Teleport Circle - Destroyer of Worlds

[Silverglass]

3. Other methods are cheaper.
This argument misses the fact that the circle has no running costs. No matter how much it costs to build, eventually a profit will be made. It will be worth it in the long run.

While the circle has no running costs per se there are associated costs, the circle will almost certainly be in a purpose designed building which needs upkeep, and those mules need handlers (or how do you persuade them to walk into a circle, you can't rope them together so 1 handler per mule, cutting down your transport rate), so you must quarter and feed the mules and feed and pay the handlers. Then you will need to tranship the goods to their final destination because as illustrated below the volume you can put through is above the volume you can sell at the destination if its anything produced from a single location like a mine.

That's 586.5 TONS of salt. I honestly can't say how much salt a large city might use in a given period of time, but I'd guess that one could use this much in a fairly short time. I'd say it would have to be a large city since this is almost 6 million gp we're talking about here.

<snip>.

In addition to the issues that MaxKaladin has raised your figures just illustrate that fallacy that permanent teleport circles make any sense, if the average person consumed 10kg of salt a year (at 27g per day that is over double the healthy limit but without canning and refrigerators much more food would be salted or smoked) then your single shipment is a 7 month personal supply for a metropolis of 100,000 people (and a lot of commercial uses are too technologically advanced to exist). So that is probably a maximum of 3 shipments a year for that metropolis, and for large or small towns there would be absolutely no point in constructing a circle. So the bandwidth far exceeds demand.

Now you could of course ship all your salt to the metropolis and then distribute it from that central point, but to do this you must therefore put it into caravans and move it overland, and any destination closer to the saltmine than the city will cost you more to deliver to than a direct shipment. The same goes for all high value commodites. The low value commodities, which make up 90% of the volume of goods shipped (e.g. grain) isn't produced in a single location and needs transporting by wagon as mules cost too much to feed and maintain.

So a merchant shipping grain would need to take the grain off wagons at a central collecting point, put it on mules or porters to move through the circle and then load it onto wagons for onward shipment. Once he's paid for all of this how much profit is he really making. And successful (and rich) merchants don't rely on a single commodity from a single site. They diversify and ship many types of goods all over a region, so one circle will not be all that useful considering the investment.

Simple economics mean that permanent circles will not replace ships and caravans. They will always exist to ship high value goods over vast distances (i.e. mithril to an city far over the sea) but other than that they would remain the province of rulers and powerful organisations who need to move people and information quickly over huge distances between safe and guarded locales.

So yes you can expect there to be circles in fortresses that link them together for the fast movement of tropps, or between embassies for diplomatic means. But of course these then become prime targets for enemy action whenever hostilities commence.

As to their being hundreds of circles existing from historical times that is also a fallacy because although the circle may be permanent it will not work if obstructed. So as abandoned towers collapse and basements containing secret circles fill in those circles become inactive. Also if the surface is detroyed through time or damage they circle will also fail.

In essence circles will exist but they will only reduce the amount of mundane transport by a tiny amount as they will be used for high risk and high value goods which only make up a tiny fraction of what is moved around by merchants.

And there is always the issue of security as anything can come through the circle so as mentioned above laws will probably be enacted making it illegal to create circles that teleport from areas that are not completely safe.

 

[Altalazar]

Some one seems to have cast Animate Dead on a slew of ancient threads from *last year* *stares at Altalazar*

Hey, I'm no necromancer. Just picking up where I left off...


And as for all the year-supply-of-salt posts - I think that was just meant as an example. Really, you could ship through an equivalent amount of a mix of all the commodities in the city.

Of course, you'd have to get all those commodities from all those different merchants all assembled together on the mule train, but hey, that is just another new business opportunity for a mule-entrepreneur!

 

[Vaxalon]

A few points:

1) So there are several hundred of these portals in the world. And? They're certainly all going to be forgotten, or else they'll be tightly controlled by armies or Very Powerful Beings.
2) If a merchant creates one in Paris, linking to England, and King Louis finds out, there's going to be a merchant's liver that sees the sun this afternoon. Most leaders won't be happy about merchants creating these huge vulnerabilities into kingdoms of their enemies (i.e., any foreign nation).
3) The mage who helped the merchant will become persona non grata, if possible, and better have some defenses against assassins.
4) When the king has tortured the merchant and driven off the mage, he'll take one of two actions: either he'll launch an invasion through the portal, or he'll have a court wizard dispel it.
5) Your very rare, capitalistic king will trust his neighbors enough to establish commerce through the portal. Anyone creating a competing portal will, of course, be tortured to death -- competition isn't a virtue when you're competing against the king. And you better believe the taxes on use of the portal will be hefty.
6) A wizard who decides to guard one of these portals won't be doing much else with her time -- definitely won't be gallivanting about earning more experience. The portal is fantastically powerful, very vulnerable, and immobile.

