Sorry if this has been posted before, but I found nothing through my admittedly light topic searching. Thoughts on the topic?

The books say no.

If you want something close, befriend a free spirit who has the rare physical variant of the astral gateway power.

I would say no. Teleportation is powerful, powerful magic that goes far beyond what Shadowrun offers. Plus, the drain alone would kill any magician who tried it.

Teleportation is best used in high-magic games, such as DnD. In what I call mid-magic games, such as Shadowrun, it doesn't quite match up with the power level of the spells. I mean, fireball is considered a powerful and dangerous spell in this game, while in DnD I bet the majority of the wizards have it and at higher levels even they can shrug it off. Also, DnD has teleportation-effects as being more powerful than fireball, which I must agree with due to the potential abuses and uses.

So, I would say it does not have a place, just due to how the spells are treated.

Definitely not, IMO. It would essentially make either security or running against high-security targets obsolete, depending on how exactly it worked. Either that, or it would be essentially useless.

~J

Teleportation is one of the few thigs completely and explicitly banned in SR. So no.

The closest thing might be the Fading critter power which allows critters (and spirits, et. al.) to jump into the metaplanes. Then, it's arguable that they could jump back out of the metaplanes in a different location, assuming the metaplanes allow that sort of things. I bring this up because that was my reasoning behind prducing a blink dog like critter that I haven't had the opporunity to use yet. But if I do, damn will it be a nuisance

Mmm, netherwalking.

~J

Teleportation and time travel are just no-nos. Too many questions.

We found our how bad this type of spell can be back in SR1. It's a game-breaker, just let your mind wander about the possibilities a bit, you'll see.

closest thing you can get is an illusion spell to make people think you have teleported. very nice for those movie vampire wannabes

What a great idea, Fygg. Note to self .....

Combine that with clout and you have the makings of some serious player twitching

I actually heard this idea from a friend...

Design a spell that shifts your presence to the Astral Plane. Crazy, huh? Drain is atrocious, but if you succeed and stay conscious, you can move as per Astral Space rules of Fast Movement.

Of course, he forgot to metion that there is no shift your body back to physical plane spell MUAHAHAHAHAHA

lorthazar: It's called "Drop Sustained Spell." That's an Action. Hey, look, you're Physical again!

More fun our way!

Well, it could probably designed but I would not allow TELEPORTATION but I could allow PHASING.

Phasing would be an elemental manipulation spell of "Light" since you break up the bodys physical form into energy.

Drain would be at least (S) and the TN would be Range in meters travelled plus the barrier rating of the obstructions in the way.

So, if the character wants to phase through a wall he would at least have to travel 1 meter and go through a wall with a BR of 5 it would become a TN of 6. If he would like to phase away from lets say a troll holding him down it would be a minimum of 1 plus the trolls body (lets say 10) which would become a TN of 11 and the troll would get to use strenght to keep him there (breaks his concentration)

Always use the highest barrier rating of an obstruction they try to phase through (a wooden door (5, wood) with a maglock (10, highly processed material) this would become 11.


Lets see.

Physical manipulation spell (Major Physical Change) Serious Drain
Elemental Manipulation Effect (Transforms into Light) +1 Level
Physical Spell (Physical form changes shape) +1 Power
Voluntary Target (No combat abuse) -1 Level
Touch Range (No combat abuse or teleporting objects) -1 Level

This brings us to a total of +1 Moderate. Can it be abused, yes, but so can everything. Could we add normal problems and limitations for this spell, sure. The caster uses this spell as an instant spell and moves at the speed of light in an energy form, spirits moves faster on the astral plane and can actually intercept him before he gets there. Wards will still stop him, and high TN will do it otherwise.

Something else might be useful here. If the caster becomes light/energy it is highly possible that he7she will short out and/or activate alarms who go haywire when they pass through it (AKA Kitty Pryde, X-Men).

Remember one thing more, a LOS is required for the target location otherwise the caster could end up within an object or another person, thus killing them.

It is not really teleportation since it requires a path where the energyform can travel. A glass window is no problem but I don't think it would be possible to phase inside a faraday cage...(i might be wrong)

Impossible?

Astral Gateway is probably your best bet if you want to approximate teleportation. Or conjure a REALLY high force spirit and get it to use the movement power on you while you levitate around with your gigantic magic attribute at incredible speed, thus giving the impression you're travelling instantaneously. You might want a high force barrier as well to stop your skin getting flayed when you fly around that fast...

Alternatively you could forget the whole teleportation thing since it's really not going to happen in SR.

