Teleportation House
ERIES OF EVENTS
- Party declares destination and pays
- Clerks lead party to courtyard to wait while they prep the portal room, they may have an encounter, exposition, or lore here
- When ready, key bearer comes and leads party to portal room
- Key Bearer gives any necessary instructions and begins Opening the Portal
- Party & Key Bearer traverse portal
- Exit other side at destination, Party is free to leave
NVIRONMENT details
The Exterior
The teleportation house is a large square brickwork building with many tall stained glass windows and stone columns along the facade. Large decorative banners hang from the entablature displaying various destinations; Patches on the walls are overgrown with ivy, giving a very scholarly appearance to the exterior.
The Interior
The interior of the building contains many chambers with various offices, portal apparatus, and rooms for miscellaneous uses. These lay along the outer wall with a wide hallway on the interior side that joins them. A courtyard lies at the center for travelers to wait and rest. As you enter, you see a long dark wood desk with a handful of clerks. Along the wall behind the desk, a vast series of square cubby holes contain drawers, curios, and many stacked scrolls of unknown importance.
The Portal Room
The Key Bearer leads you to a small stone room with many intricate glass orbs and metal rods. Each orb is finely carved with many faintly glowing sigils. The rods appear to be made of gold and point various forks and staves toward the center of the room. There lies a small dais where an etched circle of runes is carved.
The Clerks
The clerks wear simple robes of various muted colors with a tabard that designates their role. Some are scribes, while others are administrators. Those that accompany travelers through the portals are known as key bearers, and their sigil represents the destination they are assigned to travel to.
Teleportation Keys
In Abaddon, teleportation is a dangerous thing. In general, portals are chaotic at best, and the further you wish to travel, the more powerful and unstable a portal must be. Traversing a portal without proper knowledge or equipment could, in a best case scenario, cast you to unknown parts of the world, and in a worst case, teleport “parts” of you to various locales.
Because of this, a teleportation key is essential. These keys are artifacts which are imbued with a distinct recollection of the location they represent. While official teleportation keys are usually rings, others may be amulets, trinkets, or even mundane objects. A key bearer always holds one of these when opening a portal, and in doing so stabilizes the arcane energy enough to traverse safely to the intended destination.
Opening The Portal
As the Key Bearer chants, lightning suddenly strikes from the center of the dais. Many are diverted into the rods, but occasionally a bolt will strike errant into the surrounding walls and let off great sparks as it impacts. Wind begins to emit from a slowly growing portal now. The orbs vibrate and flicker wildly. You can see a liquid changing scene on the other side. One moment you see a field of flowers, the next a snowy tundra, the next a desert canyon. It shifts and snaps from place to place, and the wind becomes more violent.
The lightning reaches a peak of activity, and licks the edge of the portal with arcane energy. It is now the diameter of the dais, some fifteen feet across.
DM NOTE: Players may see various unsettling or wondrous things through the portal before it is stabilized. This can be used as an opportunity for a plot hook.
Then the portal stabilizes and the wind dies down, bolts of electricity arc between the edges of the portal and the rods, the orbs glow brightly.
As you step through the other side, you feel a sudden wave of exhaustion. It feels as if you had just run a marathon. The clerk walks twenty paces into the room and stops. They releases their concentration and the portal implodes with a great WHOOP, then crackles into blue glittering dust.