My players have a simple one: teleportation circle on a swivelling platform. faces up when in use, faces down over a 100' drop to open sea when not in use.
@@theravenousrabbit3671 oh, /cruel/ would be 100' over a scorpion pit that has a Tasha's Hideous Laughter field enchanted between 5' and 10' up--the bottom 5' doesn't have the field.
So basically treat Teleportation Circle as a Star Gate → can teleport you to far places if you got an address → is guarded 24h/7 in case of invasion → has a mechanism that prevent unwanted arrivals → needs coded communication to verify wanted arrivals → is used to bring prosperity and new resources
This is what happens in my universe. Its a science fantasy universe, but different planets have different tech levels. The organization who controls interplanner trade wants to keep it that way. And they are "apolitical" at least when it comes to other planets, but this organization of lets just call them super science aliens make sure that things don't go wrong. They have only six times in the past and that was all becuase this organization allowed said things to go wrong so they could manipulate events in their favor. The Maiosq Corporation (the Industrial or economic wing of the Xian Empire/Republic) - Controls trade in and out of portax with scanners and strict laws of what can/can't be traded. - Each end of the portaxes (my stargates) have guards. - If people attack the guards then the portax shuts down on failsafe. Only Xians can open it up. Which means you either need to control them or know your way in if you do something to fuck over the local guards. Only Xians know the tech. - this has allowed for Neona (my alt earth) to have connections to not just far places on their planet, but with other planets. And allows for tech jumps for certain areas. Neona is interested as it is the one place that imports more black imagicite (something used to counter magic) and is full of non-magical and anti-magical groups who for nearly 500 years banned the trading in portaxes, but people still needed those things to make sure mages didn't rise up. Which is oxymoron since most of their clergy practices "magic" but the good kind of magic.
Mostly that, but the most interesting and big diference is that some spies can put a hidden one in a safe house and the moment you realice you have a small army in your main city.
I would say that any permanent teleportation circle, whatever the purpose it is created for, would be in a secured room with gates, guards, and/or magical defences. It is functionally another entrance to your stronghold, and one that should be assumed to be very public.
@@matthewparker9276 Might it be safer to put it in an open but easily monitored space well outside your walls? That maximizes flexibility by friendly users (such as an emergency escape when they have no time to arrange appropriate security clearance in advance) without compromising your defenses.
That's how I run it. It's usually in a closed and guarded corner on the edge of a castle for security reasons. In case of escape, it locks behind you. In case of invasion, guards are waiting to attack. A few places, like temples of priests, have their circle near the main entrance, but they very much want to be the first sight you see in town (for donations, emergency injuries / resurrections, quarantining people that might be diseased from far-off lands, etc.)
@@scottmartin5990 i think cities could be donut shaped, with the teleportation circle in the center. this way you have to get through walls no matter which way you try to come into the city and when the city is under siege, the city could coordinate with allies through the sending spell when to open the teleportation circle to bring in supplies
@@scottmartin5990 I go with the open and exposed idea myself. Because it would be ridiculous to spend so much to make these and then not be able to use them efficiently because of your security. Have defenses overlooking the open teleport plazas. Have them watched and monitored. Leaving those teleport plazas into the greater city would of course be watched and taxed. Moving to a teleportation circle empire would likely rapidly move the tech level to a renaissance equivalent or even industrial. Having forts with massive gunpowder guns trained on each portal would make it an inconvenient approach for an invasion.
@@michaelsandy2869 There's also the question of whether creatures retain velocity after passing through the portal. To maximize cargo volume during those 6 seconds, you'd want every creature running at full tilt, which would be much safer if they have room to spread out on the other side.
you should read "A Soldiers Life", thers teleportation specelist there who therefore become important targets in the neverending wars. The author shows different ways they could Hinder the mages, and perform different ways throughtout the book, would recommend.
"Silencing" someone generally is a last resort, for some Wizard to go so far to put themselves in desperate danger on something that is globally unsustainable they must have a damn good reason to do so... and for said reason, there's definitely a reason for the (evil) player party void the initial contract and aid the wizard for short term gain.
If you haven't done anything on bags of holding, you certainly should! 1 person could carry 10 bags of holding could hold 5000 lbs of goods & be easily sent through a teleportation circle or using tree stride. Transport of any raw material or finished goods would become trivial with any sort of extra-dimensional storage.
@@donatodiniccolodibettobardi842 Any trade group able to begin consistently using them would cause a balloon effect where they become more and more able to construct/acquire them; this would just grow at an even more scaling rate as wealth concentrates, infrastructure around making them increases, etc.
Artificers able to produce bags of holding and other magical inventions to facilitate production and trade would also become very important, likely becoming centralized and analogous to our current tech industry giants.
There is a book series called The Forgotten Ruin, Basically U.S. Army Rangers meets DnD. There is one scene where they jump through a portal up in the air, and have Feather Falling cast on them, basically parachuting in.
What is the team compositions I wonder? 1 teleporter per how many? Is there an amulet that can be made to serve the same role as a basic teleportation mage? Maybe a recall beacon to an armored box with venting system in case the amulet is stolen and used to teleport a bomb back? Idk.
The idea of an army moving through a 10ft wide gap in 6 seconds in ridiculous to me. But, assuming 30ft moving without dashing, thats 12 medium creatures, and that's plenty if they are highly skilled and well trained, depending on destination fortifications.
So I'm seeing an adventure that is one of these geographically isolated opulent teleportation based cities that once traveled all over the globe. Something happened and killed the teleportation wizards, leaving the opulent city now completely isolated, filled with stuff and people from around the world, and over the last 1000 years has degenerated into a mad max dungeon city filled with monsters and magics from all over the world from 1000 years ago.
Why wouldn't they immediately become nomads? They have connections all over the world. Some would stay sure but the smart ones would leverage their connections and re-establish their hegemony over the old trade routes, which would keep the city pretty prosperous. I could see a war between those who stay and those who leave, since they'd have to set up colonies who would naturally wanna be independent after a while.
@@geordiejones5618 With that wrinkle what about this idea: The adventure starts at a place that was once long ago a far flung small colony of the city. They have finally re-activated a teleportation portal back to the ancient city, and they have hired the adventurers to be the first to go through, scout the place out, and report back.
I hadn't considered land smuggling before but as soon as you brought up all those tolls it makes me think people would definitely smuggle items across land
Teleportation Circle in the same space as a permanent Private Sanctum spell would be ideal for this. You could also cover the circle so the "address" isn't visible to people since the gate appears "in the nearest unoccupied space"
One thing you forgot to factor in was mining operations and other resource gathering operations. Your portal-trade cities wouldn't be entirely cut off, because they would have to occasionally explore around looking for resources in the wilderness, so that would be one reason to keep funding roads, navies, etc. If they don't do that, their economy is eventually going to collapse.
@@sidecharacter7165 scrying only targets a creature and arcane eye has to start within 30ft of the caster. Divination magic can help but it won't replace expeditions and the need for transportation of material and people on some level.
I think that's what he meant by "satellite towns" that have direct access to these resources, which would either transport goods to a nearby teleportation hub or have a circle created in their locality so the various ores and whatnot could be directly moved to the large city where the smelting takes place.
Every exploratory expedition would just need a Mage to create a new portal linked to their homeland at the site of a discovery. No road building would be necessary.
I think part of the main way it wouldn't UTTERLY upend overland trade is much the same way we still have a variety of freight options for the modern world. Yes, SOME companies drop the cash to basically overnight EVERYTHING because they are focused on moving fast and being more capable of pivoting as needed. But plenty are also stuck in the situation of moving SO MUCH material that the NUMBER of castings of teleportation they would need PER DAY would become untenable and there'd be no functional loss in doing caravan shipments if they flow was routine and organized. As well, it creates a kind of labor log jam issue. Having even the ABILITY to cast Teleportation Circle requires a 9th level caster. And that's still going to be only once per day. Maybe twice if they burn their Arcane Recovery. And 9th is high enough level that it isn't just a GIVEN that you will have a wide talent market. So then you might have a handful of locations that can maintain a workforce of casters who can manage some teleportation, but the whole network would break down as soon as any of them start faltering. Imagine the city that supplies iron and other metals starts having issues with keeping up on their teleportation. By pure happenstance, the next generation just hasn't produced enough casters that are interested in doing this job AND have the talent to achieve it. As their numbers get tighter, you're also just hitting the existing workforce harder and harder, eventually losing even more to burn out. Having even this one link break in the chain could cause massive disruption. So, what are the other cities in the web expected to do? SOME amount of this could be mitigated if cities with excess casters could get some of them to relocate, but that is a TALL ASK. As such linchpin laborers, they are basically saying good bye to their old life in a significant way. It could be even worse if it becomes too frequent that one SPECIFIC city is the one churning out the most casters handling this job as they become de-facto monopoly holders on the very IDEA of trade. Like, imagine in our modern world if almost every single airline had a significant political allegiance to one single country. And then one day, that country said "We're not going to fly to France anymore". What happens to France?!? All in all, I think the uncertainty and potential for disruption would always keep this kind of set up from becoming more than a special slice of trade. While incredibly efficient in theory, it also requires buy-in. If your teleport webway isn't wide enough, the utility shrinks. If you don't have the magical workforce to handle bandwidth, it crumbles. So in the end, it kind of winds up in the same position as, like, those helicopter ubers.
I love that The Stormlight Archives goes through this, there's *spoilers* like 9 or 10 large platforms with a central hub that can be used to transport people/goods, and a significant amount of time is given to how factions have to be convinced to let a warlike people open a teleporter into the middle of their capital and to how these oathgates affect the logistics and trade in the world
Sounds like there's a really poignant story to be told here about wealth inequality, globalisation, urbanisation and the rural/urban divide... Some of the most pressing issues of our time, basically. This is good.
There's also something to be said for the existence of spells like Fabricate and Mold Earth. These could very easily be used to maintain roads and bridges. A team of 6 mages with Mold Earth can simply create a 5 ft path while walking down it. 24 mages if you want the road to be 20 ft wide. I could see magic initiate schooling becoming an integral part of rural education.
i'm just imagining a world where car-centric planning and unwalkable living spaces are even worse because they don't even have cars, they just teleport to the city or the local teleport hub when they want to go somewhere
I'm imagining a flight controller sort of position where someone is constantly recieving and responding to sending in an effort to coordinate people coming through the circle. You wouldn't want 5 groups of merchants fully loaded with goods coming through at the exact same time, or would need a sufficient room to handle this, lest some poor laborer with arms stacked of crates gets teleported ontop the outhouse outside because 60 people tried to use the circle at the same time.
Interesting thing to note: 5e reduced the teleportation circle spell's level from 9th in 3.5 to 5th level in 5e, making it a hell of a lot more accessible. An enterprising Sorcerer who acquires 9th level and is willing to dedicate all their spell slots and sorcery points could potentially cast 6 TC's a day, while a Wizard would be limited to 2, albeit if Warlocks are allowed to learn it (they are an optional/variant class) it can get absurd with 2 ever hour. Granted, this still requires a 9th level character, but this would make for a cushy-af retirement if they were sick and tired of saving the world all day every day. This also presumes we're not talking about someone inventing a Stargate-esque permanent item... which feels inevitable. EDIT: also, in 3.5, the circles were permanent and one-way, often functioning as magical traps. In 5e, the spell is a one-time single-use teleport that if done at the same spot every day for a year creates a permanent rune sequence to make targeting that location easier whether with TC or with other spells (up to and including freaking _Plane Shift_ or _Gate_ for a mind-bender).
Damn, just looked up the 3.5 version. I can kind of see why it's 9th level, as it's essentially a permanent Gate, with no need to even use slots. Wild. I still think teleportation circle in 5e should probably be 6th level, just due to the outsized impact I discuss here. But the channel focuses on how the game is actually presented, so alas. Stargates are likely inevitable
@@Grungeon_Master Honeatly its rather bathaling to me that teleportation circles have no distance limit in the Forgoten realms setting, as that would make it even more masive plothole how there could still be mystereous and mostly unexplored continents on Toril beyond Feirune. There really should be 2 (or maby 3) different versions of the teleportation cyrcle spell, with the 5th level version only managing, like 1000 miles at the very most, while only the 9th level version can take move you across the planet.
@@viktormadzov5286 I think the intent is that teleportation is supposed to be based on the Law of Contagion, that is that you can teleport between things that have been in contact (even if that's only that you've _seen_ the destination which most of the distance-based spells outright require). The only teleportation spell that kinda breaks this is Dimension Door, but even that requires that you can at least describe the destination that is within the distance range, meaning there is at least some knowledge of the destination (which it appears that knowledge fits the DND contagion criteria).
@@Avigorus That would preaty much invalidate most of Grungion Masters vidoe here. Still, there's nothing in the description of teleportation cyrcle that inply's the "rule of contagion" even apply's to this spell. The rule makes sence for all the other teleportation spells, as you need some kind of conection to the point your teleporting to in order to focus the spell. But why go through segnificantly more work,time and resorces to make a PERMANENT teleportation cyrcle if not to curcumvent the limitations of the low of contagion
@viktormadzov5286 Would the law of Contagion apply to the person who cast the circle, the person teleporting to the circle, a venn diagram of both or either, or at all? RAW, it seems like a Teleportation Circle someone has no knowledge of could grab people teleporting vaguely nearby, with emphasis on intercepting teleporting into places that have one anywhere else, so that part at least has a printed answer, but, if someone happens upon a teleportation circle made by, say, an entrepreneur sorcerer setting up 30 circles over a few years, would they immediately be able to access all the other circles that sorcerer made, or would they be limited to ones they know about? If sorcerer A puts a circle on the moon, sorcerer B puts a circle in some King's basement, and neither sorcerer has seen the other's circle, but they have met eachother and handed over a teleportation key or whatever, could A teleport to B's circle, or B to A's? What level of separation is the limit to networking a circle?
Business-wise, a teleportation circle like this will have its own toll. And that toll will be very expensive because of supply and demand. The equilibrium cost for this teleportation toll will eventually be the same as whatever money is saved from not shipping it long distance normally. Look at our works and how more expensive it is to ship by plane as opposed to cargo ships. You pay for the convenience so much that the old way will still exist because it’s cheaper.
