Impact of Teleportation Circles on post-apocalyptic rebuilding?

[aimlessPolymath]

I'm working on writing a setting for the Legend system by Rule of Cool games. In my setting, the world was devastated by a magical apocalypse 5-10 years ago. The old adventurers are retired, ruling over their own cities, guilds, etc. as the world rebuilds and a new crop of heroes rises, fueled by high background magic that pushes their abilities to new heights.

One thing I'm having trouble with is evaluating the impact of massively available teleportation and its impact on trade and exploration, as enabled by the following feat:

Create Teleportation Circle [Skill]
You have learned how to punch a hole through space that links two locations together.
Prerequisites: 9th level, any two of Arcana, Engineering, and Geography as trained skills
Benefit: With an hour’s effort, you can craft a gate of sorts that provides one-way instantaneous teleportation to a single location within 100 miles. You must have studied the target location carefully (as per the teleport spell) and the target location cannot be affected by dimensional lock or similar.
The portal can be destroyed with minor intentional physical effort, but otherwise lasts indefinitely. This is a [Teleport] and [Warp] effect.

The 'careful study' referred to here amounts to one hour's worth, which may be performed under Scrying.
I've assumed that most major cities are more than 100 miles away from each other, and houseruled that the 'other end' of the gate may be destroyed just like the near end can.

What does trade look like in this world? Is it trivially easy, or might 'trade routes' exist that make some areas important for their location as much as for their resources? Are there simple houserules I can apply that would increase the importance of locations/routes, like applying a small material component 'tax' to usage?

I'd also like competition over resources to be a theme in this world; what would the process of taking control of a newly discovered resource (ex. ancient armory, arable land, den of trainable monsters) look like, given that they require time and effort to be developed, but relatively little travel time to reach those locations and ship people/resources there and back? How would opposing city-states act to steal away control of these areas?

[John Out West]

Sounds like a fun setting. My thoughts are as follows:

Hub Cities: There would most likely be global cities with vested interests throughout the world. Imagine Great Britain during the age of sail, controlling the Indian trade routes and making a killing. Its doubtful that they would be willing to share these circles, and getting to use them would be rare for the general public. They would most likely destroy any known circle that is controlled by an enemy faction.

Flash Wars: War would be extremely quick, with thousands of soldiers pouring into cities from secret circles built within the walls. Spies would be inevitable and unstoppable.

Circle Cults: Cultures that don't understand or are incapable of the levels of magic required to create these circles will assume that they are divine, and will build rituals around them. They will craft fake teleportation circles in hopes that goods and travelers will be teleported to them, similar to when foreign wizards set up previous circles.

Splotchy Maps: Most nations can only control what they can defend. When you can teleport an army anywhere, everywhere is extremely defend-able. Territorial maps would most likely be splotchy, with nations controlling areas within at least 10 miles of any fortified circle that they own, even if it is deep within enemy territory.

Colonialism: It would be extremely easy to suppress any people around a fortified circle, and rebellions would be near impossible. Many nations would become vassals to larger nations, regardless of distance, and would be exploited for labor and resources. Similarly, fights over these colonies would break out between the greater nations.

TL;DR - I think looking up how the world reacted to the age of sail would inform the setting, as it was similarly a huge advancement in travel during a cruel age, where nations who knew how to build and use ships could essentially get anything anywhere, and would profit tremendously.

Hope that helps!

[Mechalich]

I've assumed that most major cities are more than 100 miles away from each other

Historically, this was not true. Cities in the US are comparatively far apart due to very late settlement dates, but cities in Europe or China, both settled much earlier, are closer together (though generally not quite as large). For example, Paris is within 100 miles of the following cities: Rouen (82), Orleans (80), and Reims (87), among others. In many areas you could chain cities less than 100 miles apart for almost 1000 miles or more in a line something like: Munich, Ausburg, Ulm, Stuggart, Hiedlberg, Frankfurt, Bonn, Dusseldorf, Munster, Bielefeld, Hanover, Bremen, Hamburg.

