A logical reason for wizard towers

[Vebyast]

A Logical Reason for Wizard Towers

We all know what a wizard tower is, and we all know that we want our wizards to have them. As things stand, however, there is absolutely no reason for anybody to build stuff aboveground, thanks to the Tome rules about effects with range longer-than-long. However, we all want our wizard towers. They're too cool to get rid of. Therefore, I've come up with a simple way to make wizard towers make sense. In a phrase, line of sight.

In a slightly longer phrase, with the addition of a single, relatively minor magical item, suddenly every single caster in the world wants a tower for himself and it is in every caster's interest to build as many towers as he can.

Edit: The original idea (repeaters --> towers) got shot down pretty easily, but the components ("we want towers" and "repeaters to make vanilla teleport usable again") are still going.

To start with, let's look at the Tome rules for rock walls and Teleport effects:

By putting anything behind at least 40’ of solid, continuous material (like solid walls of dirt, stone, ice, or whatever, but not a forest of trees or rooms of furniture) the area is immune to unlimited-range or “longer than Long Range” spells like Scrying and transportation magic like teleport, greater teleport, the travel version of gate, and other effects.

Just for the purposes of making sure everybody's on the same page, the most important side effect of this: on a curved world with Earth's radius, a single teleport can only take you about thirty kilometers, and that's assuming you have a 100-meter hill to stand on. Take into account the fact that most DND worlds are tiny (see this map, which fits roughly fifteen entire fantasy settings into one earth-sized globe), and it gets even worse. Of course, this makes teleportation effects much, much less useful for long-distance travel than they were originally. The wizard can only take you about three hours' fast march instead of from anywhere to anywhere. Not a major problem, but it makes the game less cinematic.



So, the proposed low-end magical item: a simple magical line-of-effect repeater. This would be a very, very cheap magical item (any caster with CL greater than 4 or 5 can create one with a few days' work) that does exactly what it says on the tin. If you have magical line of effect to a repeater, then you also have magical line of effect from the repeater. The distance to a point staged through the repeater is the sum of the distance from the repeater to the point and the distance from the caster to the repeater (this is recursive, of course; you can chain repeaters together for going around multiple corners).

Why does this result directly in towers everywhere? Simple: teleport infrastructure. If you put your repeater a thousand meters up in the air, the horizon is a lot further away, so a single teleport can take you further. It is in two cities' best interests to build a line of repeaters between their cities, because that allows casters to teleport between those two cities. Since these towers are relatively cheap, every caster with even mediocre skills would be able to raise one wherever they were with only a few minutes' effort (a single stone shape and a premade repeater beacon would do the trick, for example). It would only take a few months for lines to be put up between every population center in the world, and only a few years before 95% of the world's surface is hooked into the repeater network.

Why does this result in wizard strongholds being towers? Also simple: defense. The wizard builds his actual stuff fifty feet below ground, as normal; that way he can't be hit by scry-and-die tactics. However, he leaves a shaft up to the surface, then extends it a hundred feet or so beyond, up to a repeater beacon. This gives the wizard the ability to see (scry) and shoot (fireball) out of his fortress while remaining safe and sound. It also allows the wizard to hook straight into the teleport network without leaving the safety of his living room, which is great for flavor.


Some other notes:

• All of this still applies when you're in flatland. Forty linear feet of trees isn't that hard to come by in a forest. Same with grasslands, shrubs, small hills, mountains, etcetera. Towers in those settings don't need to be as tall (a hundred meters is plenty in flatland), but they're still present, if only in large cities and trade hubs.
• Loading up their lair with these gives wizards back the "omnipresent antagonist" feel they used to have. It also presents a neat bonus for sufficiently small rogues, namely, HVAC stand-ins.
• It turns large oceans back into trade and communication barriers. Since you can't build towers on water, you can't build teleport lines over water, and so you have to go around on land.
• The towers provide strategic objectives for the party to play with. For example, a city of evil is under siege by the armies of good. The party's goal is to go around flattening towers in the region (which are defended by scry-and-die tactics from the city) until the city is cut off from the teleport network, at which point the good guys can steamroller it.
• It's now possible to teleport through the Planes of Earth and Water. All you have to do is place a string of repeaters in the rock or water every forty feet. Since the repeaters are basically chump change (you could Wish for dozens or hundreds of them at a time), major cities in the Water and Earth elemental planes are simply connected to each other again.
• The beacons have to be large, immobile, time-consuming to activate, or all of the above. Otherwise, casters would carry around pouches full of repeaters, which they would toss around corners and through doors in fights.
• Something to add to this setup would be "keys" of some form. Basically, the repeaters are set up so that they can only be activated if you have the key, which could be a command word, a physical chunk of stuff (say, a sergeant's badge for the Armies of Good), a particular property ("only bards can use this repeater"), or even particular people ("only the master of the tower can use this repeater"). This makes the world a bit more interesting (for example, cities can lock down their trade routes to enforce taxes and tariffs, or armies can set up repeaters that only they can use), but it also makes casters rather more powerful (for example, the aforementioned omnipresent-in-his-own-lair wizard).

