A teleporation circle is a magical device that allows the instantaneous travel between one circle to another. They also help regulate and safely organize teleporting travelers in high population areas.
History
Function
Creation
The creation of teleportation circles is a rare thing. In Nora, it is the duty of the Royal Magi to install, maintain and oversee teleportation circles. Each circle must be inspected once a year. Each is recorded in the magus's logs
Any uncataloged teleportation circle is considered illegal and subject to destruction. The creators (and sometimes, even the users) are then subject to the Unseen Court.
House Orien maintains an extensive network of permanent teleportation circles in cities throughout the Five Nations. Outside the Five Nations, circles are somewhat less widespread, limited to larger cities and national capitals. Orien invests heavily in expanding this service, however, and expeditions to remote regions are under way to allow customers to reach even the most far-flung places.
House Orien ensures its control of the portals by locating them inside sprawling stations that feature fine accommodations – rooms, restaurants, shops, and spas – to pamper customers and protect the circles from unauthorized use. For paying customers, Orien heirs perform the Linked Portal ritual, allowing rapid transportation between any two of the house’s established teleporation circles. The house also allows experienced ritual casters to use its teleportation circles as the origin point for their own rituals, which reduces the component cost of the Linked Portal or True Portal rituals as described in the ritual entries of the Players Handbook.
Realizing that anyone who has access to the Linked Portal ritual could use them, however, the house closely guards the sigil sequence associated with each one.
Teleportation circle access: 50gp
page 67 of City of Stormreach, which suggests that a teleporter comes to Stormreach about once every three days. So it’s a service that exists, but it’s not reliable; per SoX you could be waiting in Korth ten days before a teleporter shows up.
With this in mind, I’ll note that the idea of charging “by the mile” makes no sense at all. It doesn’t make that much difference to the teleporter whether you’re going five miles or a thousand, and you’re using his daily charge either way; so the idea that you could pay ten gp to teleport ten miles is just silly. Any sort of teleportation is going to cost thousands. It’s a service that only the very wealthy can afford, and even they can’t always get it.
Linked Portal is a level 8 ritual that allows the user to access a network of circles, described in the ritual as being at “most major temples, important wizards’ guilds, and large cities.” It’s too institutional and advanced for 998 YK Khorvaire as presented in Eberron, and makes airships and lightning rail travel largely obsolete. As such, unless I’m running a 4E campaign, I would ignore it completely and keep teleportation as a rare and expensive service.
By default 3.5 rules, there is no circle service at all: you hitch a ride with an individual teleporter with a Siberys mark. By 4E rules, it’s not using teleportation circle, it’s using linked portal. As such it only provides direct transportation between portals. The ECG says “House Orien maintains an extensive network of permanent teleportation circles in cities throughout the Five Nations. Outside the Five Nations, circles are less widespread, limited to the larger cities and national capitals.”
Again, while it’s there to accommodate 4E rules, this system doesn’t fit my personal vision of Eberron in 998 YK. It makes travel to remote locations too quick and casual; I’d rather that a trip to Stormreach be significant as opposed to a quick stop down at the Orien enclave.
If we’re talking circles, then we’re talking 4E’s linked portals. Which means you tell the house member the destination city and they take you to the portal. It’s not as flexible as a 3.5 teleportation circle spell.
Material Component
Amber dust to cover the area of the circle (cost 1,000 gp).
Not to mention that a Permanency spell on Teleportation Circle would be free, XP apart.
Yep, "Create Teleportation Circle" ritual, Manual of the Planes, p. 149. Level 15, cost is 1000 gp per square, plus 5 healing surges. It lasts 24 hours, but it can be sustained by spending 1 healing surge per day. If it's sustained for a year + a day (harsh!), it becomes permanent.
Although, for a non-adventuring NPC it's not so bad. Say, the city commissions you to sustain the ritual for a year, and for that year the city pays you some nice cushy salary for not doing anything dangerous.
