Is it possible to communicate with more than one creature at once using Awakened Mind's telepathy?

Question

The Great Old One warlock patron grants the Awakened Mind feature at 1st level (PHB, p. 110):

Starting at 1st level, your alien knowledge gives you the ability to touch the minds of other creatures. You can communicate telepathically with any creature you can see within 30 feet of you.

The mixed use of plural and singular "creature" in the text is causing some debate. I have looked for some sort of official ruling, but I cannot find anything.

Is it possible to communicate with more than one creature at once using Awakened Mind's telepathy?

Since it is one-way communication, and a specific language is not a requirement, it seems as though it should be possible to "broadcast" to the minds you wish to reach out to. And a group of creatures would appear to satisfy the "any creature" wording.

Answer 1

There are numerous existing precedents in the PHB which indicate any means multiple.

The confusion here is centered around a single word, emphasized below:

You can communicate telepathically with any creature you can see within 30 feet of you.

Example precedent: If you can cast the spell Animate Dead you are able to send telepathic thoughts to your minions collectively. The spell Animate Dead (PHB pg. 212-213) is explicit in the usage of any and all being separate and distinct. Relevant text below:

On each of your turns, you can use a bonus action to mentally command any creature you made with this spell if the creature is within 60 feet of you (if you control multiple creatures, you can command any or all of them at the same time, issuing the same command to each one).

This is an example of how other abilities and features should be read in the same manual. In this case, any indicates that you can select up to and including all of the minions under your control.

To further support this, pretty much every usage of the word any in the PHB denotes a selection among multiple options. There are literally hundreds of examples, dozens of which exist in the spell category, to peruse.

I am of the opinion that the wording here is indicative of the ability to speak to any creature within its range, which means it's not limited to one. If it was, it would have explicitly stated this in the same manner as a spell like Suggestion does (PHB pg. 279):

You suggest a course of activity (limited to a sentence or two) and magically influence a creature you can see within range that can hear and understand you.

Note that suggestion specifies a singular creature, not any creature within range.

Now let's compare it to a similar telepathy spell, Sending (PHB pg. 274):

You send a short message of twenty-five words or less to a creature with which you are familiar. The creature hears the message in its mind, recognizes you as the sender if it knows you, and can answer in a like manner immediately. The spell enables creatures with Intelligence scores of at least 1 to understand the meaning of your message.

You can send the message across any distance and even to other planes of existence, but if the target is on a different plane than you, there is a 5 percent chance that the message doesn't arrive.

All instances used here are explicitly singular.

The same applies for Telepathy (PHB pg. 281).

What this all suggests is that any is used when you have multiple targets, and the singular is explicitly stated.

So, with all that being said, logical arguments for both interpretations, singular and collective are sound. Ultimately, and lacking official ruling, this will require DM arbitration in your games. Since it's not 2 way communication without the receiver having some telepathic ability or skill, it's hardly overpowered.

I would personally rule it as able to hit multiple targets since the precedent is amply set by other spells and abilities that the usage of the word any is collective, not singular. When a spell is singular, it is normally explicitly detailed in that manner.

Answer 2

Probably not

The first sentence of the feature description (like many/most feature descriptions) gives a general overview of what the feature does, or where/how you get the ability to do what it says. The second sentence onwards describes what that means mechanically.

In this case, the first sentence says:

Starting at 1st level, your alien knowledge gives you the ability to touch the minds of other creatures.

It tells you what in general the feature allows you to do (communicate telepathically) and where you get the ability from (your "alien knowledge").

The second sentence onwards tells you what that actually means, how it works, if there are any restrictions, etc.:

You can communicate telepathically with any creature you can see within 30 feet of you. You don’t need to share a language with the creature for it to understand your telepathic utterances, but the creature must be able to understand at least one language.

The first sentence does not imply that you can communicate with multiple creatures at once. It's just generally describing your ability to "touch the minds" of creatures around you; if it said "touch the mind of a creature", it might confuse some people into thinking they could only communicate with one particular creature (ever) with the feature.

As Ryan Thompson points out in a comment, even if you don't think "any creature" is necessarily singular, the sentence that follows refers to "the creature" and "it", which are both unambiguously singular (and unlike "any" or "a", the word "the" refers to a definite noun rather than an indefinite one). As such, the feature seems intended to enable telepathic with communication with one creature at a time.

Answer 3

Most likely not.

The ability states:

You can communicate telepathically with any creature you can see within 30 feet of you.

If you were supposed to be able to use Awakened Mind on multiple creatures, it would say

You can communicate telepathically with any creatures you can see within 30 feet of you.

It does not, however, so I think it's pretty unambiguously single-target.

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Generally, D&D 5e tends to be rather explicit if you can do something, so I believe they would have written something like

You can simultaneously communicate telepathically with multiple creatures you can see within 30 feet of you.

if that were the intention.

Answer 4

Yes

Let's look at the whole text of Awakened Mind:

Starting at 1st level, your alien knowledge gives you the ability to touch the minds of other creatures. You can communicate telepathically with any creature you can see within 30 feet of you. You don't need to share a language with the creature for it to understand your telepathic utterances, but the creature must be able to understand at least one language.

Now let's break it into pieces. This ability allows you to communicate telepathically with any creature, but there are some requirements:

• You must be able to see the creature
• You must be within 30 feet of the creature
• The creature must be able to understand at least one language

That's it. This ability does not require you to choose a target creature as so many spells and abilities do. It places no limit on how or when you can communicate, only that you can communicate with any creature if they meet the above requirements.

The answer by Lino Frank Ciaralli gives good examples of precedence for why the wording does not limit this ability to a single creature at a time.

Answer 5

No, as indicated by Sage Advice

See this Sage Advice article from July 2015:

Does the warlock’s Awakened Mind feature allow two-way telepathic communication?

The feature is intended to provide one-way communication. The warlock can use the feature to speak telepathically to a creature, but the feature doesn’t give that creature the ability to telepathically reply. In contrast, the telepathy ability that some monsters have (MM, 9) does make two-way communication possible.

Emphasis mine.

Once again, it very specifically calls out that you can talk to "a creature". You talk to one creature, and unless it has telepathic abilities as well, it cannot talk back.