In a conversation over on a social media site that shall remain nameless, Hannah Rose suggested giving even fairly low-level PCs limited access to teleportation, just as a way to get them to the adventure site and back to town. I don’t want to assume that I know all of the points she’d make in support of this, and Hannah, if you read this, I’d love for you to give your perspective in the comments.

Travel Time

Teleportation circle and teleport (and, in earlier editions, teleport without error) exist chiefly to solve for inconvenient travel time, and to skip the many encounters between here and there. 3.x D&D’s scry-buff-teleport late-game takes this to excess, to such a degree that 4e and 5e did what they could to end that. Limiting available destinations is intrinsic to teleportation circle’s design in 5e, for example.

In low-level play, PCs have an even harder time ranging far from their home base, in games that expect them to return home between dungeon delves. Merric Blackman started this conversation by pointing out that his PCs saw the practicality in setting up a base camp outside the dungeon, rather than spending a week marching home and a week marching back out to the dungeon. Heaven help you if there’s more than one random encounter in that week of travel!

In principle, you can solve some of this with a Hommlet-style town built close by the dungeon entrance, but that only takes you so far. For a lot of story conceits, there can’t be a significant city or town that close to the dungeon. The whole justification for plumbing the dungeon’s depths is that dangerous things come out and threaten nearby settlements; a town or city right there would simply be destroyed.

Now, I might try for seven hours of travel rather seven days, because the 14-21 miles of travel is enough of a buffer to explain away anything you need to explain away. Take this as my general advice for West Marches games – put a lot of interesting things within a day’s travel or less of the home base.

Having said all of this, I think Merric’s point is valid, and Hannah suggests giving players access to limited teleportation to bypass that travel time. I’ve done exactly that in my Aurikesh campaign, and for all that it’s a significant consideration in TTRPG setting creation, it’s even more of one in LARP setting design.

The Homestone

In Aurikesh, there’s a megadungeon called the Abbey of the Immortal Saint. It’s optional content rather than the focus of the whole campaign, so the players have been there several times at this point. It’s also located hundreds of miles from the city that is the center of the action. The first time they went there, they hiked it on foot, sneaked past the local gendarmerie, and made their way to the first level of the dungeon. At the end of that level, they found a fey grove with a magic item called the Homestone.

The Homestone lets them teleport from anywhere to the fey grove on the first level of the Abbey – the fey grove is set as one end of its teleport pattern. The other end is wherever they departed from; if they don’t teleport directly back to wherever they came from, the Homestone’s pattern breaks, and its set destination is wherever they left from on the return journey. It’s complicated to explain but easy enough in real use.

I wanted to greatly lower the barrier to entry of visiting the Abbey, and secondarily I wanted to give the PCs a weirdly-shaped tool. Kainenchen’s fighter, Lanth, is the primary bearer of the Homestone, though she handed it off the one time the PCs went to the Abbey without her. Lanth has also used it to get out of an extremely dangerous situation, heal up with a Second Wind and a healing potion, and teleport right back into the action. The PCs have often discussed plans that would “break” the teleportation connection to the fey grove, but the difficulty of “fixing” it again has always stopped them.

Fast forward 90 sessions. I’ve mentioned interesting adventure locations that are a week or two of travel away from the PCs’ home base. They’re very interested in exploring some of those options. I placed them as far from the city as I did because that’s what felt right to me at the time, but it presents me with a problem. They have a goal they need to complete on Midsummer’s Day, and they don’t want to miss the date due to travel time.

The players’ solution to this – now that there are a several wizards of 6^th to 7^th level in the overall roster – was to work on making a variant Homestone, using necromancy. The idea is that it would let them travel to places suffused with death, such as graveyards and major battle sites. Sounds good to me, so I came up with an item that they’d need in order to make it. They’ve now been working on acquiring that for eight sessions. When completed, Gravestone will be a different kind of somewhat inconvenient teleportation.

Methods

How are your PCs using this teleportation that differs from a PC spellcaster using teleportation circle and teleport?

1. An NPC, such as their patron, casts the spell instead.
2. An item does it.
3. An immobile object does it.
4. A ritual, more complicated or costly than the spells, does it.
5. It’s a common part of the world – a magical subway or ley line network.

Limits

Limits, such as a very short list of possible destinations, go a long way with this kind of thing. First off, I don’t want to have so much teleportation available that gaining teleportation circle, teleport, or plane shift are no longer exciting. D&D already points to exactly this in the way teleportation circle is more limited in its uses than teleport, and in the use of portal keys to leave the Cage and go to all kinds of places.

There are a lot of obvious similarities between these solutions and fast-travel points in video games, such as the griffons in World of Warcraft. You’ve got to travel to the location once, click the thingy, and then you can get back there a lot faster than walking again in the future. Not to get off on too much of a tangent, but from a worldbuilding perspective I’ve always adored EverQuest’s separate druid and wizard teleport options. Like a lot of things in EQ, it’s incredibly inconvenient, but it feels more real as a living world.

Most forms of teleportation “shrink” your world. The problems that used to be far enough away that they were safely off-camera and not the PCs’ problem… suddenly aren’t. In my game, they know something ugly is going on in the politics of the neighboring grand duchy, but they can’t do a lot about it. Once they can do something about it, they’ll feel like they have to. The world feels smaller, its threats a little less meaningful, once overland travel is for lesser beings than your PCs.

