The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy

[Emperor Tippy]

What is the “Tippyverse”?
At it’s most basic the Tippyverse is nothing more than a setting where the D&D 3.5 rules as written are largely taken at face value and as the basic rules for a world. More specifically, the existence of magic and magic items is integrated into the setting from the start and not tacked on.

Basic postulates:
1. Epic Magic does not exist, it’s way too game breaking to try to make any setting that can work with it.
2. The deities are mostly silent
3. Everything else is pretty much as RAW (excluding some of the truly screwy things like drowning resurrections)

History of the Tippyverse
The Tippyverse (TV henceforth) was created when I was looking at the impact of long distance teleportation magic on a setting; more precisely just how badly such magic mangles the traditional settings. Let’s look at the military and economic implications of such magic.
D&D is a setting where there are no large scale defenses against teleportation magic. It is impossible to prevent an enemy from dropping his entire military right into the middle of your nation with teleportation circles whenever he chooses to do so. The only viable way to defend yourself is to concentrate all of your vital military infrastructure in a relatively small area and concentrate your forces on that area; meaning that you will always have forces on hand to deal with a potential enemy attack. The traditional D&D towns and villages simply can’t be defended because your enemies can drop thousands of troops into them in under a minute and then evacuate back out the next minute.
The concentration of vital government and military infrastructure in a single location is going to naturally lead to trade and other economic activity being focused on that area (large population usually paid in cash, very high security). This concentration of people is going to open the City up to attacks on their food supply, fortunately this problem can be solved by Create Food and Water traps.
Teleporation Circles will be set up between the City and fellow Cities simply because they are the only remotely safe and cost effective way to rapidly move goods between the cities. Who is going to ship goods by boat when TC’s are faster, cheaper, and safer? Or by wagon train? The fact that TC’s are point to point and have fixed points is going to eliminate the various small villages and towns that tend to dot the path between Cities both in real life and in more traditional D&D settings. The high initial investment of a permanent teleportation circle is also going to ensure that they are only set up between locations that can make them profitable within a relatively short period of time, which eliminates most of the smaller cities and villages as well.
All of this combines to create a self reinforcing cycle that concentrates the vast majority of the worlds population in cities that are linked to each other by teleportation circles, fed by create food and water traps (as farms can’t be defended effectively), and require large standing armies for defense.
You are quickly left with the large cities (most on par with the likes of Sharn, or even larger, in terms of population) that hold upwards of 99% of the worlds non monstrous population and cover (maybe) one percent of the worlds surface and the Wilds between the cities that are filled with the denizens of the various Monster Manuals. The Wilds are also where you will find the small villages and thorps of more traditional D&D, where the population is constantly threatened by monsters, rarely exceeds level 5, rarely sees magic, and is basically subsistence level.

The Cities
The massive concentration of population and trade in the various cities (I recommend between a dozen and a hundred cities in the average Tippyverse world) is naturally going to lead to a concentration of wealth and knowledge. Securing that wealth requires a military force that can stand off the strongest of attacks and deal with even high level adventurers. The traditional Tippyverse tends to make use of armies of Shadesteel Golems and Warforged for defense, usually with Wizard officers. This kind of military force becomes necessary to defend a City from other Cities and the various powerful denizens of the Wilds, but it also has the side effect of making the initial investment required to defend a city quite high.
Depending on the DM’s decision a City can be everything from a post-scarcity world populated by various spell traps where even Death is a rarity to a relatively normal D&D city. What the cities are is a location for high level political intrigue, high level adventuring, and of high magic. When the cities Guards are Shadesteel Golems led by level 10-15 casters with invisible Warforged scouts linked with Permanent Telepathic bonds flying overhead and hanging out on every street corner, adventurers will not get away with all of the various shenanigans that they can in more traditional D&D (where the PC’s can regularly solo the city guard after tenth level or so).
Cities are usually ruled by a council made up of the strongest casters in the city. After all, might does make right in D&D and wars between high level casters tend to end badly for everyone involved making the co-opting of new individuals on this power level a necessity (and those that won‘t play ball get ganged up on by every other high level caster in the City).
Over time cities will fall (be it from the attack of an enemy city, a flight of dragons, a civil war between it’s leadership, natural disaster, or whatever else the cause) and others will rise to replace them. New cities are rarities but they do occur (about as often as cities fall).

