sentient, largely similar in appearance, but it likely has an entirely foreign moral compass, which makes it more 'other' and therefore more edible. I think everyone has a subconscious opinion on what crosses the line and it doesn't strictly seem to hinge upon how intelligent the creature is, more how different it is to us. Personally, I think the most human fantasy creature which I would eat is a classic fantasy orc. They're similar to humans in most ways however they are clearly a distinct species and culture. The fact that they are 'evil' in the view of humans helps a great deal I think.
There's probably a scale of 'physical resemblance', 'difference in moral alignment' and 'eaters conscientiousness + agreeableness' which let's you work out where the vague lines are.
In the case of plants, the spell text seems to imply that they aren't naturally sentient or capable of thinking, and their "memory" is limited to the past day. I think the magic is basically summoning a primal spirit into the body of the plant or animal, and you're talking to that, not to the actual plant itself.
I liked the video. About Goodberry, though, the spell doesn't say that it fills you up, only that it "sustains you." The way i think about it is, sure, you won't starve to death while on the "Goodberry Diet," but you're not going to like it. I believe 5th edition also says that you need a pound of food a day to avoid starvation, which isn't much. Even on my current weight loss plan, I eat 2 to 3 pounds a day of low calorie food in order to make up a calorie deficit while also staving off hunger pangs. In my mind, no large group of people is going to CHOOSE goodberry where they could choose not going hungry.
Total confusion of a lizardman cook being yelled at by the party for making bandit stew.
And utter disapointment of the warlock after realising that his favorite stew is forever off the menu.
That has to be my favorite D&D moment when it comes to food.
Bard: You can't cook bandits, it's cannibalism!
Ranger: Sssstrange, meat is meat.
Warlock: I go for seconds.
DM: Rest of the party stares at you.
Warlock: I go for seconds, awkwardly.
the lizardfolk solution: everything is sentient, and everything is on the table
Goblin Druid: Maybe you should have thought about that before killing bandits. Next time kill their horses and let the bandits flee.
Necromancer*staring aghast at the waist of dead flesh*
@@voidwyrm6149Honestly, apart from the cannibalism, this is legitimately a position that some animist religions take, most notably Inuit animism, which pretty much states as a fact that all animals have souls, just like people, and thus proper thanks must be provided both for the deity in charge of the animal species in question (for allowing you to effectively eat one of their children!), but also to the particular animal in question, with a promise that no part of the animal will go to waste.
lizardfolk are so fun for this trait. mine once almost ate an unattended child but it walked off before he could swim closer. meat is meat, and a humanoid child is the same as a fawn or calf to him. it's a weird mindset to get into, but interesting for fantasy purposes.
When I played an elf druid, their culinary rule was no farm-raised livestock. Any meat they ate should have had a fair chance at fight-or-flight.
Playing a goblin ranger/druid, I had a rule of don’t kill anything you aren’t going to eat. A 200 lbs orc warrior is a feast that will last for days, possibly weeks. Never waste what could provide you sustenance. Even the bones can be ground down to make cakes out of the marrow.
Anything you don’t eat can feed mushroom patches, providing food later.
@@almitrahopkins1873 environmental conservation!
Love that value system works well too for nature spirits and gods of the hunt (think that quest with hircine in Skyrim)
It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If we assume elves had the advantage early on, they would retain the best land for them. Same for dwarves. That leaves humans with lower quality land that they would have to adapt technology to make work.
Meat eating Elves and Druids just makes sense to me, as the natural connection with plants is thematically more powerful.
I like your limitation suggestion, it reminds me of my own wood eld druid. However he did get seduced by the civilized peoples' farm raised bacon, was probably his biggest vice.
Under Speak with Plants it specifically says "you imbue plants with limited sentience" which means they didn't have it before so no I have no problem eating them after the spell ends because they won't have it after the spell ends. Casting Awaken on something is completely different because it says "the target must have no intelligence or an intelligence or 3 or less." Again not sentient before you cast. I wouldn't eat an awakened plant or animal. As for attacking wild shaped druids read Wild Shape. When you hit 0 HP you turn back to your natural form so if you did try to kill the pig it would turn back into a person before you could try to eat it.
Older sects of Buddhism did distinguish between eating plants where you pretty much had to kill them to eat them(stuff like carrrots or lettuce) vs stuff that would survive if you took from them(stuff like fruit trees or sweet potatoes). Something to think about.
And that's why they're batshit mad
I have a feeling that some intelligent plants might insist you eat their fruit. For instance, an intelligent strawberry bush might ask you to please eat their berries (but also to be sure to do “#2” outside a couple days after eating them).
But I need firewood for winter
That only really works if you don't chew up the seeds (which mammals, such as humans, categorically do). But then, a talking strawberry bush could just offer the berries and politely request that you scatter the seeds somewhere far away.
@@greatestcait Fair enough. But does the strawberry bush know the tree down the lane is evil or not and should I fight it to the death
The thing is that fruit, specifically, is meant to be eaten. The entire point of plants producing fruit is so that animals will eat the fruit and disperse the seeds. In the case of humans, and presumably any other being that develops agriculture, the plant doesn't even have to rely on the person leaving the seeds in its...leavings. Its species gets furthered in is survival as a crop. Would a sentient strawberry bush know all that? Idk, depends on the worldbuilding I guess...
@@greatestcait Strawberry seeds are very much likely to pass through because they are so tiny.
But you are right, a lot of plants try to avoid having their seeds eaten by mammals, to the point that peppers developed a toxin that hurts mammals specifically but does not affect birds which swallow fruits whole usually. But turns out humans like the way it hurts and started to eat more peppers and plant them, in a way the pepper socceeded but not the way anyone expected.
What if there's a theological justification; in many mythologies certain foodstuffs are given to mankind by the gods, like the corn kernels given to the Aztecs by Cinteotl. Would they not say to any worried corn-spirit "Fear not, for in nourishing me you do your duty to the gods and will be rewarded for it in the next life." And given that D&D gods tend to be eminently immanent, they're likely to be correct.
It would be funny if orcs had this same kind of logic in eating humans: "dont worry, i might bee cooking you for dinner, but my god will welcome you in afterlife as youve served your purpose as my food!
The reason we have different words for cow and cow meat, but not chicken and chicken meat, is because of their historical relative status. Only the rich could afford to eat beef or pork regularly. The peasants raised the livestock and the upper class ate the meat. This also explains the language difference. "Cow" is Germanic, while "Beef" is French, because thats what language each group spoke.
Yes, the distinction between words for animals and words for meat is a unique quirk of English, a side effect of the Norman conquest. Definitely not a common linguistic feature.
@@scottmartin5990 Indeed, in my country (Spain) we actually have the equivalent of the word "meat" and then have to say which animal is (like "pig meat" instead of pork). I think this is the norm for most people on the world.
Yeah he called "beef" a euphemism and I had to pause and come down to the comments to look for this because... no. No that's not why English has special words for some types of meat.
Poultry.
The same happens with vegetables that have two names, for example; aubergine and eggplant.
They are a result of international influences through history.
