Can you teleport into a void?

[Senko]

I was thinking about flying creatures who might want to teleport from the ground to the air so takeoffs are easier (dragons for example) and it got me wondering about other places with no clear navigation points like the plane of air or water and deep space for creatures like Migo. So I'm wondering per the rules can you teleport to a place with no landmarks to identify it as distinct from other areas. For example this empty patch of the plane of air (just open skies no land, water or fire that could be used ad a navigation point vs all the other empty ) patch's of the plane of air or halfway between pluto and the Kuniper belt

[Bjørn Røyrvik]

I allow it, including into the Oort cloud. I don't see anything in the rules that disallows it and the rules are silent on the subject of what is needed to distinguish one thing from another when it comes to infinite spaces. I assume that as long as there are two places that are distinct and the distance between them can be expressed in numbers - even infinite numbers - Teleport will work (barring the normal hindrances).

TP does require you to have a specific goal in mind. You can't just teleport to "a random spot on the plane of Air" or "an orbit beyond the outermost planet" - you have to express the goal somehow. I would for instance accept "one billion miles straight ahead (on the Plane of Air)" or something similar. I have also allowed "it would be a Miracle if this Interplanetary Teleport I'm about to cast takes us right where we need to go".

[AwesomenessDog]

Note that you can teleport just wildly into deep space (at least as far as your magical means allows) assuming you can simply see the direction you would end up. This however is by no means a guarantee that you will be safe upon landing, as there are plenty of outer space monsters, including the Elder pantheon that could just swallow you if you blink anywhere near them on accident with a greater teleport. You also could teleport into something completely hostile to life that you couldn't see from X lightyears away, or that has of course moved into that position in said X years of time. Only interplanetary teleport has any protections for the user however.

[Azothath]

‹(•¿•)› only if you are zen as you have to visualize your destination.

[Diego Rossi]

Teleport wrote:

You must have some clear idea of the location and layout of the destination. The clearer your mental image, the more likely the teleportation works. Areas of strong physical or magical energy may make teleportation more hazardous or even impossible.

YMMV, but "that piece of space with no discerning features" doesn't match my definition of a "clear idea of the location and layout of the destination".

Teleport doesn't allow you to select your destination as "one million miles ahead". You need an idea of the location and layout of the destination. That description covers the first part, but not the second.

Plus, for space teleportation, there is Interplanetary teleportation. The text seems to imply that you need to aim at a celestial body, not at an empty space, but one hundred million miles from that star on the X, Y, and Z axis should be acceptable too.
Interplanetary teleport removes completely the need to have an idea of the layout of the destination.

Quote:

Interplanetary Teleport
Source Ultimate Magic pg. 225, Pathfinder #14: Children of the Void pg. 54, Inner Sea World Guide pg. 295
School conjuration (teleportation); Level arcanist 9, cleric 9, oracle 9, psychic 9, sorcerer 9, wizard 9
Casting
Casting Time 1 standard action
Components V
Effect
Range personal and touch
Target you and touched objects or other touched willing creatures
Duration instantaneous
Saving Throw none and Will negates (object); Spell Resistance no and yes (object)
Description
This spell functions as teleport, except there is truly no range limit and you do not need to have seen your destination, though you must have a solid grasp of which world you wish to travel to (“the third planet from the sun” is an acceptable destination, but “a habitable world near that bright star” is not). If you have a specific location on a planet in mind, you arrive there without a chance of failure; otherwise you arrive at a location that would not immediately be life-threatening. If no such safe landing zone exists on the world, such as someone attempting to travel into the sun without the proper precautions in place, the spell simply fails.

[AwesomenessDog]

Diego Rossi wrote:

Teleport wrote:

You must have some clear idea of the location and layout of the destination. The clearer your mental image, the more likely the teleportation works. Areas of strong physical or magical energy may make teleportation more hazardous or even impossible.

YMMV, but "that piece of space with no discerning features" doesn't match my definition of a "clear idea of the location and layout of the destination".

Teleport doesn't allow you to select your destination as "one million miles ahead". You need an idea of the location and layout of the destination. That description covers the first part, but not the second.

