How can a wizard create a permanent teleporter?

Question

Teleport traps and teleport rooms are classic tropes for both dungeons and wizard towers. You enter the room, you get teleported. In old school dungeons typically without a saving throw, and sometimes without even realizing what happens as the target area looks the same. Often the range is limited to somewhere nearby, more like Dimension Door than like Teleport.

In a DM designed dungeon, the DM or adventure author just puts in the teleporter, and it works. Magic!

As a player character wizard, I can create a permanent Teleportation Circle, although it will take me a year and a small fortune in consumed components. But that is still not a proper teleporter. It seems Glyph of Warding does not work with Teleport either.

The ideal teleporter would not need any active intent by the creature teleported, just stepping into the area (or touching an object) should be sufficient to trigger it. It would be useable as either a trap -- e.g. teleporting a thief into a dungeon cell, over a vat of acid or outside -- or a fancy elevator. (This answer doesn't do either for 5e.)

Outside of off-label use wish, how could a player character wizard create a permanent short-range teleporter for their tower?

Answer 1

You probably need to work with your DM.

As you said, while things like short-range site-to-site teleportation is somewhat common in dungeons and other DM-created environments, it's not really made available as a player-facing option. A teleportation circle would be an incredibly high price to pay for what amounts to a magical elevator. But then, the game as written doesn't deal much with player-owned property at all, much less magical installations for such places, so it doesn't seem that there's any actual problem with the players having this, but simply that the rules don't contemplate the question at all.

As unsatisfying as it is, the best answer is to talk to your DM to figure out what costs and construction effort is needed to build a 'stepping disk' or some such piece of magical architecture. You'll need to work out rules for how it works, what the rarity is, what it costs to make, and what it does.

I would suggest that you base your item on Dimension Door, both for range and effect. It basically just has a hard-coded target location -- it's set to always take you so-many feet in a specific direction. (Note that dimension door can't be tied to a glyph of warding because of the ability to take a buddy with you, which makes dimension door not target only one creature, but that would be a one-shot elevator anyway, which isn't much use.)

I'd probably count this as a fairly cheap item, probably uncommon. Common items tend to be minor flavor effects like what you could do with a cantrip, which seems low for a teleporter, but rare is the realm of fairly potent combat items, so that's high for what is basically a fancy staircase. Make it essentially immovable, so it breaks down if you move it, and reinstalling it requires some fraction of the original cost in time and gold to reset its target location. I guess you'd have to build two of them to have two-way travel, but maybe you and the DM decide it comes with two "pads" that connect to each other (unless you want it to be one-way only).

Answer 2

The Rules Say...

5E is very, very limited in the ability of players to make Permanent things. Even the rules for crafting magic items mostly come down to "Ask Your DM."

As a result, there is nothing I can find in the actual rules that lets you do this. However, constructed teleportation gates definitely exist in the worlds of D&D (for example, the 'shortcut' gates littered all throughout The Dungeon of the Mad Mage). So, they must be possible to create.

So Make a Magic Item

As a DM, this has been my general approach whenever my players want to do stuff like this, and it has worked well enough: Treat it like Magic Item Creation. Naturally, you'll need to get your DM's buy-in to do this. But this is, effectively, what you want to do. You want to create an immovable magic item that creates a persistent magical effect. A 'gate' that creates a point to point teleportation service.

As it happens, there is a spell in 5E that does precisely what you're suggesting: 2-way point-to-point teleportation with a limited range. The spell Arcane Gate.

You create linked teleportation portals that remain open for the duration. Choose two points on the ground that you can see, one point within 10 feet of you and one point within 500 feet of you. A circular portal, 10 feet in diameter, opens over each point.
[...]
Any creature or object entering the portal exits from the other portal as if the two were adjacent to each other; passing through a portal from the nonportal side has no effect.

This is, effectively, exactly what you want. Only downside is that as a spell, it only lasts for 10 minutes, and requires your Concentration.

So if we were to make a magic item that replicates this effect, we can ballpark that it'd be a Rare magic item (replicates a 6th level spell). From there, just work with your DM to look at the DMG or Xanathar's for rules on crafting a magic item and how to go about doing so.

Now, this is getting into "How I would do this" territory, but I'd be perfectly fine with this magic item. Yes, it creates a persistent ongoing effect...but it's also immovable. In fact, I'd be tempted to curve the costs of creating the item downward simply because immovable magic items are so limited in utility. If your DM doesn't want it to be 'unlimited use,' then slapping a charges limitation on it to actually cast Arcane Gate would be an answer to that.

Answer 3

The Magic Conch shell (no, not the one from Spongebob).

The adventure Storm King's Thunder features several copies of a magic item call The Conch of Teleportation. It is an enchanted conch shell that the various giant lords use to reach an undersea fortress. Here's how it works:

As an action, you can cast the teleport spell by blowing into the shell. The destination is fixed, and there is no chance of either a mishap or the spell being off target. Anyone teleported by the conch appears in a specific location designated by the item’s creator at the time the uvar rune is inscribed on the conch. It doesn’t allow teleportation to any other destination. Once its spell is cast, the conch can’t be used again until the next dawn.

Specific mechanics for creating one are not given, though the item description gives us some of the instructions. The creator specifies the destination when the specific rune is inscribed on the conch's surface. Using the Magic Item Crafting rules from Xanathar's Guide to Everything, crafting one of these will cost 20,000 gp and take 25 workweeks.

However, there is one significant limitation: it requires attunement. You would be using one (or more) of your attunement slots for this, which is a pretty high cost. But outside of this, I'm pretty confident there isn't any other player-facing method besides spending the time to make a permanent teleportation circle.

Answer 4

The rules were not designed for PCs to do this without GM support

Magic traps don't have to follow specific spells. Here is an example of a magic trap from the SRD. Note no specific spell is mentioned:

Fire-Breathing Statue Magic trap

This trap is activated when an intruder steps on a hidden pressure plate, releasing a magical gout of flame from a nearby statue. The statue can be of anything, including a Dragon or a Wizard Casting a Spell.

The DC is 15 to spot the pressure plate, as well as faint scorch marks on the floor and walls. A spell or other Effect that can sense the presence of magic, such as Detect Magic, reveals an aura of Evocation magic around the statue.

The trap activates when more than 20 pounds of weight is placed on the pressure plate, causing the statue to release a 30-foot cone of fire. Each creature in the fire must make a DC 13 Dexterity saving throw, taking 22 (4d10) fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.

Wedging an iron spike or other object under the pressure plate prevents the trap from activating. A successful Dispel Magic (DC 13) cast on the statue destroys the trap.

Likewise a teleport trap would not have to follow the exact description of any particular spell like teleportation or dimension door.

5e does not have specific instructions for materials, time, or expertise needed to build traps, because it is assumed traps are a GM thing, and not used by player characters. There are some rules for building basic mechanical damaging or snaring traps using thieves tools in Xanathar's guide, I believe, but nothing about magic traps. Magic traps are magic items, after all, and 5e doesn't give players specifics about creating magic items, only how long and how much time an item of a specific tier should take (Xantahar's guide has some useful info about that). The specifics of what tier the item is, what components you need, and any quests involved are left entirely up to the GM if they want to include magic item creation at all.