Welcome to the first part of Campaign Mastery’s major contribution to the November 2015 Blog Carnival. The theme this time around is the Unexpected, and this series is all about taking something that is usually assumed to be basic and reliable – Portals and Gates – and throwing some unexpected surprises into the mix…

Most GMs (and certainly, most players) assume that a Portal is nothing more than an express train from point A in the celestial firmament to point B, a shortcut across planar boundaries that connects two points in localized space that are otherwise remote. In fact, planar travel without the use of Portals is so inconvenient in comparison that the Portal connection can probably be considered the fundamental point of configuration of the relationship between the two planes, assuming it is at least semi-permanent.

In other words, establishing any sort of lasting connection to another plane is tantamount to rearranging the planes of existence in such a way that the formerly-remote destination can now be considered cosmically-adjacent to the plane of departure.

That alone can be a bit of a head-scratcher for the GM, who has to keep track of and understand the tactical ramifications of such devices, whether they be of the plot or the fictional-construct variety. Those planes that were neighbors of the destination plane, and hence virtually as distant from the point of departure, are now just one plane removed, practically rubbing shoulders with the departure plane. This makes control of the destination plane a critical tactical element to anyone who is capable of mounting an interdimensional conflict, no matter what the scale – though it isn’t strictly necessary to control the entire plane, just the area which contains the destination point of the Portal. It’s a potential supply line that must be cut!

I’ve been musing on these subjects for a while now, as I worked on other things, and felt it time to expand people’s horizons just a little bit, by throwing multiple conjectures and possibilities out there for GMs to contemplate. This is just the warm-up! Let’s go blow some minds, shall we?

Image based on ‘Delicate Arch 1’
provided by FreeImages.com/Steven Ritts
Vintage Frame Image by FreeImages.com/Stasys EIDIEJUS
Click on the image for 1024×768 version.
Click on for the original photo by Steven.

Parameters

There are a couple of key parameters that readers should bear in mind through the fun and games that follow. I’ve listed six, but there may be others that haven’t come to mind.

Direction

The first, and perhaps most important, is Direction. Portals and Gates can be Mono-directional, Bi-directional, or Unidirectional.

• Mono-directional: Objects can only pass from one specific end of the Portal or Gate to the other end, and not vice-versa, as though the Portal was a one-way street.
• Bi-directional: Objects can pass from either end to the other, but travel can only be in one direction at a time, rather like a Stargate, or a road that is too narrow for traffic to pass. Attempts to travel in the other direction when something is already in transit the other way can be blocked (you simply can’t enter the Portal) or can result in a collision of some kind, with the consequences open to the GM to decide.
• Unidirectional: Objects can pass from either end to the other at the same time.

Permanence

What’s the behavior of the Portal over time?

• Temporary: Portal lasts for a finite amount of time, and then it’s gone, or changes in nature, or in destination.
• Enduring: Portal lasts for a very substantial period of time, enough that people start to think that it’s permanent, and start to build plans around it – and then it’s gone, or changed. If it’s affected by “sunspots” or some equivalent, the change may be temporary – and recurring.
• Recurring, Reliable: Portal isn’t there all the time, but – like old faithful – it appears on a predictable basis. More complex versions may follow a pattern that connects to many different destinations in a predictable manner, or varies parameters in a predictable manner. Still more fun can be had by linking the patterns to different times of year (the zodiac approach) or phases of the moon (the lunar approach) or to some other parameter – anything from the total life-force of the travelers (Hit points) to overall or individual alignment to the amount of magic being carried by each person or by the group.
• Recurring, Anarchic: This is exactly the same as the last category, but without two key words: predictable and pattern. The Portal is there at unpredictable times for unpredictable durations, and may be consistent in its other parameters, or unpredictable, or even cyclic.
• Permanent: Portals connect A to B permanently until disrupted or destroyed. Other parameters may change randomly or according to some pattern, but the Portal itself is constant.