The Wilds
The Wilds are the area between cities. Here is where you will find everything from dungeons to Orc armies to small farming towns. The Wilds are a Death World by most standards and most individuals will have a hard time eking out an existence. Magic is rare and largely limited to Sorcerers, Warlocks, Druids, and similar classes. Most individuals are low level and it’s rare to find a PC class.
The Wilds are where you will find most of the more traditional D&D quests occurring (dungeon crawling in the ruins of fallen cities, clearing out various monsters, rescuing the mayors daughter, etc.). You will also find a few “barbarian” kingdoms out here (more traditional D&D kingdoms) where the very lack of high level magic (as those capable of casting it migrate to the cities) keeps the kingdom from reaching that singularity point.

What the Tippyverse isn’t:
1. It’s not a world ruled by a single all powerful wizard who mind rapes the opposition (at least not traditionally).
2. It’s not a 1984/Parinoia/Big Brother world where freedom does not exist and the government controls every facet of life

---
Now that the general overview of the Tippyverse is out of the way I will provide some of the fluff background for one of my games in just such a verse. Note that I coined the phrase “Points of light in the darkness” before 4e was even envisioned and that’s been the name of this setting from somewhere around 2007.
---
Points of Light
 History is broadly delineated into two time periods; before Teleportation (BT) and post Teleportation (PT). Zero PT is marked by the invention of the Teleporation Circle by the wizard Akkarin. Fortunately or unfortunately for the world (depending upon your viewpoint), Akkarin’s apprentice Lehon had a keen mind for business and realized the economic implications inherent in the Teleporation Circle. Within a decade the 60 most populous cities on Brychold were linked by a network of Teleporation Circles and trade between them had increased nearly a hundred fold, bringing much economic prosperity to those cities while simultaneously destroying many smaller cities and towns that depending upon trade routes that were no longer in use.
The City of Tung was lead by a fairly powerful mages guild that spent nearly 20 years attempting to reverse engineer the Teleporation Circle before they managed it, and unfortunately for the world they had nothing so benign as breaking Lehon’s trade monopoly in mind. Tung used their own TC’s to launch rapid invasions against rival cities and started what would become known as the Century of the Warring Cities.
A hundred years of lighting raids and vicious attacks saw then end of traditional armies in the war’s between cities and their replacement with the Steel Legions. The Shadesteel Golem was first fielded by the city of Duvarn, whether they invented it or got the plans from somewhere else is unknown however, in the twenty fourth year of Warring and proved a match for even the mage guilds of the other cities; naturally leading to other cities fielding their own Shadesteel Golems in short order. The second half of the Steel Legions were invented in the City of Sharn 8 years later when the first Warforged stepped out of the first Creation Forge. While far less powerful in combat than a Shadesteel Golem, Warforged were much more intelligent and much cheaper and rapidly began to fill the roll of scouts and even NCO’s in the Cities military forces.
The Century of the Warring Cities ended more in a series of non negotiated cease fires than it did treaties and to this day, over two thousand years later, most Cities still exist in a state of Cold War with one another. Of the 60 Cities that existed at the start of the CoWC period only 19 still existed as anything but ruins by the end of the period. The next two millennia saw the rise and fall of more cities until the present day, where 117 Cities and 32 Alliances exist.

While the Cities enjoyed great prosperity during even the height of the CoWC period, the rest of Brychold was rapidly falling back into barbarism. Without the trade routes between major cities and the army units assigned to patrol those routes to keep monsters away, most of the towns and villages rapidly collapsed as they lose access to vital goods and saw increased monster activity. Between the monsters, loss of trade, loss of knowledge (as most of those with valuable skills emigrated to the Cities), and bandit warlords the Wilds were chaos.
The CoWC period made the chaos far worse as the destruction of cities dropped hundreds of thousands (and even millions in many cases) of unprepared individuals into the Wilds. With criminals fleeing the surviving cities to escape into the Wilds, the mass number of refugees, and the ever increasing number of monsters as the adventurers who had been keeping them in line were almost inevitably hirer away by the Warring Cities, the chaos became even worse. By the end of the Century nothing larger than a town existed in the Wilds and most population groupings numbered at best 50 individuals who lived largely as hunter-gathers.
Over the next 2000 years the Wilds have recovered to the point where several barbarian kingdoms exist and farming villages have returned, although the vast majority of the population living in the Wilds is still one hard winter away from death.

