Ok, ok, let me get out my fire extinguisher and prepare for the onslaught ...

:Gets fire extinguisher:

Ok, ready!

I was thinking about how teleportation might be brought to the world of SR w/o becoming abusive. Yes, I have read that magic in SR can not alter the space/time continum (page 47 of MitS).

It could be accomplished by using two hermetic circles that were magically linked to each other and created by the same mage.

I would use a test for each circle, a test for linking them, and a test for sending someone trhough them. Multiple people would be harder (higher TN). Perhaps limiting the amount of people by half the force of the lesser circle (round down)?

A few caveats:
+ The same mage would have to create both circles.
+ The circles would take a number of weeks equal to force.
+ Linking the circles causes them to become active until they are used at which time the link is severed.
+ Failing the test would sever the link as well.
+ All ones and part of you might make it while the rest stays here...
+ Metamagic technique

It would never come up on a run (except for the enemy mage to escape ) and therefore would not be a game breaker.

Granted this requires setting aside a design rule of magic; however, as the mana level rises who knows what will happen?

What do you think?

- theartthief

How about, it's expressly banned, but you can do it in your game if you want to.

Why the need to justify it at all?

It breaks the rules, and the gameworld. If this ever exists, suddenly it's priority number one for the corps. Anyone who can learn it does so they can get a nice cushy job; no one who has it has any reason to do anything but work for the corps, and it removes in large part the ability to actually interfere with normal business.

I might vaguely consider something like World Knots from Myth, but teleportation between arbitrary points? Hell no.

~J

TheArtThief, what you've got looks pretty good. You can have it be something special that only one magician knows (perhaps requiring a new metamagic technique), or something that is general knowledge.

Consider whether you want teleportation to "cost" 1 point of Karma, for example, by requiring a bonded focus be destroyed as part of it.

It's banned in MitS. It's in the chapter about spell design and what magic can't do.

Don

Sounds like a very limited Astral Gateway or some kind of astral travel very much like the kind that a few IE and Dragons can do. The main difference here is that for a normal mage it requires weeks of preparations, material and probably a specific metamagical tecnique.

I see nothing unbalancing about it since it would be of limited use. Even if corporations would take a crack at it there would be limitations. At best it could be a nice getaway for the president of UCAS or a good way for a CEO of Renraku to zip between Japan and the Arcology.

Perhaps some kind of mass transportation would be possible but then you would need some kind of ritual sorcery with groups of mages and one circle at each side. You can forget moving large quantities of goods.

As I said above, this would be more akin to a physical body travelling through the astral space to appear within a hermetic circle/lodge a the other end.

Now, what would happen if someone disrupted one or BOTH circles in the middle of transition?

One circle: Ends up at beginning or end
Two circles: Lost in the astral?

Another way of "teleporting" (I really hate that word) would be a physical manipulation spell designed by someone.

I'd say a Transformation spell "Transform into Light" and here's the problem. You would end up with an effective body of "0" since light hardly has any mass and have a severe allergy to darkness/shadow. Your quickness would be at the speed of light and you would be unable to hold anything, hit anything or speak, hear etc. You would on the other hand see EVERYTHING within the visual spectrum.

Have fun.

TheArtThief: You have, knowingly or not, recreated the wheel. There is an ED spell similiar to what you describe, though it includes very fast travel through the astral between two bone circles rather than teleportation. Because teleportation is munchy shit. Yeah.

Ya know, as much as this flys in the face of cannon, its SO restricted, especally if you add in the 1 karma bonded foci, I dont see that much broken with it.
Kagetenshi, they are hardly arbitary points. A repectable force hermetic circle takes a good chunk of time and money to make.

It's only banned/forbidden/flying in the face of canon if it's "teleportation". i.e. If it causes you to cease to exist in one location while simultaneously beginning to exist in another.
However, as AH pointed out, a spell that gets you from one place to another is not necessarily teleportation, it could be a different form of transportation that is NOT forbidden. Now if, as a GM, you still don't want this in your campaign that's simple enough. The mana levels aren't high enough yet. However, a spell that lets someone/thing "transubstantiate" into a fully astral form, use fast movement, then turn back to the physical isn't really breaking any SR rules at all.

AH: Couldn't the light-bearers do something like this in ED? (light-bearers, is that what they were called? My apologies, I haven't looked at ED in years and years)

So there is some precident for this sort of thing being possible in SR, the only real problem is calling it "teleportation".

Doesn't look like a game breaker to me. Hell, even if the players get their grimy little mitts on it they have to set up some elaborate Scooby-esque trap to make it effective.

I don't see it being the new "hot thing" for corps either. Like some one already stated, its not effective as anything more than high class/emergency transport. Additionaly, if its used as an escape route it can't be used to send some one inside an active ward. So its not a totally secure evacuation.

