Teleporting Blind Shing Challenge

[Long Shadow]

Off the top of my head, Astral projection has been always useful for scouting ahead before teleporting, though time limit versus distance between surface and orbit might be difficult. Simply astral ahead, check out where you want to ahead then teleport.

[flatline]

If you can see it, you can teleport to it. Use an optical telescope to find your target and then try to open a dimensional portal to the target. No need to resist vacuum since dimensional portal does not let things like air or water go through the portal. Simply look through the portal to see if it's inside the ship before stepping through. If the portal opens to the vacuum of space, try again.

Teleport superior would be easier as long as you were prepared to teleport to the outside of the ship (I recommend Sustain instead of Resist Vacuum, but either will work). Then mystic portal through the hull.

The major downside of Teleport:Superior is that you can take fewer soldiers with you.

--flatline

[flatline]

No need to resist vacuum since dimensional portal does not let things like air or water go through the portal.

Not so. Lazlo has a weapon which allows them to open a rift onto the surface of a star - which burns the crap out of everything on this side. Also, the Arcane MK II ship of the UWW has a TW weapon that opens a rift to the elemental plane of water (which instantly freezes in space) and throws big giant chunks of ice at attacking starships or missiles. Also, dimensional rifts are permeable from both sides - that's how things "slip in" as the BOM puts it.

Unsurprisingly, canon seems to contradict itself on this matter. I don't have the book, but Underseas reputedly explains that dimensional portals somehow prevent your examples from working. I'm sure someone can chime in with the appropriate book quote.

--flatline

[The Beast]

No need to resist vacuum since dimensional portal does not let things like air or water go through the portal.

Not so. Lazlo has a weapon which allows them to open a rift onto the surface of a star - which burns the crap out of everything on this side. Also, the Arcane MK II ship of the UWW has a TW weapon that opens a rift to the elemental plane of water (which instantly freezes in space) and throws big giant chunks of ice at attacking starships or missiles. Also, dimensional rifts are permeable from both sides - that's how things "slip in" as the BOM puts it.

Unsurprisingly, canon seems to contradict itself on this matter.

LOL - I wouldn't be surprised.

I don't have the book, but Underseas reputedly explains that dimensional portals somehow prevent your examples from working. I'm sure someone can chime in with the appropriate book quote.

I have Underseas.. Let me see if I can find something like that..

Edit - I found it: "Note: The water from Earth and other planets do NOT spill into each other. The nature of Rifts are such that air and fluids do not spill or mix from one environment to the other, even when people pass through them." - Underseas, pg. 19, first paragraph.

This totally contradicts how TW rift-based weapons technology works. Nice catch.

Not really. The TW-weapons were engineered to overcome that limitation.

As for the OP, you could scan the ship to try to obtain a layout of it and use that to teleport over. It wouldn't be like having a picture to go off of, but it would beat a blind jump.

[cornholioprime]

No need to resist vacuum since dimensional portal does not let things like air or water go through the portal.

Not so. Lazlo has a weapon which allows them to open a rift onto the surface of a star - which burns the crap out of everything on this side. Also, the Arcane MK II ship of the UWW has a TW weapon that opens a rift to the elemental plane of water (which instantly freezes in space) and throws big giant chunks of ice at attacking starships or missiles. Also, dimensional rifts are permeable from both sides - that's how things "slip in" as the BOM puts it.

Unsurprisingly, canon seems to contradict itself on this matter. I don't have the book, but Underseas reputedly explains that dimensional portals somehow prevent your examples from working. I'm sure someone can chime in with the appropriate book quote.

--flatline

It's not a "contradiction," it's a "plot device."

Rifts can be either "omni-permeable" or they can be "selectively permeable," it all depends mainly on the usage in any given Book (for example, the impermeable rifts in the Underseas books versus the villages which are kept alive by the use of rifts that are permanently connected to water) -and GM's call in any given game.

[cornholioprime]

Remote Viewing or the use of a Crystal Ball or the Palladium equivalent of a scrying pool or some other such method -including (but not limited to) first Object Reading the personal effects of a fallen Golgan soldier on the ground, or a picture of the inside of the ship, or any other such use of technological, psionic, or magical means to get the location of the ship -at the very least to improve the odds of a successful teleport chance -then teleport in.

Not really that much of a challenge.

[cornholioprime]

Remote Viewing or the use of a Crystal Ball or the Palladium equivalent of a scrying pool or some other such method -including (but not limited to) first Object Reading the personal effects of a fallen Golgan soldier on the ground, or a picture of the inside of the ship, or any other such use of technological, psionic, or magical means to get the location of the ship -at the very least to improve the odds of a successful teleport chance -then teleport in.

The whole point of the thread is to find a way to get into a ship without doing a blind teleport. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.