Coinage
Thanks to the numerous means of wealth creation made possible by magic, the Cities have ceased to use precious metals and instead use the Drake (equivalent to the copper piece), Scepter (equivalent to the silver piece), and Sovereign (equivalent to the gold piece). All three currency types are created in three ways; the first (and least common) method is the same as the creation of any other magic item with each coin taking approximately a day to produce for those who know how to produce magic items (have Craft Wondrous items feat), the second (and most common) method is through the use of Currency Forges (resetting Wish traps) owned by the individual Cities and are capable of turning out a coin every 6 seconds (or 14,400 coins per Forge per day, 5,256,000 coins per year), and the last method of currency production is with the use of a Coin Purse (a magical item that captures a bit of a creatures essence when they are killed by the bearer and uses it to create a number of coins, the amount dependent upon how powerful the creature is and several other factors (used by DM to provide coin based treasure for monster encounters that take place in the Wilds)).
The communities in the Wilds still use Copper, Silver, and Gold coins.

----
That's a snippet from Points of Light, I'll post an example city and example Wild's nation later. Feel free to ask any questions you have (either about the Tippyverse concept in general or the Points of Light setting in particular) and I will endeavor to answer them

[Keld Denar]

And so shineth the light from above.

And the common people looked upon it, and it was good.

/subscribed!

[vampire2948]

All hail Emperor Tippy!

Nice post, looking forwards to more. Will be useful to have a link for people who ask the 'What is the Tippyverse' question.

[Emperor Tippy]

All hail Emperor Tippy!

Nice post, looking forwards to more. Will be useful to have a link for people who ask the 'What is the Tippyverse' question.

Why I posted it actually, I logged on and had like a dozen PM's asking me questions about it.

Not to mention I'm mildly annoyed at all the people who think it's nothing more than a mind rape setting. It was never that and was always as attempt to make a setting that allowed all forms of play across a broad spectrum of levels and play styles while still maintaining suspension of disbelief, verisimilitude, and an inability for the PC's to drastically redefine the world with even a modicum of common sense.

[PetterTomBos]

That's.. Just.. AWESOME! :D

My players: keep out:

Spoiler

Show

Definately using this as how the strange, foreign lands work in my setting ;)

[SamBurke]

And... subscribed.

This is the sort of logic I'd love to see applied to DnD: mages using power in sensible ways.

[dextercorvia]

Is Points of Light something that is available to the public?

[Psyren]

It seems to me that the lynchpin then to a TV is mass teleportation.

I will be watching this closely of course, but I suppose my questions are twofold:

1) How would one adapt the TV to a psionic setting? (I think someone was trying this - Urpriest?)
2) Does the TV translate to PF rules equally well? Are any of the key elements significantly changed?

When I have some time I can dig through my splats and try to answer these questions myself, but I ask on the offchance someone else has already thought about this.

[Emperor Tippy]

Is Points of Light something that is available to the public?

More of it will be posted in this thread, but no it's not. As the entire setting is hand written it's a pain to upload.

It seems to me that the lynchpin then to a TV is mass teleportation.

It is. Teleporation Circles allow the rapid deployment of entire armies numbering (potentially) in the hundreds of thousands into an enemy city in minutes. When such an ability exists it becomes impossible to maintain a traditional nation because you can never secure your borders and the attacker will always have a nigh insurmountable initiative advantage. This will lead to centralization as the only viable defense, with the inevitable knock on effects. That gives you the start of the Cities.

Then come the economic side effects. A single permanent TC has a cost comparable to a Galley and can potentially move upwards of 70 billion pounds of goods per day. No other means of trade can possibly compete with a TC. That leads to the end of trade routes which screws over the smaller communities as they aren't profitable enough to get a TC and merchants no longer pass through them on the way to major trading hubs. Combine this with the concentration of military force making small communities non viable when faced with monsters and it very much becomes a world sharply delineated between the Cities and the Wilds.

Remove permanent Teleportation Circles and a Tippyverse will never form in the first place.

I will be watching this closely of course, but I suppose my questions are twofold:

1) How would one adapt the TV to a psionic setting? (I think someone was trying this - Urpriest?)

The critical components can be transferred straight over. Psionic Teleportation Circles exist, as does Fabricate. With traps of each (as you can't make permanent a Psionic TC) you can get the two critical components of the Tippyverse (teleporation and food traps).