Plus, for space teleportation, there is Interplanetary teleportation. The text seems to imply that you need to aim at a celestial body, not at an empty space, but one hundred million miles from that star on the X, Y, and Z axis should be acceptable too.
Interplanetary teleport removes completely the need to have an idea of the layout of the destination.

Greater teleport also gets rid of that distance limit without explicitly stating it has to be on the same planet you start in. The only difference is you see need either line of sight/effect and a specified distance, or to visualize the destination. So if you can see into a direction of darkspace, you can travel any distance in that direction.

[Senko]

I'll give you the no visualization for the plane of air or earth but if you talking deep space could you visaulize how the stars would look from that position?

AwesomenessDog wrote:

Diego Rossi wrote:

Teleport wrote:

You must have some clear idea of the location and layout of the destination. The clearer your mental image, the more likely the teleportation works. Areas of strong physical or magical energy may make teleportation more hazardous or even impossible.

YMMV, but "that piece of space with no discerning features" doesn't match my definition of a "clear idea of the location and layout of the destination".

Teleport doesn't allow you to select your destination as "one million miles ahead". You need an idea of the location and layout of the destination. That description covers the first part, but not the second.

Plus, for space teleportation, there is Interplanetary teleportation. The text seems to imply that you need to aim at a celestial body, not at an empty space, but one hundred million miles from that star on the X, Y, and Z axis should be acceptable too.
Interplanetary teleport removes completely the need to have an idea of the layout of the destination.

Greater teleport also gets rid of that distance limit without explicitly stating it has to be on the same planet you start in. The only difference is you see need either line of sight/effect and a specified distance, or to visualize the destination. So if you can see into a direction of darkspace, you can travel any distance in that direction.

I believe they errated that when they made interplanetary teleport for some reason. Be a shame if you hit a black hole though.

[Diego Rossi]

Senko wrote:

I'll give you the no visualization for the plane of air or earth but if you talking deep space could you visaulize how the stars would look from that position?

If you can visualize how the stars look from that position, sure.

The trick is being able to do that.

I recall that it was explained at the time that without Interplanetary Teleport you can't teleport even to the nearest celestial body, but I don't see a FAQ saying that. I checked only UM and the CRB FAQs, so it can be in some other secion.

[Temperans]

Reading the spells helps a lot, assuming we aren't going for interplanetary just huge range Greater Teleport

this is a long in depth explanation:

Greater Teleport wrote:

In addition, you need not have seen the destination, but in that case you must have at least a reliable description of the place to which you are teleporting. If you attempt to teleport with insufficient information (or with misleading information), you disappear and simply reappear in your original location.

First, if you don't have a reliable description the spell just teleports you to your same location.

Second, assuming that you have a "reliable description" in what way that description is formulated the spell does not care, the spell will take you there regardless of what is at that location. The spell does not care what type of description or how its formulated, it just has to be "reliable", aka you cannot teleport if your margin of error is too large.

Third, assuming that you have your reliable description and the spell works, you check on the relevant table. In this case the familiarity table of the teleport spell, which has these options:

* Very familiar, unlikely if you are teleporting into random space.
* Studied carefully, slightly more likely if you set up properly.
* Seen casually, might be possible if you travel enough.
* Viewed once, same as above.
* False destination the likely case given the nature of space.

Why is false destination the likely case? Well, first here is the description of that

False Destination wrote:

“False destination” is a place that does not truly exist or if you are teleporting to an otherwise familiar location that no longer exists as such or has been so completely altered as to no longer be familiar to you. When traveling to a false destination, roll 1d20+80 to obtain results on the table, rather than rolling d%, since there is no real destination for you to hope to arrive at or even be off target from.

With that out of the way, the important thing to consider with space travel is time. It takes time for light to travel to our eyes and so we are looking at the past of objects when we look out into space. An object that is 1 light year away has moved 1 full earth year by the time the light reaches our eyes, and the greater the distance the more pronounced the effect. So the star you see in the night sky might actually be trillions of miles away from where you imagined it was, that is not even including paralax and other distortions that the light might encounter along the way.