[Blasted]

I think that this doesn't really give a reason for wizard towers so much as a reason for wizard radio masts. 100m+ high, with a periscope/crows nest/viewing platform on top. While interesting in itself, I don't see it as a traditional wizard's tower.

To push it further, a better solution would be hot air balloons (depending on realm), floating rocks/platforms and large flying creatures capable of carrying the repeaters. This gives you the benefit (so long as they remain in sight distance), while removing the disadvantages of being immobile and are simpler to get hold of.
Depending on the technology used, you could get up to the higher atmosphere and really get a good sight range. At 1000m you get 112km vision.

[Ice9]

Requiring the repeaters to stay immobile would at least favor some form of tower (although yes, not exactly a classic one). Another factor is that if anyone can use the repeaters, then you definitely wouldn't want a permanent connection into your base of operations. The simple setup would be more like:

A
|
B--C

A: The tower beacon, as high up as possible
B: A fortified room with some guards in it.
C: The Wizard's actual home base.
With the connections between each being long thin partially-full tunnels (let's say just the 15' on each end solid) that can be sealed with a sliding block to cut off their LoE.
(Actually, you can make these links as long as you want, with multiple repeaters - the key is that at one or more points, the connection can be broken if desired).

You keep the AB connection sealed in general. When you want to scry or whatnot, you go to point B, seal the BC connection, open up the AB connection, and do your scrying/teleportation/whatever.
This way, at least your enemies can only teleport in if they manage to find out when you've got the AB connection open, and they won't get all the way to your home, just to a fortified room that can hopefully be turned into a deathtrap if things go badly.


If the "personal use only" option is in effect, then this security isn't needed. Just scatter repeaters around your base like they're going out of style, and enjoy your "one way mirror" for scry-n-die.

[LR]

I'm not sold at all on curvature blocking teleportation. In a world like that, Wizards wouldn't come up with some silly workaround, they'd just start teaching Plane Shift in Wizard colleges instead of Teleport. The problem with Teleport fixes itself by dropping Teleport out of the genepool.

[PhaedrusXY]

Even with the horizon blocking thing, they could teleport to the moon (or whatever), and then teleport to wherever they wanted to go in the first place. No need for repeaters as long as there is some celestial body that you can actually survive going to. At least after they get Greater Teleport access.

I had forgotten about that rule in the Tomes, though. It's a bit late in my Tome game to implement it, as the PCs have already been teleporting all over the place thanks to one guy with the fiendish feat, and an Enveloping Pit (50' deep Portable Hole). That method of travel brings its own host of problems, though. It's not very good for "Scry and Die", unless you mean the party dying.

[For Valor]

I'm not sold at all on curvature blocking teleportation. In a world like that, Wizards wouldn't come up with some silly workaround, they'd just start teaching Plane Shift in Wizard colleges instead of Teleport. The problem with Teleport fixes itself by dropping Teleport out of the genepool.

I disagree. Both plane shift and greater teleport are level 7 Wiz/Sor spells. Now, I guess you could say "I use plane shift to teleport to the next city[/i], but you're going to be 5d% miles away from your destination. Using greater teleport, you will be exactly where you want to be.

Now, I can see plane shift being nice in this situation compared to the normal teleport, since they've both got a chance for messing up (sorta... you know what I mean). But teleport is a level 5 spell, so there's really no comparison.

EDIT: I also think that the general consensus to solve this problem would be floating sky rocks or clouds that solid objects can rest on (like the giants have!)