I do, however, have some recollection that folk like the Black Lodge had access to higher and more powerful magic than was normally possible. Alas I don't own Threats, although I don't think it was mentioned there anyway. I'm sure I heard them being linked to teleportation somewhere. Hmm, maybe it was just on dumpshock!


Another book I don't own is Dragons of the Sixth World, although I doubt it's mentioned there either. But if lowly mortals could achieve (somewhat laborious) teleportation in Earthdawn times, then maybe dragons, and eventually metahumans, will be able to in SR. One day. One day very far in the future.

Teleportation, yep, definitely exists in some form in my game. The players have seen it done.

Of course, it was done by your friend and mine The Laughing Man to set an example of just how far out of everybody's league those people are. The mage in the party tried for weeks to cobble together a theory on how it was done (best of luck old son) before deciding that all he was getting out of it was a Induce Migraine spell (Self only, Sustained )

As for time travel, I did actually play in a game where time travel appeared. It was the whole point of the run, to steal some weird prototype that we instead wound up being affected by. The whole thing was very subtle, it took us ages to work out we'd been moved back one day in time. Naturally the device was trashed at the end of the run, and the inventor disappeared completely (very X-Files). Kudos to the GM, it was well-handled and gave us that real "there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy" feeling (the run was later linked indirectly to the technoshamen, an invention of that GM predating otaku; magical types that affected technology. I still have the Browning Ultra-Power that has a TN mod of -1 and half as much range again that was part of my reward for the run...)

Harlequin can't teleport, his power was somewhat explained, and teleportation wasn't it.

I made a device in a game once that was being developed by Texas Tech using quantum mechanics. A lot of the quantum theory is extremely hard to follow, but there are theories on how it could be applied to a form of teleportation. In any event, I had the runners making a data steal on the lab with the room-size machine. Almost had one of the power hungry players try to use it.

Would've been a bad idea as I'm down with the "No Teleportation Allowed" crowd here. Too much power. Should my power hungry friend have tried the machine out, it would've been one of those no-rolls deaths. Owie.

I posted this question years ago on the old forums - I think you have to think pretty carefully about its effects, and make it tough to use, but I'm not convinced it's a game breaker.

The first thing you need is to have a reasonably common set of barriers to teleportation - ideally not just wards, but a number of mundane methods as well - living tissue maybe, 1st and 2nd Ed style, or a magnetic field at a certain frequency, some kind of special alloy etc, etc - that answers a lot of the "how do we make our high security area proof against teleporters" questions.

A second, compatible option is to make it line of sight only, and/or to make the range quite limited unless it's cast as a powerful ritual. If teleportations are draining and take you less than a hundred meters in most normal cases then they lose the "we can never track down the bad guy because he just teleports away" problem - the teleporter will need to have a nearby hidey hole scouted out and will need to be able to complete their escape after resisting drain.

Showing my RM roots, how about:
Leaving: Caster may teleport to any point within their line of sight, maximum distance is the number of successes on casting test (TN 4) x 20 meters. Target location must be specified before attempting to teleport and if insufficient successes are generated spell fails without causing drain. Drain is f/2+2/S

Teleport: As leaving but travel need not be LOS and range is halved. Drain is f/2+3/D. For travel to areas not within line of sight the caster must have a mental image of the area and make an intelligence test (aided by mneumonic enhancer) to accurately place themselves in it. On a failed role the teleport does not occur and drain is suffered, on a rule of 1 the cater teleports into a solid object and dies.

Just recently watched X-Men 2 again the other day, and if you want limited teleportation (or a close approximation thereof) just limit it the way they did in the movie, LOS only.

My favorite SR GM let one of my many elf-mage's have something akin to teleportation, but it was a metamagic technique, not a spell.

The character could shift his physical body to the astral plane with a willpower test (TN=background count), and negligable drain (moderate drain, TN=BG count).

The character could only take active foci with him, and personal object with a strong enough personal connection that they could be used as a ritual link (also had a shotgun that was rarely use... never on a person, that the character also carried).

On the astral plane, I had to use my normal physical-plane attributes (which were very low, at least compared to my mental attributes), I could not move through any barrier that I could not move through on the physical plane, only got a +10 to my initiative (as opposed to the normal +20 for astral beings, and I had to fight for that), but I could move at my normal astral speed.

The character was taught this ability by a great dragon who'd used it twice in front of the character, and had used it in multiple campaigns. (As mentioned before, it was one of the things used to point out how much there was that mortals just couldn't comprehend). The dragon made the character swear an oath that he wouldn't try to project to the metaplanes while using the ability (or the dragon would hunt down and kill the character).