**********************

Anyway, there you have a super basic intro to interstellar travel problems, the reason why Starfinder rules say that wild space is more difficult to travel, and the reason why "I teleport to space" has a decent chance of leaving you stranded in an unknown place if it even works at all.

Assuming we use Interplanetary Teleport

Why was this even a question?:

Interplanetary Teleport wrote:

This spell functions as teleport, except there is truly no range limit and you do not need to have seen your destination, though you must have a solid grasp of which world you wish to travel to (“the third planet from the sun” is an acceptable destination, but “a habitable world near that bright star” is not). If you have a specific location on a planet in mind, you arrive there without a chance of failure; otherwise you arrive at a location that would not immediately be life-threatening. If no such safe landing zone exists on the world, such as someone attempting to travel into the sun without the proper precautions in place, the spell simply fails.

For interplanetary teleport to even work your description of destination needs to be a lot better than "that void over there" this is the type of stuff you pay astrophysicists to determine and even they give a huge margin of error for exact locations. It is not easy to calculate a location in space, much less get a good description of it.

[Temperans]

Diego Rossi wrote:

Senko wrote:

I'll give you the no visualization for the plane of air or earth but if you talking deep space could you visaulize how the stars would look from that position?

If you can visualize how the stars look from that position, sure.

The trick is being able to do that.

I recall that it was explained at the time that without Interplanetary Teleport you can't teleport even to the nearest celestial body, but I don't see a FAQ saying that. I checked only UM and the CRB FAQs, so it can be in some other secion.

Teleport does not care if you go to other planets, what it does not let you do is go to another plane. So, you technically could not use Greater Teleport to go into the heart of a star or black hole since those are considered part of the positive and negative planes respectively. But you can teleport outside of the star or black hole and then move into them normally.

You may be misreading the "Interplanar travel is not possible." as "Interplanetary travel is not possible.

[Senko]

So it seems going by the comments you can do a basic jump e.g. visualising a mile straight up if your used to flying but teleporting to places with no clear descriptive nature is not. Makes exploring the extent of certain planes or space less feasible.

Temperans wrote:

Diego Rossi wrote:

Senko wrote:

I'll give you the no visualization for the plane of air or earth but if you talking deep space could you visaulize how the stars would look from that position?

If you can visualize how the stars look from that position, sure.

The trick is being able to do that.

I recall that it was explained at the time that without Interplanetary Teleport you can't teleport even to the nearest celestial body, but I don't see a FAQ saying that. I checked only UM and the CRB FAQs, so it can be in some other secion.

Teleport does not care if you go to other planets, what it does not let you do is go to another plane. So, you technically could not use Greater Teleport to go into the heart of a star or black hole since those are considered part of the positive and negative planes respectively. But you can teleport outside of the star or black hole and then move into them normally.

You may be misreading the "Interplanar travel is not possible." as "Interplanetary travel is not possible.

No I'm not I'm going off what I've seen other posters say including this post by James Jacobs in another thread. . .

In print materials, by the way, we WILL be going with the limitation that greater teleport is planetary and cannot be used to travel to other planets. Other planets in our setting are effectively "other campaign settings." As such, we do want to limit travel between them to only the highest level spells, the most powerful artifacts, and things like stationary portals between worlds... of which there are plenty on Golarion if you know where to look.

but maybe there wasn't an official faq/errata? Personally I'd rather just leave greater as able to get anywhere given it seems to be as much theme based to disallow/limit it as anything else and for me personally there should be a progression in alieness other worlds, other planes, other dimensions, etc and I'm thrown off by the concept of it being easier to travel to heaven/hell than to the moon. Still its an outlier in most games as I said so I tend to ignore it.

[Temperans]

Senko wrote:

So it seems going by the comments you can do a basic jump e.g. visualising a mile straight up if your used to flying but teleporting to places with no clear descriptive nature is not. Makes exploring the extent of certain planes or space less feasible.

Temperans wrote:

Diego Rossi wrote:

Senko wrote:

I'll give you the no visualization for the plane of air or earth but if you talking deep space could you visaulize how the stars would look from that position?

If you can visualize how the stars look from that position, sure.

The trick is being able to do that.

I recall that it was explained at the time that without Interplanetary Teleport you can't teleport even to the nearest celestial body, but I don't see a FAQ saying that. I checked only UM and the CRB FAQs, so it can be in some other secion.