So how DO you give the incentive to build towers?

[Vebyast]

The point about celestial bodies is well made. You could probably get where you need to go even without the habitable part; all you need are nerves of steel and a really, really good concentration bonus. However, three problems:
1) You have to know where you're going. You could probably get around this after a solid argument with your DM, but it'd come down to how you interpret Greater Teleport's ability to put you wherever you want, and whether it follows Teleport's restrictions on "you have to have seen your destination".
2) This tactic requires multiple castings. Not a real problem for people with the Greater Teleport feat, but definitely a problem for people casting out of their highest-level spell slots.
3) You need multiple celestial bodies if you want to jump to the other side of the world. You also need more and more castings. When you're talking about seventh-level spell slots, it adds up fast.


Also, I cede the point about these not being more of radios masts. However, I do think that they'd still be towers or floating rocks rather than birds. Birds don't have constant uptime and they require active maintenance; a tower, on the other hand, you just drop down in the middle of nowhere and forget about.



Edit: I am reminded of one of the more whacked-out novels I've ever read, in which some of the dragonlance main-story characters went and flew to one of the setting's magic moons. It was kind of weird.

[For Valor]

1) Greater teleport doesn't require that you see the destination (it says so in the description, in the same sentence where it says there's no distance cap), so that doesn't matter.
2) It also takes multiple castings with this whole radio tower thing. Celestial bodies are still better ideas than towers.
3) I was thinking about repeaters on the celestial bodies, actually...

But we all agree that wizard towers wouldn't work out with these ideas in mind. So what would encourage wizard towers?

I was thinking about towers providing magical benefits based on their radius and height, but it would require a lot of fudging...

[Grek]

This: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51359

Plus some rituals with an AoE of LoS that you would want to put up on as big an area as possible.

[Blasted]

from a real world POV you want a tower because it provides defense.
That defense is made up of:

• a vantage point
  strong walls
  defenders

Magic systematically removes each of those advantages.
there are better vantage points on flying things. Strong walls are now easy to breach. Defenders can be housed elsewhere can be summoned or created when required.
A dungeon makes a much better location every time.
You'd have to make some arbitrary reason. magical benefits based on height/radius are as good as any.

[Prak]

what if all the towers are made by Seekers of the Lost Wizard Traditions to benefit from Expanse of the Sky. Hell, maybe the ceiling of each level has a magic roof that allows them to cast as if they were standing on the top of the tower (under an open sky). Or maybe there should be a Tome version of Sanctum Spell, and one of the benefits is that any circumstantial bonus you would receive in one part of your sanctum, you receive in all of your sanctum.

[Vebyast]

Another idea: large-scale or permanent magic (enchanting, etc) either causes problems for things around it or has problems if there's stuff around it. An example of the first case: when enchanting magic items, every ten tons of dirt within a hundred feet makes the enchanting take 5% longer. An example of the second: whenever you finish an enchantment, every ten tons of dirt within a hundred feet generates an earth elemental intent on eating your new Ring of Protection.

[For Valor]

That makes the whole thing more of a bother than a strict possibility/impossibility the way teleporting worked.

I like the idea of Sanctum Spell and improving AoE effects if you're in a tower where you've linked yourself to whatever magic gem is there.

[Blasted]

Another idea: large-scale or permanent magic (enchanting, etc) either causes problems for things around it or has problems if there's stuff around it. An example of the first case: when enchanting magic items, every ten tons of dirt within a hundred feet makes the enchanting take 5% longer. An example of the second: whenever you finish an enchantment, every ten tons of dirt within a hundred feet generates an earth elemental intent on eating your new Ring of Protection.

This interferes with casting on the ground, but that may be your intention.
The best place to cast would be a 100' spherical room, deep underground.

I think that improving magical defenses may be the way to go. You don't need your 40' of rock to prevent teleporting/scrying if a spell can do it. But that's only half way there.
Underground you can funnel attackers in pretty much any way you want (within reason in terms of umber hulks, etc.) With a tower you're going to be attacked in any way an aerial attacker wants. There are many more flying threats than digging threats, I think.

[Kaelik]

I'm not sold at all on curvature blocking teleportation. In a world like that, Wizards wouldn't come up with some silly workaround, they'd just start teaching Plane Shift in Wizard colleges instead of Teleport. The problem with Teleport fixes itself by dropping Teleport out of the genepool.