While the ability could get me out of handcuffs, it was only really useful for fast travel or possibly to escape, but my character had made enough enemies aware of most of his powers and general personality that keeping him using it for impressive escapes was nearly impossible (but the rest of the team was really impressed). The character was eventually captured (last game) and being transported in a van lined with magically active wood, the character was hooded with a mage-mask, and covered with fab-drenched towels. Also in the van was a pair of guards aimign shotguns at me, and several other similarly bound prisoners. When I vanished, the guards started shooting the other prisoners in the head... my character had a problem with killing non-combatants (tied up and unconcsious = non-combatant), so he let himself be transported like a lgood little prisoner... ahh the memories, the GM promised soem fun in a sectret orbital prison for mages, but the semester ended (at college) and I graduated and moved 2200 miles away . Thanks for the reminder...

Just an idea if you really feel a need to add some sort of teleportation to your games. Doesn't really break the rules, but doesn't really follow them either... look at it as more of a "transform into weak spirit" metamagic ability (or spell, if spells are preferable).

Uber-Mage
S'Ren

Instead of teleport, how about something along the lines of Create False Body.
That would allow a mage to create a humanoid shaped body out of available materials (coats, straw, paper, dust) and jump into it and move around like a rigger.
All spells cast while in the False body would cause physical Drain and there would still be a limit on how long he could sustain said spell. The mage could then end the spell and travel astral back to his own body.
Although this would not allow for transporting goodies it would still allow the player to hide it in a convenient spot to be found later, during normal buiness hours.

I always liked the idea of teleportation as powerful magic, but achievable and long range.
Does anyone here read Errant Story.? The way it's done there is with ritual sorcery, and requires something like a summoning circle on both ends. If you want to make it even harder, require there to be mages at both the sending and receiving circles.

We had a game where fast movement/teleportation was sort of achieved.

Manipulation spell, Instantaneous, S drain, LOS, TN = Body + spcl(see below). Converts your body into Light/energy. Noticeable in the visual spectrum as a bright flash of light like a flashlight covering the distance traveled. Localized thunderclap as the instantaneous transformation breaks the sound barrier (equivalent to a gunshot). Cannot move through solid objects unless they are transparent. Must add Object resistance to TN (half for drain) for highest rated item that the caster wishes to bring with him. Can have caster only versions, or cast on others.

We felt this was fairly well balanced. Its not gonna be stealthy. Its gonna be pretty difficult with hi bod and technology carrying targets. Can travel long distances with a telescope

Good as a 'get the hell out of here fast' spell for the mage or a single party member in dire perril.

Was there any range limit on that? Cause like you said, with a telescope you could go far...like, the moon, or Z-Orbital.

Turning your body into light would be roughly equivalent with setting off a nuke. Say you have a 60 kg mage. When he converts to energy he will be 5.4*10^18 Joules (60*9*10^16 J). That's about a 1290 megaton blast. That has a range of about 200 kilometers for producing third degree burns for a nondirected blast, and you would be focusing this from where you are to where you are going.

Considering that I used a pretty light mage, you can see where this would go if a troll mage tried to turn herself into light, I hope.

Talk about suicide bombing eh?

A metamagic technique that allowed someone to shift their entire body to the astral would have an Earthdawn precident, wouldn't it? Isn't that something the Lightbearers could do?

I did a run once where the players were breaking into a underground, black bag Ares facility out in the boondocks. The place was SOTA, guards, meta dogs, spirits you name it. They were there looking for a computer chip, but what they found was a lab where they were working on teleporting. Not with magic, but with technology. They had a super computer with a semi AI crunching numbers. They had two labs, one in the boondocks, and one Ares RD in Seattle. The connections were hardwired and you could teleport between the two. That was it.

Of course the facilities auto destruct was set and the team teleported out at the last second. A bunch of lab coats were really surprised when the team appeared on the pad.

I think a one shot, that cannot be duplicated is how something like that could work. But never with magic.

My Alma Mater, ANU in Canberra, has completed what I believe to be the first working demonstration of teleportation - a beam of light, which is a bit like cloning a sheep in the "are you sure it's the same one and do you really care?" sense, but I gather they're gradually moving towards solids...

bbc news

Problem with all of the viable technological teleportation methods I've seen is that none of them seem to offer any suggestion that it won't just result in the death of the individual and the creation of a second individual who believes that he or she is the first individual. Irrelevant for individual 2, but individual 1 might care.

~J

No, individual 1 would care if he wasn't atomized or molecularly deconstructed in the process.

The closest thing I know to teleporting is Gecko Crawl, with the Extended Rate modifier (x 10), with a spirit using his Movement Power on you.