2) Does the TV translate to PF rules equally well? Are any of the key elements significantly changed?

I don't know enough about PF to answer that one. So long as permanent teleportation circles are possible you can (and logically would) have the Tippyverse. Ultimately everything else is simply a bonus feature. With a Create Food trap you are pretty much set.

[Douglas]

It seems to me that the lynchpin then to a TV is mass teleportation.

More specifically, Teleportation Circle. No other means of teleportation I am aware of has enough capacity to have the effects described here without assuming a truly staggering number of high level casters.

How would the Tippyverse change if that single spell were removed? There'd still be the possibility of a trap-based economy, but it seems like much of the military and trade underpinnings of TV would fall apart without TC.

Edit: And ninja-answered. Still leaves the question of what you think D&D magic minus Teleportation Circle would logically do to a setting.

[Qwertystop]

Finally, a description of it!

[bloodtide]

Just a basic question: But how do you figure Teleportaion Circle is so much of a problem?

1)Spellcasters. You'd need a 17th level plus spellcaster to cast Teleportation Circle. Even if you were to have a massive magical empire, there won't be more then 25 or so spellcasters of that level around. So you have a problem simply casting the spell.

2)Permanency. Again you'd need the 17th+ level spellcaster to cast a permanency and the teleport circle. At the most a single spellcaster could make five such circles a day, at a cost of 5,000 gp and 22,500 xp. That's enough for a spellcaster to loose a level as it's less then 20,000 between levels at the high level end of the chart.

3)Military Attacks. A teleport circle can only send a couple troops at a time. Everyone that can fit in a five foot circle. This is not a good way to get an army into a city. Even just getting a small strike force in will take some time.

4)Trade. A teleport circle can only send a couple creatures and their maximum load. So you can't teleport wagon loads of materials. It would be a slow process to have several people pick up what materials they could and teleport back and forth.

5)As noted in the Teleport spell description, 'areas of strong physical or magical energy may make teleportation hazardous or impossible. Now, granted there are no rules for this, but at least it is in the rules. You also have to take into account magical defenses.

In the end Teleport does not look practical for warfare or trade. Yes, they both have their uses, but not all out world changing.

And if your going from 'teleport' as existed from the dawn of time, then defenses will have existed too. So you'd have equally powerful and permanent anti-teleport area spells to block such effects.

Now, I don't mean to tear down your whole 'mega city and wastelands', I'm just pointing out that saying teleport circle is a world changer does not work out.

[Emperor Tippy]

More specifically, Teleportation Circle. No other means of teleportation I am aware of has enough capacity to have the effects described here without assuming a truly staggering number of high level casters.

How would the Tippyverse change if that single spell were removed? There'd still be the possibility of a trap-based economy, but it seems like much of the military and trade underpinnings of TV would fall apart without TC.

You aren't really likely to see a trap based economy without the population concentrations that become a necessity when TC's exist. The initial cost is quite high unless you are using Wish abuse and the like to get the traps cheap. The TC's almost make a viable market for traps that are turning out things like 14,400 backpacks per day. A hundred cities with an average population of 10 million each? All reachable essentially by walking? The item traps aren't going to be flooding the market in the Tippyverse. But when you are lucky to have one city a nation that breaks a hundred thousand people?

Edit: And ninja-answered. Still leaves the question of what you think D&D magic minus Teleportation Circle would logically do to a setting.

Without Teleportation Circles you can't drop armies into enemy cities, without that ability it actually becomes viable to defend your borders in a more traditional way. Sure, you can use various methods to teleport your army in (run them through a Shapechange trap and have them turn into Archons and teleport in to attack) but all of those methods have draw backs that TC doesn't.

As for what such a setting would be like? I don't really know, I've never really thought about it before.

[Rubik]

Just a basic question: But how do you figure Teleportaion Circle is so much of a problem?

I'm pretty sure a strategically-placed oak tree and an acorn of far travel would do it. Just give acorns to everyone (via AoFT traps) and have them teleport to the place the TC is keyed to.

[Ryu_Bonkosi]

Subscribed.

Very nice. The description of the true tippyverse makes me really want to run a game that uses that kind of world.

[Gavinfoxx]

Aren't there options in Draconomicon or Stronghold Builder's Guide which can defend against teleportation? Or scrying, for that matter?