I think you're forgetting one very simple thing: People actually believed in all of these things you describe in fantasy, but they still ate what they ate. Though, I suppose they didn't have to actually face them in their daily lives to worry as much about the ethics.
Exactly, and neither would people in D&D worlds: the number of druids going around and casting Speak with Animals on random livestock in order to promote starvation has got to be fairly low. What are the chances that one of them shows up at mealtime at your particular house, with a free spell slot to burn, and isn't knocked unconscious by people who just want to eat in peace?
Close to nil.
His first example of what people would think was dismissal, he did acknowledge it also in the vegetarian? section that they would face a lot of pushback.
@@Hrafnskald Reminds me of story in Norse mythology, where Thor, Loki, and Odin are just walking about when they see a giant otter, and they hunt it, skin it, and eat it. Only to find out that it was someone's son who had transformed themselves. Even though they know that shapeshifters exist, they aren't something to bother thinking about in their culture except in the rare cases when it turns out that it mattered. They just deal with the consequences when it happens.
@@Hrafnskald I find it funny the assumption that Speak with Animals will make people like animals *more* . Instead I'd argue that it would force people not to anthropomorphize animals.
I'd also argue that RAW most animals affected by Awaken would be somewhere between chaotic neutral and neutral evil, since it never states that the added intelligence comes with any new moral instincts. So the animals are still just as selfish and capable of empathy as they were before (altruism isn't exactly the norm for animals).
@@vakusdrake3224 Or True neutral.
Siberian bear-hunting rituals include a prayer of thanks to the bear for providing its meat. Which is a bit of trivia that has somehow stuck with me from my doctoral studies in religion.
Honestly the practice of thanking the animals you kill for their meat seems like it wouldn't hold up to the existence of speak with animals, awaken, and cannibalistic humanoid races. Since people are going to know for a fact that the animals would feel about the same about being "thanked" like this, as a human would feel if an orc was giving them thanks for the meal they were about to provide lol.
@@vakusdrake3224ong thank you! Im so sick of people being like "i thank the food that i killed" it doesent matter! If the creature being killed doesent want to die they dont want to die!
In general, Siberian peoples have a respectful attitude towards bears. There are many beliefs about bears:
Bears are almost human and understand human speech. In order not to attract the bear, people call it allegorically: the old one, the man in the fur coat, the woman with the children - about mama bear, etc. When meeting him by chance, people try to talk to him respectfully in order to leave peacefully.
At the same time, hunting a bear is an act of valor of the hunter. During the hunt, you and the bear are putting your lives on the line, so it is considered like a fair duel.
When a bear is killed on hunt, people apologize to it. If the bear attacked first, then there is probably no need to apologize.
After a bear dies, its spirit can track what happens to its remains. When eating bear meat, you need to croak like a raven before doing so, so that the spirit of the bear thinks that it is being eaten by a raven, and does not bring a curse on people. Eating bear meat gives its strength to the eater. If the bear's skin was disturbed by strong shaking, this will cause bad weather - a storm or snowfall.
Computers. You can talk to them.
In English, the difference in words between livestock and the meat is due to the influence of the French language upon the aristocracy in medieval England.
brb, going to go eat my laptop.
@@DBArtsCreators Just a tad more plastic in your diet than usual :)
But really if I remember the video correctly I'm just referring to the fact that people can talk to computers but we don't see computers as people. It wasn't in reference to what people should eat, so much as his assertion that being able to talk to something means we should feel bad for not considering it people. In fact, in a lot of fantasy worlds, it's more common to encounter things you can interact with in a people-like way which aren't people, such as magic items, spell effects, and so on.
But... english had a world for "cow meat" before beef. It's not TH-cam friendly anymore but still.
in the goodberry system:
what happens when one of the compulsory casters of goodberry realizes they have full power over whether or not the 10 (or in the case of a higher level caster, maybe even more) people theyre in charge of feeding get to have a meal?
they might accept that it is their duty to feed them, or they might realize how easy that power is to exploit, like what happens in the real world all too often: work for me or you dont get to eat
If the people eho create the goodberrys also has a monopoly on violince this would most likely happense. But if not they would properly be treated as the farmers in the middle ages
I think this hypothetical gets even more interesting if we are using dnds leveling system. A level 1 Druid, the weakest Druid with power, can feed 20 people a day. A level 2 30 (or 40 if they’re circle of the land, probably the most common type.) And by level 3, still a relatively weak druid, they can feed 60 people a day (80 if they’re circle of the land.)
That’s an entire small village that can be fed by one circle of the land druid. It also would lead to these spellcasters being in incredibly high demand as most work pre Industrial Revolution was agricultural. So one person being able to feed 80 a day is levels of efficiency that is unheard of.
Druidic society already has a system of gatekeeping in place. One cannot become a Druid without a mentor.
Sure the 20-80 people could rise up against their Druidic overlord. But then what? Without beasts of burden, livestock, crops, or well, what will they do? Leave their home and walk to the next village or town? Would or could that village take them in?
The rationing of food and water can be a powerful motivator. With a group of people otherwise separated from the rest of society by several days travel through harsh terrain, I can see a Jim Jones/David Koresh type cult built around a Druidic overlord with high charisma and wisdom.
Grab your ketchup and crunch away my friends.
It depends on how rare magic is. Any druid and most rangers would be able to cast goodberry. Would the magic initiate feat become a common thing for certain professions? Would a wand of goodberry become part of the traveler's kit for emergencies? Between all of this, I doubt it would be a means to coerce people, but rather a respected profession in a society so inclined.
It could get worse, what if all the goodberry casters got together and made a union. Given that they are by nature spell casters they are not nearly as defenseless as farmers would be so would be significantly less susceptible to coercion, and with no prior existing agricultural infrastructure or storage, if they say no food then you get no food until their demands are met. They are not like farmers where a military force could beat them up and take their crops, then replace them with new peasants next year. Their skill set takes too long to mature for them to be replaceable and, unless I am mistaken, goodberries are only good for the day they were made on and spoil if not eaten, so not reserve food would exist.
About Goodberries:
I don't remember the name of the webnovel. However, settings was like this: Nobles of the world had Magic with which they could help common folk grow food, they afterwards collected crops and delivered to the nobles, etc. The problem was that no one new how crops needed to be planted and tended without Magic. So, if the noble was killed in the war or the territory was left unattended people would starve, because no one knew how to grow the plants and only nobles had magic.
What Goodberries creates is monopoly and dependency, which if the industry is disrupted will result in global death from starvation.
This assumes that civilized = vegetarian, which is not historically the case, nor is there currently a vegetarian majority in the real world.
Closeness to nature can just as easily justify "all animals and plants consume each other, therefore my eating animals and plants is no different from the hungry goblins or lions that want to eat me". Circle of life, and whoever wins, eats and lives on. Assuming that just because something can communicate with a creature means we will prioritize its wellbeing over our own is a big stretch. See: Whale, Dolphin, Squid.
That's how my ranger views things. For a while we had a character in our party who was vegan and we got into some fun arguments.