While long-distance roads are largely used for inter-city or inter-state trade and diplomacy, there's another side to road networks - local trade and communications. A city will still need a certain acreage of farmland in order to feed its population, and that farmland will need ways to transport the food to the nearest teleportation circle in order to enter the trade network. Going the other way, while you can do a lot of trade in luxury goods, anything you want to trade to the much larger market of the common population will require a distribution network to reach them. There's no need for long-range road networks, but, unless you have the equivalent of modern farming technology to enable one farmer to feed 150 people rather than about 1.5 people with medieval European practices (corresponding to around 2/3 of the population being farmers)
Even dimension door is going to be pretty rare in most settings. I mean that's a 7th level character! Usually by then the PCs are far beyond the average people, NPCs above that level are pretty rare Edit: This is a fun discussion and world-building! Though i do think there are some reasons why this might not happen in many settings. - again, how many people can actually cast these spells? - do they even want to spend their days as a glorified transport? How much would you actually need to pay them? Teleportation might be too expensive for anything but rush shipments - Throughput. Even a dozen wizards could only cast teleportation circle a couple times each (unless they're even higher level). That's a hard limit on the amount of trade that can pass per day. Imagine the delays and backlog. - Teleportation the spell is specifically uncommon is some settings for this reason as well
I have dedicated a lot of time to figuring out how common magic would be in certain settings. Even made a little demographics generator so that I could get a sense of how common having enough Intelligence to become a wizard would actually be. I think it really comes down to just how common magic is. I've run settings where Imperial mages have access to all spells of 5th level and below and NPCs commonly reach level ten. I've also run a setting where their is only a single wizard above 10th level in the city and no NPC really gets above level 5 without being a notable character.
I think all of your questions really do come down to "How common are these spells?" Cost? Supply and demand. If you only have one wizard who can do this, he can set the prices. Throughput? there is only so much a single wizard can do. I tend to solve these by just asking how common these wizards are and or if they are state sponsored. A magically "industrialized" kingdom may have a lot of access to wizards just because of a public education system that teaches magic, but a kingdom where wizardry is still an "artisanal" discipline, taught from master to student, where knowledge is siloed, then you would have faaaar less access to that level of magic, assuming said wizards even want to share.
That's a current law, with current procedures. Just because it was also a law a long time ago does not exactly make it an old law. When I say 800 year old law, I mean it hasn't been touched, edited, or currently written and cited. It exists in it's 800 year old form to this day. To compare the price of a medieval cat to the 10 commandments was kinda stupid. Because it's not illegal to sleep with your neighbors wife. But if that cat I just purchased howls at the moon.... what's your return policy?
@@cobinizer I've been saying that for years now. I abandoned D&D at 4th Edition and never looked back. That said, Pathfinder 1st Edition is an even better version of the 3.5 rules.
@@cobinizerDo you old farts constantly have to bring up edition wars at every possible opportunity? 3.5 was, what, 30 something years ago? Give it a rest already.
@@soloplayer7600 Far from edition wars. 3.5e was mathematically more fleshed out and better written than 5e and 4e. We don't cling to it because "Old = Good!", We cling to it because we want to show people that 4e and beyond is a load of horse slop being fed to them by a lazy ass company who can't even be bothered to proofread, let alone playtest, any new material for any form of quality control. Example: Necromancy in 3.5e, is a solid option with good advantages and disadvantages. You can kill a lot of weak things very quickly, without risking your own health, but if something is too high level, then you have to do the dirty work yourself lest you risk your precious minions Necromancy in 5e completely breaks the game and the turn-based action economy because of Bounded Accuracy, meaning that *eventually* Those 1000-something bow-skeletons will land enough crits to take out an ancient red dragon. It really feels unfair to watch WotC Get away with such lazy game design when we know they have, and can do better. In reality, they're just a bunch of washed up Hasbro shills trying to milk us for cash instead of entertain us.
Great video! I have thought a lot about this to make a setting where teleportation is commonplace. In this setting, teleportation portals were invented 50 years ago in a gnomish confederation of cities on a certain mountain range. These machines use a rare resource that seem to be exclusive to these mountains, and the resource is split into two to link two portals. The gnomes can give just one half of the teleportation core to other nations, which is what has helped the gnomes to keep control over the teleportation and made them the hub for international trade. This invention made the economic importance of the confederation grow by orders of magnitude, and the teleportation core is split Teleportation goes from as common as bus stops (in the gnomish confederation) to as common as train stations (~1 per larger town) in their allies, to as common as airports (only very large cities) in other places. Some interesting implications of this technology as you described: ○ Kingdoms that previously thrived on trade because of their position or harbors are either in decline, or have to deal with the Gnomish confederation to trade through their hub to remain competitive. There is significant political intrigue to be had in the politics of which cities are granted portals and which are not. Many cities try to find out the secrets of what resources are used for the portals, how to build and operate them, and how they might steal teleportation cores. ○ The portals can be turned off on either side so there are fewer military applications except for quick surprise attacks through open portals before they can be turned off. ○ The Gnomish confederation used to have a relay system of runners between their mountain cities (just like the Inca Chasqui), but this has fallen into disuse since the construction of the portals. Running has instead become the most popular sport in the confederation and there is a big sports event where teams of runners run the entire length of the old mountain road network in a relay race. And some other ones that I came up with: ○ The gnomish confederations three largest cities are linked together by enormous portals that are permanently operating, so that they are essentially districts of one city. But they still retain some cultural distinctions from Before Teleportation (BT) ○ The portals are powered by magical batteries that are charged by mages expending spell slots (based on optional spell point system, page 288 DM guide) and this has significantly impacted the role of mages in the gnomish confederation and cities with portals. There is a class of mages that do not do much magic themselves but are instead just used for their magical power, derogatorily called "Battery mages" or "Batteries". These mages are mostly lower level, and do not get the respect they used to, or that their higher level counterparts still get. The gnomish federation does not use taxes but rather has a system of drafted labour (also based on the Inca) and trade levies as the basis of their state funding. There is growing resentment and there may soon be a battery mage labor strike / union building effort / revolt. The magical batteries are also used to power magical items made in the gnome confederation but that is a part of world building I won't get into here. ○ New portals take significant effort to set up. Teleportation cores are large, and they cannot be transported through other portals or by teleportation. If that is attempted the teleportation abilities interfere with each other and create powerful Wild Magic effects that can e.g. teleport the core to a far away unknown location, create explosions, summon creatures from other dimensions, etc. So cores for new portals need to be transported the old fashioned way and are vulnerable to attack during transport. A potential quest for the players is to be on a ship transporting a new Portal Core and protect it from attacks along with gnomish troops. ○ While the gnomes are mostly pacifist and use their technology for political intrigue and economic / cultural power, some of the cities in the confederation have set up colonies in other parts of the world, using the portals to efficiently extract resources from the colonies. There are tensions between the cities in the confederation because of this. ○ What most gnomes don't even know (only some found out recently) is that the teleportation cores are actually the fossilized gladius (internal shell) of a species of squid capable of teleportation in the deep ocean. These squid still live in the ocean next to the mountain range. This ocean has many island chains similar to the Aegean and is ruled by an league of cities similar to the Delian League (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delian_League) but really in control of the most powerful city similar to Athens. These cities have started fishing deeper in the ocean and while the squid are hard to catch because they can teleport away, some are killed before they can teleport and if the Delian League finds out what the gladius can be used for, they could break the Gnomish monopoly on teleporation ... ○ Since the portals were built, there has been an influx of immigrants from other races, especially humans and dwarves, with some (half)elves and other races. A large fraction of those migrants have settled in the Cliffside Capital District (CD), because that’s where the artificers guild is and most of the international portals for trade, but the University CD has also attracted many spellcasters. A lot of the houses in the city are built at gnome size, forcing larger races to stand crouched and awkwardly using too small furniture. The (areas of the) cities with many migrants have more taverns and inns and shops that are built larger to cater to other races. Space is at a premium in the Cliffside CD and the mountaintop University CD, so while the first wave of immigrants settled in Cliffside, the second wave has been forced into houses built into old mines of the Cliffside, and the third wave into the Forest Valley CD (outside the city walls). The latter is a slum that has sprung up outside of the walls, and which the gnome confederation tolerates but which is not ruled by the confederation. There could be interesting interactions between the well-established first wave of immigrants, and the less lucky second and third waves living in the mines and outside of the walls. Some immigrants want to settle in the other cities of the federation, because the commute is short for all of them, being linked to the capital with portals. But the gnomes are hesitant to allow immigration to all their cities and mostly restrict it to the capital. There are tensions between the gnomes and immigrants because of different cultures. For instance, the gnomes are mostly vegan and it is illegal to eat animals in their cities. But the immigrants of other races are often not vegan, and so some smuggle animal products into the federation. Animal products can be obtained freely in the immigrant district outside of the forest valley city walls, since this is a slum that isn't under direct jurisdiction of the gnomes. The gnomes find this disgusting, and some are calling for different ways to deal with the slums: Their taming, removal, upgrading into a proper part of the city, or closing the gates of the forest valley city to all non-gnomes.
The normalization of teleportation in fantasy is a neat way to solve a major problem I've had for a while. In a world where you have giants, dragons and monsters of all kind as a normal feature of the world....masive interconected humanoid civilizations simply should not exist. When you think about how critucly vital trade, exchange of ideas and maintaining stabilaty are for the development of human civilization, its seams hightly unlikely that most humanoids civilizations ever hope to maintain territory's larger then city states or small kingdoms. Curtainly many have acheaved this for long stretches of time, but eventually most of that will perish in time and contribute to the vast lost anchant civilization ecosisten that are ubiquites to these kinds of worlds😅 But with telepirtations, things are very different. In my mind, the majority of a fantasy world would need to be made up by wild or mostly uncivilized lands ( as otherwise there would be not enought room for the monsters) Advanced civilizations would then be (with few exeptions) relatively smaller territory's, but could still maintain prosperaty, advamcemant, and contact with other advanced empires through vareous forms of telepirtstion and magical telecomunicatuon
@@AAAAkaishicÌIÍ636 Precisely. - Also remnents of long forgoten kingdoms/empires, much of it repurpused as mystereous temple complexes, artifact voults, homes of yuan ti, sphinx, outlows, kobalds and other monsters, and natural dungions -Also elfs, centaurs, orcs, and other races eather live in the wilds or live more in harmony with surounding nature. - Also small isolated or hidden kingdoms - Also......... There's a lot that can be found in these vast lands outside the interconected regions of human civilization
What separates the most powerful then are those who could defend farmland because constant food and water is how you keep a city going@@viktormadzov5286
It would actually be Gems. The chalk and/or inks need to have gems mixed into them. There was a Web comic that I read years ago that had a joke about a wizards apprentice getting a great deal on Gems, 300 Gold for 500 Gold worth of Gems and the wizard ordered the apprentice to buy more. 😂
I see no difference between this and our airports. Does it revolutionize travel and trade? Yes! Does it make roads and ground shipping irrelevant? Heck no. Infrastructure is more complicated than that. And you'll rapidly get pretty extensive regulation/ taxes / fees/ etc
Idk when you think about combining teleportation circle with pack mules and bags of holding it might actually be far better than just about any other form of shipping.
@Tupadre97 But the permanent circle isn't the final destination of your goods, is it? You'll need infrastructure to distribute from that transit hub. Along with prices to match the convenience of teleportation, if your goods aren't time sensitive, it may be more economical to ship ground across normal trade routes.
But airports compete with modern ships, trains, and trucks, not with sailing ships and carts pulled by pack animals. Modern alternatives take days to weeks, while pre-industrial alternatives would be weeks to months. Moderns ships also carry a hundred times the cargo with one tenth of the crew, and are less likely to sink because of a storm.
@Br3ttM You are somewhat correct. magical storage solves the difference in carrying capacity. Some even prevent the contents aging depending on the ruel set. Redily obtainable sustainable ground transportation does top out at about 23 mph in 5e dnd unless we're including the likes of eberron or spelljammer. It's not great, but it's not awful. Water travel is where things get really problematic in most settings. Ships in 5e are painfully slow (4mph max), require large crews, and have few to no options magical or otherwise to aid these problems. Along with the various risks at sea, ships as written are almost never a viable option for long-distance trade or travel in 5e.
I imagine research into semi-permanent circles would emerge pretty quick. The ability to only have an active circle for send and receipt when you ‘draw’ the last sigil-or to highjack whatever metaphysical byway these circles create or access would become premium conflict fodder
Speaking to trade routes drying up (10:40): I just spent a week in Cape Charles, Virginia, now a small beach town. I'm not a beach person, so I explored its history. The town was once the rail terminus on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay from New York. It was built so that Southern agriculture could be brought by rail to Norfolk, Virginia, carried by ferry to Cape Charles, and then by rail to New York. For a time, just outside of the town was the world's largest "truck farm" (a farm for fruits and vegetables meant to be transported elsewhere and not consumed locally). In other words, this town was a really big deal. But the completion of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel in 1964 opened up a route across the Chesapeake to trucking, which was more efficient than rail-to-ferry-to-rail. Cape Charles and the whole of Northampton County withered. The town has been reinventing itself as a tourist spot for a bit more than a decade and is on the upswing, but get a longtime resident to remember the 90s... There are monsters that feed on poverty(13:08).
In the world of Final Fantasy XIV there's a network of Aetheryte Crystals - the in-universe fast-travel system - that people can use to effectively Star Trek transporter-beam between at the expense of a toll relative to distance travelled and some negligible portion of one's own magic power. It's not D&D-levels of convenience as it's limited how much that the crystals can actually move at a time and over-use of it can physically harm you, but just having the crystal available fundamentally shapes the world. The main setting - the Western civilization of Eorzea - is broken into Greek-style city states which center around these Crystals. Allowing them to comfortably maintain a cultural sphere of language, religion, and commerce across an entire continent despite roving monsters being a constant threat outside their high walls. They have smaller crystals that maintain the main city's connection to their satellite settlements like agrarian communities, quarries, mills, military outposts, etc. Even more granularly, they have internal networks of crystals that just let you move through a city, which allows for an interesting paradigm shift in terms of pedestrian traffic. Also notable is the main geopolitical threat to these city-states is an expansionist Empire that's largely composed of a race of people whose main defining quality is they can't use magic, which has a lot of complicated effects on their specific worldbuilding but relevant to the crystal network is the aforementioned cost of magical power isn't something they can pay under any circumstances. Which, in part, leads to the necessity of the development of airships, but they also have the impetus to draft or recruit from peoples they've conquered that can use magic to actively exploit things like the Aetheryte Crystal network.