In any case, your teleportation circles provide an extremely strong incentive to locate cities in this fashion, so that each one is 80-100 miles apart and controls a roughly circular territory 40-50 miles in radius (this is a reasonable structure anyway, because that distance is about as far as a response team can reach in one day of riding hard). This means you're going to have a setup where all of your cities are part of a massive centralized trade network through which materials and people move extremely rapidly (to continue with the Europe example, this is analogous to the high-speed rail links within the extant Eurozone, only for cargo in addition to passengers).

Because travel within networks is extremely fast (not instant, because you'll have to spend some time transitioning from one circle to the next), and because the region each city is responsible for controlling on its own is manageably small, this system is ideal to foster massive empires with a distributed, highly bureaucratic system of governance that maximizes resource flow and empowers a strong central authority with control of the major military forces. The best model is probably Imperial China.

However, you said this is a post-apocalyptic scenario, so the model shifts to divided China in an inter-dynasty period. The cities remain in place, each controlling their own territories still, but the circle network has been drastically disrupted so that only small regional areas remain in contact and most cities have achieved nominal independence. Conquerors move about trying to take control of additional cities and add them into their own networks while destroying the budding networks of their rivals by raiding. Note that walled cities are typically very hard to actually destroy. Walls can be breached and an army charge through, but this usually fairly easy to subsequently repair. Many walled cities built by the Han Dynasty were besieged and changed hands a dozen times during the subsequent chaos of the Three Kingdoms period without being impaired in the long term, and many medieval town walls almost one thousand years old remain remarkably stable even in the present day.

A key question, of course, is how common the spellcasters capable of creating these circles actually are (and how willing they are to spend their time doing so), because they are absolutely the single most precious resource in your entire world.

I'd also like competition over resources to be a theme in this world; what would the process of taking control of a newly discovered resource (ex. ancient armory, arable land, den of trainable monsters) look like, given that they require time and effort to be developed, but relatively little travel time to reach those locations and ship people/resources there and back? How would opposing city-states act to steal away control of these areas?

Most point-based resources like metals, stone, spices, and the like will be entirely within the domain of a single city-state, so taking control of them means taking control of the respective city - the ability of the countryside to resist the vast resources that can be poured through even a small city-state network is essentially nil. More dispersed resources like cattle, timber, or wine would be more difficult to control, because they'd be spread across regions including numerous cities.

[Yakk]

A key issue is "how hard is dimensional lock".

If dimensional lock is expensive, that spell makes location trivial. Going 1000 miles is going to be similar to walking a few 100 feet.

A single person can build 12 teleportation links per day. Over a year that is 3000 links. 1000 people doing that means 3 million links.

If we have 3-fold redundancy (as it is easy to break it) and 2 years, that means 1 million spots are on the teleportation network. You could cover Europe with a network of teleportation spots where no spot in the entire continent is more than 3 km away from the network in 2 years, and reaching any portal from any other takes on the order of 2 minutes.

At this point traffic starts being the problem.

A full city becomes pointless. There are no natural barriers, so one empire very rapidly rules the entire area. Brutal wars break out as zero-length logistic trains allow the first nation that starts to snowball to basically swallow the world. Brutal guerrilla warfare follows. Non-compliant cities are razed to the ground.

Fortresses with teleportation wards exist as for stores of value, and from them flow supplies for the centralized army. Secret "military" teleportation roads with scrying guards exist to ensure that the obvious way to break trade doesn't work, plus the networks themselves are designed redundantly. That network can be many times smaller than the commerical one.

---

OTOH, if locking against teleportation is easy, that is what happens. Everywhere gets dimension locked. Only certain locations permit teleportation, and those areas are surrounded by fortifications, including "deadman" switches to shut down teleport gates. Cities defend their network and shut down anyone else's network within their domain.

Warfare then consists of taking over these nodes or shutting down the teleportation wards.

---

The natural size of a country or polity is determined by the logistical technology of the era, plus some legacy. Such teleportation gates make logistics trivial, which in turn means that the natural size of a polity is colossal; larger than modern states like China and the USA.

