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

[Horwath]

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).

this.

or the components must be put there by the caster.
so you needed to be there and put the focus there and hope that no one moved it to a bottom of the ocean before you cast the spell.

but this spell is just needless variation of teleportation circle.

as a get back home spell(if needed) I would make it like this.

4th or 5th level conjuration:
Mass recall.
1 Action cast.
you make a magical beacon at the location where you stand.
Beacon lasts for 24hrs(or more depending on spell level)
Beacon must be within certain distance, depending on spell level

anytime within 24hrs you can use your Action/Bonus action/Reaction(depending on spell level) to teleport yourself and anyone you pick that is willing within 60ft

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

My suggestions:

• 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).

Being aware and giving them a saving throw would be interesting instead of an auto-negation. To make it even better, they know a portal is opening and get a save once the casting starts...that way, if they fail the save, they have an hour to prepare for whoever is coming through.

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?

Yeah, and Word of Recall only lets you bring your carrying capacity.

There’s already an 8th level spell that allows you to move treasure:

Demiplane is 8th. It lets you fill a room up with treasure and then open that room in any other location and unload it. So, instead of cultists hauling treasure, it's one wizard travelling from one location to another (presumably using teleport)

 

[J-H]

How about a limit that you have to have been to the destination spot within the last week? That's a hard cap on the viability of long-distance transport. You can bypass it by Teleporting somewhere and then Portaling back, but at that point you're expending some higher level resources to make the it work, so it doesn't concern me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

How common are 11th level + spellcasters in your setting?

 

[aco175]

Portal Lock: 2nd level spell that prevents portal from working for 24 hours.
Destroy Portal; 3rd level spell similar to Dispel Magic but works on permanent portals as well.
Alter Portal: 4th level spell that redirects a portal end point.
Acid Portal: 6th level spell that strikes (12d6) acid upon anyone passing through portal.

The messer becomes the messee.

 

[evilbob]

How about a limit that you have to have been to the destination spot within the last week? That's a hard cap on the viability of long-distance transport. You can bypass it by Teleporting somewhere and then Portaling back, but at that point you're expending some higher level resources to make the it work, so it doesn't concern me.

This seems like a good idea, but all you'd have to do is use the spell and then you've reset the timer again. It just becomes a maintenance thing; it doesn't really change anything.

 

[Stalker0]

I like the idea of a "key" to use it.

Perhaps you have to craft a key, and "attune" it to a spot for like an hour. As long as the key is there, you can use the spell to teleport there (and remove the upcast so its not permanent). If the key is moved the spell doesn't work.

Now its a flexible word of recall, but it requires some prep. and it removes a lot of the abuses like just portaling into a king's castle and stealing the treasury or killing the king.... to do that you need to spend an hour in the place casting some magic spell. So if you can pull that off....hey more power to you. Good for a fun plot, but not so good that it explains why everyone doesn't use the tactic.

 

[the Jester]

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

IME Kobold Press has a lot of great ideas, but I often find their idea of "balanced" to be pretty far removed from mine.

 

[evilbob]

Perhaps you have to craft a key, and "attune" it to a spot for like an hour. As long as the key is there, you can use the spell to teleport there (and remove the upcast so its not permanent). If the key is moved the spell doesn't work.

This actually makes the spell even better in some ways because if you can get the rogue to sneak into a spot and hide a (permanently invisible?) key there, you can teleport in: vs. having to have the cleric stomp around to that place in person. But at least it sets a physical object dependency vs. just having to have been to a place any time in your life, and in theory someone could take the key and throw it into the ocean or some place that makes casting the spell very bad, lol.

Thank you all for these thoughts though, I love all these ideas!

 

[TheSword]

I would make it adventure specific. That particular dungeon has ancient statues that channel conjugation magic and make that kind of spell possible.

There’s nothing wrong with a home portal spell that returns you to the same point in the dungeon - like Diablo. Just make sure it only works for that and not other things.