I kind of like it.

What is a "Lightbearer" is this like some kind of totem?

I seem to remember someone saying somewhere that mages traveling in this fashon could be bound as spirits.

I may be mistaken because what little I know of ED was learned on these boards.

Joker9125: Yes and no on the totem thing. THere is not an exact SR equivalent.

THose who translate directly to the astral plane can indeed by bound as spirits.

Well, the reason that stuff is banned in Shadowrun is that magic has to follow physical laws, such as conservation of energy. But scientists have worked out how stuff can be teleported; what they haven't worked out is how it could possibly be done with any great speed. So how about this: You can teleport, but teleportation is a sustained spell, and you have to sustain it 1 year for every miligram of matter you wish to teleport, working out to a hundred billion years for the average human.

There is at least one key difference between fast astral movement and teleportation. A faster astrally moving spirit can still slap you around when using fast travel, while teleportation removes that possibility. There's also rules for stopping fast travel, while teleportation would have to generate a new set of restrictions that would also be debated in the forums for how game breaking they are.

Just go with the extremely difficult astral side-step, it will cause you less pain in the long run.

For instance, can you teleport through a ward? What about across space? If not, why not? You're never crossing the intervening space, so the warps or barriers shouldn't matter.

~J

After going back a looking at the rules for astral movement and thinking about every SF movie (good and bad) with teleportation (transporters or what-cha-ma-call-its) I see the point that everyone is making. I will modify the skill (and TN) such that the mage running the thing has to guide himself and others through astral space at the speed of thought.

Hitting a barrier or ward would be bad at that speed.

Thank you very much for the feedback!!

- theartthief

You teleport. Your character dies extremely painfully. Meanwhile, at your intended destination, a completely new person, physically identical to your character, with all the memories of your character and firmly believing him or herself to be your old character, is born.

~J

Thats technically accurate according to Star Trek teleportation.

Not to sound like a trekkie but if im not mistaken in star treck they break you down atom by atom and send you to location X and reassemble you atom by atom. Kinda like making something out of legos then taking it apart and putting it together somewhere else.

Actually, I think in Star Trek they convert your body into energy and then convert the energy back into a body at the destination, much like when they use the replicators. Which brings me to the biggest scientific error in Star Trek: The massive amount of energy they would have to use just to replicate an apll, or a sandwich, or a new uniform. If they can create that much matter, the Enterprise should be able to turn a planet into an asteroid field. That's at least as much energy as the Death Star would have to generate.

As for the manabolt, it does indeed follow the law of conservation of mass-energy; it merely uses a new form of energy which Newton didn't know about: mana, the energy of magic. Teleportation, on the other hand, destroys matter in one place and creates it someplace else, violating conservation of mass-energy by destroying and creating matter rather than transmuting it.

Would it be possible to do something similar to the astral sidestep, only instead of the astral plane, using a metaplane where it IS possible to teleport?

Just for the record, nothing in SR says magic cannot teleport you. The spell design rules say Sorcery cannot be used to alter the space time continuum. However the same list also says that Sorcery cannot predict the future and cannot summon or banish spirits, which other skills can. So even though you can't reasonably create a teleportation spell, there's actually a canon pattern of metamagical and normal skills doing things sorcery can't.

The energy required to create even a large apple is actually only about 10 megatons (relatively speaking, this assumes an apple of about a quarter kilo mass). Althoug that is excessive compared to their firepower, in Star Trek they do frequently toss around notions like a starship destroying an entire planet's crust and such. Still, like all sci-fi, it has less to do with sci than fi.

Asimov would disagree with you.

~J

I would have no objections on principle alone to something like using the metaplanes as a shortcut. Get a spirit to transport you to the metaplanes, do a quickie astral quest, and come back to the physical plane at your desired destination.

Only the duration isn't certain. You could come out within seconds of having gone into the metaplanes, or it could have been months.

~J

Maybe specify the time as a condition of the quest?

Can you do that? If you can, it'd probably make things more difficult…

~J

I was under the impression that was impossible, because to go to a metaplane you have to do it directly, without going to astral space, and your body never goes with you. When the Astral quest is over you just "return" to your body.

If a free spirit uses the Astral Gate power to send you to the metaplanes, you simply step into the gate and go, gear and all. This is how mundanes access the metaplanes. The book mentions that your gear and cyber may change to fit the setting, so you must be bodily present.

I always figured that the easiest way to simulate teleporting is via a modified Astral Quest.

Simply put, a spell or ritual allowing you to move your physical body into Astral space, and take advantage of the speed of movement on the astral. Once you get to your destination, you drop back down to physical space. Over short distances, the time is effectively instantaneous.