USA and the USSR proved during the cold war that they are perfectly capable of projecting a world-wide military force. I'd argue we didn't actually convert into that due to MAD and the nuclear bomb. Despite that, the two juggernauts where effectively world-scale empires.

[Xuc Xac]

A single person can build 12 teleportation links per day. Over a year that is 3000 links. 1000 people doing that means 3 million links.

A single person of 9th level or higher who also has a college degree. How many of those exist in the world and how many of them want to spend all their time making gates?

And how big are the gates? If they're the size of a normal 3'x8' door, you've basically got a high speed rail line but the train only has one door so embarking and disembarking is slow if you have hundreds traveling. If they are big enough to drive a wagon or caravan through, can you see through them to the other side or do collisions happen? Who has the right of way? Do you enter and exit the same side of the gate? If so, you can't have simultaneous two way traffic. If it's a circle that you stand in to get Teleported to the other circle, what happens if the destination circle is occupied? Does it have to be empty to work? Can places block their circles by just posting guards to sit in them?

[Mechalich]

A single person of 9th level or higher who also has a college degree. How many of those exist in the world and how many of them want to spend all their time making gates?

Probably not many, but it only takes one to warp the world. Impact of even a single Bob the Gate-Builder magus is pretty drastic. Such a person probably builds two links per day - hooking up a new node into the network and then linking it to the next one, perhaps more if they've decided the city they're in is going to be a hub rather than just a spot on the line. Even if said person only works a normal five day work week and takes holidays off (a rather low labor rate for the middle ages) they still probably work around 250 days a year, so that in one year they can hook up that many cities. France currently has 434 municipalities with over 20,000 inhabitants, which is probably a decent proxy for the number of places it had worth caring about in pre-industrial times. So our hypothetical Bob the Gate-Builder could hook together the entirety of France - Europe's geographically largest nation - in two years.


It's probably worth noting that the whole gate-building scenario is merely one example. In D&D-style worlds the ability of high-level casters to drastically alter the world according to any given particular obsession is immense. Consequently, they need to be accounted for at the individual level because each one represents an actor at least as powerful as an entire nation-state.

[Yakk]

How many are there?

Well whomever starts mass producing gates wins wars. Either they train more, or someone else does.

Whichever society produces more gate builders and figures out how to get them to work more gains infinitely better supply lines and trade networks. They start to win, destroying all rivals. And the rate they do this is measured in years.

I mean, portals like that dwarf modern transport tech. Let alone crazy cheeze like portal-water-wheels.

Need to get ore out of a mine? 2 steps. Need to get food to a storehouse? Wood to a shipyard? (But who needs ships?) Stone to a castle? (Who needs castles? Armies teleport.) Tax collectors to a farm? Spices? Ice for an icebox? Heck, just put the icebox in the arctic, and walk for 2 minutes to get the stored food.

The impact is just crazy.

[aimlessPolymath]

Sounds like a fun setting. My thoughts are as follows:

Hub Cities: There would most likely be global cities with vested interests throughout the world. Imagine Great Britain during the age of sail, controlling the Indian trade routes and making a killing. Its doubtful that they would be willing to share these circles, and getting to use them would be rare for the general public. They would most likely destroy any known circle that is controlled by an enemy faction.

Flash Wars: War would be extremely quick, with thousands of soldiers pouring into cities from secret circles built within the walls. Spies would be inevitable and unstoppable.

[...]

Splotchy Maps: Most nations can only control what they can defend. When you can teleport an army anywhere, everywhere is extremely defend-able. Territorial maps would most likely be splotchy, with nations controlling areas within at least 10 miles of any fortified circle that they own, even if it is deep within enemy territory.

Colonialism: It would be extremely easy to suppress any people around a fortified circle, and rebellions would be near impossible. Many nations would become vassals to larger nations, regardless of distance, and would be exploited for labor and resources. Similarly, fights over these colonies would break out between the greater nations.