[Emperor Tippy]

Just a basic question: But how do you figure Teleportaion Circle is so much of a problem?

1)Spellcasters. You'd need a 17th level plus spellcaster to cast Teleportation Circle. Even if you were to have a massive magical empire, there won't be more then 25 or so spellcasters of that level around. So you have a problem simply casting the spell.

Not really. There are tons of ways to do it. A level 11 Warlock could set up the TC's if you built right.

And there is the fact that TC's can be permanent. A single one renders trade routes gone between it's two end points.

2)Permanency. Again you'd need the 17th+ level spellcaster to cast a permanency and the teleport circle. At the most a single spellcaster could make five such circles a day, at a cost of 5,000 gp and 22,500 xp. That's enough for a spellcaster to loose a level as it's less then 20,000 between levels at the high level end of the chart.

You gate in a Solar, have him use his Permanency SLA to make the TC permanent, and have him use his Wish SLA to get you another scroll of Gate. Play around with higher CL Gate Scrolls and you can set up an entire network for the cost of one gate scroll.

3)Military Attacks. A teleport circle can only send a couple troops at a time. Everyone that can fit in a five foot circle. This is not a good way to get an army into a city. Even just getting a small strike force in will take some time.

It can deliver over a thousand people per round.

4)Trade. A teleport circle can only send a couple creatures and their maximum load. So you can't teleport wagon loads of materials. It would be a slow process to have several people pick up what materials they could and teleport back and forth.

Um, yes you can send wagonloads of material. A wagon is attended by the animal pulling it. And you can move over 70 billion pounds of goods through a TC per day with the right set up. Although even with walking it still delivers more goods than a cargo ship.

5)As noted in the Teleport spell description, 'areas of strong physical or magical energy may make teleportation hazardous or impossible. Now, granted there are no rules for this, but at least it is in the rules. You also have to take into account magical defenses.

No rules means it doesn't matter. And the defenses are taken into account, there are trivial ways around all of them except epic magic.

In the end Teleport does not look practical for warfare or trade. Yes, they both have their uses, but not all out world changing.

And you prove that you have no idea what you are talking about and/or never bothered to run the numbers.

And if your going from 'teleport' as existed from the dawn of time, then defenses will have existed too. So you'd have equally powerful and permanent anti-teleport area spells to block such effects.

Ah yes, the dreaded houserule. Which has exactly no place in the Tippyverse. No magic exists to block teleportation over an entire nation at anything approaching a reasonable cost.

Now, I don't mean to tear down your whole 'mega city and wastelands', I'm just pointing out that saying teleport circle is a world changer does not work out.

Um yes it does. You can run 96 people through a TC per round. Or 960 people per minute. Or approximately 60,000 people in an hour. And that's without even trying to be efficient.

Using a Permanent Animated Object on a gargantuan object and it can move 8,000 pounds per trip. In 38 trips a single one will move as much as the total carrying capacity of a galley. At 1 trip per minute (and I have systems to get it down to one trip every two rounds) you would move as much as the total cargo capacity of 38 galley's through the TC every day. And that's without using any of the trips to increase the numbers.

[Emperor Tippy]

Aren't there options in Draconomicon or Stronghold Builder's Guide which can defend against teleportation? Or scrying, for that matter?

Nothing that can defend an entire city, much less an entire nation. At least not for a price that even begins to approach reasonable.

[Gavinfoxx]

I meant for large strategic rooms or buildings or stuff. If the Draconomicon option can defend cavern shaped areas of a particular size, would you see more buildings taking shape in such a way that they can be defended by that option?

[jindra34]

I meant for large strategic rooms or buildings or stuff. If the Draconomicon option can defend cavern shaped areas of a particular size, would you see more buildings taking shape in such a way that they can be defended by that option?

Efficiency and logistics. If you claim a lot of area you essentially need a barracks per square mile, and you need to ward each one of them, both against teleporting and destructive spells. That gets really expensive really quickly. And then you need all the support for those soldiers. Which if objects need more soldiers to guard. It ends up being a outward going cost spiral.

[Inferno]

Wouldn't a tippyverse where cities use large numbers of Warforged for defense soon find Warforged replacing the fleshier races?
The Warforged are produced more quickly, level more quickly (if they are seeing the majority of combat/never sleep) and don't rely on food/water traps. And as proper intelligent constructs I can't see them being held exclusively to more martial/cannon fodder type positions.

