A question I find myself pondering for each setting I make. Trains and airships are of course staples of Eberron, and Teleportation Circles are a D&D classic, but does your specific setting have some special way for those adept at magic to transport themselves over large distances? And how does this affect the world?
I run Eberron but my wife's game world has a fairly elaborate crystal magic with a clear white crystal that can be grown that acts as a sponge to other magical energies.
We have a charge that turns them green and creates almost a R&M style portal that is created by smashing the crystal. It can only open portals to places the user knows.
They're not super common but our party has a small crystal garden on their lands that produces a batch yearly and provides enough to be able to get to places fast in an emergency or avoid long travel times. Maybe 30 a year for the whole party.
Depends upon the campaign, but most of them it is either ships, convoys of wagons and maybe primitive zeppelins outside of established areas, with most folks sticking to large roads or trade-routes where the local nations and factions can field armies or militias to keep the roads open, the bandits pushed back and there's regular mini-forts to take shelter in if actual monsters show up.
For actual magical transportation, I'm assuming you mean stuff like Eberron's train-system, Teleportation magic and the like?
To prevent Teleportation being abused I generally added a Homebrew rule that while you could teleport anywhere, you couldn't displace most forms of mass in the process, meaning if there was something in the way of your entrance like, say a wall, or another person, you basically made a save-or-die D20 roll and added either your Dexterity or Spellcasting Stat to the roll to function as you twisting just out of the way at the last moment or being able to tweak the teleport at the last second to try to avoid Brundleflying yourself.
Short-range teleports were less likely to end up with this as you'd generally be able to see where you were going, and most teleports displaced gasses and liquids like water, but anything more solid than that and you'd have a problem. Most high-level location-specific Teleportations like Gates and Teleportation Circles have an additional rule that, with rare exceptions, the spells will actively eject objects and creatures from their confines to prevent this tragedy, and if the area cannot eject these 'blockages', the spell will fail dramatically and the teleported individuals will be cast into the nearest open space and take force damage as normal from the trauma.
In regards to magical physical transport, like enchanted wagons that pulled themselves or airships that ran on magitech engines, that kind of thing, they weren't very common because you had to burn spell-slots to keep them running, or produce expensive alchemical reagents to fuel the engines. You could have teams of Wizards who did nothing but sacrifice their spells to a Zeppelin's magical furnace, making the engine keep running for an hour per spell-level, with additional spell levels either being stored as additional 'hours' of fuel to burn or additional energy to make the Zeppelin move faster at the cost of accelerated fuel usage or increase its maneuverability in a pinch.
How the above affected the world was more the wealthy had access to magic, which allowed them to remain wealthy. A merchant convoy could make dozens of runs trying to save up enough money to replace all their oxen and horses with enchanted bridles that allowed them to basically move all day long, cutting their travel time down significantly and with Gentle Repose woven into their wagons, allowed them to transport perishable items without a loss of product. Armies would go to extreme lengths, even blackmail and outright theft, to acquire magical vehicles that could be used to tip the balance of power in their favour, such as turning self-propelled wagons into mobile catapults, alchemical steam-boats into warships to patrol regions of the sea where the winds were fickle and could die off suddenly or turn into tempestuous storms, or aforementioned Zeppelins to serve as flying artillery or as a counter to another army's aerial units such as Gryphon Riders or a really uppity Dragon.
All this, in turn, made magic something the nobility had, which made it both a sign of status ... and a black mark against your name because it meant you were one of them, the bastards who'd tax you into the ground, the houlier-than-thou clerics who'd draft your children into a war and then get them killed despite all that healing power, the snooty Wizards whose experiments blighted the land, created monsters and blew up your house but Gods forbid they actually get called to task on it.
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A question I find myself pondering for each setting I make. Trains and airships are of course staples of Eberron, and Teleportation Circles are a D&D classic, but does your specific setting have some special way for those adept at magic to transport themselves over large distances? And how does this affect the world?
I run Eberron but my wife's game world has a fairly elaborate crystal magic with a clear white crystal that can be grown that acts as a sponge to other magical energies.
We have a charge that turns them green and creates almost a R&M style portal that is created by smashing the crystal. It can only open portals to places the user knows.
They're not super common but our party has a small crystal garden on their lands that produces a batch yearly and provides enough to be able to get to places fast in an emergency or avoid long travel times. Maybe 30 a year for the whole party.
Depends upon the campaign, but most of them it is either ships, convoys of wagons and maybe primitive zeppelins outside of established areas, with most folks sticking to large roads or trade-routes where the local nations and factions can field armies or militias to keep the roads open, the bandits pushed back and there's regular mini-forts to take shelter in if actual monsters show up.
For actual magical transportation, I'm assuming you mean stuff like Eberron's train-system, Teleportation magic and the like?
To prevent Teleportation being abused I generally added a Homebrew rule that while you could teleport anywhere, you couldn't displace most forms of mass in the process, meaning if there was something in the way of your entrance like, say a wall, or another person, you basically made a save-or-die D20 roll and added either your Dexterity or Spellcasting Stat to the roll to function as you twisting just out of the way at the last moment or being able to tweak the teleport at the last second to try to avoid Brundleflying yourself.
Short-range teleports were less likely to end up with this as you'd generally be able to see where you were going, and most teleports displaced gasses and liquids like water, but anything more solid than that and you'd have a problem. Most high-level location-specific Teleportations like Gates and Teleportation Circles have an additional rule that, with rare exceptions, the spells will actively eject objects and creatures from their confines to prevent this tragedy, and if the area cannot eject these 'blockages', the spell will fail dramatically and the teleported individuals will be cast into the nearest open space and take force damage as normal from the trauma.
In regards to magical physical transport, like enchanted wagons that pulled themselves or airships that ran on magitech engines, that kind of thing, they weren't very common because you had to burn spell-slots to keep them running, or produce expensive alchemical reagents to fuel the engines. You could have teams of Wizards who did nothing but sacrifice their spells to a Zeppelin's magical furnace, making the engine keep running for an hour per spell-level, with additional spell levels either being stored as additional 'hours' of fuel to burn or additional energy to make the Zeppelin move faster at the cost of accelerated fuel usage or increase its maneuverability in a pinch.
How the above affected the world was more the wealthy had access to magic, which allowed them to remain wealthy. A merchant convoy could make dozens of runs trying to save up enough money to replace all their oxen and horses with enchanted bridles that allowed them to basically move all day long, cutting their travel time down significantly and with Gentle Repose woven into their wagons, allowed them to transport perishable items without a loss of product. Armies would go to extreme lengths, even blackmail and outright theft, to acquire magical vehicles that could be used to tip the balance of power in their favour, such as turning self-propelled wagons into mobile catapults, alchemical steam-boats into warships to patrol regions of the sea where the winds were fickle and could die off suddenly or turn into tempestuous storms, or aforementioned Zeppelins to serve as flying artillery or as a counter to another army's aerial units such as Gryphon Riders or a really uppity Dragon.
All this, in turn, made magic something the nobility had, which made it both a sign of status ... and a black mark against your name because it meant you were one of them, the bastards who'd tax you into the ground, the houlier-than-thou clerics who'd draft your children into a war and then get them killed despite all that healing power, the snooty Wizards whose experiments blighted the land, created monsters and blew up your house but Gods forbid they actually get called to task on it.