I disagree. Both plane shift and greater teleport are level 7 Wiz/Sor spells. Now, I guess you could say "I use plane shift to teleport to the next city[/i], but you're going to be 5d% miles away from your destination. Using greater teleport, you will be exactly where you want to be.

Now, I can see plane shift being nice in this situation compared to the normal teleport, since they've both got a chance for messing up (sorta... you know what I mean). But teleport is a level 5 spell, so there's really no comparison.

EDIT: I also think that the general consensus to solve this problem would be floating sky rocks or clouds that solid objects can rest on (like the giants have!)

So how DO you give the incentive to build towers?

Plane Shift is also a level 5 spell. And Greater Plane Shift is a level 7 or 8 spell.

You aren't making a strong argument for abandoning Plane Shift distance travel since Teleport in random curvature land also requires tons of X level slots to get where you want, because you have to go around curvature slowly.

[For Valor]

Plane shift is level 5 for a cleric, level 7 for a wizard. And greater glane shift is level 7 for clerics (8 for wizards).

We were talking about wizards, since clerics build monastaries and shit instead of towers (therefore this thread doesn't care about them).

Also, you don't use "tons of X level slots" because of the repeater. Please read ALL of the OP, not just the parts you think you can poke holes in.

[LR]

Plane shift is level 5 for a cleric, level 7 for a wizard. And greater glane shift is level 7 for clerics (8 for wizards).

We were talking about wizards, since clerics build monastaries and shit instead of towers (therefore this thread doesn't care about them).

Also, you don't use "tons of X level slots" because of the repeater. Please read ALL of the OP, not just the parts you think you can poke holes in.

Yes, plane shift is a 5th level Cleric spell, but you're the one using Dungeonomicon rules.

As written, a Wizard can learn a spell from any spellbook page or scroll she has deciphered. Deciphering a page or scroll is a spellcraft check that, among other things, tells you whether it is arcane or divine. That means that under the rules as written, a Wizard can take Cleric Scrolls and copy them into her spellbook and then they become Wizard spells of the same level. Honestly… most DMs will not let you do that even though the PHB is extremely specific that that is exactly what you can do. But if it's really important to you to learn Cleric spells, you still can.

A DM can use whatever rules from Tomes he wants, but when talking about the Tomes universe in a vacuum, that luxury doesn't exist.

Even giving you that Wizards can't do that, they can still bind a Janni chauffeur to ferry the party from place to place with her at-will plane shift. They can even bind the Janni yesterday and use teleport today once they get close enough to their destination.

Also, Wizards build towers because Wizards can actually build towers made of 40 feet of contiguous adamantine and cockslapping the world with your giant phallic building is exactly the thing a bored Wizard would do. They don't need magical periscopes as an excuse.

[For Valor]

Using the RAW to give wizards plane shift as a level 5 spell is about as legitimate as saying that monks aren't proficient with their unarmed strike--it's written, but it isn't intended.

Also, the thing about plane shift and teleport used together is also wrong. The OP (and I'm just trusting Vebyast here) says that you can only go 30 km around the earth with a single teleport, which is about 18-19 miles. Now, with plane shift you're distance-off is five to five hundred miles. Compare 18 to 500... 500 is a lot bigger. So no, plane shift is still a terrible idea.

And then you said something about adamantine penises. Har har, you are hilarious.

[LR]

Isn't this argument about the RAW in Tomes creating the unintended consequence of no astral travel through the circumference of the Earth? You aren't going to win any points by claiming RAI.

Also, I'm not talking about the Wizard casting Plane Shift anymore, I'm talking about hiring a Janni who can plane shift at-will and using that to get there. Which is still a lot easier to believe than proposing a system where Wizards create teleport relays for potential enemies out of the goodness of their heart. Hell, Wizards using Necklaces of Adaptation to teleport into space and back again is more believable.

[Kaelik]

Using the RAW to give wizards plane shift as a level 5 spell is about as legitimate as saying that monks aren't proficient with their unarmed strike--it's written, but it isn't intended.