Its also worth noting that any character can participate in the create teleportation circle ritual, even if they are not the ritual caster, by donating healing surges. In our party my swordmage is currently two surges down per day (for our two in progress circles) as he has the most to spare. Being able to cross the continent rapidly is worth a great deal to us, and as our wizard has the quick portal power it provides a great escape option
Teleportation Circle
Over time, you craft a magical beacon for others to teleport to.
Level: 11 Component Cost: 680 gp
Category: Travel Market Price: 900 gp
Time: 1 month Key Skill: Arcana (no check)
Duration: Permanent
You create a permanent teleportation circle suitable for use with such rituals as linked portal and planar portal. You pick the unique signature code of the teleportation circle and engrave this into the ground, preferably in stone or metal because of their durability. It is customary to place guards and defense at a teleportation circle, but those are not a part of the ritual.
Teleportation portals (although most of them should broken) can be anywhere you want them. Rather than have them along main thoroughfares I think it's also fun to have them in unlikely locations (in the underdark, underwater in the dragonmere, in a trash heap in a forgotten alley in waterdeep, in an overgrown jungle morass in Chult)..more reasons to adventure, or to return to places of adventure.
I'm guessing that that is deliberate. It can really break your game when a player flips open his stack of books and points out a portal exactly where they're trying to go. These things show up at the speed of plot, and that's a good thing.
However, if you do want to make it arbitrary, here's how I'd do it. Any location major enough to have a background feat listed in the FRPG has a known portal in its capital. Access to these portals may vary from place to place, but they're always there.
There is no other way I know of to create teleportation circles, but that's part of the design intent. The circles were created by ancient and powerful magic. Not every wizard can create them, which is why generally only mages' guilds and other such important buildings will have them.
Also, if you've got active portal services, why have merchant ships carry them? You'd only need a portal room or two in each major city, and bam, near-instant trade.
The basic system in 4ed is that there are permanent teleportation circles scattered across the lands. Most are in cities, mage guilds, various temples, etc. Each circle has a selection of arcane marks that are unique to that circle (arcane GPS coordinates). These circles do nothing on their own, but they are the target for the 10 minute ritual that opens a short lived one-way teleportation circle. To link to a circle, you have to know it's arcane marks… meaning either research or having seen it.
In general, these teleports are cheaper if they are cast from a circle to another circle, but can be done from anywhere to a circle.
Linked Portal (8) - Teleport to a circle on the same plane. Same level as Raising the dead.
Planar Portal (18) - Teleport to a circle on another plane.
Forbiddance (20) - Can block teleportation unless of higher level then caster of the ritual. Can be sustained by spending 1 healing surge each day (even if not in area) and after a year and a day, becomes permanent.
True Portal (28) - Teleport without using a circle.
At heroic level, permanent teleportation circles in specific locations in large cities would be fine. Since cities don't want just ANYTHING walking into the middle of the city, these circles are bound to be guarded well and using them will probably cost money (guards have to get paid, ya know). Churches might have teleportation circles but only to churches of the same religion and only for characters of the same alignment as the church or god. Fast travel can also be accomplished with Lighting Mounts. A Pegasus or something that flies even faster, with a permanent speed spell, could fly quickly from city to city but be trained to not deviate from the course. Heck, you could even make up a creature of your own that flies faster than anything ever seen but does so only for something expensive as payment, like cinnamon, and doesn't deviate from the course because, well, there's no cinnamon in the troll cave, only at the destination. Another option for fast travel could be teleporting ships. Picture boarding onto a huge ark-like vessel that, instead of sailing, gets teleported to another port (picture the guild highliners of Dune).
Fast travel methods really become tricky, and I personally think they should have issues involved. A wizard's guild in a city could have them, but using a personal teleportation circle should have some risk. Teleportation to a wrong area, or a complete failure should be considered. Or have better chances if the PC has spent a lot of time there and knows it well should be a possibility. Or if you want to mess with them, the severely failed Teleportation could… Send them to Hell.
