D&D 5E Never considered banning a spell before: Portho's Portal from BoET

[evilbob]

I've never worried about banning spells or splat books before: but this is the first spell that's made me question whether or not it should exist, especially in the campaign we're currently in. (Portho's Portal is from "Book of Ebon Tide.")

It is a 4th(!) level spell that creates a teleportation portal that stays open for at least 24 hrs - up-casting to 6th level makes it permanent. It requires an hour to cast and 100g's worth of components (so it's not an "escape" spell), but the only other stipulation is that it must be to somewhere that the caster has "stood" before (in the mortal plain or the feywild). In other words, it's an extremely cheap, extremely low-level form of teleportation that only costs time and requires you to have been to a place. (It also can't fail, although "deities" can keep it from working in their domain.)

I'm not worried about having a literal "escape rope" spell for dungeons - that stuff is usually hand-waved anyway. But this sort of spell fundamentally alters how a game world exists.

• An 11th level cleric, sorc, or wizard (or anyone with access to a 6th level spell) can open a permanent doorway between two locations. If that were the case: massive numbers of merchants would go out of business, because you could just walk through a portal to get that rare spice 2000 miles to the south at any time. Trade caravans, mercenaries - they would all lose money as rare trade would become extremely common and competition for prices would expand to include anyone on the material plane. But that's assuming the portals are free to use: alternately, there could be powerful cartels or mage guilds charging to use these portals, and killing any 7th+ level caster who could challenge their trade - which would be an entire campaign issue all in itself!
• Similarly, all resources could be exploited so much more easily thanks to easy travel. Rare game, magic item components, even deep dungeon gem mining: retrieving it would now by trivial once it's found.
• Say goodbye to dragon hordes or banks: as long as you could get to a location once, if treasure were unguarded for a few minutes, you could open a portal to/from your home and shovel everything through quickly. You might have to dispel your own spell so you couldn't be followed, but you would also be able to close it from the other side. Or let anyone else come through and kill the dragon or take over the bank. If an elf or other long-lived creature had ever stood in an ancient cave, they could periodically see if anything had decided to live there, and just rob it.
• No ruler would be safe, as any cleric/mage ambassador that visited their throne room could portal a small army in at any time. Assassinations would be extremely common; once breached, any location could be breached any number of times. Rulers would have to keep themselves moving.
• The problem only gets bigger the longer the spell exists: once more people have had access to go somewhere, more people can cast the spell to go there again. Over-tourism! (Hey kids, want to see Mount Doom this weekend? It's just 5g to use the portal and then we can make one ourselves!)
• Anti-portal tech could be palaces built on air or with anti-gravity spells so no one could stand there!
• I'm sure there are more.

All that to say: the entire world would be affected by teleportation circles with extremely light endpoint requirements that can also be cast by clerics, which is basically what this is. It fundamentally alters how technology works in that world - like teleportation circles and sending did before it - but at a much more accessible level.

On a more specific note, it also completely trivializes huge chunks of the "Horde of the Dragon Queen." In fact, that entire campaign is pointless, because all the cult needed was a 7th level caster to avoid the entire thing. It's campaign-altering. If the BBEG has been to your town before, guess what? He can show up any time. Technically there's no requirement for where the spell could be cast from, so in theory someone could open a portal from the Abyss and let Tiamat into the world that way (although it is limited by deities). Ditto literally the entire campaign for Wild Beyond the Witchlight, although again, you could pull the "god" card out and have the portal be blocked that way.

I know lots of people on this board ban stuff all the time, and that's totally fine. I'm looking for different advice: first, is this spell as bad as I'm worried, or am I overthinking it? Am I just being worried because I'm not thinking it through or being flexible enough? Second, what's a more natural response to this spell that could allow it in-game but not break campaign plotlines? (If it were a homebrew game I wouldn't care, but a published adventure before this spell is going to now have loopholes, IMO.)

ps. Speaking of BoET: the titular 7th level Ebon Tide spell is almost a copy/paste of 8th level Earthquake, but one level lower. I feel like there may be a few spells that are going to be tricky from that book.

 

[BookTenTiger]

What is BoET?

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

It feels a lot like Diablo. Go to a dungeon and, when you clear it, port home.