Size

While the values for this parameter described below suggest consistency, that’s not necessarily the case.

• Small: One person at a time can pass through the Portal. Others may have to wait to enter until that traveler arrives, or they may be able to follow like links of sausages. That first variation also introduces the variable of travel time for the GM to play with.
• Medium: A small group of up to four or five can pass through the Portal together. Anyone more has to wait – see my comment on travel time a moment ago.
• Large: A wagon or large group can pass through the Portal together in squads or units. Anything up to say, fifty or so at a time. More have to wait.
• Immense: An army, or a fully-crewed ship, can pass through the Portal together. Travel time can be tactically significant.

Travel

This parameter can be independently assessed for each end of the Portal.

• Stable: The location of the Portal entrance/exit is fixed in geographic location relative to something. You can add color by having that be something that is unaffected by the growth and erosion of the land around it – so that (on a mountaintop) you have to periodically excavate down to the Gate, or build a platform in order to reach it if the ground elevation has subsided. Perhaps the Portal can only be reached at High Tide?
• Proximate: The location is relatively fixed, relative to some surface feature, but that feature only defines a locus of probability within which the Portal can be located at any given time. This variable works well if the Portal is recurring, rather than people seeing it move, though fun can be had either way.
• Defined: The Portal is in one of a set number of locations, usually but not necessarily in close proximity, but which one is prone to change from time to time. This works well if the ‘Portal’ is a Stonehenge-like feature, for example, and which henge leads to the Portal changing either predictably or randomly.
• Wandering: The Portal moves, either randomly or in a predictable manner, and is not bound to any particular geographic locus. Unless it recurs with great rapidity or doesn’t move very far at a time, this can confuse people as to whether or not it is the same Portal each time. That can be great for generating paranoia if handled properly, but it’s just irritating to all concerned under any other circumstance. But, having a Portal that “walks around the world” in a straight line over a period of time – one or more years – bringing a tactical advantage and/or penalty to first this nation and then that – can add a very interesting new wrinkle to a game setting. If you go this route, I would suggest that the number of Portals in the game be very strictly limited so as not to dilute the effect.

Disruption

Everything always comes out the other end of a Portal at the same size and in the same condition as it left, right? Why should that be so? Portal travel can be profoundly unnatural, and involving all sorts of twisting and stretching and compressing. The effects can be physical, or mental, or spiritual (an alignment shift each time you use a Portal sounds like fun); and temporary or permanent. There may or may not be ways of shielding against, or mitigating, the effects. It can even be a matter of timing, if a Portal is unstable or recurring – stable when it first forms and becoming more disruptive as “the candle burns”, or perhaps starting out as very disruptive, becoming more stable as it “firms up”, and then growing in disruptive force as it begins to fade. Also, contemplate the merits of a fixed degree of disruption vs. a percentage disruption. The first keeps low-level characters out of the things and prevents armies from using them, but the more elite the operative, the better able to cope they are; the second opens the door to more egalitarian usage. Lots of possibilities…

• Safe: This is what players expect, and it’s the condition that makes it safe for a number of applications of Portals to become interesting. If Portal travel is too difficult or dangerous, other variations won’t matter because they won’t be used – except in extreme circumstances. Of course, if that’s the desired outcome….
• Irritating: There’s minor and temporary disruption of some sort. No more than 10% HP loss, or a loss of 10% of a stat for an hour or so.
• Demanding: Either the degree of disruption or the duration of the recovery required go up a notch in seriousness. 30% loss of hit points, or of a stat, for example, or 10% semi-permanent loss, or something intermediate in both. This can be managed but will generally require planning for recovery in advance. Mitigating capabilities begin to become significant at this level of disruption – meaning that some people can use the Portal and others can’t.
• Difficult: A further advance in the danger posed by Portal travel, to the point of temporary near-incapacitation. Up to 75% loss of hit points, or 50% of a stat, with a reasonably quick recovery – or half that and a slower recovery, or half that again with semi-permanent effects. Mitigating capabilities are very significant at this level of disruption.
• Dangerous: Whatever the effects of the disruption are significant to the point of making the traveler an easy target. This can be fine, if the destination is into an area held by friendly forces that will protect the traveler until they have recovered – but it makes a Portal a tactical vulnerability to the side that has one as much as it can be a tactical advantage.