Historically, this was not true. Cities in the US are comparatively far apart due to very late settlement dates, but cities in Europe or China, both settled much earlier, are closer together (though generally not quite as large). For example, Paris is within 100 miles of the following cities: Rouen (82), Orleans (80), and Reims (87), among others. In many areas you could chain cities less than 100 miles apart for almost 1000 miles or more in a line something like: Munich, Ausburg, Ulm, Stuggart, Hiedlberg, Frankfurt, Bonn, Dusseldorf, Munster, Bielefeld, Hanover, Bremen, Hamburg.

In any case, your teleportation circles provide an extremely strong incentive to locate cities in this fashion, so that each one is 80-100 miles apart and controls a roughly circular territory 40-50 miles in radius (this is a reasonable structure anyway, because that distance is about as far as a response team can reach in one day of riding hard). This means you're going to have a setup where all of your cities are part of a massive centralized trade network through which materials and people move extremely rapidly (to continue with the Europe example, this is analogous to the high-speed rail links within the extant Eurozone, only for cargo in addition to passengers).

Because travel within networks is extremely fast (not instant, because you'll have to spend some time transitioning from one circle to the next), and because the region each city is responsible for controlling on its own is manageably small, this system is ideal to foster massive empires with a distributed, highly bureaucratic system of governance that maximizes resource flow and empowers a strong central authority with control of the major military forces. The best model is probably Imperial China.

These two posts together suggest that the pre-apocalyptic geography of civilization likely consisted of a number of hub cities, each representing a major power, linked by a connected graph of mid-size cities each of which are 80-100 miles apart. Around each of these cities, there would be a larger number of rural settlements, which connect to the larger cities via foot traffic. The 'borders' of countries, in practice, are determined by adjacent nodes in the chains where each is controlled by a separate city, with tight border controls, emergency measures to rapidly shut off the portals, etc.

In the post-apocalypse, the most-used links between the hub cities would be the first ones to be reconnected, since those links would be most likely to have been studied in the past, but reconnecting to areas that no mage had carefully studied would be far slower, and might require expeditions.

Total flash warfare isn't something I'd like to be a significant factor in the post-apocalypse (though possibly a tactic used in the past), and I'd like to create some houserule to reduce its impact; I'm considering ruling that the destination of the gate can be easily detected magically and disrupted during the hour it takes to be created, giving cities (particularly hub cities, which would have better detection infrastructure) some warning of imminent attack, letting them choose to disrupt the incoming attack, teleport their own troops in to prepare, or prepare a counter-ambush.

Circle Cults: This is such a great concept I'll find a way to stick it in the setting. Maybe uncontacted groups that understand that teleportation circles exist, but are just guessing about how to actually create one? I'm imagining a mechanical engineer trying to reengineer a train from first principles, and it isn't pretty.

Most point-based resources like metals, stone, spices, and the like will be entirely within the domain of a single city-state, so taking control of them means taking control of the respective city - the ability of the countryside to resist the vast resources that can be poured through even a small city-state network is essentially nil. More dispersed resources like cattle, timber, or wine would be more difficult to control, because they'd be spread across regions including numerous cities.

An excellent point.

A single person of 9th level or higher who also has a college degree. How many of those exist in the world and how many of them want to spend all their time making gates?

And how big are the gates? If they're the size of a normal 3'x8' door, you've basically got a high speed rail line but the train only has one door so embarking and disembarking is slow if you have hundreds traveling. If they are big enough to drive a wagon or caravan through, can you see through them to the other side or do collisions happen? Who has the right of way? Do you enter and exit the same side of the gate? If so, you can't have simultaneous two way traffic. If it's a circle that you stand in to get Teleported to the other circle, what happens if the destination circle is occupied? Does it have to be empty to work? Can places block their circles by just posting guards to sit in them?

There are a lot of questions here; I'll give my knee-jerk reactions but I'm willing to be flexible if some answers generate problems for the setting.

-Each known city-state has a very small (2-3) number of affiliated gate-creating people, and lack the educational facilities to train large numbers of them. Additionally, there are a somewhat larger (3-4 per city-state, total) number of unaffiliated gate-makers, who have unionized. Education of new gate-creators operates on a master-student system.

The throughput of the links between hub cities is essentially infinite as a result of accumulated work; the expansion of the network is much slower, and is limited by the gate-maker's ability to carefully and safely study the target location rather than by time.