If anything *Speak with Animals* should only reinforce this, as people find out that altruism towards non-family is not a very common animal trait. Realistically if you're being consistent with alignment then arguably most animals should actually be evil aligned: After all if a animal that behaves selfishly and has nothing we conceive as morality would be evil aligned were you to *Awaken* it, then it shouldn't just get a pass for having low intelligence. Or alternatively to be consistent they should allow you to play obviously evil characters who still register as true neutral/unaligned because they're extremely dumb.
What you are saying is might makes right. Its regrettably the way most people, regardless of if they live in a "civilized" or "non civilized" place think. But i think that just because we can doesent mean we should. And especially if we can choose the most empathetic option that will be the most altruistic while it not harming our own wellbeing we should always take it. Even if someone will never help you back, if you can save them without it being overly dangerous to your self you should!
@@lillambilamb3345 Necessity makes right. The last sentence sums it up perfectly: "If you can save them without it being overly dangerous to yourself".
Failing to eat will kill you. Failing to eat will not make them immortal. You cannot save every plant and animal, and attempting to do so will always result in your death.
@@lillambilamb3345 What I am describing are Darwin's theories on natural selection: organisms that are best adapted to their environment thrive. Those that are poorly adapted, die. Biology dictates outcomes: for an animal to live, it must consume plants and/or other animals. Kindness is possible, refusing to eat is suicidal.
Good video. I expected a side note about how speaking to trees would make wooden tools seem macabre, but that's not food.
Also, with magic there are plenty of ways to explain creatures having detailed memory prior to a spell. Speak with Plants might summon a Fey spirit to read the xylum and chlorophyll and reverse engineer what happened to the plant recently.
Well if you can't reproduce with it while it is alive, it's not cannibalism.
Because if you can reproduce with it, it's at least in some sense a subspecies of your own kind.
Also, that does raise a strange question about dragons...
But when it comes to trees and plants, a living entity that has never been able to commune with others before, might still take a long time just to realize that it can share its thoughts for the first time ever.
Also, the spell Speak With Plants in D&D belongs to the school of transmutation, the same school as Polymorph that can drop an enemy's intelligence down to one.
Also, a fun fact the horse that stomped out calculations utilized the expressions of people to know when to stop, and did not in fact learn arithmetic.
So it was more like a fun trick really. :3
Moral questions like these lead me to believe that, if spells such as Detect Magic/Evil and Good/Poison and Disease exist, that someone would stand to benefit a lot by developing a "Detect Soul" spell. Obviously from a moral standpoint, one should probably respect the lives of everything, even the soulless, but it might ease a lot of moral quandries if you learn that this particular cow or stalk of corn isn't going to 'feel' the impact of being harvested in the same way. But that of course gets into the philosophy of, "What is a soul and what does it mean if you do or don't have one" so who knows
Would it be better to have psionic to use their power to detect though, sentient, Conscious and Conscience. To see if they have those traits or would it be like a jellyfish and seastar
Maybe even text the spell talk to things and create experiments. To see if the magic granite those traits to those things and create my imbuing artificial, spirit or enhancing it. If you are unable to detect though from a tree or read it mind would that brings up questions about those magic
Arguably, isn't it more ethical to eat something that has a soul (and therefore can go to the afterlives that exist in most D&D settings) than to eat something that is snuffed out entirely the moment you kill it?
@@caseyw1288 Hard to say! If we're going off of Curse of Strahd logic, creatures without souls are basically living puppets without much thought or feeling to them and the module makes a point to (sorta) make you not feel bad for killing them since they're just empty vessels, but if a soulless creature has just as much emotion and individuality as one WITH a soul, THEN I think it starts getting extra fucky
@@evanunhinged5771 That will be questionable for some race in dnd like elves. Since their God doesn't create new souls but recycle them. Making a finite number of souls for elves and plus living so long too. That also would be a philosophical question about any extra elves being born or half elves are they soulless being walking around and living their life without knowing they don't have any soul.
So how would you be able to differentiate between an elves with a soul and an elves without a soul. How would they be treated by their own people if they find out that an Elves was born soulless
@@majesticgothitelle1802 I'm mostly asking in the specific context of, "Does this boar have a soul and if it doesn't do I have to feel bad about killing and eating it," but that IS an interesting question, I'm not sure how a half-elf's soul would work if the elven gods aren't making any new souls. Maybe whatever God governs the other parent's half would make or recycle a different soul? Maybe some half-elves have elf souls and some don't? I dunno! Neat philosophical quandary
Another fascinating, thought-provoking video, Tom. As you point out, some plants do need to have their fruits and nuts eaten in order to reproduce. Thus, they probably have adapted to feel pleasure rather than pain if these parts are removed, pain being reserved for attacks on the roots, leaves, and other vital organs of the plant. This may not help humans, since as you say, we can’t live by just fruits and nuts, but many bird species do, and conceivably some fantasy races might also. And in fantasy, gods, priests or wizards might have tinkered with human biology to allow us to live that way also.
About the “all goodberry diet” civilization, bear in mind that this civilization will be a more thoroughgoing theocracy than any known in history. A small elite of druids and rangers who can cast this spell literally controls whether everybody else in the land gets to eat or not. Excommunication doesn’t just mean a rotten afterlife; it means immediate starvation! Sure, an excommunicate might turn to “forbidden fruit” for sustenance, but the plants and animals will whisper to each other until word reaches the druids, and the “murderer” is hunted down. The word “lord” comes from the old Anglo-Saxon “hlaf-weard,” meaning “loaf guard”; the man who guards the loaves of bread is, very literally, the boss of you. How much more so the druids and rangers who not only guard but create the only food you can safely and legally eat!
It's actually not really only a post enlightenment period, strict vegetarianism was a thing in India for at least 2k years, and there was at least one philosopher during the Islamic Golden age that was a modern day vegan
All part of the moral obligation to become an undead that doesn't have to feed on the living, like an awakened skeleton.
Honestly I think Awaken animals would actually serve as a major reason *to feel okay about* eat animals: *Since it never states that they gain any new moral instincts* , which people always seem to miss when they anthropomorphize them. So not only would most animals behave shockingly selfishly, but most animals have a large number of offspring they treat as somewhat disposable. Which means that in all likelihood any awakened animal is not going to be seen sympathetically, since they'll be willing to sell out literally anyone to save their own skin (even if from starvation). After all relatively few animals will risk too much, or pay too much for any single offspring, since they're playing a numbers game (and plenty of animals will even eat their own young).
Essentially most animals that have been subject to Awakening (since animals that display altruism clearly like great apes tend to have over 3 intelligence and so not being valid targets) would be neutral evil as soon as Awaken gives their behavior moral weight. After all what would you call someone who is totally indifferent to the suffering of strangers and willing to sell their own children into slavery, or just eat them if it gives them the resources to care for a larger number of children in the future?
Honestly I don't think knowing that other people might view your selfish behavior as evil is as important as the rules thinks it is. So I tend to think that the concept of "unaligned" creatures is silly and that neutral evil is the "default" alignment for anything that hasn't evolved/been created with moral intuitions, honor, or the like. I think that even if animals aren't smart enough normally for their selfishness to count as evil, that the existence of Awakened animals might lead people to view regular animals as being for the most part essentially evil, with the Awakening having served to show their "true colors".