One more fun thought: why not adapt the Call Of Cthulhu insanity system for the effects of Portal travel? You start with a temporary quirk that can be overcome, but if you use Portals too often, you end up with a crippling psychosis – and every individual has a different reaction, and threshold before going off the deep end…

Repeatability

There should be some way of disrupting or destroying a Portal, though it may be dangerous. The question is, what happens then? Will a/the Portal reform of it’s own accord, or must a new one be intentionally created? And will it connect with the old destination, or go somewhere new, or something in between?

• Precise: A new Portal using the same departure point will lead to the same destination point. This implies some cosmological relationship between end points, but it may be so complex as to defy analysis.
• Self-Locking: A new Portal using the same origin point will lead somewhere close to the old destination point (close being a relative term, of course); over time, the destination point will slowly move back into the old groove until eventually, it is as though there was never an interruption of services.
• Resistant: A new Portal from the same origin may resist following a path to the same destination; some sort of ‘potential’ which the old Portal link followed has been disrupted or consumed. Wait long enough without trying to re-establish the Portal and conditions may or may not recover. Think of the path between the two end points as being akin to a lightning bolt, following the path of least resistance; the very act of doing so removes the condition that made this the path of least resistance. Another way to think about it might be that the end-point builds up a resistance to the spacially-disruptive presence of a Portal. Or perhaps there is a lot of dimensional disruption that results from the destruction (permanent or temporary) of a Portal that will leave a new one more unstable in one or more respects – again, probably mitigating over time. How long do you have to wait? Who knows enough about Celestial Morphology to even guess? But lots of wizards and philosophers will have opinions, I’m sure! It’s also possible that this resistance can be overcome with the expenditure of greater effort in creating the new Portal; perhaps some sort of artificial/unnatural/arcane mechanism is required, akin to putting up a lightning rod?
• Vague: A new Portal from the same origin may be directable to some point near where the old one was, but the “healing” of the universe after the old one was destroyed/disrupted has left a “scar” where the old exit was located. Perhaps No magic will work in the immediate vicinity afterwards – that rather depends on just what magic “is” in the specific campaign.
• Unpredictable: A new Portal from the same origin will connect with another point completely at random, uncontrollably. The best that you might be able to do is ensure that it’s the same plane of existence, or perhaps you can target a region – somewhere within 100km of the old one. This option makes the stability of established Portals all the more significant, and turns the Portal entrances into locations to be very heavily fortified and protected to ensure that no-one disrupts the ‘bond’ connecting them. Which may be exactly what the GM wants the PCs to undertake…

I’ll be repeating the essential contents of this panel at the head of each of the articles that follow, but not the full discussions of possibilities. They need to be kept in the GM’s mind because I’m liable to switch gears between them without notice!

Ideas #1-4 – Temporally unstable Portals

Why do Portals only ever seem to connect with the “now” of their destinations? Is it that time travel is difficulty to manage? If so, I can sympathize – and direct the reader to my trilogy of articles on the subject – (This article, on how to handle alternate histories, might also be helpful).

Or perhaps it is “Too Sci-fi”, demanding a greater understanding of the underlying physics of the game world than the GM wants to invest his energies in creating – though, to my mind that is not only missing a bet, it is a critical error in thinking on the part of the GM. Missing an opportunity because a little sci-fi in your fantasy lends it verisimilitude and credibility that is ten times as hard to achieve in any other way, and because (unlike in real sci-fi) you can be as fuzzy and woolly and grandiose in your thinking as you want, using fantasy elements to fill in the gaps – so you can have all the fun without all the tedious hard work. And a critical error in thinking, as explained in one of my very first articles at Campaign Mastery, A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs.

