ZEITGEIST Traffic through Teleportation Circles ADV 6

[ediz]

Hi,

My party was successful spying on Lya Jierre at the Summer Court and one of them is planning on performing a stakeout at Citado Cavallo's teleportation circle to find the Jacale.

I was wondering how much traffic comes in and out of the circle daily and basically how difficult will it be for the character to suss out which one is Jacale and whatnot.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

There should not be a lot of traffic. The mechanics of this may vary for 4th edition but I know nothing of its rules.
In Pathfinder they are not teleportation circles (9th level spell so only 1 or 2 eladrin in the world can cast that) but teleportation beacons which increase the accuracy of long range teleport and also make it harder to arrive elsewhere in the city. This means that everyone who teleports needs the help of a 9th level or better wizard or 10th level or better sorceror (or one of the settings ill defined specialist magi like Jacale who can only do none combat stuff) there are only a limited supply of these casters and they can only teleport a few people and has a theoretical cost of at least 450gp per spell. This means it will be the rich and couriers carrying important information who will travel by teleport. Many of these will be repeat travellers and so the pc's can eliminate them as suspects and for almost all of them the origin of the teleport will be known.

The result of this is that there will be a fairly small number of people arriving , in small groups from known destinations so the number of suspects will be very small, meaning the pc's should not find it difficult to work out who the suspect is. I certianly let them work out who the suspect was and follow them fairly easily, if they can't then it makes the advance warning pretty useless and this plot even harder to defeat.

 

[ediz]

Cool, so I will make it a DC 10. I mean at 9th level that should be a layup. Thanks a lot.

 

[Shimrath]

We dealt with this recently in my own campaign. The Constables were returning to Citado Cavallo from the surrounding hills (after looking into a little goblin problem). One of my players said, "I'd like to ask around the city to see if anything 'out-of'the-ordinary' has taken place. That led to a conversation about the size of the city and where best to inquire, which led them to the city's teleportation circle.

The adventure says: "at the naval yard, at the teleportation beacon - people definitely remember the purple-skinned woman," so when they asked the portal guards if they'd seen anything extraordinary, the answer was yes. That led to the Constables tracking down Jacale and detaining her (after a tense encounter, which had to be home-brewed as no stats are presented for Jacale).

 

[ediz]

I imagine your players must have been hauling it. The deed should be done by the afternoon of day 3 and only preventable by the morning of day 3. But theoretically you could catch her when they get back. My player found her, posed as a guide to bring her to Thrag's confused the Commodore with the Admiral and then got lost. So she rode off. He found Thrag's, disguised himself as her to say someone is impersonating her but he is already enchanted so that did not work and then confronted her in her room but instead of taking any physical action is being brought before Thrag with Jacale. I tried to hint he should take some action but nope. We will see what he does tomorrow.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

My players have a penchant for the spectacular, they brought the enforcer Gnoll from the capital along and arranged to catch Jacale in the act of enchanting the captain, made a big fuss about it and completely blew the Ob's plans. They could not link it to Lya as they only had their spy goblins word for it, as Jacale had been hired by an Ob officer unconnected to Lya precisly so if she was caught Lya was isolated from any fall out