Given the prevalence of cannibalism in human history I honestly have my doubts about a norm against cannibalism arising which includes any canonically evil humanoids. I think it would be more natural for people to decide what to eat based on how morally sympathetic the creature was, so people may be more ok with eating goblin/orc (depending on how intrinsically evil they are in cannon) than they are with say whale/elephant.
People live in a world we have long thought of as being saturated with spirits. We have dealt with this kind of thing well enough, I feel.
The reason English differentiates between "meat from an animal" and "animal" is because right after the Norman conquest on England (by William the Conqueror in 1066), you had French-speaking nobility with the lower classes being English-speakers, and so words in Norman French started to creep into the language, and the chefs who prepared the (French) nobles' meals were among the first to learn some new terminology. Thus, boef (cattle) became beef, porc (pig) became pork, and so on. So it's not originally a matter of abstraction, though the chefs in question undoubtedly thought the words referred only to the meat, and not the animal it came from.
It's in the souls. A little bit of soul is fine, but the more complex a soul, the worse the meat.
Just eat dirt, oh wait no, elementals exist.
No wait elemental had been living in my house rent free and been touching all my pottery
Save an elemental, ban conjured water!
@@DanielMWJ I just imagine a world wide ban on conjuration magic. Since the elemental, fiend, celestial, spirit, jinn and other beings of other realms.
They might see that as some form of adduction, crime against free will and enslaved. Forcing to do a task against their freedoms and other stuff.
I laughed at the thought of a conjuration wizard going to court. due to the crime against summoned an other worldly being against their will and force labor
In a Spelljammer game, Brennan Lee Mulligan put a "psychic cuttlefish shot" on the rock of Bral. The cuttlefish would telepathically plead for its life before being consumed, but the vendor insisted that they weren't sapient.
What is socially acceptable to eat varies greatly across the world today, so I imagine the same would be true of a fantasy world.
People tend to eat what is available and abundance of other options appears to be the reason we don't eat things.
Let people really starve just a few days and the local population of pets will start getting thinner. You may not eat your dog (at first), but that unknown dog? *Everything is food when you're starving.*
So abundance = specialized diets. While the less there is to eat the more the menue expands.
In addition, a great deal of plants can be harvested without harming the plant. Or maybe each individual grain, fruit, and seed can be made sentient?
At that point, does it even matter since it just makes the truth abundantly clear: life cannot exist without death, because life lives by feeding of other life (yes, even plants who photosynthesize because the soil is made from dead things).
As the famous quote goes: "Life needs things to live."
Things is other life, because nearly all life (except really simple ones) require organic matter as fuel.
You literally cannot live without causing the death of other life, just as much other life cannot live without your death. Hence why I find "evil death cult" a bit overdone. Death is absolutely necessary for there to be complex life. 🤔💀👻
Seriously, give me more death druids. It's imperative things die and feed new life!
Then there's the pleasure of food to keep in mind too. Much of luxury foods today are simply so because people are willing to pay a lot for them.
Shellfish and salmon for example, used to be peasant food. Lowly bottom feeding beasts? Fish from the local river? Hardly fit for the local lord, now is it, with how simple it was to procure.
That still happens today, expensive "luxury foods" are simply whatever is difficult to get. Quality is a secondary concern when it comes to exclusivity!
The wealthier you are in a fantasy world, the more fantastical your diet is likely to become as well as, most likely, unhealthier, because you eat more and more based on exclusivety.
That means fat, sugar, rare and powerful monsters, and weird planar substances that are probably toxic and sometimes require magical antidotes, and every now and then things get a bit too rare and exclusive and now you have a gibbering mouther or worse as a surprise dinner guest! 🤣
This discussion reminds me a lot of "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", and I think many of you might enjoy it. Theres a passage where harry thinks about this conundrum after discovering he is a parselmouth 😂
I like the idea that entities not predisposed to speech don't have clear concepts of things like their own mortality, but when suddenly having the ability for coherent expression forced upon them gain all the other self-awareness baggage that goes with it, and are sometimes rather resentful about their 'rude awakening'.
The divide between food and animal names is a legacy of Norman conquest. "Beef" f.e. is derived from the Old French for "ox", so describing the meat as different from the animal dates only as far back as Middle English, and even then, it's only different because it derives from a different language. And the reason we didn't do that for chickens was because that term (poulette) got applied to _all_ farmed birds.
There would be major geopolitical impacts for sure. One can imagine that hunting would be heavily controlled due to the risk of accidental harm to a powerful or important creature. Conversely, I think farming livestock would probably be encouraged over allowing the common people to blunder into who-knows-what in the forest
Druids may end up as the one least woried about that question having experienced the perspective of most of the food chain wille wildshaped. After all, the only reason we are not woried about predators is because we build tools, cityes and society to protect us from nature. Being more in touch with nature druids may stil avoid eating anything they know is sapient out of principle, but it's worse to waste a kill than to eat an rabbit they did not know was awekened.
I follow a guy on Twitter who is making his own TTRPG, and he’s made a very interesting version of elves. They value nature so much they refuse to eat plants and only eat meat, and any meat.
Sounds similar to Elder Scrolls wood elves. The second best kind.
I think magic food would be mostly reserved for the nobles as they would have the money to pay high lvl people to cast hero feast
Seems a bit narrow minded
The goodberry commune at the end sounds a lot like the good version of what Neckbeardia TTRPG coined burgerpunk. The fantasy version was that magic users had created consequence-free (for the caster) create food and drink guilds of Magic users that supplanted the agrarian economy. The big difference was in Burgerpunk all food was basically fast food if it was created by mages and the guilds basically ended up becoming like modern fast food companies with even more open power to manipulate governments.
I always liked the idea that Speak with Animals or Plants just enables the caster to understand the creature’s natural form of communication, like being able to comprehend birdsong in terms the brain can understand. One good point also is that insects are not animals and there’s no spell to speak with insects so maybe fantasy cultures would be more likely to eat diets heavy in insects for protein. Fruits and vegetables are also more like eating seed pods than the actual plant itself so enlightened cultures maybe actually favor eating vegan diets in order to facilitate seed dispersal in cooperation with the apple tree or acorn tree for instance. A culture that exclusively eats magically conjured food is so amazing though.
for goodberries, it doesn't even have to be infinite to be a major element of how the world works
as long as it can last for a few decades, the civilisation that first invents it will have such drastic demographic, economic and logistical advantages over their neighbours they should easily conquer the whole world if they so chose
and if it lasts for a few centuries instead, the majority of people might have entirely forgotten all other means of food production by the time it runs out, causing massive famines
I make it clear to my friends that if I were actually in the world of d&d, I’d be cooking up the weirdest shit. Everything that looks less human than a half-orc is up for grabs. I do not care, I wanna know what goblin tastes like 😂. Hell, I’d even go so far as to eat elves if I got permission.