Maybe it’s “Too Cosmic”, and – as a GM – you’re only interested in low-level adventures when the risks are great and the capabilities limited. That’s fair enough, but it overlooks the potential for low-level adventures or even whole campaigns centered around Portals created by someone else!

Or perhaps, as with the tragic circumstances that led the Apollo 1 fire to be lethal for the three Astronauts on the launch-pad, it is simply a failure of imagination – that it isn’t done simply because most GMs never think of it.

There are four things that Time Travel lets the fantasy GM do that are incredibly more difficult or outright impossible any other way:

• Directly connect the PCs with the backstory / campaign history;
• Directly connect the PCs with the consequences of their actions and choices, permitting them to reshape the campaign to their desires;
• Increase the degree of difficulty and tactical complexity of situations by introducing people from the future that want to change, or prevent change, to what the PCs are doing;
• Play games with cause and effect that make the improbable possible (and very entertaining) and provide the PCs with a back-door escape from campaign-ending mistakes.

  Go watch Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure again to see what I mean – and then follow it up with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, rounding out the “hard work” of “campaign research” with Back To The Future! (Link is to the 30th edition set of all three movies with a fourth disk containing two hours of extra features).

Surely, all that makes it worth thinking about?

I have four ideas to throw at you from this basic category.

Idea #1: The Future

Connecting to the future is a good deal for the GM. It means that the PCs can uncover what’s known about their enemies long after the fact, discover who they are and what they want, and make decisions accordingly, with no risk of altering their own history.

Oh, if only it were that simple! History is written by the winners, and – even to some extent in the modern world with all our ability to capture and broadcast events as they happen – manipulable in significance and interpretation. Don’t believe me? Where do you think conspiracy theories come from? People reinvent the facts to fit their beliefs and ideology all the time, and it’s as easy to swallow and believe a lie as it is the truth. Everyone does it, and after putting it all into a blender, experts come along and write a “definitive” version of history that accords with their values, philosophies, opinions, and preconceptions.

What’s more, history is easily lost and forgotten. The true facts might never have been recorded, or the records lost, or damaged, or simply be equivocal. Historians then romanticize something to fill in these blanks, supported with the best evidence they can find, and that then becomes the “official history”.

The passage of time means that more and more source materials are lost, until only the speculations and interpretations remain; and, since these too, are subject to the ravages of time, inevitably the authoritative accounts become harder and harder to distinguish from the speculations that they supplanted. Because historians always need to be busy doing something to earn their keep, and like to make sense of things as best they can (always taking into account their values, philosophies, opinions, and preconceptions), they rely less and less on these authorities and rewrite the history.

When you can’t tell what’s true and what’s not, the best you can do is go with whatever seems to make the most sense. And that’s completely discounting the distortive effects of propaganda and willful falsehood for political or entertainment purposes. not to mention the capacity for honest mistakes!

100 years after the death of the last participant, the details and specifics begin to grow fuzzy. Four hundred years after that, and specifics of any sort are hard to come by, and reliable ones even moreso. 500 years further, and even generalities are reliant on fragmentary records that need to be interpreted, often completely devoid of context. 1000 years removed again, and most of the records are completely gone without a trace, and beyond broad generalities, reports of reports of reports are often the most reliable sources of information. Languages are changed almost beyond recognition, and vagaries of meaning and word-choice are lost; all that is often left is a literal translation shorn of context and any hope of assessing bias.

The reliability of the information the PCs can obtain decreases with every year into the future they travel; but the unknowns also diminish, filled with something, factual or speculative.

Even today, we’re still learning new things about the events of the Second World War that can completely reshape our understanding of events and why they occurred. Every new revelation only emphasizes how incorrect and incomplete the recorded histories of only ten years ago were.

