Waypoint Style Teleportation (3.5e Variant Rule)

Author: Tarkisflux (talk) Co-Authors: Wildmage Date Created: 08-01-2012 Status: Complete Editing: Clarity edits only please

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Introduction

Teleportation is a wondrous ability that allows instantaneous and relatively safe transit between two known locations. Unfortunately, it's form in Dungeons and Dragons supports narrative elements that we don't much care for. Teleport makes for an amazing last moment escape spell and can rob you of a complete victory over your foes, or them a complete victory over you, with little cost or drama. In combination with scrying, it can become an ambush spell. The ability to travel to any place you've seen means that you can scry a location or enemy, prepare for them, teleport there and deal with them while they're surprised, and then teleport back. And while there are certainly countermeasures for this sort of tactic, they are often unreasonable to apply for every enemy the characters may have or for all of the characters and their friends to have these defenses against their enemies. Aside from that, the ability to find a location remotely and travel there instantly eliminates exploration aspects from stories. In a number of stories and games the journey to a place is half of the entertainment, and it is lost if you can just cast around it.

In many games these issues don't arise, and that's fine. But we feel that there's room for improvement with teleportation style effects, improvements that allow us to retain the narrative elements we like while removing some of the potentially problematic elements. These rules are intended to be those improvements.

A large portion of the issues with teleport arise not from the transit itself, but from the ability to select your destination from literally anywhere. So the core changes here will be to remove the ability of teleportion to travel to any location, and instead limit the destinations. We do this with a spell replacement, eliminating the Teleport line of spells in favor of the new Warp line of spells. These spell effects can only take you to a location prepared in advance with an Anchor Point, a magical sigil described shortly. They also require additional time to use and can be followed relatively easily, so they are much more difficult to use for ambushes or last minute escapes. To support these changes, we're going to reorganize some teleportation effects and define a new keyword for them to help streamline teleportation related effects. Lastly, we will also provide conversion information for existing characters and monsters.

General Rules

[Teleportation] Descriptor

Any spell that causes you to instantly travel across some distance within a world or plane is a [Teleportation] spell. These spells generally do not achieve this by using planar shortcuts, and are unaffected by having any particular plane cut off from a space. A [Teleportation] effect can only transport a target to a specific location within long range or a location that has been "anchored" by an anchor point.

Anchor Points

Anchor points are magical markings at a fixed location that allow for direct and error free travel to their location. They are unique symbols that are determined by their location, their creator, and the ambient magical conditions at the time of their creation. They are visible to anyone with the ability to detect magic. Most anchor points are copied into a notebook to be referenced during casting.

Finding new anchor points

Because they can be used as a relatively cost effective travel mechanism, and also serve to funnel new arrivals into a specific area, many cities and towns have public and well known anchor points. These are generally printed or posted in a public place, some may even be drawn on the area that they anchor. Vendors even sell maps with corresponding anchor points depicted near the cities they serve.

Private anchor points also exist of course, but knowledge of them is harder to come by. These sigils can easily be given to trusted companions or family members as a way to come home more quickly. Pieces from personal libraries may contain recorded anchor symbols that were relevant to the owner. And of course detect magic will also reveal an anchor point in an area (yes, even while scrying), so any spellcaster with access to an area can just look around to find any existing anchor points.

Creating an anchor point

Creating anchor points is a simple ritual; knowledge of a [Teleportation] spell is not required to create these points, but knowledge of the spell automatically confers knowledge of the ritual. The process requires a gemstone of semiprecious or greater value to serve as a focus that is not expended. Making an anchor point requires four successful DC 20 knowledge (arcana) or knowledge (religion) checks to set the point. The first check is made 15 minutes after beginning the ritual, with another check every 15 minutes until you have reached four successes. Anchor sigils are unique, as much a product of location as creator, and some special or magically unique areas may require more difficult checks, more successful checks, allow fewer failures, or be entirely unanchorable (many areas deep underground are in this last category).

Anchor points may also be strengthened by making an additional four successful checks, the DC for these checks is equal to the previous create / strengthen DC +2. Anchor sigils can be strengthened in this fashion up to 11 additional times. The strength of an anchor sigil is obvious to anyone viewing it with detect magic. Strengthening is generally performed on public anchors to make them resistant to pranksters removing them, since a sigil strengthened 11 times requires at least two hours to remove. It is less common on private sigils.

If removed, an anchor sigil can be remade on the same location using the standard creation above; remade sigils are similar but not identical to the old sigil and thus cannot be reached without knowing the updated sigil. Someone attempting to recreate the old sigil can do so, but must have a copy of it available for reference, and the initial creation DC increases by 5. This increased DC does not apply to later strengthening attempts.

==Destroying anchor points

Once made, anchor points are not especially difficult to remove. Permanently destroying an anchor point requires one or more knowledge (arcana) checks. The DC for these checks begins at 15, plus 2 for each level of strengthening that the anchor sigil has received. Each check to weaken an anchor point requires 10 minutes and a gemstone of semiprecious or greater value to serve as a focus that is not destroyed in the attempt. If you succeed one layer of strengthening is removed and the DC is reduced by 2 points. When the DC has been reduced to 15, a successful check destroys the anchor point. You receive a +3 bonus to these checks if you created the anchor point.

New Spells

Replace the following spells with their new counterparts:

Old Spell	Old Spell Level	New Spell	New Spell Level
SRD:Teleport	Sor/Wiz 5, Travel 5	Warp	Sor/Wiz 4, Travel 5
Greater Teleport	Sor/Wiz 7, Travel 7	Greater Warp	Sor/Wiz 6, Travel 7
Teleport Object	Sor/Wiz 7	Greater Warp	Sor/Wiz 6
Teleportation Circle	Sor/Wiz 9, Rune 9	Warp Circle	Sor/Wiz, Rune 9

In many cases, the new spell level will be lower than the old spell level. This is intentional, as the spells include more drawbacks than they previously did.

A fourth level teleport spell?

Yes, a fourth level teleport spell. One that requires one round to cast, has a 4+ round delay even after casting is complete, and only takes you to specific locations. It's a teleport spell that you can't use to take you exactly where you need to go, not without DM fiat or significant planning, so you generally can't skip game sections. It's a teleport spell that you can't use to immediately skip out of a fight when things turn bad, and it's possible people might get stuck behind. And on top of all that, it's a teleport spell that offers a substantial chance to break or cancel. It's less a combat utility spell, and more a "hey, let's go to that town over there" plot utility spell, and placing it a level after you get tactical flight is completely reasonable. This spell is potentially balanced to an even lower level actually, but placing it below level 4 cuts off the "now fight your way out" stories earlier than a lot of people seem to want. If you're comfortable with those stories being removed in favor of delaying standoffs, or simple scene shifts via pursue warp, you could even set this spell at level 1 if you wanted. You may want to adjust the target scaling in that case, however.

Existing Spell Updates

Rewriting every [Teleportation] spell, or spell that interacts with a [Teleportation] spell, to fit with these rules changes would be quite difficult and generally unnecessary. Instead we list the spells and their changes here.

Other Conversions

Finally, any creature or item that had the ability to use any of the above as Sp, Ex, Ps or Su loses them but instead gains:

(YY) Dimension Door/X day

(YY) Same spell as they had before just the fixed version behind/X day

Were (YY) is the same type of special ability they had before and X is equal to the number of times they could use the (YY) before the fix.

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