Creating a Custom Magic Item: Price Advice for a Teleporting Tattoo

[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.

[Finoan]

Double checking: You are the GM and this is a homebrew item for the player characters to buy and use, yes?

That is what I am intuiting from the post, but I want to make sure.

[WatersLethe]

Word of Recall divided by 7 targets is 715 gold each, which is within spitting distance of the 600 gold you mentioned. Makes it seem like 600 gp is a reasonable starting point for such an effect if a player was going to acquire it on their own.

If I were running it, I would make the creation of the tattoo a custom ritual based on Word of Recall and have the fee set to 600 for wizards who are members of the organization but using the tattoo for personal reasons, and then have the cost waived or significantly reduced if the tattoo is being used for official business. You can say the ritual focus is a super rare and fragile magical construction that the order keeps in their home base.

This ties the access to this custom, super useful teleportation ability to relationship with the order.

If you want it to exist in a much easier to acquire form you could just ignore the actual cost (~600gp) and give it whatever cost you want.

You could even throw in an additional downside, like it reduces your Fortitude by one while it's on you, to give justification for lower prices.