-How big are the gates/how fast can people come through/are there other logistical issues? Probably they can transport something as big as a person or medium-sized crate every few seconds, or something along those lines? More if they set up more circles in the same area. I'm leaving this question mostly unanswered because the time/resource costs to create a teleportation circle are essentially zilch over several years when backed by the resources of a country, letting people set up as many as they like in the long term.

I'd rather make it less safe to create them/more easy to disrupt/require a cost to make use of them rather than make the upfront cost to create "enough gates to do X" higher. For example, I might houserule that scrying the target location does not allow the user to create a circle there, and that they must have visited in person (which forces gate-makers to travel to the destination before setting up, limiting expansion of the network); alternatively, that they require an activation reagent with cost that scales with the mass to be teleported (which applies an effective tax to transport of goods). I haven't decided whether or not I'll apply those rules in the final version, but I'm considering it. Ideas along those lines for rules would be appreciated.

-Can a circle be blocked/disrupted from the other side? Yes, probably trivially. In addition to blocking it, a guard could just destroy the circle after the first enemy soldier comes through; some mechanism might be set up to destroy many at once. Maybe the circle goes dim when there's something blocking the target area.

Update:
I've used Pathfinder equipment tables to run some numbers on the costs of moving loads. Assuming a staff of about 5 people per wagon of 4000 lbs, all paid as trained hirelings, the cost to move loads 100 miles by animal works out to about 1.4 sp per 100 lbs moved. This tells me that I can set the reagent cost per use of a teleportation circle at about twice that, 3 sp/100 (or equivalent in local currency) lbs, and have the two systems be competitive. One offers speed, and one offers lower costs.

[Whiskeyjack8044]

In my world, Elves live in enclave cities dotted around the globe, but these cities are all connected to the "Nexus Forum" in the Feywild. The effect is that each city is more or less seen as part of one big city. One might live in city A, go through the nexus to the Forum and then go through the nexus to city B where they work. Maybe go to lunch in the Fey Bazaar in the Forums, or shopping in city C.

Also, you can find almost anything in the Nexus Forum (which I imagine as like a whimsical Grand Bazaar in Istanbul). The intent is that the Elves use the Forum as like a physical internet as well as a travel hub. A city has many nodes, like bus stops, that all lead to the same node in the forum. People don't teleport inside each other when they use the node at the same time because magic.

[Yakk]

If you change the rules of teleportation, then conclusions drawn based on the rules you provide are invalid.

You appear to be changing them in order to generate a world with certain properties you hold in your head. Things like banning scrying, adding a cost to teleport, etc etc.

Describe the world you want in your words rather than "here are the properties of teleportation, what does it mean to the world" then invalidate the work people do by ... changing the rules of teleportation.

[aimlessPolymath]

That's fair. I'm looking for a few properties:

1. While teleportation is commonly used, there are 'rural community' equivalents for which it is not economically useful to set up circles, even with access to low-cost labor to create them over hundreds of years.
2. Teleported armies are a significant tactic, but not an infinitely powerful one; cities can have varying levels of defense prepared, and do not need to interfere with their own economy on a daily basis (ex. dimensional locks everywhere) in order to stay safe.
3. An invading force has some strategy by which they can take control of a settlement or development, such that success is probable but not certain except with overwhelming force.
4. The teleportation network cannot be rapidly or fully rebuilt from scratch once destroyed by the apocalypse.
5. Optionally, there are some locations that inherently more valuable (ex. as trade routes) because of their location, not because of specific resources they are near.
6. Optionally, when a new resource is discovered, information spreads more quickly than the discovering city can fully develop or take control of the resource, producing a period of vulnerability.

I'm aware that mass teleportation usually generates a large number of absolutes: it's an absolute offence by means of teleported armies, it's an absolute economic advantage, and so on. I'd like to soften those advantages without removing them completely.

I did mention several of these requirements in the first post:

What does trade look like in this world? Is it trivially easy, or might 'trade routes' exist that make some areas important for their location as much as for their resources? Are there simple houserules I can apply that would increase the importance of locations/routes, like applying a small material component 'tax' to usage?