Embrace the based "Meat is meat. 🤷♂️" true neutral lifestyle. 😆
Lizardfolk mindset/pos
Actually on my games we have the idea that eating intelligent life is cannibalism, which is an evil act. So eating a Griffon or a Manticore is an evil act because they are intelligent, despite being non-human monsters that would eat you without thinking it twice.
Implementing a goodberry system would be the equivalent of the local lord saying that "all living things in this region are subject to poaching law", peasants would lose access to any form of self-subsistence if the state wizard/druid can turn anything "legally sentient" on a whim. And it's not like peasants can even tell the difference between actual sentient creatures and "claimed" sentient ones.
I would see Speak with Plants as something similar to Speak with Dead: collecting information from the object/landscape and formulating it in the form of an answer to questions. Corpses (Speak with Dead specifically states that you speak with the corps, not with the soul of the dead person) don't have sentience of their own, so nothing about this situation proves that plants do. And if some fairy is a part of the landscape, you are probably breathing them in as well, so if you don't want part of them getting into you, you should either not be on the said landscape at all (which may not even be what this particular fairy would prefer), or you should isolate yourself from the landscape in any way available, including using the Air Bubble spell and so on.
this occurred to me while playing BG3 when using Speak with Animals was easy and fun to do... now I'm thinking of making a character with at least one level of druid and they will have goodberry and create water because they refuse to eat "their friends"
But the noms
please consider making a video on the diverse architecture of fantasy settings especially fantasy races and/or fantasy species
"If it ain´t sentient it is not food." Firbolg probably
Love your content, man. Incredibly interesting ideas to consider - the comment threads they inspire are really interesting to parse through too.
woodcutters would knock on wood before chopping, gotta wake up the dryad if you're accidentally looking to fell her tree.
it's generally consider unethical to eat what you can a conversation with.
Laios Touden: I don't have such weakness
I once played a harpy monk. Part of contending with the chaotic innate nature of harpy vs the orderly nature of their monastic upbringing was avoiding casualties, but asking my GM "does it look tasty?" whenever something died.
1. I'm a firm believer that the spells PCs use are, largely, not things people whose job isn't "adventurer" could or would ever use. Like, if you've got a knack for magic and are a a wage laborer, is Speak With Plants really the most useful application of it in your day-to-day life? The philosophy of eating sentient plants and animals is far from the interests of your average D&D cooper or farmer or even low-level mage.
2. I could definitely see sapient plants striking up arrangements to survive while giving a portion of their fruit and edible leaves to humanoids interested in eating them. Planting the seeds somewhere nice or keeping them from the lumberjack's axe would seem pretty standard, but some plants could easily take it much much further.
3. Maybe they could take it in completely the opposite direction, sorta like how some people badly misunderstand the leftist aphorism that "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism" to mean "Fuck it. Go nuts!" If everything is potentially sapient, why have taboos about which living things you eat? Maybe the scruples we have in the real world about eating common pet animals are completely alien to the fantasy person; maybe another humanoid species is literally fair game, maybe even members of one's own species. Hell, with sentience, you could even throw cannibalism contracts into such a society. You could choose to be a meal the way we choose whether or not to be an organ donor.
Your insights leave me wanting to adopt these ideas in my game
If the creature is normally and permanently sentient/sapient, its out of bounds for food. Otherwise, temporary mental boosts don't count.
In a world where most creatures that can talk want to kill and eat you, this would not happen. Someone living in a D&D world would regularly encounter sentient creatures able to communicate without magic who want to kill them, and freely say that. So the pig can talk? That makes it just like the horde of orcs who tried to kill and eat us, the dragon who tried to burn and eat us, the mindflayers who tried to transform and consume us, and the tribe of giants who want to smash and eat us.
In our world, Sentience = Reasonable exists because humans have enough food and don't need to eat other humans to survive. Sentient monsters, in contrast, regularly prey on humans. To survive in a D&D world requires killing (or getting others to kill) those who want to kill you and cannot be reasoned with.
In dwarf fortress, elven ethics allow for the consumption of sentient creatures. I think this makes a bit of sense if theyre drawing less of a line between beasts and sentient creatures, if theyd eat a pig theyd eat a human
How to season an elf meat?
It depends on what kind of elf you have meat of.
If it's carnivore/cannibal elf,like in Divinity OS, then it will likely have "bushmeat"
Meat of a carnivore, which is tougher, less nutricious, and not at all pleasant to eat. But it can be quite good with a good amount of salt(long-cured)
or made into a stew with traditional methods. It will soften the meat and give it better flavor.
If it's a vegeterian high-elf, which for centuries and a lot of generations didn't eat a piece of meat, and weren't a subject for adrenaline or fear often. maybe they got more softer red meat, than what regular human has.
...but it's all a speculation. Not that i had a chance to experience it. Don't get me wrong... ;)
In some real life circumstances, people considered anything that was 'not them' okay to eat. During the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition, the local tribe whose area they passed through did seriously consider hunting and subsequently eating the expedition because they didn't recognize the members of the expedition as people. They definitely weren't of the tribe and apparently there was also some confusion based on prevalence of body hair that some members of the expedition were actually beasts.
There are peoples in Africa who farm cows, but rather than slaughter cows for meat the preference is bloodletting and milk. The cow can recover its blood within weeks, which preserves the food source as well as letting the cow live.
In the plant world, herbs, berries, and fruit trees all benefit from being harvested and, in the case of fruits and berries, this is done while causing zero damage to the plant. There are also plants that clone and spread, such as the sweet potato. You could harvest the cloned sweet potatoes from the runners while leaving the original tuber intact, thus leaving the whole of the original plant. Considering so many plants are adapted to being trampled, grazed, or otherwise damaged by daily weather, I think it’s reasonable to say that the pain they’d endure from a harvest would be minimal. And that’s without even getting into fire adapted plants, potentially even able to withstand grilling before their sentience has fully faded from their cells.
I have a non-DnD based magic system I write in with a friend, and in that system are some mages who have an... affinity with life, both human and animal. And if they're strong mages or more highly attuned (which are separate things), they can feels the life and sometimes emotions of animals nearby, especially if they concentrate on them. It's not hearing animals in their language, but it is awareness of their feelings and inner selves.
My general concept is that mages with this "life" affinity, tend to skew strongly towards BOTH ends of the debate on whether animals should be eaten.
Both coming from different angles of "people and animals aren't so different".
The anti-meat eating side using arguments we're all well familiar with, and the pro-meat side arguing that we're all part of nature and a person eating meat is no more ethically compromised than a wolf doing the same. As long as you don't cause unnecessary suffering in the process. (Even the pro-meat life mages have very strong feelings about animal welfare in general and ethical slaughtering).
So there's lots on both sides, but fewer that are the sort of "eh I just eat what everyone else in my community eats and don't think too hard about it" neutral that we see a lot in out world. They're sort of forced to confront the issue and pick a side, unless they actively choose to ignore it.
