Help finding an old concept; natural RAW result being magocratic city-states

[Grim Portent]

To me the logical outcome is that the first person to start on this plan is likely going to be the only one who ever manages to pull it off,* so after a while any city in the teleportation circle network becomes another fiefdom of the original city, and in essence just an extension of it.

The advantages of instantaneous travel are numerous, so getting support for putting circles in cities before going all magic-overlord should be easy enough, the wainrights, porters and sailors will be unhappy, but everyone who has to cut deals with them to move goods will be pretty interested in the idea of being able to walk to another city without ever leaving the city you started in. Throw in some of your infinite wealth to curry favour with the general populace of a target city and they'll embrace teleportation circles with open arms.

But once you've started this it will be easy to stop anyone else from muscling in. The wizard who de-facto controls seven major cities isn't going to have a hard time squishing the wizard who's still just an enterprising copy-cat working out of a warehouse, either by economically undercutting them or by just actually squishing them.

Being immortal, because that's honestly trivial, you can just play the long game and let cities absorb into the mega-city over time. Hell, you could even let them leave when they want on the relatively safe bet that they'll want back in at some point. Why crush an army with your invincible constructs when you can just wait for them to ask, cap in hand, to reap the benefits of assimilation?

A magical dystopia isn't a sensible endstate, because no one should be powerful enough to challenge the, hopefully benevolent, tyrant who shackled the world to an unrivalled economic system.



*The odds that a whole bunch of spellcasters are going to have roughly the same ideas and implement them all at roughly the same time with a 100% success rate is overly optimistic to me, and once one spellcaster has achieved the whole indestructible army part of things no one else can ever really catch up without being crushed, especially if they've also got the teleportation circles bit down for unrivalled logistics.

[awa]

my opinion is the most likely end point of a pure raw setting is some kind of wasteland of the self replicating undead.

Shadows and wights exterminating all life long before the first wizard casts teleport circle.

[johnbragg]

Goodberry is capped at 8 hp of healing over 24 hours, so not exactly infinite.

Good catch. Fountain of cure light wounds trap works just fine though.

If I’m recalling correctly, Tippy was assuming that the teleportation circles would initially be set up for trade, and then would be coopted as conduits for invasion. He further claimed that “the attacker will always have a nigh insurmountable initiative advantage.”

There seem to be two common-sense responses to this. First, if teleportation circles are a gateway for your enemies, it would make sense to go to some lengths to avoid using them in your city.

Teleportation circles are one-way, by the spell description. But if you're using them for a trade network, they're going to be in "inbound / outbound" pairs. And TCs are your trade centers, they're going to be economic hubs that the cities re-orient themselves around.

If you can’t possibly avoid reliance on teleportation circles (a major assumption in itself) then it seems most likely that these would be located well outside the city and fortified into kill boxes against any incoming hostiles. I’m not sure if Tippy ever really accounted for that.

For an invasion / commando raid, I think you'd cast a new, temporary teleportation circle. Wait, I think a major part of the reason for the concentration in cities was because you could only proof a limited area against teleporting armies in. So you WOULD killbox the inbound teleportation circles, but that just escalates the arms race, and when peace eventually DOES break down, it gets more destructive.

Part of the reason for the cities was to limit the area you'd have to secure against scry-and-die raids.

But then, his setting seems to rely on oversimplification of economic interactions, as well as a general sense of inevitability about the scenario. If you read some of his early posts, he just handwaved away a lot of issues which would most likely arise very quickly.

Yeah. I'm no tactician, but knowing exactly where your enemy is likely to show up seems like it'd be a pretty hefty advantage, even if you can't just set up something to block their arrival.

I don't remember why you can't just Mordenkainen's Disjunction the TC if they start invading. Wait, yes I do--the spell effect is on the other end. The TC from Eastville to Westerton is a spell effect in Eastville. Casting MD in Westerton doesn't do anything to the TC.

I'm honestly uncertain why Tippyverse cities ever invade each other

Ego. Religious quarrels. Vengeance cycling out of hand. Racism. Paranoia.

In the first page of that thread, Jack_Simth pointed out that the only reason would be ego, which Tippy doesn't seem to have responded to, although he does causally mention dead cities as the result of one or another issue.

But I would think that if all cities were under equal threat of being attacked from all other cities, either one city would strike first or they would all strike simultaneously, and either way you would end up with, at best, one city left. Very much like putting a lot of spiders into a single large container; after a day or two, you just have one spider left.

It takes a lot of unsustainable assumptions to keep multiple cities alive in the Tippyverse, and I think most pathways would quickly lead to the complete mutual destruction of the cities, or at best one city ruling the devastated remnants of the others. And of course that doesn't do much for trade, so whatever city survives will most likely retreat into itself and ignore the outside world.

I kind of like that. The oldest cities wall up their inbound TC points, or just use the spot as a dumping ground so that the spell fails ("The spell fails if you attempt to set the circle to teleport creatures into a solid object...")

Less pessimistically, your politics doesn't stay city vs city, it's among and between inter-city faction networks. Which essentially means that the cities are integrated into a single political framework.

my opinion is the most likely end point of a pure raw setting is some kind of wasteland of the self replicating undead.

Shadows and wights exterminating all life long before the first wizard casts teleport circle.

Probably true. Especially if the fell drain version of Locate City bomb works for you.

[Grim Portent]

my opinion is the most likely end point of a pure raw setting is some kind of wasteland of the self replicating undead.

Shadows and wights exterminating all life long before the first wizard casts teleport circle.

Doesn't the fluff for shadows say that they tend to stay in the place they formed? Not really a world ending threat, more the creation of hostile spaces in mausoleums and caves and so on that get more hostile when anyone is stupid enough to wander in and get murdered.

Wightpocalypse is still a big risk. Though at least you can crush them with siege weapons or hail them with arrows, not that it will necessarily help much depending on when and where the wights start to mass.

[awa]

tippyverse is raw only and their is no raw limitation to shadows moving about, that said their are so many self-replicating undead that dont have that limitation (many with much higher cr) that I dont think it matters.

Remember nothing in raw stops a wight from gaining class levels and they have a large racial bonus to stealth so massed archers or siege weapons arnt that useful.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Grim Portent
…because no one should be powerful enough to challenge the, hopefully benevolent, tyrant who shackled the world to an unrivalled economic system.

That sounds like a great campaign hook right there, and exactly the sort of circumstance wherein heroes arise.

Originally Posted by Grim Portent
The odds that a whole bunch of spellcasters are going to have roughly the same ideas and implement them all at roughly the same time with a 100% success rate is overly optimistic to me….

Agreed—but beyond this, I’d think that there would be some savage infighting among all those capable of even conceiving and implementing such a plan. These high-level, superintelligent spellcasters should be able to easily work out where all this will end up, and I’d think there would be a great deal of preemptive striking at each other, to the point that these high-level casters would be locked in a cold war of their own, without much time or interest for dabbling in economics.