And yet, in the Tome rules, it's intended. Just like the Teleport limit. Without intended Wizard casting Cleric spells, you don't have any limit on Teleport. With Teleport limit, Wizard casts level 5 Planeshift and level 7 Greater Planeshift.

Also, the thing about plane shift and teleport used together is also wrong. The OP (and I'm just trusting Vebyast here) says that you can only go 30 km around the earth with a single teleport, which is about 18-19 miles. Now, with plane shift you're distance-off is five to five hundred miles. Compare 18 to 500... 500 is a lot bigger. So no, plane shift is still a terrible idea.

Janni has Plane Shift at will. That means you can just keep rolling till you get a roll of 20 or less.

[For Valor]

Um... alright, so what I'm seeing here is that wizards would rather:

Pull Lesser Planar Binding to grab a Janni and plane shift until they are 18 or fewer miles away from their intended destination, and then teleport there.

As opposed to:

Create a magical object that repeats the spell teleport so that transportation always uses only one spell, doesn't take as much time, and can even be used for self-defense.

....yeah.... even if the Janni doesn't run away (You can't tell it that you're going to kill it if it plane shifts because you'll never be able to hunt it down, and using dimensional anchor or a magic circle with the same effect is unfeasable. So you'd need to befriend it or bribe it.) you're still looking at burning 2 spells and spending some obnoxious amount of time plane shifting as opposed to wiring yourself into the teleportation interweb and only burning one spell to get to exactly wherever you want.

[PhaedrusXY]

It is an interesting premise, and it could certainly work if you wanted to include it in your own game you're DMing. It's pretty interesting in fact, and could offer several plot hooks itself. It's not made of bullet-proof logic, but then again nothing in D&D-world is. There are also other ways around the problem it is addressing, but then again, that doesn't mean this still wouldn't be an interesting system to stick in your game world.

[For Valor]

Agreed.

Still... while this is an interesting idea, it doesn't encourage wizard towers.

What sort of magic boost would work to encourage wizard towers? Last night I thought about buffs and spells with durations. Maybe towers with some proper form of structure make dispelling more difficult/impossible?

[LR]

Agreed.

Still... while this is an interesting idea, it doesn't encourage wizard towers.

What sort of magic boost would work to encourage wizard towers? Last night I thought about buffs and spells with durations. Maybe towers with some proper form of structure make dispelling more difficult/impossible?

Dispelling isn't really a thing that Wizards actually worry about in the field, and magic traps that you can't dispel would be overly cruel to the players.

Tomes gives a good rational for Wizard Towers (and towers in general) in cities.

Spired
Magic has been used in the construction of the city to enable tall spires of surpassing delicacy. Only the most agile fliers can enter such a city, but defenders can fire down upon invaders with surprising ease.
Prerequisites: City must have been designed by someone with at least 10 ranks in Knowledge(architecture) and the ability to cast 5th level effects.
Effects: Only flyers with a Maneuverability Rating of Good or better can fly in the city. Attackers in the city suffer from archer attacks every 10 minutes as natives exploit the unique construction of their city.

For Wizard Towers outside civilization, I can imagine Wizards using the tops of strong towers as entrances for their fortresses, but that doesn't solve the problem of getting Wizards inside the towers they build.

Something like towers allowing free spellcasting out of spellbooks that's dispelled when brought outside the tower would encourage the actions we want (Wizards spending long hours in their towers researching), but would also allow unlimited iron production and other tricks with Instantaneous spells.

[For Valor]

why haven't I ever seen that before? I swear, I've read ToF backwards and forwards... -*sigh*-

I do like that "free casting within a small area" thing for the tower. Of course, this would kind of destroy the whole idea of PCs bursting in--a wizard could certainly spend an hour or something fortifying the whole damn place before getting to his experiments.

. . .

Lightbulb.

Why not combine the above idea with the idea from Vebyast's latest post. There's a special type of permenacy that you can use on mage's private sanctum. It gives the sanctum unlimited spell use with a very small area, so long as the mage is there ALONE (excluding summoned and called creatures--this way adventurers can break in and all the wizard's buffs will drop, but he'll have 100% of his spells).

THEN, this special version of the sanctum has a 5% chance of dispelling itself every round for each [weight here] of solid matter within [range here] (this decides how tall the towers need to be, minimally). That's ASF... on steroids... which is perfect for a spellcasting on steroids.

How does it look?