One key thing to remember about the aetheryte teleportation system is that it breaks down people fully, body and soul, when using it. This carries risk of faulty reassembly and is very taxing, with distance increasing the drain, to the degree that the city states recommend several days of rest after long distance travel By which they mean distances such as Limsa to Uldah (neighboring states) rather than to Yanxia (cross continent) and that the WoL (player) is a mad(wo)man doing so and doubly mad from our frequency of use. It is mostly used to transport goods (minor damage to a box of ore is spillage and sacks of grain do not have souls to risk) which you only do once sufficient trust is established
Tippyverse did a deep dive on this and other high level magic and it's effect on the D&D world back in the day on the giantintheplayground forums. It's still available.
I'd imagine most teleportation circles are in fortresses near the city but not within the city & is probably on a space surrounded in a way to make it difficult to build a strong group there, maybe surrounded by a moat or on a small island near the coast but difficult to use to transfer troops.
Arcane is definitely my favorite example of this in fantasy, the advancement of teleportation technology fundamentally changes the way the city works and the economy of the city that invented it, further enhancing the divide between the higher class and lower class parts of the city.
The way I've always interpreted the Teleportation Circle is that while you choose the destination circle by it's rune sequence, that circle doesn't necessarily become linked back to your own circle. Permanent circles can therefore only one way to their destination, unless some mages agree on both sequences when creatong their circles. It makes me think more of a web of transportation links where planning a route is not as simple as "I know that sigil I'll go there" but more a careful plan of which circles to hop through. More established cities might have a hub of circles that act as relay points which could really compound the economic effects you go into.
In the book "Will save the galaxy for food" the protagonist is an out of work space hero because teleportation has made heroes redundant. The dangerous depths of space are just bypassed. It's a very funny book.
The Wheel of Time explores this question pretty heavily once our heroes rediscover Traveling. Since it’s teleportation by portals that slice through the air, there’s a practical problem of hurting someone or cutting them in half when Traveling randomly. While it is used as a weapon a few times in the series, more often than not, that first restriction is a concern that causes people to set up specific areas for Traveling. And it fundamentally changes movements of people and armies and supplies throughout the series. The series explores the changes of logistics and strategy. And since not every side of various conflicts has access to Traveling weaves until later in the series, there’s a lot of guarding the ability secretly.
What are you trading? What do you have to trade? Where are you getting it from? How is it manufactured? Where do the factories get their materials from? How do you get the goods to the teleporter? Every one of the answers to every one of these questions is a reason why the local economy isn't drying up anytime soon, and lead to costs keeping teleportation from being a money printer. That's assuming those costs, or lack of available resources in the area, don't prevent trade from being cost effective in the first place.
The problem I have with teleporting for free using a permanent circle is that...well the pattern of that circle is obviously like a password for it. A permanent circle would only connect with itself. When casting the spell to go somewhere you have to manually draw a specific circle when casting the spell, you can't just draw a basic pentagram or whatever and then select wherever your want to go. If that wasn't the case then you wouldn't need a full minute of study to memorize the pattern (password) to link to said circle.
A newer, faster trade route does not automatically invalidate any other, slower trade routes if the faster trade route has a higher cost to profit ratio, if the faster route is more expensive to take, then the shipping company would only take that route if their cargo was in some way time sensitive, otherwise it's the slower route every time.
The amount of protection national teleportation circles would require, the cost of making a teleportation circle, plus the rarity of 9th level and higher mages, would make the tolls on using teleportation circles expensive. A city or nation would want their teleportation circles protected. I can imagine black market teleportation circles too.
It would be so easy to set up teleport circles in secret too. I imagine the local governments would make a big deal of making it so you have to have a licence to make a teleport circle. Cracking down on illegal circles would become a VERY big deal.
In DND the “Mage” is 9th level and has always been very common. People are weaker than the Time of Teoubles but still have plenty of mid-levels. Just look at the Flaming Fist in BG3
The Science Fiction series 'Perry Rhodan' once had cheap technological portal teleportation. A company might have a business entrance in the most important city in the system, but their actual office was somewhere else in the star system, where it was much cheaper to buy/rent. Some merchants even had it directly to their space freighter for when they were in the system. Some rich people even had their living space throughout the star system. The entrance could be at the capital on earth, their living room on Mars, the bedroom on Venus, the garage on a space station and so on. Though that technology is no longer available. The same series has introduced a city that is spaced out over galaxies. The size of the individual part went from the extreme case of a single building to a small neighbourhood to a part the size of an entire city by itself. Thanks to the extremely high technology level and the city keeping out of local affairs local governments don't even realize that a part is part of the city, much less them knowing that the city exists.
I had a similar discussion once. I believe one of the main reasons that you won't see teleprotation circles as established trade routes is that, if there is public knowledge of a teleportation circle in the centre of a large settlement and since learning a circle only takes about 1 minute, you can easily get your hands on a way to get there and send your armies STRAIGHT into the heart of the enemies civilization centre. Such a risk is too grant, hence they are mainly kept as secretive or private passages for important individuals.
This is pretty much the core concept to the 3.5e "Tippyverse" setting; an exploration of all the world implications of magic and especially teleportation. Essentially, the world is dominated by leagues of magically-empowered super-cities, with barren wastes and subject nations the only thing in between while the cities are fed by magic and guarded by legions of golems. Pretty interesting read.
using harry potter as an example, you might have a tax on the teleport powder, tolling the source of teleportation networks directly and with the infrastructure that exists, it certifies a safe port gate, each chimney is ensorceled to detect an obstruction and prevent overlapping arrivals then you'll cast anti-portal barriers on the premises, so that only the port powder method is viable, you wouldn't want people casually teleporting into private property
This is the first of your videos the Algorithm blessed me with. And damn i need more of this. These kinds of thought experiments are inspiration gold for any DM
Mages only have so many spell slots, so they are likely to raise cost for paying to as high as possible for each cast, with the economics of D&D which you are using, 50gp for material cost alone ignoring mage compensation is probably more than merchants are paying most caravans, not to mention they likely already invested in wagons and pack animals to get materials to and from production sites. This is also ignoring that in historical contexts and the fantasy settings sales opportunities arise along the roads people travel. The wanderlust appeal to working such jobs is also diminished. Also ignores that people dispersing to more remote areas usually will be the ones producing raw materials needed for a lot of economies. Also ignoring that rich countries don't like benefiting other rich countries when not necessary, as it is strengthening their rivals. However most importantly it seems to be ignored that every Teleportation Circle is a security risk for those traveling, as those traveling as you won't see that the city you are traveling to is on fire or under siege before you get there. D&D has no shortage of BBEG's or fiendish forces that would not jump at the opportunity to slip a raid or invasion through a teleportation circle so maintaining one also requires a sizeable security force, that could easily turn off investors. As any mage capable of casting Teleportation Circle could likely cast spells like fabricate to clear away obstructions.
This makes me think of stargates and planes. Both speed up travel drastically, and can bypass tolls set up by others. They also dont require a route to be maintained (in the traditional sense). However, unless teleportstion becomes a common course or class peiple can take, youll have a very limited amount of long range teleportation mages. Meaning its high value items/VIPs that gettransported. Common goods (food, textiles, spices, ore) likely will still be transported in more traditional methods. Smuggling can happen, and be a big problem, but its unlikely to completely invalidate traditional trade. Just drive prices higher. A boat is slower than a plane, and has more risks at sea. But its still cheaper and more economical to use in many reguards. Side topic: Stargates+Hover Trains 37 mins long = Win.
Your video covered the same territory that Aurora’s Catalogue of the Realms did in AD&D 2nd. That book was an AD&D version of the Sears catalog for the Forgotten Realms setting. We made use of their trade network more than once by bribing the casting mages to let us ride along with a regular cargo shipment.
A small group of low-level artificers could replicate as many bags of holding as they need, allowing them to transport their goods to market as well as transport most of the raw goods they need back with only a couple of uses of the circle. If the setting somehow doesn't have artificers (which would make no sense as they would be inevitable in this kind of setting) then every merchant guild would buy as many bags of holding as they can afford in order to get as much trade done per trip as possible (assuming there is enough demand for their goods). This is doubly true for settings with high security teleportation circles with strict schedules like were discussed in the video. The biggest trade hubs would likely have incredibly tight scheduling and it may take days for a spot to open up for someone to use the circle. As a result it would be incredibly important to make sure you can transport as much as possible with each trip. This would also likely result in a bag of holding or other dimensional storage tax being introduced by the owners of the teleportation circles. Not to mention the risks involved whenever two or more bags of holding are near each other. You would need counter measures to make sure that people don't get sent to the astral plane. Safety standards would need to be created and strictly enforced such as specialized backpacks or saddlebags to hold multiple bags of holding in such a way that they can't accidentally rip open a portal to the astral plane. Additionally checking bags of holding for contraband would be an incredibly dangerous but necessary job in such a setting, likely requiring a high level caster with access to revival spells and plane shift or some equivalent to them to be on hand in case of emergencies.
7:45 Depends on how common high level spellcasters are, in say Eberron there are probably only a handful och mages with acess to 5th level spells, It's basically the peak of what an NPC caster can have.
Also, i could see the argument with all the resources put into teleportation circles, that magic research would at some point find a way to increase the time limit form 6 sec in to some thing less limiting say 38mins.
I mean the research already exists. If a circle is cast on the same place every day for a year, that circle becomes permanent. A 9th level wizard can cast 2 circles per day, a 9th level sorcerer who dedicates themselves to nothing else can do 6, realistically 5 because they'd still need to transport themselves between sites. These numbers only go up with level or further specializing into doing it. A Warlock could conceivably do it a near arbitrary amount of times per day. Contract a Wizard to do this, and you have permanently connected two points, contract a Sorcerer to do this, and every single border fort in your kingdom has a wardrobe you can walk into and pop out of another. This is within a year, and this is assuming you have to entirely outsource the problem, and have no in-house ability to do it. A dwarf could spend a century making these transport pads in every single Dwarven hold on the continent, or the next one over; dwarves don't even need to literally tunnel their way between cities, they can just link partial tunnels and treat the path as contiguous. And don't even get started on the Sahaugin. Every single waterway linked, every dank underdark pool has a back door the Sahaugin empire can reach, the apocalyptic invasion of the Sahaugin is like a gamma ray burster pointed at the setting; at any moment the Sahaugin could just decide "you know what, today's the day we take the surface" and BAM, half a million fish men in every single geographic province within a week.
You need a high level spell every turn you want to use the circle, though; I think OP was saying that something more akin to 'portals' which anyone could walk through any time, would be developed. Indeed, the D&D 5e setting describes numerous such "always on" portals, & even more that simply require a particular (totally arbitrary) 'key' condition to activate... yet there's no canonical spell or ability which creates something quite like that (unless you count the Alkilith). Astral color pools, Ethereal curtains, Fey circle crossings, & Shadowfell blots, can all just be walked through without even meaning to. It seems inevitable that someone would figure out how to create permanent, commonly walkable portals?
You want to have multiple teleportation circles to increase throughput. More circles means more trade, or just more travelers. You'd probably end up setting up specific circles for travelers to go between multiple cities publicly, all of these cities having mutual agreements for setting these up as a kind of public transport between their cities only after their trade circles are being used to some high capacity. These cities would grow, for all the reasons you were stating. And there could even be one of them that's a dedicated farmland center. But some of these cities might be so big that they decide to setup teleportation circles to get from one city district to another. Someone who grows up with that kind of public transport available might never even consider that idea that teleporting one mile or a hundred miles is any different. They might never think about it. Eventually this would create a single city that exists in multiple places. Districts separated by continents and oceans, or whole vastnesses of space on their plane. This would also be even more expansive of a city if you being to include something like Gate. While it would be expensive to alter the spell for more use than 1 minute of concentration, I imagine a megacity would be able to fund the creation of at least one artifact that could allow them to at least colonize other planes with similar setups as their own megacity. On Teleportation Cirlce shenanigans. The only clever thing I can think of that you didn't already mention is drawing a circle on some moveable object, like a sheet of metal. Or having it be one two pieces of wood that you can separate to deactivate the Circle without damaging it. This would allow the turning on and off the Circles without the cost of Antimagic fields. Moving them would also allow for you to create a room under the Teleportation Circle room to have a bunch of Teleportation Circles setup on the sheets of metal, or whatever material. Creating a sort of switchboard of Teleportation Circles, and the ability to just move the Circle to a premade prison for unauthorized users instead of moving the cage over the Circle.
Tbh that single city being spread across the planet might be a prelude to a single world spanning empire. Especially so when you think about how that city would be able to teleport it's army literally anywhere it extends to. That could pretty easily end up with a world conquering empire if the positive feedback loop never ends.
Regarding the underground teleportation circle shenanigans- it would be extraordinarily funny if a new sewer project accidentally becomes the nearest unoccupied space
I'll bring up a spell that doesn't seem to have been updated to 5e, Shrink Item. It allows you shrink 2 cubit feet/level so based on 5e's scaling 10 cubic feet with the ability to upcast. Shrunk items become 1/4000 of their original volume and mass or basically a handkerchief.
Given the subject of this video, I highly recommend Larry Niven's "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation." The audiobook read by Bronson Pinchot is rather good, as well. He goes over a lot of the practical issues and their effects on society.
Let me introduce y'all to teleportation piracy. If you know the sequence of a circle, you can hijack it and redirect its traffic to your own. Hence they're mostly used for military purposes. Sure, you COULD use it for trading, but all that gold you sunk into it will become completely worthless if someone cracks your sequence. This also invalidates one of the most overpowered military uses, which is supplying a besieged town.
To counter this exact problem in my world, I homebrew that you can only use teleportation circles naked or with atuned items, Everything else get scatered in the astral plane. This way, you need support in the reiciving end of the circle to avoid public shame and also justify monks in the setting, since being able to fight without weapons is important in this context. Even with this, the mágical Police in the several countries spend a lot of time investigating and destroying ilegal mágical circles.
There are arguments for and against whether you can put a permanent teleportation circle on a moving surface (such as a vehicle) and whether it should work if it moves from that "same spot" but whether you're for or against that argument, there's no reason you couldn't put the circle on a movable object that doesn't move for a year. Imagine a teleportation circle inscribed on the seam of some kind of trap door, or other moving mechanism. If you want to turn it off, just open it. It's permanent, so it shouldn't just cease to be, and I don't know if anyone would argue for it to work if it's not an actual circle. Heck, you could potentially just include some kind of key stone that is removable when the circle is "closed." no muss, no fuss, no excessive traps built to protect against unwanted travelers.
This presumes magic is widely understood and prolific. I've always subscribed to the "Gandalf was only 5th level" school of thought. Just because we have access to all these levels and abilities as player characters doesn't mean everyone (or maybe anyone) else does. (I am not presuming to tell anyone how to world build - high magic realms can be fun too). I like the idea - in D&D, at least - that the heroes are rare and exceptional. There may be an ancient and powerful sage, or lost tomes that can teach such powerful magic; but by and large, a spellcaster must work hard to earn their power, and those secrets are jealously guarded.