I'd also like competition over resources to be a theme in this world; what would the process of taking control of a newly discovered resource (ex. ancient armory, arable land, den of trainable monsters) look like, given that they require time and effort to be developed, but relatively little travel time to reach those locations and ship people/resources there and back? How would opposing city-states act to steal away control of these areas?

A key point here is competition; I want there to be time for two groups to have it out against each other, rather than one dominating instantly as flash warfare would normally imply.

[Yakk]

Assuming you don't want a modern MAD + trade world, historically polities expanded to natural logistical limits.

These barriers could be rough terrain (mountains), defensive lines (like rivers), logistics length, or limits of administration.

A polity 2-3x the size of another can muster overwealming force ... if the other one doesn't have a defensive advantage, or logistics make the invasion too hard.

Teleportation gates make logistics crazy. They are better logistics than the modern world has. Either they need to be limited in volume or expensive to use.

Transport by land is expensive, calorie wise. It takes a horse-and-cart X calories to carry Y calories of food Z km. This results in an exponentially increasing calorie cost to move goods that is very, very unforgiving.

River barges and ocean going ships break this calorie cliff. Ocean going ships can use sails and harness wind power, which is much cheaper than horse-food. River barges can move food more efficiently than anything short of a railway.

The key part of teleportation's economic impact is that it is cheap, not that it is fast. But the cost has to be quite large for it to be as expensive as land-travel over any distance.

Prior to the age of sail, ocean going trade was extremely risky. So that kept the cost up.

For military, it is the speed and topology that make it have a huge impact; the cost also, but far less so than for trade.

Risk can be a cost. Something that can be traded for food can be a cost (what if teleportation drains ley-lines, and ley-lines are also used to boost crop yield?), or rare substances. Rare substances run into a problem that often they are less rare when you really start working at getting more of it. ;) The absolute cost floor of those substances, as compared to the cost of using large amounts of fertile land to grow food with large numbers of peasants working and protected on it (aka, calories).

Pre-modern era, the economy was about calories. You had peasants working the land, which produced calories, which supported specialists and warriors on the surplus. You could also convert the peasants into laborers or troops. But it is that solar -> farm -> food cycle that your economy is all about. Warriors, blacksmiths, etc -- all kinds of technology to make that basic energy-pump function better.

Whomever has more fertile worked farm land is rich.

The alternative is fishing, where wood + crafting + sailors produce fish (calories again).

Trade goods are things worth the calorie cost to move around. Gold and silver, as a form of currency. Iron and other metals, to build tools. Stone and wood, to build structures. As trade gets cheaper, cloth starts becoming tradable, and mills that mass produce it can start ramping up.

Then there are luxuries aimed at the upper (owning) class -- spices and exotic dried foods (tea, sugar, chocolate, etc).

---

To prevent flash-wars and polities that swallow the world, you need topology on your teleportation gates. One traditional form is ley lines and nodes; making teleportation circles that don't follow ley lines could be possible but extremely expensive. For example, a teleportation circle might deplete the local free mana after teleporting a handful of people, and require hours or days to recharge. Following a ley line would both provide power to each end and because the transport is along the line, it is cheaper.

Ley line nexuses, where multiple cross, could be given some defensive advantage. Maybe from there you can shut down unauthorized teleportation circles, or even prevent them, that open nearby.

(Mumbo jumbo: you make the nexus resonate with a particular harmony; in order to open a teleportation portal that doesn't instantly shut down, you have to match that harmony. Attempting to fuel it from ley lines without the harmony key blows up in your face. City-states would defend the knowledge of that harmony to a few key individuals.)

[Edea]

Could also just assign a greater Travel-associated deity (TN) to the task of managing the teleportation network, and if mortals try to do abusive **** with the gates the deity just disintegrates them utterly/sends them to an inescapable demiplane of punishment. Have his clerics focus on maintaining the peace/gate neutrality and otherwise maintaining the network. Maybe even creating these gates in the first place requires the deity's approval.