| PariahDog119 |
The item in question is a tattoo. It has a negligible effect of allowing the user to move it around the body, either to display it or conceal it. The primary effect is that it allows the user to teleport back to the place they got the tattoo, as if they'd used Word of Recall. In order to reduce the price, I'm willing to make the tattoo "consumable," so that it has to be recrafted to teleport with it again.
The lore behind the tattoo is that it serves both to identify members of an order of wizards and to allow them to escape if they're captured by an inquisition.
If I were to use the scroll price as if Word of Recall were a spell and not a ritual, it costs 600 gp. This seems high. But then again, Word of Recall itself costs 5,000 gp to cast as a ritual. On the other hand, this tattoo would affect only one person, not seven, and the place it's going can't be changed. 8th level Teleportation also works as a model, giving a much higher price of 1,300 GP, but Word of Recall is the closest spell I can find that does what I want. Return Beacon with no range and no passengers also works, but no range heightens that spell to level 9, and I'd like to get the cost lower, not higher.
| vegetalss4 |
I'd note that Word of Recall also cannot change the location once cast (except by paying for the ritual again, much like how they could craft another magic tattoo).
Using Word of Recall as a basis for a scroll you'd also have to include the cost of the materials. rather than saying 5600 gp I think it's fair to divide the cost out among the 7 targets.
Rounding to a neat number 5000/7+600 = 1300 gp (before rounding we get 1314.29). That's the same price as the 8th level scroll of teleportation, so I think we might be in the right neighborhood here.
Now the scroll would allow you to go basically anywhere, rather than a preselected location, but at the same time it'd also
a) take up one of your hands,
b) take 10 minutes to cast (the activation time of the tattoo hasn't been explained) and
c) not give any bonus to hiding it.
I think that ultimately long-range certain-escape-by-teleportation just seems like something the game deliberately makes expensive, so as to restrict it to high levels, and perhaps to prevent it from being trivial even then.
If you really want it cheaper as the GM I might suggest as an explanation saying that the hidden wizard order needed to set up a big expensive ritual at the "point of return" that the tattoo's can then connect with.
That also gives you the option for plots related to the inquisition learning the location of the secret base and thus threatening to remove the escape option. (both plots where they do learn, and attack the place and plots where the PC have to stop them from learning/stop someone who did figure it out from reporting the location).