Examples? Stalin’s motivations and thinking in allying with Hitler are now understood to be a means of buying time (forestalling the inevitable invasion by Hitler’s forces) until his spies could determine the intention of Japan; it was only when he became convinced that the Japanese were not going to again try and invade Siberia that the forces held ready in the East could be released to come West – forces that German Intelligence had either ignored or discounted. That’s one. The state of the German economy under Hitler, perpetually on the precipice of collapse without massive infusions of stolen cash from conquests, explains a lot of previously-obscure objectives and military strategies.

No matter what they learn, there will always be something that’s unknown, something that’s incorrect, something that’s misinterpreted, and something that leads them into a false sense of security. The GM is in total control of their sources of information and can plausibly manipulate it however he sees fit – giving the players all the essential backstory in an entertaining form, while keeping major twists and turns up his sleeve with which to surprise them when the time comes.

On top of that, there will undoubtedly be factions that want to expose future-traveling PCs to willful misinformation in order to manipulate the past in their favor, and groups who simply want to stop the PCs from doing anything at all. For every ally they gain, they add two or three enemies – who will know parts of the truth more clearly than the PCs, and are able to take advantage of it, accordingly!

And all of that presupposes that the Portal connects with the future of the portal’s location, i.e. it’s future self. Things get even more intriguing if you contemplate a portal connecting not with another plane now but with that other plane at some point in the future. How will the Elemental Plane Of Fire change with a couple of centuries, or millennia, under its belt? What hazards will exist that the PCs have never heard or thought of? And how reliable will any information be with planar boundaries to cross?

On top of that – as if all this wasn’t enough already – the very concept of temporal instability suggests that there is no consistency in terms of when the PCs will arrive. This time, it might be next week; next time, 836 years from now. Every time they go there, the destination plane can have changed completely, presenting a new face to the players. Each time, they will have to start from scratch, seeking out new allies and overcoming new enemies and obstacles.

Such a portal is a direct line into adventure and into the backstory of modern events. In fact, the greater danger is that those modern events will be overshadowed by the sheer scope of what is on offer down the rabbit-hole!

Idea #2: The Past

It’s not too difficult to dream up a temporal cosmology that permits the PCs to do anything they want in the past without affecting their own time. A pipeline into the past therefore permits the PCs to interact directly with the causes of the troubles they now face, exploring the context of their situation first-hand instead of being exposed to page after page of exposition or written history. I truly wish I had thought of this option back when I was first contemplating the need for the Orcs and Elves series, it would have saved me a huge amount of time and trouble – and prevented shutting the campaign down for long enough to do the work. Significantly, it has not restarted afterwards!

Connecting to the past means that there are no easy answers on tap to the PCs, no matter how incorrect those answers might be. They will only learn what they go out and discover for themselves. It’s a way to bring the past to life in a way that is infinitely better than just about any alternative that I can think of.

But that’s only after the PCs have figured out where and when they are. If they already know that Portals lead into the past, that’s all well and good; but if they have some desperate plan to solve their problems by sneaking around them across planar boundaries, a surprise trip into the past can be all the more entertaining.

But the fun doesn’t stop there – the easiest way to permit the PCs to act without altering their personal futures is to assume that no Portal or Gate leads to the multiverse of origin, they all lead to parallel-world versions of the multiverse. You also need to postulate some sort of temporal resonance that binds characters who travel by Gate to their own timeline, so that when they return to their present, they really do return to their present.

(Not that doing so will necessarily be as simple as clicking their heels together and saying “there’s no place like home” three times! The Portal they use might be mono-directional, requiring arcane engineering at the destination end to become bi-directional (even temporarily). And if it’s not a temporary change, if it lasts for any span of time at all, they have just opened a doorway for the forebears of their enemies straight into the PCs stronghold).

But this fact, by it’s nature, limits the accuracy and validity of the information the PCs can develop about their own situation. And details that they get wrong can easily get them killed – or in even worse trouble.

Temporal instability always compounds complication with complication, and – from the GM’s perspective – it’s all gravy.