[Gavinfoxx]

Well, there are options for creating arbitrary amounts of wealth and resources in this setting though, right? I mean that a city could still project power in a relevant way to make it a city state with a demesne, you know? And perhaps be a bit more spread out?

[jindra34]

Well, there are options for creating arbitrary amounts of wealth and resources in this setting though, right? I mean that a city could still project power in a relevant way to make it a city state with a demesne, you know? And perhaps be a bit more spread out?

Besides land (which traditionally was needed primarily for farming [replaced by Food and Water traps]) what exactly would one stand to gain by expanding outward?
And as for projecting power, everywhere not under heavy guard is essentially equidistant to everywhere else. Meaning you could project power halfway across the world as easily as a mile out side your city. As could everyone else.

[Kobold-Bard]

So very, very subbed.

[TheGeckoKing]

I have a question - if you've kept them all in, how do all the more exotic races (Monstrous Humanoids, The Dragons, the Outsiders etc.) react to all this technological/economical growth?

[Jack_Simth]

Now, I don't mean to tear down your whole 'mega city and wastelands', I'm just pointing out that saying teleport circle is a world changer does not work out.

That's not what tears it down.

What tears it down are when you reach the Wish traps and the True Creation traps (or the realization that a fabricate trap doesn't really need materials to work with, as the source materials are part of the material component of the spell, and so 100 copies of the source materials at trap creation gets you all you need forever) to get certain things. And that doesn't so much tear it down as change the nature. Once you've got that going, you don't need the TC's any more except at controllable junction points for local travel, and can spam Forbiddance or similar effects (heightened to 9th to avoid Greater Spell Immunity - materials are gotten via Wish / True Creation / Fabricate traps) to keep most armies out (although unless you find a way to bypass SR, the Golem armies can still get you, and sufficiently CL pumped Spell Resistance traps can arrange for an army that could get in).

Of course, you'll still end up needing the army anyway, as Wish has that pesky clause about "Regardless of local conditions".

Oh yes, and if you have a City, the only real reason to conquer another is Ego, as you have every thing (separated out into two words for a reason...) you actually want already anyway.

More specifically, Teleportation Circle. No other means of teleportation I am aware of has enough capacity to have the effects described here without assuming a truly staggering number of high level casters.

Spell Traps of Teleport Without Error can pull it off the exact same way (and are actually marginally better, as they can have a bigger trigger area, permitting more throughput for comperable costs).

How would the Tippyverse change if that single spell were removed? There'd still be the possibility of a trap-based economy, but it seems like much of the military and trade underpinnings of TV would fall apart without TC.

Edit: And ninja-answered. Still leaves the question of what you think D&D magic minus Teleportation Circle would logically do to a setting.

It could be made to skip from TC-dependent TV world as described to a trap-dependent one that looks very, very similar.

[bloodtide]

Not really. There are tons of ways to do it. A level 11 Warlock could set up the TC's if you built right.

And there is the fact that TC's can be permanent. A single one renders trade routes gone between it's two end points.

Ok, don't know much about Warlocks, but if you say they can do it.

You gate in a Solar, have him use his Permanency SLA to make the TC permanent, and have him use his Wish SLA to get you another scroll of Gate. Play around with higher CL Gate Scrolls and you can set up an entire network for the cost of one gate scroll.

If your going this route, then you can block teleportaion with the exact same kind of thing. You could Dimensional Lock a whole city. Not to mention all the other teleport block type spells, effects and such.

It can deliver over a thousand people per round.

I wonder how you figure this? Teleport circle makes a five foot square teleport people that step on it. How do you figure 1000+ people can step on the five foot square in ten seconds? Or are you using the 'commoner railgun' type reading of the rules?

Um, yes you can send wagonloads of material. A wagon is attended by the animal pulling it. And you can move over 70 billion pounds of goods through a TC per day with the right set up. Although even with walking it still delivers more goods than a cargo ship.

I'm not sure an animal 'attends' a wagon, but ok.

No rules means it doesn't matter. And the defenses are taken into account, there are trivial ways around all of them except epic magic.

All the rules are taken into account? From all D&D books? Even say the Strongholds Builders Guide? Cityscape? All of them?

And you prove that you have no idea what you are talking about and/or never bothered to run the numbers.