...not that this comes up a lot in our writing. We only have one character who's always a life mage in our stories, and one who sometimes is, depending on circumstances. And we don't discuss the full-time one's diet much. And the part-time one we're mostly discussing his enormous sweet tooth. Discussing our characters' philosophies on food ethics is... not one of our normal priorities.
in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy at the restaurant at the end of the universe there was a scene where there was a cow? server? I think that talked to the main character and suggested which part of itself that the character might want to order to eat. and this video reminded me of that scene.
What about create food and water? I guess this deserves a part two, focusing not so much on what people eat, but if and how societies will produce and procure food sources.
I once turned a DM’s stomach because I had access to a wagon and eleven orc corpses while I was playing a goblin ranger/druid. The other players were complaining about the lack of treasure while I was planning a feast for the tribe I built using the downtime system in Pathfinder first edition.
A goblin with access to a tannery gets leather from pretty much anything. A goblin with a butcher shop gets meats and sausages from organs. A goblin with access to a mill can crush bones into a a fine paste to bake into calcium & protein rich siege bread by adding it to a bit of ground wheat flour.
The DM never considered that I would be looking at the possible value of the bodies as a feast for my tribe or something I could use to cement alliances with the other tribe living in the flooded portion of Absalom. That’s probably why his game was such a depressing failure. It stifled the creativity of players who thought in terms of building tribes and kingdoms over beating the big bad guy and taking treasure. I made my character for the wrong game.
Meat is meat. If you start questioning that, you go hungry.
Dogs and cats are also directly beneficial to us as something other than food. Dogs help us survive Mostar by helping us hunt and cats help keep disease-causing pests under control.
Fun fact about pork, mutton and beef. It runs a bit against your point, but their words comme from french, after England had lost a war. The animals themselves kept their Anglo-Saxon roots, but then, when it was served to the newly instaured french nobility, it was the french names that was used, porc, moutton et boeuf.
Perhaps in a more ascetic situation the holy days are observed with the use of the goodberry spell. Rather than having to deprive themselves of food they simply forgo the work of harvesting and preparation to better focus on their meditations for the duration of the observance. Normal labor may still continue, maintanence of fields and such, but perhaps a week long absence of prepared foods.
i usually love adding my own thoughts and how i do it in my world but i can't add anything to this, the only insight i can give is that people do what they need to to survive and they only care about thair in groups. kind of what you were talking about at the 3 min mark, nothing except magical food is objectively moral to eat
thats where the create food and water spell comes in so its just magical food being created by mana
Depending on how easy it is to create food with magic it would just be easier to use it even if you don't care about the whole ethics thing. Why do all the work of raising livestock, farming plants, hunting or gathering if you can just use magic instead?
Easy idea to make goodberry an idea. It as finishing returns if you eat it regularly. It’s survival food not a meal
In my setting there is actually a race of talking fairytale animals called Skovkin. They can typically be any animal but most commonly take the form of cats, toads, bears, foxes, and wolves. They are indistinguishable from regular animals except for the fact that they stand upright and wear clothing. Skovkin generally do not eat other Skovkin but they have no problem eating non sentient animals. A Skovkin mouse could watch a Skovkin cat eat a normal mouse right in front of him and see no problem with it. Not saying that Skovkin haven't tried to eat eachother before but mostly its seen as extremely taboo and wrong.
In my world magic has stopped famine, but not by having one magic berry. Nothing goes to waste and no crops fail because hailstorms and such are prevented, so food is quite cheap. This allows it to be fun instead of stressful. So magic has entered cooking and it's there to stay.
When harvested or caught, ingredients can be kept at peek freshness with magic. Then, you can use magic to set the temperature and humidity just right for what you want. Be it wine, bread or ice cream.
Culinary magic is a form of art that combines cooking, science, biology and magic. I wish we had this in our world.
I treat plants as effectively little more than the hair/nerves of the planet in D&D. No inherent soul; at most they may host a fey spirit.
Eating plants is more like eating hair shaved off after a trip to the barber. There's no concern unless you try to eat the source of that plant/hair (in the case of plants, that's the entire planet. In the case of hair, it would be the creature you shaved). And honestly, if something is attempting (or even considering) eating your planet, you have an entirely different, more dangerous situation going on.
The topic of food is one I"ve thought on a lot for my world of buge, Entopia.
Point 1 - All "animals" are plant or fungus based. Actual bugs are all fully sapient
Point 2 - Many bugs are exclusively carnivorous.
Conclusion - Cannibalism *must* exist.
Of course murder isn't okay. However, something you might notice on a visit to the world is a complete lack of cemeteries. The bodies of the dead are cannibalized to sustain the living
I've considered having an alternate metbod too, involving regeneration. Chopping off an arm, serving it to someone, then regrowing it. I'm not sure how to or if I should implement that solution
If a sentient mushroom insists you eat it, don't!
Interesting thing id like to point out. Halflings are known for their appetites and love of food, but this trait has a history of taken on darker aspects in tbe history of DnD. Halflings are often targeted most fiercely by man-eating creatures because many of these creatures find they taste the best. However, Halflings are on of the races with the highest propensity to resorting to canibalism when falling onto dire straights, or when losing touch with civilized ways of living. This includes other humanoids, but also other halflimgs. It really puts the supposed good taste of halfling meat into a darker context. This isnt even including settings like ebberon or dark sun where more primitive contingents of halflings are more common. More interestingly is thst in 3rd edition, the primary Halfling god Yondalla gained the sin of gluttony domain when that domain was published. This is a domain she shares with Yeenoghu and includes a spell that allows the caster to eat a target alive. Halflings have a facinating relashonship with food outside of their cottagecore aesthetic.
It makes a lot of sense for druids to become Jain monks. Even if goodberry was not a sustainable food source. It is possible to live without causing a significant amount of harm or death to other living beings (strictly following ahisma), though it’s obviously not easy.
I play a druid in my group's main campaign and I've been playing her as a vegetarian. Not so much from an "I'm not eating anything I can talk to" perspective but more a "why kill if I don't have to?" point of view.
We also treat Goodberry from the perspective of: Sure, it covers all the nutritional needs but it's not satisfying. Too many days of straight Goodberry meals and you're cranky and willing to eat the backend of a dead skunk.
I just finished the Seven Kenning trilogy. With the discovery of the sixth, the power over and communication with animals, the character that discovered it, when he came back to his original city, he asked where he can find a restaurant with a vegetarian menu(even before being blessed, he didn't like to kill animal and eat meat despite being from a family of hunters). He is answered that now most(if not all) offer vegetarian options, as to not seem inhospitable to the Beast Callers(those blessed by the sixth).
I don't think eating meat is something that the goddess that gives the blessing mind though. She does call herself a huntress.
Do you only do official D&D content, or any fantasy stuff?
If the latter , maybe a video about Dungeon Cores in the world. If you aren’t familiar with that, basically dungeons as living, sapient beings making monsters, traps, loot, digging down, etc, either getting mana passively from the environment, from people fighting in them, and/or killing people inside of it.
If the former, then maybe a video on mimics, or the lords of madness (mind flayers, aboliths, neogi, beholders, etc).
Runequest dealt with this. Glorantha is crazy deep.
A Spectator is now a really important creature. They can cast create food and water at will.