Stuff like this is one of many reasons I've switched to Savage Worlds, where teleportation is (generally) strictly personal and has a range of 24 yards, or well within the range of a volley of crossbow bolts. 😈
Waiving the cost for travel between two established circles is what leads to the upheaval. Don't do that - players are overly prone to the lure of abandoning adventure for simulated entrepreneurship without additional coaxing. If you must, the various powers would yet attend to maintaining and patrolling their overland infrastructure all the same, to support bulky material transport, discourage mundane invasion, and cultivate an experienced security arm. All the nasties prowling the trade routes shouldn't be given the opportunity to range into your settlements and devour defenders without practice handling them. Your villages will have nursery rhymes and the like for teaching which neighboring monstrosities to meet never with eye or ear or lung or always with fire or so on, but field work is still needed.
You make a lot of great points You could use some graphics, like scrolling over the stuffies. I'm not asking for a silent film but things like a portal image or old toll booth even briefly appearing would help break up the background's stillness. Great video!
p2e adressed this really well. A permanent teleportation circle can only be cast by a 19th or 20th level wizard, and circles can be off by as much as 10 miles between their creation and destination point (they don't form a network, it's a one way portal)
Another thing teleportation extremely simplifies is warfare because not having to deal with supply lines is a general’s wet dream. Therefore it also makes world conquest actually possible maintaining it also. Therefore instead of a league of cities teleportation could create a massive urban centered empire
You can send an army to any major city in minutes, but you still have travel time and supply considerations the moment you step outside that city. You could spend a year setting up a new forward base to support logistics in a new region, but that still takes a year to advance however far you're willing to stretch your supply lines in the meantime. And while an army is defending the new location and its supply line for that year, it's not available for rapid response anywhere else... You could conquer the trade federation, but the rest of the world would still pose the usual logistical hurdles.
Generally speaking, normal NPCs don't want to mess with anybody who can cast Dimension Door, even if it means losing some money. Among other things, those individuals are few and far between. The only reason it seems more common is because the game follows the PCs, who usually can get quite powerful. NPCs of 9th level of any adventuring class, let alone arcane casters, so the likelihood of it becoming a Thing outside a few major trading cities/towns with good mundane transportation networks that goods can flow into and from the Teleportation Circles. That said, trade warfare (including those without Teleport Circles and competing Teleport Circle networks) would probably take the form of killing off those high level NPC arcane casters that are used to enable the use of Teleportation Circles. Not to mention defacing or destroying the Teleport Circles themselves. Or creating an identical Teleport Circle with the same sigils to 'steal' some of the incoming teleports, if the DM permits that. I love these deep implication of fantasy issues videos. :)
How I do teleportation circles in the system I'm making is they have a much smaller range but there's devices that expand the range that needs to be guarded making for roads needing to still be maintained. Also teleportation circles can be locked making it so that to properly use a teleportation circle you must use an associated telepathy network. It also makes so a military tactic to use is to infiltrate and take out the range expanding devices to cut off parts of thd nation from the teleportation and telepathy networks
I'd love to see your take on mirage arcane (i.e. the spell that lets you build city blocks, giant skyscrapers, or mile high adamantine walls in 10min). Especially when combined with a illusion wizard that can modify the spell at any moment as an action.
This is actually done in the Spellmonger series of books - but from the PoV of the mages. It's been causing growing political tensions for many books now, and we're expecting it to come to a head in a few books hence.
Sure commerce is nice, but without an off-switch a teleportation circle also presents a security risk. A city may need to keep it's sigil sequence a tightly guarded secret, lest an army suddenly charge out of a portal behind the bulk of your defenses. Perhaps a kingdom might construct a fort outside the city walls; teleporting goods and travelers a day's journey away is still significantly more efficient than walking the whole distance while maintaining a secure perimeter.
At the end of the video I do discuss an off switch that theoretically works for 24 hours, and some anti-invasion strategy too! Definitely a worthy consideration.
Amazing video as usual, a real brain teaser! Gonna be thinking about this for a while. Have a great day, take care of yourself and keep up the good work!
This also makes tax collection much simpler! just send a traveling Collector with some guards. have the mage open up a portal once they reach the village for collection. and send the goods back to the capital. a single spellcaster, a few guards. and a bunch of pack animals could travel cross country to gather all the taxes easily. No risk of transport raids. you could even maybe use a few unseen servants to carry stuff into the portal. If that dont invalidates their restrictions.
I don't know if it traveled from 3rd to 3.5, but teleport portals were a thing. I remember one 3rd party campaign book that had a huge multi lane highway that traversed many different planets through gigantic teleportation portals. I thought it was pretty neat.
i'd make them still have to "redraw" the circle, but the big trade cities have fancy setups where the pattern is carved into the floor at an angle and you just pour you pre-made official 1 use "portal ink" jar into a well on one side and it flows out and fills in the grooves. Also these jars are probably massively overpriced/taxed, and the apprentices that churn them out are paid horribly and most of them end up turned into slimes or otherwise killed by magical material accidents.
Too sick to go into detail, but IMO the proliferation of teleporting bulk goods and people would lead to "inwards castles" in a medieval setting. Also, fun fact, D&D apparently is not medieval, but reinnessance, at least according to actual representation (the whole rapier duelist/ swashbuckler thing for example puts it at least 17th century). Not that it changes much how teleportation would affect society, just another of my nitpicks.
It's availability is something I dislike about DnD magic. When I DM, I do what I can to make magic like a teleportation spell something that only the most brilliant of wizards can comprehend and do. Even then, a teleportion circle brings out more wonder to my players when it's, for example, some mystical grove or shrine built by an ancient power or something. I need it to be mysterious and generally not known about...I've seen so many new players eat that up because of the sense of wonder. Perhaps a few moderately skilled casters know of it, but don't know how to do it. Obviously, players should have room to learn what they desire once they get powerful enough imo, so they would get the chance to become that genius caster who can use the spell.
You Just enhanced the 'western marches' concept significantly. Now instead of the usual one direction is back to civilization ALL directions of a isolated keep with a circle or unexplored wilderness.
Really enjoy your videos. They make me think about my world setting a lot. In my setting all the major cities have a teleportation circle, but all are at least a day of travel outside the city, surrounded by a fort (keeping unwanted folks out and unwlcomed visitors in). I will definitely be stealing the idea of Private Sanctum though! Group of trained mages that keep that spell on retainer and prep to cast it whenever the circle is activated.
Teleportation circle in 5e by default is a 5th level spell, so not that common to begin with (it might even be unheard of in some kingdoms), and the caster must be *at least* 9th level, so already a highly trained specialist and will command an exorbitant fee (I know I would), especially if he is to make the teleportation circle permanent, if there are even that many resources to spend in the supply chain. Plus, transport ships can pull double duty as naval vessels or supply vessels at the very least, so well worth the investment by security standards. And that’s not even considering the corruption and mismanagement that usually goes into logistical systems. Plus, the ship builder’s guild, the teamster’s guild, the wagon builder’s guild, the horse-breeder’s guild and the tax-collecting baronies who control the toll roads (who in turn pay a portion of those *taxes to the king)* will have something to say about it if some upstart mage starts undercutting all that revenue. It’s not as easy as you think, even though it may be more probable than in 3.5 due to the retcon of the rules on teleportation circle which was level 9 and *SO* much better than the 5e version.
So many people have put so much thought into this but the one thing that everyone assumes is that teleportation would be used equitably and efficiently. That’s a big assumption, imo! In our world, many amazing new technologies have been underused because established industries bury them. Other times, revolutionary new tech is monopolized and commodified so that only certain groups of people can afford to use them. The point is that it’s not just good enough to think through the possible effects of a set of spells like this, but to think about who would control its usage and why
Another reason the dresden files is an underrated unsung hero of fantasy. Its teleportation system involving the Way and the Nevermever makes the act of teleportation both challenging and involving.
These things are not even difficult to come across! Kingmaker games will have rules on how to build kingdoms within your fantasy universe. One of the things easily constructed, usually under magical buildings, is a Teleportation Gateway. It is the backbone of any logistic network you will create, because the time taken to "go on foot" will make a Kingmaker game a bit of a nightmare. Yet that shows us that this device, this world changing piece of magical technology, is... common place. Any established nation will have a few of these, all their major cities should be considered one trade/culture hub!
I like the idea of teleportation being a “shady” business because of all of the security risks involved with it. Few large cities would want a circle inside its walls because of the amount of extra security they would have to employ. But, because of its convenience maybe the thieves guild have a bunch of wizards on payroll to have these networks illegally, changing where they are at all times not to get tracked by various authorities. Even bigger cities take advantage of this, but not publicly or openly. A lot of potential for scheming and interesting plot/history/lore! Some big cities that were built on this “tech” being infiltrated by older cities seeing them as competition. “DDOS” attacks preformed by outlaws through open gates, overwhelming security. A lot of possibilities! Really cool video :)
Something else to consider I think is the fact that people could dispel a permanent circle. it doesn’t have specifics for this but if it’s implied that dispelling makes it so it reverts the spell only to the point where you must recast once for it to become permanent again then armies or some other plan to keep the portal not accessible for 24 hours would mean another years worth of casting would be required for the city. Furthermore the rules specifies that you can only teleport to a permanent circle so that city regardless of their resources by the rules the city is disabled. If we did ignore this last rule however, I think it would create a interesting problem for the city where in order to gain funds it must keep the portal open, so to fix this that would have to implement a tax. While the cost of the spell is technically 50gp it could be assumed that making the chalk and ink requires a certain level of skill and time. For a adventurer this would be no problem since they have the time to learn but in a city, the king isn’t going to crush gems himself. This implies that the cost should be more then 50gp thus we could assume that a tax for each trade might be somewhere in the realm of 5-10gp depending on how many trades are being made in a single day.
1) Training a specialist capable only of creating portals should be much easier and cheaper than training a full-fledged magician capable of much more than creating portals. 2) If the portal is considered citywide property in a world based on feudalism, the city will collect a tax on maintaining the portal from its residents and there will be guilds that will be engaged in the production of appropriate magical reagents and the creation and maintenance of an urban network of portals (hardly a medieval city will have only one portal, rather a central one in the city and portals in the adjacent settlements producing goods necessary for the city, such as food, wood, mining iron, etc., villages producing raw materials for the creation of portals will be especially important).
An interesting concept to debate over for how it affects the world this type of magic is available in. In the setting I'm making, which is meant for a custom TTRPG system I'm working on, magic comes from 1 way portals called Rifts. Things can come into the world from Rifts, but so far no one has figured how to open the door the other way. All magic in this world comes from the energies that slowly seep into the world form these Rifts, so there is an incentive for mot to want to keep them around. As for the Teleportation conundrum, my current idea is that because Rifts are already teleportation doorways to another world (or worlds, the world's inhabitants are unsure), and they still don't know how the Rifts actually work or are formed, Teleportation magic is extremely dangerous, both for the one that uses the magic, and those around them on both ends.
I love how you actually consider building a world around the reality of teleportation! I considered pretty much the exact same implications of the spell, but ultimately decoded I wanted a world with more reconisable trade dynamics. Therefore rather than homebrew the spell to be more powerful as you did, I curtailed teleport (and similar) spells to 15 miles distances. Coupled with maybe only 1 in 10,000 humans in my setting being able to cast 4th or 5th level spells, and 1 in 100,000 able to cast 6 or 7th level spells, it seems to take the drastic economic implications out the spell while still allowing effective tactical use of them. It has the added benefit of preventing the players from travelling at will across the world, too, which I hoestly think almost all DMs would prefer... teleport is the bane of rich, location-specific adventure design.
These are converstions I wish more creatives had, that REALLY dig into how fantasy, horror and science fiction would blend into what we observe in nature, history, and science. That's what's gotten me into writing, go dig in those in between places where science is mysterious and magical, fantasy has form and mechanism and horror seems to be poised to consume all at once.
Why aren't people using Planeshift to harvest resources from the elemental planes? An entire parallel dimension comprised of infinite earth would mean you could procure samples of gold, diamonds, even adamantine at dirt cheap prices, then bring them back to the material plane and sell them at a huge mark up!
![PASULOL รามเกียรติ์ ตอนที่ 4 นนทกพบรัก [Ramakien Ep.4: Nonthok in love]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tMUQgmZzf_A/mqdefault.jpg)
My players have a simple one: teleportation circle on a swivelling platform. faces up when in use, faces down over a 100' drop to open sea when not in use.
That is so cruel and I LOVE it.
@@theravenousrabbit3671 oh, /cruel/ would be 100' over a scorpion pit that has a Tasha's Hideous Laughter field enchanted between 5' and 10' up--the bottom 5' doesn't have the field.
Maybe you been watching GoT? 😉
That is not how teleportation circle works by RAW, as it has to be fixed in place, on the ground, but you do yours.
@@xornxenophon3652
You could place it on an island only accessible by ship. You sail to get to one and sail to get out of it.
So basically treat Teleportation Circle as a Star Gate
→ can teleport you to far places if you got an address
→ is guarded 24h/7 in case of invasion
→ has a mechanism that prevent unwanted arrivals
→ needs coded communication to verify wanted arrivals
→ is used to bring prosperity and new resources
Exactly! Glad we weren't first on this one.
This is correct! And well said.
This is what happens in my universe. Its a science fantasy universe, but different planets have different tech levels. The organization who controls interplanner trade wants to keep it that way. And they are "apolitical" at least when it comes to other planets, but this organization of lets just call them super science aliens make sure that things don't go wrong. They have only six times in the past and that was all becuase this organization allowed said things to go wrong so they could manipulate events in their favor.
The Maiosq Corporation (the Industrial or economic wing of the Xian Empire/Republic)
- Controls trade in and out of portax with scanners and strict laws of what can/can't be traded.
- Each end of the portaxes (my stargates) have guards.
- If people attack the guards then the portax shuts down on failsafe. Only Xians can open it up. Which means you either need to control them or know your way in if you do something to fuck over the local guards. Only Xians know the tech.
- this has allowed for Neona (my alt earth) to have connections to not just far places on their planet, but with other planets. And allows for tech jumps for certain areas. Neona is interested as it is the one place that imports more black imagicite (something used to counter magic) and is full of non-magical and anti-magical groups who for nearly 500 years banned the trading in portaxes, but people still needed those things to make sure mages didn't rise up. Which is oxymoron since most of their clergy practices "magic" but the good kind of magic.