What makes you think that using a combination of magics, psionics, and technology (this last one being the most limited in utility for the Shing, for obvious reasons) to eliminate the "blind teleport" isn't doing exactly as you requested?

Using existing cannon spells from the BOM and Rifter, come up with a way for the Shing to dimensionally shift (teleport, etc) from the planet surface onto a orbiting space ship.

My definition of a so-called "blind teleport" is when you try to do so WITHOUT first trying to get any mental picture of the destination in your head before you try to make the jump. What's yours?

1. Use torture or charm spells to get captured enemy personnel to give you audiovisual data of the orbiting spacecraft.
2. Cast portal to spaceship.
3. Read resulting portal to see if it is safe to go through.
4. Go through portal.

Again, no real challenge here.

(Note to the forum audience: I was wrong about my assumptions of the Sensitive Psionic Powers that I thought Shing possessed; what they are born with is useless for this scenario, and it doesn't look like they can get any more psionic powers when leveling up.)

[flatline]

I finally went and read the Shing description and I must retract my suggestion of using an optical telescope. It seems unlikely that they would be able to construct or use such a thing.

Sorry.

--flatline

[flatline]

Requiring a 100% success rate might be a constraint that we can't meet. Even Teleport:Superior only has a 99% success rate to teleport to a place the caster knows well.

A more reasonable constraint might be that success is possible and failure isn't fatal so that you can try again until you succeed.

--flatline

[cornholioprime]

FL: "Unsurprisingly, canon seems to contradict itself on this matter. I don't have the book, but Underseas reputedly explains that dimensional portals somehow prevent your examples from working. I'm sure someone can chime in with the appropriate book quote."

It's not a "contradiction," it's a "plot device."

Perhaps not to you, but to me to does look like a complete contradiction.

In canon, some Rifts are selectively permeable (the Lazlo Rift, the Phase World Rifts, et al.), some Rifts are essentially impenetrable except to the conscious decisions of living creatures to walk through them (the undersea Rifts in Rifts: Underseas), some Rifts are decidedly one-way in 'favor' of the individual opening the rift (the Rifts which the Promethians use to dispose of both waste from Center as well as would-be invaders without exposing themselves to the incredible heat and radiation of a star; the Triangular Rift that Tolkeen deployed which allowed objects to be sucked into an inhospitable extradimensional realm without harming Tolkeen, etc.), and some are permanently open dimensional rifts allow constant, two-way travel of both creatures and objects from one side into the other without apparent limit (the Cycling Rift at the St. Louis Arch, the various Pulsating Rifts presented in Rifts: Megaverse Builder, etc), and so on.

There's no "contradiction" in how Rifts work because you were never told by the authors that Rifts all work in the exact same way.

Rifts can be either "omni-permeable" or they can be "selectively permeable," it all depends mainly on the usage in any given Book

That really doesn't work because of the nature of what we are talking about: dimensional rifts. They connect two dimensions. What happens when a rift connects one dimension that is permeable with another dimension that is not permeable? Is only one side permeable or are both or neither?

It depends upon what the Author of a particular book wants to accomplish; see above for examples.

[cornholioprime]

.....Basically the same thing, only I am trying to find a way to avoid any % chance of teleport failure. Otherwise, it would seem too risky, even if it's only a 1% chance.

......I don't think that would give you a 100% chance of success, unless maybe you did a psychic Mind-Bond with the person, but then that would be using Psionics.

.....That all works except for getting the 100% success rate.

Not only are you 'moving the goalposts' when you now demand a 100% success rate for this challenge that you laid out...

Using existing cannon spells from the BOM and Rifter, come up with a way for the Shing to dimensionally shift (teleport, etc) from the planet surface onto a orbiting space ship.

.....but you are asking for the impossible -namely, a 100% success rate via the casting of spells, which as far as I know is impossible.
Not unheard of via other means (powerful magical artifacts, high technology, etc.), but not possible via conventional spellcasting unless the individual creature in question has an innate or externally granted bonus to its successful teleport percentage.

Even so, even when your pre-imposed handicap (of not allowing the Shing to use their natural abilities to sense what is on the other side of a rift) is taken into account, the Shing can still, easily, use an array of invisibility and charm and domination and compulsion magics in addition to teleportation magic to get up to an orbiting ship. And that's just what I could come up with after only 30 seconds of thought; I almost shudder to think of what the REAL Mage-players like Damian Magecraft could whip up if they decided to take this on.


Sorry, man, but it's really not all that much of a challenge.

That statement doesn't denigrate your efforts to create said challenge so much as it is an acknowledgment and testament to the limitless versatility of magic.

[13eowulf]

Taking some liberties and with some rampant speculation:

Perhaps the Shing are also masters of Dreamstream Magic, using several spells, most notably Dream Window from Between the Shadows, to accomplish the feats mentioned. (From what I can tell the Dreamstream related spells fall under what most refer to a 'invocations', and not a specialty school.)