DnD Teleport 5e spell guide

DnD teleport 5e is perhaps the strongest mobility spell in all of Dungeons and Dragons. Forget flying on brooms, perilous sea voyages, or trudging about on foot. Once your party’s Wizard has learned to teleport, long travelling montages full of bandits and wild animal encounters will be a thing of the past.

One of the great things about DnD teleport 5e is that there’s no real limit to how far this 7th-level spell can take you. True, your location has to be on the same DnD plane, so no nipping over to the Nine Hells or flying to the Feywild. But beyond that, you can teleport anywhere you please and can even bring up to eight willing participants with you, or an inanimate object that fits in a 10-foot cube. The spell can be cast swiftly, too, taking just one action, which makes it super useful for escape attempts.

Despite all its benefits, using Teleport 5e is not entirely without peril. if you’re not familiar with the location you’re travelling to you might end up dangling off a cliff or in the middle of the sea. It’s best to be well-travelled if you’re going to learn teleport, or just stick to safe, local journeys.

Teleport 5e features

Teleport 5e can be learned by Wizards, Bards, or Sorcerers. It takes one action to cast, and while you can use it to teleport anywhere, your teleportees must be within 10 ft of you. Here are the spell’s basic features:

Using Teleport 5e

If you’re lucky, or prepared, then you’ll appear safely in the location of your choice. You can guarantee your teleport efforts will always go off without a hitch if you teleport to a permanent teleportation circle, or have an associated object taken from your teleport destination within the past six months – this could be anything, from an arcane artifact to a handful of gravel. Once you’ve unlocked teleport 5e, you should probably just be pocketing items wherever you go.

Teleport 5e is more accurate the more familiar you are with your target destination. If you’re very familiar with the location- know a lot about it or have been there often – then chances are good you’ll teleport successfully. That chance decreases if you’ve just seen the location casually, shrinks again if you’ve only viewed it once, and again if you’re teleporting based purely off a description. If you have a false destination, for instance, if you’re trying to teleport somewhere that doesn’t really exist, then the spell is guaranteed to go wrong.

If you’re not on target, there are three ways teleport 5e can go wrong. The simplest (and worst) outcome is a mishap. This means that your teleport went so badly that you were buffeted around all over the place. You take 3d10 force damage and then roll again on the teleport table (included below) to find out where you end up.

One up from a mishap is the similar area outcome. This one’s rather up to GM fiat – it means you arrive somewhere that’s visually similar or has the same function as the place you’re trying to go. It should be the closest similar location to your destination, but if you’re teleporting somewhere truly unique, there’s really no telling where you’ll end up.

The off target outcome is more precise and complex, requiring a bit of napkin mathematics to figure out. You and any companions or objects travelling with you will turn up near the teleport destination, but over or under shoot by a distance of 1d10 × 1d10 percent of the total teleportation distance. You can determine the direction you mistakenly travel by rolling a D8 and assigning each number a point on the compass (1 is North, etc).

Teleportation Circle 5e

While teleport 5e is a 7th-level spell, teleportation circle is only a 5th-level spell. As you might expect, it’s more limited than the regular teleport spell we’ve covered so far.

A teleportation circle is a 10ft diameter circle that you draw on the ground, covered in sigils. When you create a teleportation circle, you can link it to any other teleportation circle that you know the sigil sequence (basically the password or postcode) for. A teleportation circle created this way will only last until the end of your next turn, but any creature can pass through.

How useful this spell is will depend on how ‘high magic’ your DnD setting is. In some worlds, every wealthy home might have its own permanent teleportation circle, in others it may only be extremely important arcane locations that have access to one.

Creating a permanent teleportation circle is a pretty gruelling process, and it’s unlikely to be something a regular DnD party attempts. The reason is simple: it requires you to cast this spell in exactly the same spot, every day, for an entire year. Brutal!