Teleport does not care if you go to other planets, what it does not let you do is go to another plane. So, you technically could not use Greater Teleport to go into the heart of a star or black hole since those are considered part of the positive and negative planes respectively. But you can teleport outside of the star or black hole and then move into them normally.

You may be misreading the "Interplanar travel is not possible." as "Interplanetary travel is not possible.

No I'm not I'm going off what I've seen other posters say including this post by James Jacobs in another thread. . .

In print materials, by the way, we WILL be going with the limitation that greater teleport is planetary and cannot be used to travel to other planets. Other planets in our setting are effectively "other campaign settings." As such, we do want to limit travel between them to only the highest level spells, the most powerful artifacts, and things like stationary portals between worlds... of which there are plenty on Golarion if you know where to look.

but maybe there wasn't an official faq/errata? Personally I'd rather just leave greater as able to get anywhere given it...

This sounds more like a "Golarion setting" thing than a "this is the way the spell works" things. From what I understand that quote is saying that they limit the scope of greater teleport so that they don't have to worry about other settings.

For example, getting tech from Androffa or the weird radium weapons of Barsoom. (Thark rifles are no joke).

[Senko]

Temperans wrote:

Senko wrote:

So it seems going by the comments you can do a basic jump e.g. visualising a mile straight up if your used to flying but teleporting to places with no clear descriptive nature is not. Makes exploring the extent of certain planes or space less feasible.

Temperans wrote:

Diego Rossi wrote:

Senko wrote:

I'll give you the no visualization for the plane of air or earth but if you talking deep space could you visaulize how the stars would look from that position?

If you can visualize how the stars look from that position, sure.

The trick is being able to do that.

I recall that it was explained at the time that without Interplanetary Teleport you can't teleport even to the nearest celestial body, but I don't see a FAQ saying that. I checked only UM and the CRB FAQs, so it can be in some other secion.

Teleport does not care if you go to other planets, what it does not let you do is go to another plane. So, you technically could not use Greater Teleport to go into the heart of a star or black hole since those are considered part of the positive and negative planes respectively. But you can teleport outside of the star or black hole and then move into them normally.

You may be misreading the "Interplanar travel is not possible." as "Interplanetary travel is not possible.

No I'm not I'm going off what I've seen other posters say including this post by James Jacobs in another thread. . .

In print materials, by the way, we WILL be going with the limitation that greater teleport is planetary and cannot be used to travel to other planets. Other planets in our setting are effectively "other campaign settings." As such, we do want to limit travel between them to only the highest level spells, the most powerful artifacts, and things like stationary portals between worlds... of which there are plenty on Golarion if you know where to look.

but maybe there wasn't an official faq/errata? Personally I'd rather just leave greater as able

...

+

I get the same impression. Golarion and Barsoom and Earth are all effectively different campaign settings in their design theory and thus only 9th level/rare magic can get you between them hence this spell and the retroactive nerfing of greater teleport if you use this setting. My personal view though is . . .

1) Travel to the moon should not be harder than travel to the afterlife.

2) The spell is largely self limiting anyway. A good telescope will give you a decent idea of the moon to travel there, getting a good idea of another planet in the solar system e.g. Eox is going to be a lot harder and gathering enough information to travel to another solar system is going to be a quest in itself possibly involving wish or similar to gather information on it. Just because you know that glinting red dot over there on the night sky is a star doesn't tell you anything about what's orbiting it and as shown above in the thread general opinion is your not going to be able to visualize it well enough to get there. So your looking at communing with deities, wish or similar to gather information and other plot related activities.

3) My personal taste is as I said a sort of progression city, country, planet/s, planes, dimensions, branes. So at lower levels your dealing with local problems and as you move up you start looking at bigger scopes culminating in (not something I ever actually run) realities where the rules are fundamentally different (places like in 3rd ed the primordial chaos that tainted and corrupted those exposed to it).

4) If you players approach is "I go to androffran and buy a dozen blaster rifles to take over the country" either your running a game where such things are expected or you've got other issues you need to deal with.

Again opinions can vary on this.