Idea #3: Anarchic Time – Closed

I’ve kind of jumped the gun on this idea a little. Anarchic time Portal travel means the destination is unpredictable. ‘Closed’ means that there is a limiting window within which that destination will occur. This works well with the concept of “critical events” that change the shape of time so radically that you can only get through them the hard way, dividing history into discrete “eras” – travel can be unlimited but unpredictable within the same “era” but not beyond it in either direction. Past and Future are equally probable.

A further option is the “Inverted Closure” – in which unlimited travel back and forth to any other era is possible, but is forbidden within the contemporary era. That means that there are no easy solutions to the problems faced by the PC’s time; recent events, and the consequences of the PCs actions, are fixed and immutable by means of Portal Travel.

This notion works well with the idea that destiny is an overall “shape” to which events will conform, though the details may vary. Something will always happen to bring about the transition between eras; prevent one by meddling in the past, and something more dire will take its place because the defeat of that enemy force has left a vacuum that the new enemy can take advantage of.

There are other ways of closing the temporal options. Perhaps the temporal shift in destination happens with every dimensional transit, no matter how it’s achieved – and is a fixed number of years for each dimensional boundary that must be crossed.

Think about that for a minute. How do you know that a Fire Elemental summoned into the Prime Material Plane is contemporary with the character doing the Summoning? Is it a question you would ever think to ask? Similarly, if you Gate into the City Of Brass, how would you ever know that it was not the contemporary version of the city? It could be from a thousand years in the future or the past, and you would never know – you simply accept it as you find it. You would not even ask the question, “when are we?” – and that throws a new unpredictability into the picture, and a new cause of misinformation into the research of the PCs.

A guiding principle to remember is “Predictability creates opportunity; anarchy creates experiences.” If a phenomenon is predictable, a character can use it to their advantage, can plan for it, and make it beneficial; only the shape and degree of the benefit changes. Unpredictability cannot be integrated into planning except in the form of contingencies – whatever a character finds is what they will experience, and it may or may not be relevant to their purposes in travel.

Idea #4: Anarchic Time – Open

Anarchic time is akin to Quantum Leap, you never know what you’re going to get mixed up in next. There is an interesting analogue to this idea in the form of a well-known principle of Quantum Mechanics, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; it suggests the concept that you can either know where your destination is, or when you will arrive, but never both. The more accurately you determine one, the fuzzier the other becomes.

This takes away the tactical advantages of Portal Travel, but replaces them with a sense of exploration, of discovery.

But it also opens the door to a whole different class of complications, without the PCs (or anyone from their era) ever setting foot into a Portal.

Picture your PCs going about their business when a Future Traveller pops up and tells you, “You must do [x] or everything will be lost,” and proceeds to spin a horror story of how ruined everyone’s lives will be if the PCs don’t agree. Alignment tests, etc, show that the time traveler is lawful good and being completely honest, and he is carrying bonafides that are quite convincing. And so the PCs set forth – only to be intercepted by another time traveler who tells them, “On no account must you ever do [x] or everything will be lost,” and proceeds to spin an entirely different horror story of how ruined everyone’s lives will be when the golden age promised by the first time traveler falls apart. Once again, his bonafides are impeccable, and he is Lawful Good, and telling the absolute truth. And, at the same time, unknown to all concerned, a third time traveler is warning the target of action [x] that the PCs are coming to tear his world apart, and he must stop them before it’s too late; and a fourth is somewhere else, warning the PC’s government that they are about to precipitate a conflict with the target of [x] and have to be stopped by any means necessary.

Without warning, the PCs are now ground zero in a Time War. Their enemies know they are coming, and are acting to stop them doing something they aren’t sure they want to do anymore, their allies have turned against them, and no matter what they choose, there will be someone pulling strings to make sure it is the wrong choice (from the point-of-view of their personal comfort and safety).