Good Limits Make Good Neighbors

Some quick and dirty types of limits on teleportation functions:

1. NPC: you can only go where your mysterious and demanding patron wants.
2. NPC: wants cash on the nail. Each expedition is a hefty cash outlay or sacrificing a minor magic item (Vlad Taltos).
3. NPC: sometimes called away on business for extended periods of time (also Vlad Taltos).
4. Item: requires attunement by one or more participants. Sure, you can take a short rest once you arrive to change it out, but if you do that, you’re committing to a short rest before you evac.
5. Item: has a chance to break when it’s out of charges (or each time it’s used).
6. Item: not useful in personal-scale combat, and bulky enough that you can’t easily stow it (teleporting vehicles, such as hyperspace drives in Star Wars).
7. Immobile object: requires you to understand the correct combination of occult symbols (Stargate SG-1, Dust to Dust, Altera Awakens).
8. Immobile object: requires an idiosyncratic portal key. The portal and the key are often difficult to distinguish from random junk (Planescape).
9. Immobile object: surrounded by danger, but still saving a lot of time compared to walking (Forgotten Realms as Ed wrote it did a lot of this).
10. Immobile object: the door only opens when it opens, you have no control at all (King’s Gate).
11. Ritual: requires a negotiation with an unpleasant NPC each time (Calamity, I think?).
12. Ritual: imposes a cost such as expending lots of your spell slots or Hit Dice, or requires a rare and hard-to-acquire component.
13. Ritual: damages the fabric of reality in a small but measurable way (7^th Sea Porte magic).
14. Common network: suffers from magical traffic overloads or magical “weather” complications (“Sorry, ma’am, there’s a Class III nimbus in the ley lines right now, you’re goin’ nowhere.” That’s when John Candy shows up to help you get back home.). You might accrue unexpected consequences from a random roll here.
15. Common network: NPCs know how to trap, guard, or completely disable some destination points (wormhole tactics in the Vorkosigan Saga).
16. Common network: you have an unpredictable, dangerous encounter each time you go in (the Ways in Wheel of Time, the Gates in Eclipse). It used to work properly, but the whole network got corrupted.
17. Any: your destination targeting is approximate at best. Sure, you cut off 500 miles of travel, but you’re still at a semi-random location between two and twenty miles from your goal (plane shift rules).

Scale

How many creatures can you transport at a time? Per trip, per day, or whatever? For the great majority of games, you want to include limitations that make it difficult to impossible to teleport armies. Once it’s possible to teleport an army, very likely your whole game and setting change to be about that. Conflict doesn’t care about space in the same way and physical defenses are entirely irrelevant. I think it would tend to escalate the setting’s conflicts, as well, because all parties feel existentially threatened at nearly all times. If you’re willing to fully commit to that being your story, follow your bliss, but that’s wildly beyond the scope of this post.

LARP Applications

I also want to discuss the applications of teleportation access in boffer LARPing. In the list above, I’ve pointed to uses of teleportation in KG, Eclipse, Dust to Dust, Altera Awakens, and Calamity. (Shattered Isles used teleportation extremely rarely, and it’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten a lot of the justification. Probably a big ceremonial magic casting?) For it to be that widespread, there has to be some design need at stake, right?

There absolutely is, and it’s the most obvious thing in the world: any adventure location more than a few miles outside of the game location (a handwaveable long walk or boat ride) is beyond the PCs’ reach in the game narrative without bringing in teleportation. Eclipse, DtD, Altera Awakens, and Calamity all sent players to distant parts of the setting so they could achieve their goals.

I know very little about the Forest of Doors lineage of games, but travel to other worlds through doors or rifts seems to be a primary part of their whole pitch. Much like Eclipse and KG, building your travel mechanism in right from the start is great for making it not feel grafted-on after the fact.

Every boffer LARP pours immense effort into designing a rich, exciting setting beyond the borders of their rich, exciting main game location(s), because the PCs need somewhere to come from, and that place is part of establishing their tone and expectations. The rest of the world is also likely an origin point for many villains and villain factions. Because those places are interesting, we want to see them and accomplish goals there.

Conclusion

The core idea I want to get across is that building some access to teleportation into your campaign setting at low-to-mid levels is probably good. It places more goals within the players’ reach, and that’s a lot of extra agency. We like player agency here! Just wrap it in limitations, so that at higher levels they still feel great about gaining access to less-restricted teleportation (if that’s even a thing in your system). Even if there isn’t unrestricted access to teleportation at higher levels, you want some sense of narrative balance on the scales against the convenience they’re receiving.

If you enjoy my work, consider backing my Patreon! For as little as $1 a month you can support my writing in this blog and get early access to all of this content!

---

You can now buy Under the Seas of Vodari in PDF!

Under the Seas of Vodari is a 300-page book that provides 5E/Fifth Edition material for both gamemasters and players to dive into a world full of action and adventure set beneath the waves of Vodari or your own campaign world. This book is a follow-up to The Seas of Vodari, a setting book filled with swashbuckling action and magical adventure. Dive into your first adventure today!