As an old DM of d&d 3.5
My player eat rabbit and vegetables they found in the forest or buy in villages.
Many times a player take skill point into cuisine (I'am french XD)
So no, goblins is not for everyday, and with me as DM, you can take corruption point by eating an aligned evil meat.
Goblin do not camp at 300m of any village, they live in the profund forest (5km is agrssivly close... The hunters can encounter), it's not the goblin slayers world.
But you find a little diablotin at each crossroads at midnight (Like the legend).
In 1st through 3rd edition, the Stonetell spell negates this whole discussion. The divination spell lets you speak with a rock about its past experiences, proving that EVERYTHING in the world has some amount of cognition, not just organic natural macroscopic matter. In my world this has led druids to act in some peculiar ways, but they still gather and hunt and eat. Some are vegetarian, others purely carnivores, often based on whether they've made a deep personal connection with one kind of food source or another
Ez. Fish are friends not food. We eat enemies, everyone else nah.
also my druid on some level is kinda cruel, she calls animals by normal people names and will also kill and eat them. obviously spent too much time talking to predators.
@@MarbleCloudsRed in claw and fang, this one is.
@@DanielMWJ evidently so.
how universally understood are animal languages? we have seen domestic animals be able to communicate across species, and have had examples of wild animals banding together across species, i believe is crows and wolves that have been seen hunting together. therefore its conceivable that all animals are able to communicate with all other animals. now following this chain of logic, the solution is simple: hunting > husbandry. Now even if this is not the case, we still have to deal with the fact that cannibalism is fairly common among animals, notable examples are bears, lions and chimpanzees. so perhaps the idea goes the other way and the eating of the dead becomes a common death rite.
now when you get into plants the problem becomes a matter of harm and death. is a seed alive and if we eat that or the fruit that contained it have we killed that seed or is it not alive until it has germinated. and does removal of edible parts in a nondestructive way harm a plant or is a non-harmful process, akin to the cutting of hair
>therefore its conceivable that all animals are able to communicate with all other animals.
You're confusing a few things. Firstly most animals don't have language, their communication is genetically hard coded. Whereas crows and many highly intelligent animals do have proper language, which we know because it has to be learned and differs by region (within the same species).
So you confusing a few different things: Firstly smart animals recognizing the hard coded communication of less smart animals and learning too cooperate based on mostly body language.
Secondly you have smart animals with language who actually learn each others language and use that to communicate (or to manipulate them by say giving fake alarm calls). This level of communication seems to mostly be restricted to birds.
Lastly you have examples like among felines, where the animal has a hardcoded instinct that causes it to mimic the hardcoded sounds produced by their prey (you ever had a cat start making chirping sounds).
@@vakusdrake3224 however for D&D, the speak with animals spell targets the person casting the spell, this strongly implies that any animals the caster speaks to afterwards already had its own language that ordinary people can't perceive.
This really doesn't change the dynamics of what people will eat. Any animal or plant that's been awakened will know that either you make yourself an oddity that humans would preserve out of their greed and/or fear or get out of dodge if they are in a prime hunting area. Any Druid that gets an inkling that they are being hunted would or should know to shapeshift to their humanoid form or wear some clearly visible indicator that they are a druid. Local Rangers or Scouts could search and find the Dryad homes or Treants or any other sentient plant and mark them or the area. Because these things are are exceptions, not rules. Not even a quarter of every woodland animal is going to be awakened, it's more like 1% of them. Not every plant is potentially awakened, it'd also be 1% or considering how many plants have to exist in a world, it's closer to 0.1% of plants would be awakened.
For most of these things unless there is something special going on, sentience is not something standard animals or plants just have off the jump. In fact I would argue that any organism that achieves this will be very aware of their position in the food change and seek safety than to risk running into predators and competition, Humans are included in this. Because they would be both smart enough and aware enough with sentience that moving would be the best solution to that kind of danger.
My table generally has a "rule of culture" when it comes to food. It's basically "when in Rome, do as the Romans do". We base our food resources based on what the locals eat unless it is either poisonous to the race we're playing as, or if it falls under cannibalism.
To be a bit pedantic [and a true quote from one of my earlier games] :
"Cannibalism is only eating of your own species." So disposing of Kobold corpses by eating them is a valid way to avoid attracting scavengers.
In the Narnia Book "The Silver Chair" the characters accidently eat the meat of a talking deer, that they thought was a normal deer. To them it's cannibalism.
Okay, so some other people have argued your interpretation of these spells is wrong, but I think it's more interesting to engage with these concepts as you describe them.
So the way I see it, if it becomes common knowledge that animals and even plants can be intelligibly communicated with via spells - and it becomes commonly accepted that these spells merely imbue animals/plants with the ability to intelligibly communicate thoughts and emotions they already have - *it may lead societies to one of two conclusions:
1) A society might conclude that the only ethical way to consume food is to consume magically conjured food or subsist off of some form of magical sustenance.
*2) A society might come to the rather morbid conclusion that, since all pants and animals consumed are sapient and sentient beings, there is no moral difference between consuming livestock or farm yields and consuming people, thus the concept of cannibalism is effectively erased as all meat, including that of people, is seen as just food and nothing more.
(* Addendum at bottom of comment)
I'd postulate that either the former would be more common, or that most people would find some arbitrary ad hawk justification for consuming animals and plants - with magical sustenance more popular among progressives, and ad hawk justification more popular among moderates, possibly with a slight general bias towards magical sustenance, also furthermore this would very much primarily be an issue in an equivalent to our contemporary age right now as veganism only really took off in recent decades, although there are notable vegetarian traditions in Hindu faiths which notably deviate from this trend as they rose to prominence much earlier, which would likely be a pattern replicated among faiths that preach non-violence in a hypothetical fantasy world with spells that allow intelligible communication with non-humanoid animals and plants.
(Edit) * Addendum: as someone else pointed out in the replies, there's health reasons for why people generally shun cannibalism, this is something I did not consider and as such my analysis is flawed. While I think the proposal is an interesting world building concept it should be taken with a grain of salt. Credit to @anvos for pointing this out, see their reply for a more detailed explanation.
I think you missed the possibility that people are only ok with eating evil creatures, but that RAW the Awaken spell would convince people that animals are almost all essentially neutral evil.
Since most animals only care about their direct loved ones, and treat even their own children as being potentially disposable. After all most animals have a large number of offspring who it makes evolutionary sense for them to treat as replaceable. However this means that say an awakened gerbil is going to be perfectly willing to consider selling their own children into slavery, after all they can just make more (and it already takes very little for gerbils to decide to eat their young).
Honestly I think if the alignment system was logically consistent then it would be forced to say that neutral evil is essentially the default alignment unless a creature has reason to evolve/be created with a moral compass like that of humans or other highly social species (though the moral compass of say a eusocial species would likely be pretty horrifying to our own sensibilities).
Keep in mind that it isn't purely societal, as humans part of the issue we know is cannibalism is bad for human health from a diseases standpoint. Thus many of the most human races probably have something similar that would make cannibalism taboo.
@@anvos658 Fair point, that is something I didn't consider, I'll amend my comment.