Is the spell supposed to replace Teleportation Circle? Easy Permanent teleportation always changes how the game works.


For the record, There's a couple spells that prevent this kind of travel: Forbiddance and Private Sanctum.

Forbiddance(6th) costs 30,000gp 1000gp to make it permanent (cast every day for a month) but it does a huge area. I think, 40k square feet.

Private Sanctum(4th): free to cast, lasts 24 hours and cast every day for a year makes it permanent. The area is 100 feet squared but larger if it's upcast.

 

[Mistwell]

What is BoET?

Was just going to ask that. This is not a commonly used acronym here. You'd think, with all the text in the OP, they'd be willing to spell out what the source is. Which appears to be a third party source as this spell does not show up in DNDBeyond for example.

Edit - Ah, found it. It stands for the Book of Ebon Tide, a third party book from Kobold Press.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Never go down the stairs without a few scrolls of Word of Recall.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Was just going to ask that. This is not a commonly used acronym here. You'd think, with all the text in the OP, they'd be willing to spell out what the source is. Which appears to be a third party source as this spell does not show up in DNDBeyond for example.

Edit - Ah, found it. It stands for the Book of Ebon Tide, a third party book from Kobold Press.

Yeah, splat books are not often balanced. In which case, I wouldn't feel guilty banning it.

 

[evilbob]

Edited OP to include book name.

 

[pukunui]

This is why I generally don't bother with third-party stuff.

 

[Stormonu]

Rather than ban it, just put some sensible limits on it.

It's the same level as Dimension Door, and has an exaggerated casting time to make it work like upcasting to Teleportation Circle or Word of Recall. It's obviously designed to be a "get back home with the loot" spell, and would use that to tweak it.

My suggestions:

• Decrease the open time. An hour is plenty, 10 minutes seems more sane. 1 minute wouldn't really be out of order nor Instantaneous. Upcasting might increase the duration.
• Limit the size of the portal; a medium-sized doorway and maybe larger if upcast.
• Require the key to be forged at the location where the portal opens to - this puts a big limit as the crafting rules are 50 gp/day, so you'd have to spend 2 days at the destination making the key.
• If the portal opens in an "owned" location, the owner is a) instantly aware of the intrusion, and b) can choose to refuse to allow it to work (preventing teleporting into the living dragon's den or king's court).

 

[evilbob]

• Decrease the open time. An hour is plenty, 10 minutes seems more sane. 1 minute wouldn't really be out of order nor Instantaneous. Upcasting might increase the duration.
• Limit the size of the portal; a medium-sized doorway and maybe larger if upcast.
• Require the key to be forged at the location where the portal opens to - this puts a big limit as the crafting rules are 50 gp/day, so you'd have to spend 2 days at the destination making the key.
• If the portal opens in an "owned" location, the owner is a) instantly aware of the intrusion, and b) can choose to refuse to allow it to work (preventing teleporting into the living dragon's den or king's court).

Thanks for the reply!

These are good thoughts. I had also thought about the "owned" location thing: that starts to get a little tricky because then you have to ask "who owns this location?" (who owns the streets of Waterdeep?) and it becomes a bit meta-gamey, plus you could always just go outside 10 feet and cast the spell for nearly the same effect while avoiding the restriction.

The more I think about it, I believe my biggest issue comes from the fact that this spell completely invalidates the entire Horde of the Dragon Queen adventure (the bad guys are routing tons of treasure all over the world to get it back to a single spot). Unfortunately, every tweak I can come up with fails to address this issue: there's no situation where this spell could be limited and still not give the bad guys a far easier option than what happens in the campaign. I believe the core problem is that it's just too low of a level: I feel like it should have been 7th or maybe 8th. 7th level wizards are easy to find in that campaign: 15th level? Not so much.

Word of Recall (mentioned above; 6th level) is a great example: this spell is functionally better in every way, except for casting time - and it's two levels lower?

I didn't realize this book (BoET) was Kobold Press and not WotC, so I think that's starting to become a justification in my mind to ban it, although I hate to do that. Maybe I can just say it's an 8th level spell instead (and Ebon Tide is also 8th level). From what I'm reading online of Kobold Press materials, a complaint that has come up at least a couple of times is that their spell levels can be too high or too low; I'm otherwise unfamiliar with this publishing house.