Quote Originally Posted by mindstalk View Post
Well, damn. I don't know how obvious it would be to casual visitors, but your big governmental/management spells include Detect Thoughts (Wiz 2) or Zone of Truth (Clerical 2) [3.5e spell levels], and Sending (Clr 4, Wiz 5). The first two radically change judicial proceedings and anti-corruption investigations, possibly even employee management, or marital relations. The last has very limited capacity but is still useful. Cheaper but a bit more exotic is Animal Messenger (Brd 2, Drd 2, Rgr 1) which lets you use messenger pigeons without having to raise and cart pigeons around.

Alternately if a lot of people have one level of Wiz or Sor, they can have bird familiars -- messengers smart enough to fly back and forth between locations, or even people they can recognize. Like pigeons but a lot more convenient. Plus the aerial surveillance capabilities in warfare.

The real world had pigeon post -- medieval Europe seems to have been deficient in this, compared to the ancients, or to the Arabs of Crusades times -- but making it cheaper and more convenient is a big deal, as is familiars or Sending to 'radio' field forces -- real pigeons could only be used by field forces or agents[1] to send messages back to a base, you had to send a human to give orders to the field.

[1] One trick apparently was a "release on capture" pigeon; if the pigeon flew in, even without an attached message, you knew the agent had probably been in imminent danger of being captured or killed.
Again, magic that touches upon mental influence of any sort is the strictest taboo. The people have a long history of dealing with fae as one of the many hazards in their lives. Though perhaps the public doesn’t need to know about the going ons of dark, secluded dungeons.

Again with fae the local creatures are potentially suspect so we turn to the likes of Sending. There’s a caveat of range in play here that mainly limits it to shorter range messages, but a few simple relay posts trivialize this.

And now to dwell on a folktale where a fae replaced a messenger bird to disastrous results.