@@anvos658 Notably that logic would dictate that you can probably safely eat anything that you can't interbreed with.
I guess a lot of it would be whatever the gods say is right, if you worship a god of hunting or the natural order you're likely to eat only what you can hunt, whereas someone worshiping Chauntea will eat what they can grow and say a prayer for their livestock to be well treated in the afterlife. One slight rework to Speak With Animals etc to avoid this ethical conundrum would be to have it summon a spirit to inhabit the body of the animal and it's the spirit that's doing the communicating, interpreting the memories etc of the animal it is possessing.
There are some interesting parallels here with the undead servitude discussion - what conditions make the death of a sentient being ethical to re-use their body? I would definitely want to consent to it before it happens - in real life we get past that step for animals by using consciences as a requirement, so if the animal is not conscience and unable to feel pain when it happens...
What if that applied to undead servitude as well... if the person was unconscious and not able to feel pain, would that be acceptable for a necromancer to kill and turn into a zombie? That sounds like very anti-social behavior
Alright, so let's get this up front: I've been vegetarian for 20 years, so I'm not unfamiliar with, nor resistant to, the idea of voluntary abstinence from specific foods. However, I feel that this discussion needs to be a lot, lot longer. A few points stand out:
1. How does the magic work: I've never played in a game where a speak with animals and/or plants spell enabled the being to communicate in a human language. Rather, it allowed the caster to understand and interpret the existing communication methods used by that being, and to approximate them in return, enabling rudimentary communication. Some GMs have run it that you can speak normally, in the magic interprets that into something the being understands. These interpretations of the spell lead to a different outlook on the issue. If different beings have drastically different levels of cognitive ability, it's more than possible that you don't get much engaging conversation from most animals. That issue of perceived sentience would take centre stage, I think. Eating an animal that merely replied with an expression of the natural instinct to continue existing is going to be far less contentious than eating one which was able to reason with you as to why you shouldn't eat it, or to react angrily at your presumption that it should be treated as food. Even if we accept Peter Singer's assertion that the only important criteria for deciding how to treat animals is their capacity to feel, there are almost certainly different levels of emotional capacity within the natural world too. Different criteria, same result.
2. Scale: Awakened animals and plants truly do represent a hazard here, but surely such creatures are more than able to communicate their uniqueness. Furthermore, they are likely very rare. The chance that most people would ever encounter one is vanishingly small. I would imagine it would simply be accepted wisdom not to kill animals or plants that communicate with you. If a wizard awakens a cow in your field, you'll probably know long before you take that cow to the abattoir. Unless there is a tradition of sadistic wizard awakening livestock in secret just that have an excuse to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting farmer in "revenge", I don't think it would be a the forefront of most of their minds. Since lower level magic allows much more rudimentary communication, I don't see it causing the same issues, even if it available at scale.
3. As to eating sapient beings, it's probably a safe bet that if it makes tools, even poor ones, it's not for eating. Any one that does engage in such activities would be treated similarly to cannibals IRL. A goblin house might suck, but it's still better than a cow. And if the creature can pick up weapons it or its kin made and use them to fight back, it's going to put a lot of people off.
4. As others have noted, the divide between meat and the animals is not universal to all language. Some have it and some don't. In Chinese, for example, the name of most meats is just "animal-meat": for example: pig-meat, cow-meat, chicken-meat. And in many cultures, eating things that still have eyes, feet, or other feature clearly linking it to its animal origins is or was a luxury activity. Sheep's eyes, pig's trotters, chicken feet etc. You're probably onto something that the perceived distance between us and the animal matters to a lot of people, but not quite as concretely as you might assume from a 21st century Western standard.
5. An important thing that should be considered is the capacity for magic to accelerate the development of lab-grown meat and other nutritional sources that simply don't involve a living, potentially sentient being at any point. IRL this is only now becoming a tangible reality, albeit not yet for the masses, In a fantasy world, with magical eccentrics on the loose, I can imagine the moment an magical industrial revolution happens, this would be an inevitability.
You forget most people will never interact with these things and would just eat things.
On my farm, I always give my chickens the chance to bite me first.
To be fair, most vegetables and fruits aren’t actually the plant itself but what the plant provides. We don’t eat the apple tree, we eat the apple it grows. We’re basically eating its… uhhh… how to put this lightly. The fruit of the plant is like the seed of a person.
I assume most people eat anything they could, because they need to survive, be it ape goblin or trees awakened animals and druids who maitain the natural order, arent against this, they partake in the hunt and eat any creature
To be fair, many people in ancient times believed in animism, that any living thing could be a spirit, thst animals were just the forms sapient spirits sometimes took in the physical world. So they likely thought it possible to converse with the things they ate.
It could simply be the case that, in the face of everything being arguably sentient, perhaps the only way for the common man to proceed is to simply be less squeamish about eating sentient creatures. Does it make much sense for our modern standards to be projected onto a different culture of people? Even in our own history, people from other cultures have delicacies which would appal someone of another culture. Also, the number of vegetarians in a population has been historically miniscule and the luxury of choice is a relatively new phenomenon for most people. If the common man struggles to get by, then it's unlikely he'd have much resistance to eating sentient creatures. Yes they probably won't eat members of their own race but, as you say, the distance from their own race is probably the key factor in this judgement. I think that morals would play a large part in this. The extent of the morals which the two creatures could agree upon is probably the most important factor, after appearance, as it's a resemblance of sentience, of a fashion. If an evil dragon is morally opposed to me, I feel justified in killing it, and may therefore feel morally justified in eating it. To take an ogre as another example, it is clearly sentient, largely similar in appearance, but it likely has an entirely foreign moral compass, which makes it more 'other' and therefore more edible. I think everyone has a subconscious opinion on what crosses the line and it doesn't strictly seem to hinge upon how intelligent the creature is, more how different it is to us. Personally, I think the most human fantasy creature which I would eat is a classic fantasy orc. They're similar to humans in most ways however they are clearly a distinct species and culture. The fact that they are 'evil' in the view of humans helps a great deal I think.
There's probably a scale of 'physical resemblance', 'difference in moral alignment' and 'eaters conscientiousness + agreeableness' which let's you work out where the vague lines are.
In the case of plants, the spell text seems to imply that they aren't naturally sentient or capable of thinking, and their "memory" is limited to the past day. I think the magic is basically summoning a primal spirit into the body of the plant or animal, and you're talking to that, not to the actual plant itself.
Maybe antimagic practices (like antimagic fields) would be followed in farming and animal husbandry to avoid sentient food.
please make a video on the architecture of fantasy races/sub-races
I liked the video. About Goodberry, though, the spell doesn't say that it fills you up, only that it "sustains you." The way i think about it is, sure, you won't starve to death while on the "Goodberry Diet," but you're not going to like it. I believe 5th edition also says that you need a pound of food a day to avoid starvation, which isn't much. Even on my current weight loss plan, I eat 2 to 3 pounds a day of low calorie food in order to make up a calorie deficit while also staving off hunger pangs. In my mind, no large group of people is going to CHOOSE goodberry where they could choose not going hungry.