Mostly that, but the most interesting and big diference is that some spies can put a hidden one in a safe house and the moment you realice you have a small army in your main city.
Sidgil seven locked
I would say that any permanent teleportation circle, whatever the purpose it is created for, would be in a secured room with gates, guards, and/or magical defences. It is functionally another entrance to your stronghold, and one that should be assumed to be very public.
@@matthewparker9276 Might it be safer to put it in an open but easily monitored space well outside your walls? That maximizes flexibility by friendly users (such as an emergency escape when they have no time to arrange appropriate security clearance in advance) without compromising your defenses.
That's how I run it. It's usually in a closed and guarded corner on the edge of a castle for security reasons. In case of escape, it locks behind you. In case of invasion, guards are waiting to attack. A few places, like temples of priests, have their circle near the main entrance, but they very much want to be the first sight you see in town (for donations, emergency injuries / resurrections, quarantining people that might be diseased from far-off lands, etc.)
@@scottmartin5990 i think cities could be donut shaped, with the teleportation circle in the center. this way you have to get through walls no matter which way you try to come into the city and when the city is under siege, the city could coordinate with allies through the sending spell when to open the teleportation circle to bring in supplies
@@scottmartin5990 I go with the open and exposed idea myself. Because it would be ridiculous to spend so much to make these and then not be able to use them efficiently because of your security. Have defenses overlooking the open teleport plazas. Have them watched and monitored. Leaving those teleport plazas into the greater city would of course be watched and taxed. Moving to a teleportation circle empire would likely rapidly move the tech level to a renaissance equivalent or even industrial. Having forts with massive gunpowder guns trained on each portal would make it an inconvenient approach for an invasion.
@@michaelsandy2869 There's also the question of whether creatures retain velocity after passing through the portal. To maximize cargo volume during those 6 seconds, you'd want every creature running at full tilt, which would be much safer if they have room to spread out on the other side.
Nice plot hook, a merchand guild hiring the party to murder a wizard before he can establish a permanent tp circle that would hurt them
you should read "A Soldiers Life", thers teleportation specelist there who therefore become important targets in the neverending wars. The author shows different ways they could Hinder the mages, and perform different ways throughtout the book, would recommend.
Don’t mind me. I’m here to steal your plot hook.
"Silencing" someone generally is a last resort, for some Wizard to go so far to put themselves in desperate danger on something that is globally unsustainable they must have a damn good reason to do so... and for said reason, there's definitely a reason for the (evil) player party void the initial contract and aid the wizard for short term gain.
Nations could go to war to prevent the creation of portals that would threaten their trade routes.
If you haven't done anything on bags of holding, you certainly should! 1 person could carry 10 bags of holding could hold 5000 lbs of goods & be easily sent through a teleportation circle or using tree stride. Transport of any raw material or finished goods would become trivial with any sort of extra-dimensional storage.
Assuming you can afford it 🤔
@@donatodiniccolodibettobardi842The rich will only get richer.
@@donatodiniccolodibettobardi842 Any trade group able to begin consistently using them would cause a balloon effect where they become more and more able to construct/acquire them; this would just grow at an even more scaling rate as wealth concentrates, infrastructure around making them increases, etc.
Artificers able to produce bags of holding and other magical inventions to facilitate production and trade would also become very important, likely becoming centralized and analogous to our current tech industry giants.
Also imagine a person carrying 6 bags of holding filled with undead stepping through a teleportation circle
I love the idea of the armies doing teleportation drills. Both to move through, and to defend.
There is a book series called The Forgotten Ruin, Basically U.S. Army Rangers meets DnD. There is one scene where they jump through a portal up in the air, and have Feather Falling cast on them, basically parachuting in.
What is the team compositions I wonder? 1 teleporter per how many? Is there an amulet that can be made to serve the same role as a basic teleportation mage? Maybe a recall beacon to an armored box with venting system in case the amulet is stolen and used to teleport a bomb back? Idk.
@@jeffwillsea6757 To Me or the OP?
would be like the Chronosphere in Red Alert!
The idea of an army moving through a 10ft wide gap in 6 seconds in ridiculous to me. But, assuming 30ft moving without dashing, thats 12 medium creatures, and that's plenty if they are highly skilled and well trained, depending on destination fortifications.
So I'm seeing an adventure that is one of these geographically isolated opulent teleportation based cities that once traveled all over the globe. Something happened and killed the teleportation wizards, leaving the opulent city now completely isolated, filled with stuff and people from around the world, and over the last 1000 years has degenerated into a mad max dungeon city filled with monsters and magics from all over the world from 1000 years ago.
Stealing this
I might be stealing this as well, of you're okay with it.
Why wouldn't they immediately become nomads? They have connections all over the world. Some would stay sure but the smart ones would leverage their connections and re-establish their hegemony over the old trade routes, which would keep the city pretty prosperous. I could see a war between those who stay and those who leave, since they'd have to set up colonies who would naturally wanna be independent after a while.
@@geordiejones5618 With that wrinkle what about this idea: The adventure starts at a place that was once long ago a far flung small colony of the city. They have finally re-activated a teleportation portal back to the ancient city, and they have hired the adventurers to be the first to go through, scout the place out, and report back.
If you run this campaign invite me
I hadn't considered land smuggling before but as soon as you brought up all those tolls it makes me think people would definitely smuggle items across land
Teleportation circles (sequences, at least) would also quickly become State secrets, targets of espionage and the heart of the community
Teleportation Circle in the same space as a permanent Private Sanctum spell would be ideal for this. You could also cover the circle so the "address" isn't visible to people since the gate appears "in the nearest unoccupied space"
And make sure there's a deep pit all around, with a tall wheeled object to occupy that space too...
One thing you forgot to factor in was mining operations and other resource gathering operations. Your portal-trade cities wouldn't be entirely cut off, because they would have to occasionally explore around looking for resources in the wilderness, so that would be one reason to keep funding roads, navies, etc. If they don't do that, their economy is eventually going to collapse.
Just use scrying magic
@@sidecharacter7165 scrying only targets a creature and arcane eye has to start within 30ft of the caster. Divination magic can help but it won't replace expeditions and the need for transportation of material and people on some level.
I think that's what he meant by "satellite towns" that have direct access to these resources, which would either transport goods to a nearby teleportation hub or have a circle created in their locality so the various ores and whatnot could be directly moved to the large city where the smelting takes place.
Every exploratory expedition would just need a Mage to create a new portal linked to their homeland at the site of a discovery. No road building would be necessary.
I think part of the main way it wouldn't UTTERLY upend overland trade is much the same way we still have a variety of freight options for the modern world. Yes, SOME companies drop the cash to basically overnight EVERYTHING because they are focused on moving fast and being more capable of pivoting as needed.
But plenty are also stuck in the situation of moving SO MUCH material that the NUMBER of castings of teleportation they would need PER DAY would become untenable and there'd be no functional loss in doing caravan shipments if they flow was routine and organized.
As well, it creates a kind of labor log jam issue. Having even the ABILITY to cast Teleportation Circle requires a 9th level caster. And that's still going to be only once per day. Maybe twice if they burn their Arcane Recovery. And 9th is high enough level that it isn't just a GIVEN that you will have a wide talent market. So then you might have a handful of locations that can maintain a workforce of casters who can manage some teleportation, but the whole network would break down as soon as any of them start faltering.
Imagine the city that supplies iron and other metals starts having issues with keeping up on their teleportation. By pure happenstance, the next generation just hasn't produced enough casters that are interested in doing this job AND have the talent to achieve it. As their numbers get tighter, you're also just hitting the existing workforce harder and harder, eventually losing even more to burn out. Having even this one link break in the chain could cause massive disruption.
So, what are the other cities in the web expected to do? SOME amount of this could be mitigated if cities with excess casters could get some of them to relocate, but that is a TALL ASK. As such linchpin laborers, they are basically saying good bye to their old life in a significant way.
It could be even worse if it becomes too frequent that one SPECIFIC city is the one churning out the most casters handling this job as they become de-facto monopoly holders on the very IDEA of trade.
Like, imagine in our modern world if almost every single airline had a significant political allegiance to one single country. And then one day, that country said "We're not going to fly to France anymore". What happens to France?!?
All in all, I think the uncertainty and potential for disruption would always keep this kind of set up from becoming more than a special slice of trade. While incredibly efficient in theory, it also requires buy-in. If your teleport webway isn't wide enough, the utility shrinks. If you don't have the magical workforce to handle bandwidth, it crumbles. So in the end, it kind of winds up in the same position as, like, those helicopter ubers.
I love that The Stormlight Archives goes through this, there's *spoilers* like 9 or 10 large platforms with a central hub that can be used to transport people/goods, and a significant amount of time is given to how factions have to be convinced to let a warlike people open a teleporter into the middle of their capital and to how these oathgates affect the logistics and trade in the world
Sounds like there's a really poignant story to be told here about wealth inequality, globalisation, urbanisation and the rural/urban divide... Some of the most pressing issues of our time, basically. This is good.
There's also something to be said for the existence of spells like Fabricate and Mold Earth. These could very easily be used to maintain roads and bridges. A team of 6 mages with Mold Earth can simply create a 5 ft path while walking down it. 24 mages if you want the road to be 20 ft wide. I could see magic initiate schooling becoming an integral part of rural education.
i'm just imagining a world where car-centric planning and unwalkable living spaces are even worse because they don't even have cars, they just teleport to the city or the local teleport hub when they want to go somewhere
@@adora_was_takenimagine being trapped in the walls of a city when the teleporter breaks down
@@carsonrush3352a world where the Rich are the ones that can afford to not be mages, while the common people have to study Just to work basic jobs
And no one will listen because they've all been brainwashed by capitalism ...
I'm imagining a flight controller sort of position where someone is constantly recieving and responding to sending in an effort to coordinate people coming through the circle. You wouldn't want 5 groups of merchants fully loaded with goods coming through at the exact same time, or would need a sufficient room to handle this, lest some poor laborer with arms stacked of crates gets teleported ontop the outhouse outside because 60 people tried to use the circle at the same time.
Lets not talk about the potential for teleporting arcane bombs…
Oof
Better yet, teleporting dimensional spaces to create essentially nuclear weapons.
Interesting thing to note: 5e reduced the teleportation circle spell's level from 9th in 3.5 to 5th level in 5e, making it a hell of a lot more accessible. An enterprising Sorcerer who acquires 9th level and is willing to dedicate all their spell slots and sorcery points could potentially cast 6 TC's a day, while a Wizard would be limited to 2, albeit if Warlocks are allowed to learn it (they are an optional/variant class) it can get absurd with 2 ever hour. Granted, this still requires a 9th level character, but this would make for a cushy-af retirement if they were sick and tired of saving the world all day every day. This also presumes we're not talking about someone inventing a Stargate-esque permanent item... which feels inevitable.
EDIT: also, in 3.5, the circles were permanent and one-way, often functioning as magical traps. In 5e, the spell is a one-time single-use teleport that if done at the same spot every day for a year creates a permanent rune sequence to make targeting that location easier whether with TC or with other spells (up to and including freaking _Plane Shift_ or _Gate_ for a mind-bender).
Damn, just looked up the 3.5 version. I can kind of see why it's 9th level, as it's essentially a permanent Gate, with no need to even use slots. Wild. I still think teleportation circle in 5e should probably be 6th level, just due to the outsized impact I discuss here. But the channel focuses on how the game is actually presented, so alas. Stargates are likely inevitable
@@Grungeon_Master
Honeatly its rather bathaling to me that teleportation circles have no distance limit in the Forgoten realms setting, as that would make it even more masive plothole how there could still be mystereous and mostly unexplored continents on Toril beyond Feirune.
There really should be 2 (or maby 3) different versions of the teleportation cyrcle spell, with the 5th level version only managing, like 1000 miles at the very most, while only the 9th level version can take move you across the planet.
@@viktormadzov5286 I think the intent is that teleportation is supposed to be based on the Law of Contagion, that is that you can teleport between things that have been in contact (even if that's only that you've _seen_ the destination which most of the distance-based spells outright require). The only teleportation spell that kinda breaks this is Dimension Door, but even that requires that you can at least describe the destination that is within the distance range, meaning there is at least some knowledge of the destination (which it appears that knowledge fits the DND contagion criteria).
@@Avigorus
That would preaty much invalidate most of Grungion Masters vidoe here.
Still, there's nothing in the description of teleportation cyrcle that inply's the "rule of contagion" even apply's to this spell.
The rule makes sence for all the other teleportation spells, as you need some kind of conection to the point your teleporting to in order to focus the spell.
But why go through segnificantly more work,time and resorces to make a PERMANENT teleportation cyrcle if not to curcumvent the limitations of the low of contagion
@viktormadzov5286
Would the law of Contagion apply to the person who cast the circle, the person teleporting to the circle, a venn diagram of both or either, or at all?
RAW, it seems like a Teleportation Circle someone has no knowledge of could grab people teleporting vaguely nearby, with emphasis on intercepting teleporting into places that have one anywhere else, so that part at least has a printed answer, but, if someone happens upon a teleportation circle made by, say, an entrepreneur sorcerer setting up 30 circles over a few years, would they immediately be able to access all the other circles that sorcerer made, or would they be limited to ones they know about?
If sorcerer A puts a circle on the moon, sorcerer B puts a circle in some King's basement, and neither sorcerer has seen the other's circle, but they have met eachother and handed over a teleportation key or whatever, could A teleport to B's circle, or B to A's?
What level of separation is the limit to networking a circle?
Business-wise, a teleportation circle like this will have its own toll. And that toll will be very expensive because of supply and demand. The equilibrium cost for this teleportation toll will eventually be the same as whatever money is saved from not shipping it long distance normally. Look at our works and how more expensive it is to ship by plane as opposed to cargo ships. You pay for the convenience so much that the old way will still exist because it’s cheaper.
actually, that's because cargo ships are much cheaper to run than cargo planes
While long-distance roads are largely used for inter-city or inter-state trade and diplomacy, there's another side to road networks - local trade and communications. A city will still need a certain acreage of farmland in order to feed its population, and that farmland will need ways to transport the food to the nearest teleportation circle in order to enter the trade network. Going the other way, while you can do a lot of trade in luxury goods, anything you want to trade to the much larger market of the common population will require a distribution network to reach them.