I'll guess I'll need you to run the numbers and show how so much stuff can do through a teleport circle.

Ah yes, the dreaded houserule. Which has exactly no place in the Tippyverse. No magic exists to block teleportation over an entire nation at anything approaching a reasonable cost.

But when you throw in gate, wish, scrolls and such...like your Solar example, just about anything is possible. And that is just core.

Um yes it does. You can run 96 people through a TC per round. Or 960 people per minute. Or approximately 100,000 people in an hour. And that's without even trying to be efficient.

Agian, i'll need you to explain how this works.

Using a Permanent Animated Object on a gargantuan object and it can move 8,000 pounds per trip. In 38 trips a single one will move as much as the total carrying capacity of a galley. At 1 trip per minute (and I have systems to get it down to one trip every two rounds) you would move as much as the total cargo capacity of 38 galley's through the TC every day. And that's without using any of the trips to increase the numbers.

Now, this could work.

[Piggy Knowles]

I wonder how you figure this? Teleport circle makes a five foot square teleport people that step on it.

Actually, that's a 5' radius circle, not a single 5' square. So you're actually dealing with an area of 78+ square feet...

[Psyren]

I suppose that once a given locale became totally self-sufficient, they might look into using their wealth to seal off their city via Forbiddance-spam until every square inch is covered.

Of course, you could then use Wish/Miracle to infiltrate someone (or several someones), have them dispel/disjoin an area of the Forbiddance (or even just throw up some nice AMFs) and then bring your army in normally.

As Tippy said, you can't really keep people out without epic magic. ("Cloister!") RAW is funny like that.

[Emperor Tippy]

Wouldn't a tippyverse where cities use large numbers of Warforged for defense soon find Warforged replacing the fleshier races?

I go with 1 Warforged per thousand citizens and 1 Shadesteel Golem per five thousand residents, as general numbers.

The Warforged are produced more quickly, level more quickly (if they are seeing the majority of combat/never sleep) and don't rely on food/water traps. And as proper intelligent constructs I can't see them being held exclusively to more martial/cannon fodder type positions.

It's not really a concern. Any warforged that starts getting ideas can just be mind wiped. And it's not like that's common in the first place.

Well, there are options for creating arbitrary amounts of wealth and resources in this setting though, right? I mean that a city could still project power in a relevant way to make it a city state with a demesne, you know? And perhaps be a bit more spread out?

Most of those methods don't actually help with blocking teleport.

I have a question - if you've kept them all in, how do all the more exotic races (Monstrous Humanoids, The Dragons, the Outsiders etc.) react to all this technological/economical growth?

It depends on the species in question. One and all they tend to leave the cities alone and the cities leave them alone. Nothing else really has the organization to actually threaten a Cities standing military, which isn't to say that Cities don't get destroyed when they go too far. They really just pretty much ignore eachother.

Ok, don't know much about Warlocks, but if you say they can do it.

It's magic item abuse.

If your going this route, then you can block teleportaion with the exact same kind of thing. You could Dimensional Lock a whole city. Not to mention all the other teleport block type spells, effects and such.

Not really. You can't make Dimensional Lock permanent. And even using Forbiddance you really can't render a city immune to TC. There are simply too many work around's (dig down 60 feet for example and TC to there, you are below the Forbiddance cube).

I wonder how you figure this? Teleport circle makes a five foot square teleport people that step on it. How do you figure 1000+ people can step on the five foot square in ten seconds? Or are you using the 'commoner railgun' type reading of the rules?

Each person can activate the trap on their turn. Run lines on all 4 sides of the 5 foot square and you get 960 people through per round using the run speed for a human. You can actually get more through but I didn't feel like figuring the numbers.

All the rules are taken into account? From all D&D books? Even say the Strongholds Builders Guide? Cityscape? All of them?

Yep. The magic to defend against teleportation on a strategic level sucks. Protecting just a single square mile with Forbiddance will cost you upwards of 3 million GP and there are very few tricks to get that cheaper (a Wish Trap buff wagon is about the only way).

I'll guess I'll need you to run the numbers and show how so much stuff can do through a teleport circle.

See later in my post.

But when you throw in gate, wish, scrolls and such...like your Solar example, just about anything is possible. And that is just core.

Yes, none of which is particularly relevant.

Agian, i'll need you to explain how this works.

See above.