And, perhaps, to top it all off in a Twelve Monkeys twist, they are all working from misunderstood fragments of misinterpreted history, and [x] is not the critical event, it is the time travelers putting forces in motion to achieve or prevent [x] that makes doom inevitable – right up to the very last instant, when the PCs can rewrite history by doing the unthinkable and making peace with someone who temporal manipulation has made their enemy, no matter how undesirable and untrustworthy that individual might be…

The one thing that can be counted as fact concerning any conflict is that there will be at least two contradictory opinions over the justification of the conflict and outcome. Any time traveler with the capability must be sorely tempted to kill Adolf Hitler before he starts World War II – but what if that places the Nazis under the command of Heinrich Himmler, or Hermann Göring, possibly making the situation worse? Hitler ruled Nazi Germany with an iron fist, but there were times when his decision-making process was dubious; this led to spectacular victories, but many of these were all-or-nothing gambles, and eventually one was unsuccessful. Both Himmler and Göring were more cautious, and possibly even more ruthless and fanatical (it must be remembered that Göring appointed Himmler head of the SS because he thought the incumbent was not ruthless enough). It’s easy to imagine another time traveler trying to undo the damage being done by the first!

In fact, that’s one of the central themes of one of my favorite books, The Proteus Operation by James P. Hogan.

That’s the sort of fun that Anarchic Open portal travel lends itself to creating.

Idea #5 – The Neighbor Of My Neighbor Is Closer Than You Think

I’m going to close out this first part of the series by stepping outside the Time Travel group of ideas to revisit an option that I mentioned at the very start of the article. Portals effectively distort spacial relationships – and if you don’t know there is such a portal, the consequences can be a very nasty surprise indeed.

But that’s fairly traditional thinking – Teleport always been used as a means of getting forces behind enemy lines. Portals and Gates are just a more structured and permanent way of achieving the same thing, perhaps on a larger scale. That, after all, is the principle theme of Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar Saga and its sequels.

But what if rifts formed spontaneously from time to time – and you had a prophecy that told you when one would form, and where it would lead? Or simply knew that a neighbor nation was working on a way to make one? What political and military maneuverings might you undertake in preparation for the day when the connection was established?

The whole principle of trade, for example, is based on the scarcity of objects and materials in one place relative to another; buy those commodities where they are plentiful, and therefore cheap, and transport them to where they are rare, and hence expensive, with the price going up with every league traveled. If a portal is going to reliably connect that plentiful region with that region of demand, reducing the travel time to a day or two, isn’t that essentially the same thing as having that resource-production area physically only a day or two away? Does the portal open the way for your armies to encircle an enemy? Or simply open a new front in a war?

Do you think the people who are going to be disadvantaged would ignore the threat if they knew it was coming? Or even suspected that it might be?

I once read somewhere that logistics, more than any other factor, determine the outcome of wars. And Portals – even to other planes of existence – can change the logistics. Tactically secure positions become vulnerable, while tactically vulnerable positions may have an army of reinforcements just a few paces removed.

The more control you have over such portals – and the more readily you can create them – the greater their military impact. A portal can be every bit the super-weapon of a fantasy campaign, and should be treated accordingly; the discovery of unsuspected and almost unlimited gold deposits pales in comparison. How much fun can you have with that? Try reading The Redemption Of Althalus by David and Leigh Eddings, one of my favorite Fantasy novels, and then argue the point.

What if the US was suddenly physically a part of Europe – perhaps connected by the equivalent of a narrow land bridge? Or Barsoom?

How would the US react if it was Mexico that suddenly had that connection – and it was to the Middle East, or Southeast Asia? How would China react? Pakistan? North Korea?

What extra-planar physical resources are out there, and what can you do with them – if you could only bring them back? How might your neighbors react? How might the neighboring planes react to the one taking the resources?

Food for thought, isn’t it?

To Be Continued…

This is just the beginning – I have 15 more nasty tricks that you can surprise your players with that are still to come in this series!