There's no need for long-range road networks, but, unless you have the equivalent of modern farming technology to enable one farmer to feed 150 people rather than about 1.5 people with medieval European practices (corresponding to around 2/3 of the population being farmers)
Even dimension door is going to be pretty rare in most settings. I mean that's a 7th level character! Usually by then the PCs are far beyond the average people, NPCs above that level are pretty rare
Edit: This is a fun discussion and world-building! Though i do think there are some reasons why this might not happen in many settings.
- again, how many people can actually cast these spells?
- do they even want to spend their days as a glorified transport? How much would you actually need to pay them? Teleportation might be too expensive for anything but rush shipments
- Throughput. Even a dozen wizards could only cast teleportation circle a couple times each (unless they're even higher level). That's a hard limit on the amount of trade that can pass per day. Imagine the delays and backlog.
- Teleportation the spell is specifically uncommon is some settings for this reason as well
I have dedicated a lot of time to figuring out how common magic would be in certain settings. Even made a little demographics generator so that I could get a sense of how common having enough Intelligence to become a wizard would actually be.
I think it really comes down to just how common magic is. I've run settings where Imperial mages have access to all spells of 5th level and below and NPCs commonly reach level ten. I've also run a setting where their is only a single wizard above 10th level in the city and no NPC really gets above level 5 without being a notable character.
I think all of your questions really do come down to "How common are these spells?"
Cost? Supply and demand. If you only have one wizard who can do this, he can set the prices.
Throughput? there is only so much a single wizard can do.
I tend to solve these by just asking how common these wizards are and or if they are state sponsored. A magically "industrialized" kingdom may have a lot of access to wizards just because of a public education system that teaches magic, but a kingdom where wizardry is still an "artisanal" discipline, taught from master to student, where knowledge is siloed, then you would have faaaar less access to that level of magic, assuming said wizards even want to share.
To learn that a law 800 years old is still in effect and isn't some thing insane is amazing.
Why? old laws are the basis for many of the modern ones. 10 commandments, code of Hammurabi, etc.
Not murdering is a law that's thousands of years old
That's a current law, with current procedures. Just because it was also a law a long time ago does not exactly make it an old law. When I say 800 year old law, I mean it hasn't been touched, edited, or currently written and cited. It exists in it's 800 year old form to this day. To compare the price of a medieval cat to the 10 commandments was kinda stupid. Because it's not illegal to sleep with your neighbors wife. But if that cat I just purchased howls at the moon.... what's your return policy?
That is what happens when you have a country old enough to have a real history.
Thank you for this. I'm working on my tier 3 group having Teleportation via circle and a Voyager Staff. Balancing stakes around that is hard work.
All transportation technologies have drastically changed the world
You are describing the Tippyverse, an old 3.5 setting shaped entirely by the harsh realities of instant travel and inherent magical inequality.
This is correct. 3.5 was the last good version of the game.
@@cobinizer I've been saying that for years now. I abandoned D&D at 4th Edition and never looked back. That said, Pathfinder 1st Edition is an even better version of the 3.5 rules.
@jrytacct Yeah, Pathfinder 1e is pretty good since it's basically 3.5 with some house rules, so, 3.75.
@@cobinizerDo you old farts constantly have to bring up edition wars at every possible opportunity? 3.5 was, what, 30 something years ago? Give it a rest already.
@@soloplayer7600 Far from edition wars. 3.5e was mathematically more fleshed out and better written than 5e and 4e. We don't cling to it because "Old = Good!", We cling to it because we want to show people that 4e and beyond is a load of horse slop being fed to them by a lazy ass company who can't even be bothered to proofread, let alone playtest, any new material for any form of quality control.
Example: Necromancy in 3.5e, is a solid option with good advantages and disadvantages. You can kill a lot of weak things very quickly, without risking your own health, but if something is too high level, then you have to do the dirty work yourself lest you risk your precious minions
Necromancy in 5e completely breaks the game and the turn-based action economy because of Bounded Accuracy, meaning that *eventually* Those 1000-something bow-skeletons will land enough crits to take out an ancient red dragon.
It really feels unfair to watch WotC Get away with such lazy game design when we know they have, and can do better. In reality, they're just a bunch of washed up Hasbro shills trying to milk us for cash instead of entertain us.
Great video! I have thought a lot about this to make a setting where teleportation is commonplace. In this setting, teleportation portals were invented 50 years ago in a gnomish confederation of cities on a certain mountain range. These machines use a rare resource that seem to be exclusive to these mountains, and the resource is split into two to link two portals. The gnomes can give just one half of the teleportation core to other nations, which is what has helped the gnomes to keep control over the teleportation and made them the hub for international trade. This invention made the economic importance of the confederation grow by orders of magnitude, and the teleportation core is split Teleportation goes from as common as bus stops (in the gnomish confederation) to as common as train stations (~1 per larger town) in their allies, to as common as airports (only very large cities) in other places.
Some interesting implications of this technology as you described:
○ Kingdoms that previously thrived on trade because of their position or harbors are either in decline, or have to deal with the Gnomish confederation to trade through their hub to remain competitive. There is significant political intrigue to be had in the politics of which cities are granted portals and which are not. Many cities try to find out the secrets of what resources are used for the portals, how to build and operate them, and how they might steal teleportation cores.
○ The portals can be turned off on either side so there are fewer military applications except for quick surprise attacks through open portals before they can be turned off.
○ The Gnomish confederation used to have a relay system of runners between their mountain cities (just like the Inca Chasqui), but this has fallen into disuse since the construction of the portals. Running has instead become the most popular sport in the confederation and there is a big sports event where teams of runners run the entire length of the old mountain road network in a relay race.
And some other ones that I came up with:
○ The gnomish confederations three largest cities are linked together by enormous portals that are permanently operating, so that they are essentially districts of one city. But they still retain some cultural distinctions from Before Teleportation (BT)
○ The portals are powered by magical batteries that are charged by mages expending spell slots (based on optional spell point system, page 288 DM guide) and this has significantly impacted the role of mages in the gnomish confederation and cities with portals. There is a class of mages that do not do much magic themselves but are instead just used for their magical power, derogatorily called "Battery mages" or "Batteries". These mages are mostly lower level, and do not get the respect they used to, or that their higher level counterparts still get. The gnomish federation does not use taxes but rather has a system of drafted labour (also based on the Inca) and trade levies as the basis of their state funding. There is growing resentment and there may soon be a battery mage labor strike / union building effort / revolt. The magical batteries are also used to power magical items made in the gnome confederation but that is a part of world building I won't get into here.
○ New portals take significant effort to set up. Teleportation cores are large, and they cannot be transported through other portals or by teleportation. If that is attempted the teleportation abilities interfere with each other and create powerful Wild Magic effects that can e.g. teleport the core to a far away unknown location, create explosions, summon creatures from other dimensions, etc. So cores for new portals need to be transported the old fashioned way and are vulnerable to attack during transport. A potential quest for the players is to be on a ship transporting a new Portal Core and protect it from attacks along with gnomish troops.
○ While the gnomes are mostly pacifist and use their technology for political intrigue and economic / cultural power, some of the cities in the confederation have set up colonies in other parts of the world, using the portals to efficiently extract resources from the colonies. There are tensions between the cities in the confederation because of this.
○ What most gnomes don't even know (only some found out recently) is that the teleportation cores are actually the fossilized gladius (internal shell) of a species of squid capable of teleportation in the deep ocean. These squid still live in the ocean next to the mountain range. This ocean has many island chains similar to the Aegean and is ruled by an league of cities similar to the Delian League (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delian_League) but really in control of the most powerful city similar to Athens. These cities have started fishing deeper in the ocean and while the squid are hard to catch because they can teleport away, some are killed before they can teleport and if the Delian League finds out what the gladius can be used for, they could break the Gnomish monopoly on teleporation ...
○ Since the portals were built, there has been an influx of immigrants from other races, especially humans and dwarves, with some (half)elves and other races. A large fraction of those migrants have settled in the Cliffside Capital District (CD), because that’s where the artificers guild is and most of the international portals for trade, but the University CD has also attracted many spellcasters.
A lot of the houses in the city are built at gnome size, forcing larger races to stand crouched and awkwardly using too small furniture. The (areas of the) cities with many migrants have more taverns and inns and shops that are built larger to cater to other races.
Space is at a premium in the Cliffside CD and the mountaintop University CD, so while the first wave of immigrants settled in Cliffside, the second wave has been forced into houses built into old mines of the Cliffside, and the third wave into the Forest Valley CD (outside the city walls). The latter is a slum that has sprung up outside of the walls, and which the gnome confederation tolerates but which is not ruled by the confederation. There could be interesting interactions between the well-established first wave of immigrants, and the less lucky second and third waves living in the mines and outside of the walls. Some immigrants want to settle in the other cities of the federation, because the commute is short for all of them, being linked to the capital with portals. But the gnomes are hesitant to allow immigration to all their cities and mostly restrict it to the capital. There are tensions between the gnomes and immigrants because of different cultures. For instance, the gnomes are mostly vegan and it is illegal to eat animals in their cities. But the immigrants of other races are often not vegan, and so some smuggle animal products into the federation. Animal products can be obtained freely in the immigrant district outside of the forest valley city walls, since this is a slum that isn't under direct jurisdiction of the gnomes. The gnomes find this disgusting, and some are calling for different ways to deal with the slums: Their taming, removal, upgrading into a proper part of the city, or closing the gates of the forest valley city to all non-gnomes.
The normalization of teleportation in fantasy is a neat way to solve a major problem I've had for a while.
In a world where you have giants, dragons and monsters of all kind as a normal feature of the world....masive interconected humanoid civilizations simply should not exist. When you think about how critucly vital trade, exchange of ideas and maintaining stabilaty are for the development of human civilization, its seams hightly unlikely that most humanoids civilizations ever hope to maintain territory's larger then city states or small kingdoms. Curtainly many have acheaved this for long stretches of time, but eventually most of that will perish in time and contribute to the vast lost anchant civilization ecosisten that are ubiquites to these kinds of worlds😅
But with telepirtations, things are very different.
In my mind, the majority of a fantasy world would need to be made up by wild or mostly uncivilized lands ( as otherwise there would be not enought room for the monsters)
Advanced civilizations would then be (with few exeptions) relatively smaller territory's, but could still maintain prosperaty, advamcemant, and contact with other advanced empires through vareous forms of telepirtstion and magical telecomunicatuon
Great idea. You can also have savages, barbarians, and criminals living in the wild lands
@@AAAAkaishicÌIÍ636
Precisely.
- Also remnents of long forgoten kingdoms/empires, much of it repurpused as mystereous temple complexes, artifact voults, homes of yuan ti, sphinx, outlows, kobalds and other monsters, and natural dungions
-Also elfs, centaurs, orcs, and other races eather live in the wilds or live more in harmony with surounding nature.
- Also small isolated or hidden kingdoms
- Also.........
There's a lot that can be found in these vast lands outside the interconected regions of human civilization
What separates the most powerful then are those who could defend farmland because constant food and water is how you keep a city going@@viktormadzov5286
The production of chalk would become a key monopoly with wars being fought over it
It would actually be Gems. The chalk and/or inks need to have gems mixed into them.
There was a Web comic that I read years ago that had a joke about a wizards apprentice getting a great deal on Gems, 300 Gold for 500 Gold worth of Gems and the wizard ordered the apprentice to buy more. 😂
I see no difference between this and our airports. Does it revolutionize travel and trade? Yes! Does it make roads and ground shipping irrelevant? Heck no. Infrastructure is more complicated than that. And you'll rapidly get pretty extensive regulation/ taxes / fees/ etc
Idk when you think about combining teleportation circle with pack mules and bags of holding it might actually be far better than just about any other form of shipping.
@Tupadre97 But the permanent circle isn't the final destination of your goods, is it? You'll need infrastructure to distribute from that transit hub. Along with prices to match the convenience of teleportation, if your goods aren't time sensitive, it may be more economical to ship ground across normal trade routes.
But airports compete with modern ships, trains, and trucks, not with sailing ships and carts pulled by pack animals. Modern alternatives take days to weeks, while pre-industrial alternatives would be weeks to months. Moderns ships also carry a hundred times the cargo with one tenth of the crew, and are less likely to sink because of a storm.
@Br3ttM You are somewhat correct. magical storage solves the difference in carrying capacity. Some even prevent the contents aging depending on the ruel set.
Redily obtainable sustainable ground transportation does top out at about 23 mph in 5e dnd unless we're including the likes of eberron or spelljammer. It's not great, but it's not awful.
Water travel is where things get really problematic in most settings. Ships in 5e are painfully slow (4mph max), require large crews, and have few to no options magical or otherwise to aid these problems. Along with the various risks at sea, ships as written are almost never a viable option for long-distance trade or travel in 5e.
I imagine research into semi-permanent circles would emerge pretty quick. The ability to only have an active circle for send and receipt when you ‘draw’ the last sigil-or to highjack whatever metaphysical byway these circles create or access would become premium conflict fodder
Speaking to trade routes drying up (10:40): I just spent a week in Cape Charles, Virginia, now a small beach town. I'm not a beach person, so I explored its history. The town was once the rail terminus on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay from New York. It was built so that Southern agriculture could be brought by rail to Norfolk, Virginia, carried by ferry to Cape Charles, and then by rail to New York. For a time, just outside of the town was the world's largest "truck farm" (a farm for fruits and vegetables meant to be transported elsewhere and not consumed locally). In other words, this town was a really big deal. But the completion of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel in 1964 opened up a route across the Chesapeake to trucking, which was more efficient than rail-to-ferry-to-rail. Cape Charles and the whole of Northampton County withered. The town has been reinventing itself as a tourist spot for a bit more than a decade and is on the upswing, but get a longtime resident to remember the 90s... There are monsters that feed on poverty(13:08).
In the world of Final Fantasy XIV there's a network of Aetheryte Crystals - the in-universe fast-travel system - that people can use to effectively Star Trek transporter-beam between at the expense of a toll relative to distance travelled and some negligible portion of one's own magic power. It's not D&D-levels of convenience as it's limited how much that the crystals can actually move at a time and over-use of it can physically harm you, but just having the crystal available fundamentally shapes the world.
The main setting - the Western civilization of Eorzea - is broken into Greek-style city states which center around these Crystals. Allowing them to comfortably maintain a cultural sphere of language, religion, and commerce across an entire continent despite roving monsters being a constant threat outside their high walls. They have smaller crystals that maintain the main city's connection to their satellite settlements like agrarian communities, quarries, mills, military outposts, etc. Even more granularly, they have internal networks of crystals that just let you move through a city, which allows for an interesting paradigm shift in terms of pedestrian traffic.