I think it's a great idea to have a few of these portals in the world. I think a world with a lot of them is pretty dang implausible, unless you make them a lot easier to create.

Daniel

All very good points. DM's should consider this kind of thing carefully.

yes, there will be portals. There may be a lot of them.

But chances are good that 1> Few of them go both ways and 2> the "in" end will usually be someplace inaccessible.

Permanent Teleport circles make for a nifty macguffin, by the way.

"The Evil Necromancer's Fortress is too heavily guarded to assault directly, but we just learned that there's a teleport circle in the ruins of Alkezor that leads directly to his inner sanctum! If we can slip in and kill the necromancer, his undead will become uncontrolled, and turn on his living soldiers! In the chaos, assaulting his fortress will be easy.

 

[Plane Sailing]

The objections to the use of the circle seem to fall into four categories:

You forgot

5. A wizard would have to expend over 25% of his available xp to create every circle. Something which could be contra-survival, especially if he was retired and has to go adventuring again to get more xp for the next one. He can't get this exp by fireballing kobolds after all, it is only for facing significant threats.

Cheers

 

[Altalazar]

You forgot

5. A wizard would have to expend over 25% of his available xp to create every circle. Something which could be contra-survival, especially if he was retired and has to go adventuring again to get more xp for the next one. He can't get this exp by fireballing kobolds after all, it is only for facing significant threats.

Cheers

Right - and that wizard will be downright pissed off if he has his sacrifice destroyed. There's an interesting, suicidal adventure to send PCs on - to destroy a teleporter circle. Then they deal with the revenge of the Wizard, the Town, the King, the Merchants... perhaps forced to go on a quest to make amends (or perhaps even to make a new one to replace it).

I suppose if I had made one I'd include on pikes surrounding the portal the heads of everyone who even attempted to destroy or hire someone to destroy the teleportation circle. Perhaps have a few pet gerbils in cages as well - polymophed would-be destroyers. Maybe a few statutes of those the wizard instead turned to stone, etc.

 

[Xeriar]

I'm not so sure that mages would scoff at giving up 4,500 exp.

If I could make a gateway that would take me from the White House to Buckingham Palace would I give up $1,000 and my knowlege of Visual Basic? Oh, heck yes!

Well, it's more like $20,000 and everything you know about computers, really

Seriously though, I now have a 17th leve wizard and unless you gave him something that made the XP cost irrelevant (scroll of wish, etc.) - he wouldn't do it. There are more important things for him to spend his time on, and already a laundry list of stuff to make. TP Circle goes to the bottom of the list (What use would he, or his allies, have for it? He has Teleport Without Error...)

 

[Endur]

One possibility would be just to errata the "permanency" line from the Teleport Circle spell. So you can create one, but its not permanent.

The Portals from the FRCS are much more reasonably priced (as well as immune to being dispelled).

One hundred days from your 17th level caster who knows Teleport Circle/Gate and has a Create Portal feat, 50000 gp, and 4000 exp. And that's one way. Another 50% to be two ways.

That one hundred days of time really makes a difference for your high level spellcaster.

Well, it's more like $20,000 and everything you know about computers, really

Seriously though, I now have a 17th leve wizard and unless you gave him something that made the XP cost irrelevant (scroll of wish, etc.) - he wouldn't do it. There are more important things for him to spend his time on, and already a laundry list of stuff to make. TP Circle goes to the bottom of the list (What use would he, or his allies, have for it? He has Teleport Without Error...)

 

[Gez]

Another difference of portals is that they have a limit on the number of times per day they can be used.

However, Portals 3.5 don't require a separate feat -- they'll be created with the Craft Wondrous Item feat.

 

[Xeriar]

One possibility would be just to errata the "permanency" line from the Teleport Circle spell. So you can create one, but its not permanent.

The Portals from the FRCS are much more reasonably priced (as well as immune to being dispelled).

One hundred days from your 17th level caster who knows Teleport Circle/Gate and has a Create Portal feat, 50000 gp, and 4000 exp. And that's one way. Another 50% to be two ways.

That one hundred days of time really makes a difference for your high level spellcaster.

In the past 9 days in said campaign his entire home country got invaded. (Invaded with the aid of teleportation-blocking rods spanning millions of square miles and gates like these that pass through the shadow. Further reason to take dim views of gates for mercantile purposes )

 

[Altalazar]

While it is certainly an interesting idea that such portals be pre-empted and used for an invasion, there really is no game mechanic for doing so, aside from the vanilla tactic of capturing one of the ends.

In my campaign, there was an invasion, but it was not through the teleporter gates - it was from another plane, and it was only indirectly caused by the gates - the really high use of magic attracted these other-planar creatures, but they go there through other means.