Also notable is the main geopolitical threat to these city-states is an expansionist Empire that's largely composed of a race of people whose main defining quality is they can't use magic, which has a lot of complicated effects on their specific worldbuilding but relevant to the crystal network is the aforementioned cost of magical power isn't something they can pay under any circumstances. Which, in part, leads to the necessity of the development of airships, but they also have the impetus to draft or recruit from peoples they've conquered that can use magic to actively exploit things like the Aetheryte Crystal network.
One key thing to remember about the aetheryte teleportation system is that it breaks down people fully, body and soul, when using it. This carries risk of faulty reassembly and is very taxing, with distance increasing the drain, to the degree that the city states recommend several days of rest after long distance travel By which they mean distances such as Limsa to Uldah (neighboring states) rather than to Yanxia (cross continent) and that the WoL (player) is a mad(wo)man doing so and doubly mad from our frequency of use.
It is mostly used to transport goods (minor damage to a box of ore is spillage and sacks of grain do not have souls to risk) which you only do once sufficient trust is established
Tippyverse did a deep dive on this and other high level magic and it's effect on the D&D world back in the day on the giantintheplayground forums. It's still available.
Tippyverse is legit the first thing I thought of when I saw the title of the video
I'd imagine most teleportation circles are in fortresses near the city but not within the city & is probably on a space surrounded in a way to make it difficult to build a strong group there, maybe surrounded by a moat or on a small island near the coast but difficult to use to transfer troops.
Arcane is definitely my favorite example of this in fantasy, the advancement of teleportation technology fundamentally changes the way the city works and the economy of the city that invented it, further enhancing the divide between the higher class and lower class parts of the city.
The way I've always interpreted the Teleportation Circle is that while you choose the destination circle by it's rune sequence, that circle doesn't necessarily become linked back to your own circle. Permanent circles can therefore only one way to their destination, unless some mages agree on both sequences when creatong their circles. It makes me think more of a web of transportation links where planning a route is not as simple as "I know that sigil I'll go there" but more a careful plan of which circles to hop through. More established cities might have a hub of circles that act as relay points which could really compound the economic effects you go into.
Another great one, Tom!
The vasts wildernesses and unconquered spaces of Lantartia are heavily justified by these things you explored 😊
The children are independently rediscovering the Tippyverse. Nature is healing
In the book "Will save the galaxy for food" the protagonist is an out of work space hero because teleportation has made heroes redundant. The dangerous depths of space are just bypassed. It's a very funny book.
Wheel of Time is the goat for this
The Wheel of Time explores this question pretty heavily once our heroes rediscover Traveling.
Since it’s teleportation by portals that slice through the air, there’s a practical problem of hurting someone or cutting them in half when Traveling randomly. While it is used as a weapon a few times in the series, more often than not, that first restriction is a concern that causes people to set up specific areas for Traveling.
And it fundamentally changes movements of people and armies and supplies throughout the series. The series explores the changes of logistics and strategy. And since not every side of various conflicts has access to Traveling weaves until later in the series, there’s a lot of guarding the ability secretly.
What are you trading? What do you have to trade? Where are you getting it from? How is it manufactured? Where do the factories get their materials from? How do you get the goods to the teleporter?
Every one of the answers to every one of these questions is a reason why the local economy isn't drying up anytime soon, and lead to costs keeping teleportation from being a money printer. That's assuming those costs, or lack of available resources in the area, don't prevent trade from being cost effective in the first place.
The problem I have with teleporting for free using a permanent circle is that...well the pattern of that circle is obviously like a password for it. A permanent circle would only connect with itself.
When casting the spell to go somewhere you have to manually draw a specific circle when casting the spell, you can't just draw a basic pentagram or whatever and then select wherever your want to go.
If that wasn't the case then you wouldn't need a full minute of study to memorize the pattern (password) to link to said circle.
A newer, faster trade route does not automatically invalidate any other, slower trade routes if the faster trade route has a higher cost to profit ratio, if the faster route is more expensive to take, then the shipping company would only take that route if their cargo was in some way time sensitive, otherwise it's the slower route every time.
The amount of protection national teleportation circles would require, the cost of making a teleportation circle, plus the rarity of 9th level and higher mages, would make the tolls on using teleportation circles expensive. A city or nation would want their teleportation circles protected.
I can imagine black market teleportation circles too.
It would be so easy to set up teleport circles in secret too. I imagine the local governments would make a big deal of making it so you have to have a licence to make a teleport circle. Cracking down on illegal circles would become a VERY big deal.
"Is _every_ part of Taxland under a _Private Sanctum_ spell?"
'Every part the assayers could find.'
In DND the “Mage” is 9th level and has always been very common. People are weaker than the Time of Teoubles but still have plenty of mid-levels. Just look at the Flaming Fist in BG3
Brilliant ideas for protecting teleportation circles here!
The Science Fiction series 'Perry Rhodan' once had cheap technological portal teleportation. A company might have a business entrance in the most important city in the system, but their actual office was somewhere else in the star system, where it was much cheaper to buy/rent. Some merchants even had it directly to their space freighter for when they were in the system. Some rich people even had their living space throughout the star system. The entrance could be at the capital on earth, their living room on Mars, the bedroom on Venus, the garage on a space station and so on. Though that technology is no longer available.
The same series has introduced a city that is spaced out over galaxies. The size of the individual part went from the extreme case of a single building to a small neighbourhood to a part the size of an entire city by itself. Thanks to the extremely high technology level and the city keeping out of local affairs local governments don't even realize that a part is part of the city, much less them knowing that the city exists.
I had a similar discussion once. I believe one of the main reasons that you won't see teleprotation circles as established trade routes is that, if there is public knowledge of a teleportation circle in the centre of a large settlement and since learning a circle only takes about 1 minute, you can easily get your hands on a way to get there and send your armies STRAIGHT into the heart of the enemies civilization centre.
Such a risk is too grant, hence they are mainly kept as secretive or private passages for important individuals.
This is pretty much the core concept to the 3.5e "Tippyverse" setting; an exploration of all the world implications of magic and especially teleportation. Essentially, the world is dominated by leagues of magically-empowered super-cities, with barren wastes and subject nations the only thing in between while the cities are fed by magic and guarded by legions of golems. Pretty interesting read.
Create Warer and Goodberry exist so food and water are easier.
using harry potter as an example, you might have a tax on the teleport powder, tolling the source of teleportation networks directly
and with the infrastructure that exists, it certifies a safe port gate, each chimney is ensorceled to detect an obstruction and prevent overlapping arrivals
then you'll cast anti-portal barriers on the premises, so that only the port powder method is viable, you wouldn't want people casually teleporting into private property
This is the first of your videos the Algorithm blessed me with. And damn i need more of this. These kinds of thought experiments are inspiration gold for any DM
Mages only have so many spell slots, so they are likely to raise cost for paying to as high as possible for each cast, with the economics of D&D which you are using, 50gp for material cost alone ignoring mage compensation is probably more than merchants are paying most caravans, not to mention they likely already invested in wagons and pack animals to get materials to and from production sites.
This is also ignoring that in historical contexts and the fantasy settings sales opportunities arise along the roads people travel. The wanderlust appeal to working such jobs is also diminished. Also ignores that people dispersing to more remote areas usually will be the ones producing raw materials needed for a lot of economies. Also ignoring that rich countries don't like benefiting other rich countries when not necessary, as it is strengthening their rivals.
However most importantly it seems to be ignored that every Teleportation Circle is a security risk for those traveling, as those traveling as you won't see that the city you are traveling to is on fire or under siege before you get there.
D&D has no shortage of BBEG's or fiendish forces that would not jump at the opportunity to slip a raid or invasion through a teleportation circle so maintaining one also requires a sizeable security force, that could easily turn off investors. As any mage capable of casting Teleportation Circle could likely cast spells like fabricate to clear away obstructions.
This makes me think of stargates and planes. Both speed up travel drastically, and can bypass tolls set up by others. They also dont require a route to be maintained (in the traditional sense).
However, unless teleportstion becomes a common course or class peiple can take, youll have a very limited amount of long range teleportation mages. Meaning its high value items/VIPs that gettransported. Common goods (food, textiles, spices, ore) likely will still be transported in more traditional methods. Smuggling can happen, and be a big problem, but its unlikely to completely invalidate traditional trade. Just drive prices higher.
A boat is slower than a plane, and has more risks at sea. But its still cheaper and more economical to use in many reguards.
Side topic: Stargates+Hover Trains 37 mins long = Win.
Your video covered the same territory that Aurora’s Catalogue of the Realms did in AD&D 2nd. That book was an AD&D version of the Sears catalog for the Forgotten Realms setting.
We made use of their trade network more than once by bribing the casting mages to let us ride along with a regular cargo shipment.
A small group of low-level artificers could replicate as many bags of holding as they need, allowing them to transport their goods to market as well as transport most of the raw goods they need back with only a couple of uses of the circle.
If the setting somehow doesn't have artificers (which would make no sense as they would be inevitable in this kind of setting) then every merchant guild would buy as many bags of holding as they can afford in order to get as much trade done per trip as possible (assuming there is enough demand for their goods). This is doubly true for settings with high security teleportation circles with strict schedules like were discussed in the video. The biggest trade hubs would likely have incredibly tight scheduling and it may take days for a spot to open up for someone to use the circle. As a result it would be incredibly important to make sure you can transport as much as possible with each trip.
This would also likely result in a bag of holding or other dimensional storage tax being introduced by the owners of the teleportation circles. Not to mention the risks involved whenever two or more bags of holding are near each other. You would need counter measures to make sure that people don't get sent to the astral plane. Safety standards would need to be created and strictly enforced such as specialized backpacks or saddlebags to hold multiple bags of holding in such a way that they can't accidentally rip open a portal to the astral plane.
Additionally checking bags of holding for contraband would be an incredibly dangerous but necessary job in such a setting, likely requiring a high level caster with access to revival spells and plane shift or some equivalent to them to be on hand in case of emergencies.
7:45 Depends on how common high level spellcasters are, in say Eberron there are probably only a handful och mages with acess to 5th level spells, It's basically the peak of what an NPC caster can have.
Also, i could see the argument with all the resources put into teleportation circles, that magic research would at some point find a way to increase the time limit form 6 sec in to some thing less limiting say 38mins.
I mean the research already exists.
If a circle is cast on the same place every day for a year, that circle becomes permanent.
A 9th level wizard can cast 2 circles per day, a 9th level sorcerer who dedicates themselves to nothing else can do 6, realistically 5 because they'd still need to transport themselves between sites.
These numbers only go up with level or further specializing into doing it.
A Warlock could conceivably do it a near arbitrary amount of times per day.
Contract a Wizard to do this, and you have permanently connected two points, contract a Sorcerer to do this, and every single border fort in your kingdom has a wardrobe you can walk into and pop out of another.
This is within a year, and this is assuming you have to entirely outsource the problem, and have no in-house ability to do it.
A dwarf could spend a century making these transport pads in every single Dwarven hold on the continent, or the next one over; dwarves don't even need to literally tunnel their way between cities, they can just link partial tunnels and treat the path as contiguous.
And don't even get started on the Sahaugin. Every single waterway linked, every dank underdark pool has a back door the Sahaugin empire can reach, the apocalyptic invasion of the Sahaugin is like a gamma ray burster pointed at the setting; at any moment the Sahaugin could just decide "you know what, today's the day we take the surface" and BAM, half a million fish men in every single geographic province within a week.
You need a high level spell every turn you want to use the circle, though; I think OP was saying that something more akin to 'portals' which anyone could walk through any time, would be developed.
Indeed, the D&D 5e setting describes numerous such "always on" portals, & even more that simply require a particular (totally arbitrary) 'key' condition to activate... yet there's no canonical spell or ability which creates something quite like that (unless you count the Alkilith).
Astral color pools, Ethereal curtains, Fey circle crossings, & Shadowfell blots, can all just be walked through without even meaning to.
It seems inevitable that someone would figure out how to create permanent, commonly walkable portals?
You want to have multiple teleportation circles to increase throughput. More circles means more trade, or just more travelers. You'd probably end up setting up specific circles for travelers to go between multiple cities publicly, all of these cities having mutual agreements for setting these up as a kind of public transport between their cities only after their trade circles are being used to some high capacity.
These cities would grow, for all the reasons you were stating. And there could even be one of them that's a dedicated farmland center. But some of these cities might be so big that they decide to setup teleportation circles to get from one city district to another. Someone who grows up with that kind of public transport available might never even consider that idea that teleporting one mile or a hundred miles is any different. They might never think about it.
Eventually this would create a single city that exists in multiple places. Districts separated by continents and oceans, or whole vastnesses of space on their plane. This would also be even more expansive of a city if you being to include something like Gate. While it would be expensive to alter the spell for more use than 1 minute of concentration, I imagine a megacity would be able to fund the creation of at least one artifact that could allow them to at least colonize other planes with similar setups as their own megacity.
On Teleportation Cirlce shenanigans. The only clever thing I can think of that you didn't already mention is drawing a circle on some moveable object, like a sheet of metal. Or having it be one two pieces of wood that you can separate to deactivate the Circle without damaging it. This would allow the turning on and off the Circles without the cost of Antimagic fields.
Moving them would also allow for you to create a room under the Teleportation Circle room to have a bunch of Teleportation Circles setup on the sheets of metal, or whatever material. Creating a sort of switchboard of Teleportation Circles, and the ability to just move the Circle to a premade prison for unauthorized users instead of moving the cage over the Circle.
Tbh that single city being spread across the planet might be a prelude to a single world spanning empire. Especially so when you think about how that city would be able to teleport it's army literally anywhere it extends to. That could pretty easily end up with a world conquering empire if the positive feedback loop never ends.
Regarding the underground teleportation circle shenanigans- it would be extraordinarily funny if a new sewer project accidentally becomes the nearest unoccupied space
I'll bring up a spell that doesn't seem to have been updated to 5e, Shrink Item. It allows you shrink 2 cubit feet/level so based on 5e's scaling 10 cubic feet with the ability to upcast. Shrunk items become 1/4000 of their original volume and mass or basically a handkerchief.
Good to see someone cover this. I never understood why settings failed to account for the prevalence of teleportation.
Given the subject of this video, I highly recommend Larry Niven's "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation." The audiobook read by Bronson Pinchot is rather good, as well. He goes over a lot of the practical issues and their effects on society.
Let me introduce y'all to teleportation piracy.
If you know the sequence of a circle, you can hijack it and redirect its traffic to your own. Hence they're mostly used for military purposes. Sure, you COULD use it for trading, but all that gold you sunk into it will become completely worthless if someone cracks your sequence. This also invalidates one of the most overpowered military uses, which is supplying a besieged town.
To counter this exact problem in my world, I homebrew that you can only use teleportation circles naked or with atuned items, Everything else get scatered in the astral plane.
This way, you need support in the reiciving end of the circle to avoid public shame and also justify monks in the setting, since being able to fight without weapons is important in this context.
Even with this, the mágical Police in the several countries spend a lot of time investigating and destroying ilegal mágical circles.
There are arguments for and against whether you can put a permanent teleportation circle on a moving surface (such as a vehicle) and whether it should work if it moves from that "same spot" but whether you're for or against that argument, there's no reason you couldn't put the circle on a movable object that doesn't move for a year. Imagine a teleportation circle inscribed on the seam of some kind of trap door, or other moving mechanism. If you want to turn it off, just open it. It's permanent, so it shouldn't just cease to be, and I don't know if anyone would argue for it to work if it's not an actual circle. Heck, you could potentially just include some kind of key stone that is removable when the circle is "closed." no muss, no fuss, no excessive traps built to protect against unwanted travelers.
Imagine the corporate espionage going on between trade alliances to send mercenaries through an enemy circle to damage their trade
Or better create hidden rogue portal straight in the middle of the city 🏙️
This presumes magic is widely understood and prolific. I've always subscribed to the "Gandalf was only 5th level" school of thought.
Just because we have access to all these levels and abilities as player characters doesn't mean everyone (or maybe anyone) else does.
(I am not presuming to tell anyone how to world build - high magic realms can be fun too). I like the idea - in D&D, at least - that the heroes are rare and exceptional. There may be an ancient and powerful sage, or lost tomes that can teach such powerful magic; but by and large, a spellcaster must work hard to earn their power, and those secrets are jealously guarded.
Stuff like this is one of many reasons I've switched to Savage Worlds, where teleportation is (generally) strictly personal and has a range of 24 yards, or well within the range of a volley of crossbow bolts. 😈
Waiving the cost for travel between two established circles is what leads to the upheaval. Don't do that - players are overly prone to the lure of abandoning adventure for simulated entrepreneurship without additional coaxing. If you must, the various powers would yet attend to maintaining and patrolling their overland infrastructure all the same, to support bulky material transport, discourage mundane invasion, and cultivate an experienced security arm.
All the nasties prowling the trade routes shouldn't be given the opportunity to range into your settlements and devour defenders without practice handling them.
Your villages will have nursery rhymes and the like for teaching which neighboring monstrosities to meet never with eye or ear or lung or always with fire or so on, but field work is still needed.
You make a lot of great points
You could use some graphics, like scrolling over the stuffies. I'm not asking for a silent film but things like a portal image or old toll booth even briefly appearing would help break up the background's stillness.
Great video!
Imagine devoting your life to wizardry, learning 5th order spells, then being a glorified taxi service
p2e adressed this really well. A permanent teleportation circle can only be cast by a 19th or 20th level wizard, and circles can be off by as much as 10 miles between their creation and destination point (they don't form a network, it's a one way portal)
Another thing teleportation extremely simplifies is warfare because not having to deal with supply lines is a general’s wet dream. Therefore it also makes world conquest actually possible maintaining it also.
Therefore instead of a league of cities teleportation could create a massive urban centered empire
You can send an army to any major city in minutes, but you still have travel time and supply considerations the moment you step outside that city. You could spend a year setting up a new forward base to support logistics in a new region, but that still takes a year to advance however far you're willing to stretch your supply lines in the meantime. And while an army is defending the new location and its supply line for that year, it's not available for rapid response anywhere else...
You could conquer the trade federation, but the rest of the world would still pose the usual logistical hurdles.
Mother of Learning is a time loop Victorian fantasy series that relies heavily on 2 forms of teleportation for its invasion and trade
Generally speaking, normal NPCs don't want to mess with anybody who can cast Dimension Door, even if it means losing some money.
Among other things, those individuals are few and far between. The only reason it seems more common is because the game follows the PCs, who usually can get quite powerful.
NPCs of 9th level of any adventuring class, let alone arcane casters, so the likelihood of it becoming a Thing outside a few major trading cities/towns with good mundane transportation networks that goods can flow into and from the Teleportation Circles.
That said, trade warfare (including those without Teleport Circles and competing Teleport Circle networks) would probably take the form of killing off those high level NPC arcane casters that are used to enable the use of Teleportation Circles. Not to mention defacing or destroying the Teleport Circles themselves. Or creating an identical Teleport Circle with the same sigils to 'steal' some of the incoming teleports, if the DM permits that.
I love these deep implication of fantasy issues videos. :)
How I do teleportation circles in the system I'm making is they have a much smaller range but there's devices that expand the range that needs to be guarded making for roads needing to still be maintained. Also teleportation circles can be locked making it so that to properly use a teleportation circle you must use an associated telepathy network. It also makes so a military tactic to use is to infiltrate and take out the range expanding devices to cut off parts of thd nation from the teleportation and telepathy networks
Haven't even watched the video yet, but the title "The Politics of Teleportation" speaks to me on a personal level. This is gonna be good.
I'd love to see your take on mirage arcane (i.e. the spell that lets you build city blocks, giant skyscrapers, or mile high adamantine walls in 10min). Especially when combined with a illusion wizard that can modify the spell at any moment as an action.
This is actually done in the Spellmonger series of books - but from the PoV of the mages. It's been causing growing political tensions for many books now, and we're expecting it to come to a head in a few books hence.
Sure commerce is nice, but without an off-switch a teleportation circle also presents a security risk. A city may need to keep it's sigil sequence a tightly guarded secret, lest an army suddenly charge out of a portal behind the bulk of your defenses. Perhaps a kingdom might construct a fort outside the city walls; teleporting goods and travelers a day's journey away is still significantly more efficient than walking the whole distance while maintaining a secure perimeter.
At the end of the video I do discuss an off switch that theoretically works for 24 hours, and some anti-invasion strategy too! Definitely a worthy consideration.
putting it outside the city means it can be easily captured
Amazing video as usual, a real brain teaser! Gonna be thinking about this for a while. Have a great day, take care of yourself and keep up the good work!
This also makes tax collection much simpler! just send a traveling Collector with some guards. have the mage open up a portal once they reach the village for collection. and send the goods back to the capital. a single spellcaster, a few guards. and a bunch of pack animals could travel cross country to gather all the taxes easily. No risk of transport raids.
you could even maybe use a few unseen servants to carry stuff into the portal. If that dont invalidates their restrictions.
I don't know if it traveled from 3rd to 3.5, but teleport portals were a thing. I remember one 3rd party campaign book that had a huge multi lane highway that traversed many different planets through gigantic teleportation portals. I thought it was pretty neat.
i'd make them still have to "redraw" the circle, but the big trade cities have fancy setups where the pattern is carved into the floor at an angle and you just pour you pre-made official 1 use "portal ink" jar into a well on one side and it flows out and fills in the grooves. Also these jars are probably massively overpriced/taxed, and the apprentices that churn them out are paid horribly and most of them end up turned into slimes or otherwise killed by magical material accidents.
You have the most amazing and fun content. Another great and inspiring vid!
Too sick to go into detail, but IMO the proliferation of teleporting bulk goods and people would lead to "inwards castles" in a medieval setting.
Also, fun fact, D&D apparently is not medieval, but reinnessance, at least according to actual representation (the whole rapier duelist/ swashbuckler thing for example puts it at least 17th century). Not that it changes much how teleportation would affect society, just another of my nitpicks.
It's availability is something I dislike about DnD magic. When I DM, I do what I can to make magic like a teleportation spell something that only the most brilliant of wizards can comprehend and do. Even then, a teleportion circle brings out more wonder to my players when it's, for example, some mystical grove or shrine built by an ancient power or something. I need it to be mysterious and generally not known about...I've seen so many new players eat that up because of the sense of wonder. Perhaps a few moderately skilled casters know of it, but don't know how to do it. Obviously, players should have room to learn what they desire once they get powerful enough imo, so they would get the chance to become that genius caster who can use the spell.
I was already coming up with some fun stuff for my Bard City for a year ... now I have some mischief to manage. 😁
You Just enhanced the 'western marches' concept significantly. Now instead of the usual one direction is back to civilization ALL directions of a isolated keep with a circle or unexplored wilderness.
Really enjoy your videos. They make me think about my world setting a lot. In my setting all the major cities have a teleportation circle, but all are at least a day of travel outside the city, surrounded by a fort (keeping unwanted folks out and unwlcomed visitors in). I will definitely be stealing the idea of Private Sanctum though! Group of trained mages that keep that spell on retainer and prep to cast it whenever the circle is activated.
Teleportation circle in 5e by default is a 5th level spell, so not that common to begin with (it might even be unheard of in some kingdoms), and the caster must be *at least* 9th level, so already a highly trained specialist and will command an exorbitant fee (I know I would), especially if he is to make the teleportation circle permanent, if there are even that many resources to spend in the supply chain. Plus, transport ships can pull double duty as naval vessels or supply vessels at the very least, so well worth the investment by security standards. And that’s not even considering the corruption and mismanagement that usually goes into logistical systems. Plus, the ship builder’s guild, the teamster’s guild, the wagon builder’s guild, the horse-breeder’s guild and the tax-collecting baronies who control the toll roads (who in turn pay a portion of those *taxes to the king)* will have something to say about it if some upstart mage starts undercutting all that revenue. It’s not as easy as you think, even though it may be more probable than in 3.5 due to the retcon of the rules on teleportation circle which was level 9 and *SO* much better than the 5e version.
So many people have put so much thought into this but the one thing that everyone assumes is that teleportation would be used equitably and efficiently. That’s a big assumption, imo! In our world, many amazing new technologies have been underused because established industries bury them. Other times, revolutionary new tech is monopolized and commodified so that only certain groups of people can afford to use them. The point is that it’s not just good enough to think through the possible effects of a set of spells like this, but to think about who would control its usage and why
This is just what I needed for my worldbuilding right now! Thanks a lot!
Another reason the dresden files is an underrated unsung hero of fantasy. Its teleportation system involving the Way and the Nevermever makes the act of teleportation both challenging and involving.
These things are not even difficult to come across!
Kingmaker games will have rules on how to build kingdoms within your fantasy universe. One of the things easily constructed, usually under magical buildings, is a Teleportation Gateway. It is the backbone of any logistic network you will create, because the time taken to "go on foot" will make a Kingmaker game a bit of a nightmare. Yet that shows us that this device, this world changing piece of magical technology, is... common place.
Any established nation will have a few of these, all their major cities should be considered one trade/culture hub!
I like the idea of teleportation being a “shady” business because of all of the security risks involved with it. Few large cities would want a circle inside its walls because of the amount of extra security they would have to employ. But, because of its convenience maybe the thieves guild have a bunch of wizards on payroll to have these networks illegally, changing where they are at all times not to get tracked by various authorities. Even bigger cities take advantage of this, but not publicly or openly. A lot of potential for scheming and interesting plot/history/lore! Some big cities that were built on this “tech” being infiltrated by older cities seeing them as competition. “DDOS” attacks preformed by outlaws through open gates, overwhelming security. A lot of possibilities!
Really cool video :)
Something else to consider I think is the fact that people could dispel a permanent circle. it doesn’t have specifics for this but if it’s implied that dispelling makes it so it reverts the spell only to the point where you must recast once for it to become permanent again then armies or some other plan to keep the portal not accessible for 24 hours would mean another years worth of casting would be required for the city. Furthermore the rules specifies that you can only teleport to a permanent circle so that city regardless of their resources by the rules the city is disabled. If we did ignore this last rule however, I think it would create a interesting problem for the city where in order to gain funds it must keep the portal open, so to fix this that would have to implement a tax. While the cost of the spell is technically 50gp it could be assumed that making the chalk and ink requires a certain level of skill and time. For a adventurer this would be no problem since they have the time to learn but in a city, the king isn’t going to crush gems himself. This implies that the cost should be more then 50gp thus we could assume that a tax for each trade might be somewhere in the realm of 5-10gp depending on how many trades are being made in a single day.
1) Training a specialist capable only of creating portals should be much easier and cheaper than training a full-fledged magician capable of much more than creating portals.
2) If the portal is considered citywide property in a world based on feudalism, the city will collect a tax on maintaining the portal from its residents and there will be guilds that will be engaged in the production of appropriate magical reagents and the creation and maintenance of an urban network of portals (hardly a medieval city will have only one portal, rather a central one in the city and portals in the adjacent settlements producing goods necessary for the city, such as food, wood, mining iron, etc., villages producing raw materials for the creation of portals will be especially important).
An interesting concept to debate over for how it affects the world this type of magic is available in.
In the setting I'm making, which is meant for a custom TTRPG system I'm working on, magic comes from 1 way portals called Rifts. Things can come into the world from Rifts, but so far no one has figured how to open the door the other way. All magic in this world comes from the energies that slowly seep into the world form these Rifts, so there is an incentive for mot to want to keep them around. As for the Teleportation conundrum, my current idea is that because Rifts are already teleportation doorways to another world (or worlds, the world's inhabitants are unsure), and they still don't know how the Rifts actually work or are formed, Teleportation magic is extremely dangerous, both for the one that uses the magic, and those around them on both ends.
I love how you actually consider building a world around the reality of teleportation! I considered pretty much the exact same implications of the spell, but ultimately decoded I wanted a world with more reconisable trade dynamics.
Therefore rather than homebrew the spell to be more powerful as you did, I curtailed teleport (and similar) spells to 15 miles distances. Coupled with maybe only 1 in 10,000 humans in my setting being able to cast 4th or 5th level spells, and 1 in 100,000 able to cast 6 or 7th level spells, it seems to take the drastic economic implications out the spell while still allowing effective tactical use of them.
It has the added benefit of preventing the players from travelling at will across the world, too, which I hoestly think almost all DMs would prefer... teleport is the bane of rich, location-specific adventure design.
These are converstions I wish more creatives had, that REALLY dig into how fantasy, horror and science fiction would blend into what we observe in nature, history, and science. That's what's gotten me into writing, go dig in those in between places where science is mysterious and magical, fantasy has form and mechanism and horror seems to be poised to consume all at once.
Why aren't people using Planeshift to harvest resources from the elemental planes? An entire parallel dimension comprised of infinite earth would mean you could procure samples of gold, diamonds, even adamantine at dirt cheap prices, then bring them back to the material plane and sell them at a huge mark up!
I enjoy all of The Grungeon Master videos 😊