As my last article seemed to cause no little commotion among some adademic circles of late, I thought I might offer some other points I decided to omit from my previous essay. I was asked by a colleague, the esteemed Helm Cozzel (First Attendant to the Superindendant of Arcane Instruction at the Royal War College in Croshother) if I might discuss the uses (and misuses) of a Circle in regards to the topic of War. As there are many ways a War Mage can use a teleportation circle to advantage, I will cover only a few of the less straightforward methods here.
While the idea of using a Circle as nothing more than a breach in a citadel's defensive wall (which is very much what it is in a defensive sense), This is really of somewhat limited use. While the mage that opened the portal (and this is in fact what it is, irregardless of the name) does not need to pass through the portal. Indeed, I have heard of mage's doing this very thing; they will cast a Circle at a prearranced time, and anyone waiting at the destination may just come through. If defense of a city is an important issue to the ruler's there, the location where a Circle will be taken into account as a matter of course. There is little doubt this is one reason that a fair number of Circles have either been placed outside the city walls, or have been surrounded by an independant defensive structure. The best way to make a Circle inaccessable is to cover the circle by a large stone disk, 20 feet in diameter and at least 15 feet thick. Another possibility would be to pack cattle on and around the Circle. If there is no free place for an intruder to appear, the portal is unusable.
If the idea of is to cause disruption rather than sending in a raiding party, the means to do so become more numerous. There is a limit to how many people can be sent through a portal. Since the portal is only open for a few seconds, and that portal has a perimeter of about thirty feet, how many people can enter the portal before it closes? While I have not found any reports that state how many people have successfully crammed into a Circle portal, my calculations place that number arount fifty. It might be possible to actually force up to twice that number through, but it would require an entire company of disiplined troops to start running into an area before the spell has even completed. An entire company who has no idea what they might be running into.
I have considered what might happen if a portal were opened at the bottom of a deep lake. I have seen the damage that was caused by a small hole in the bottom of a dam. The dam had been constructed with a liftable gate many years before, and then appearantly forgotten about. The dam was made larger in decades afterward, and on the third subsequent expansion of that dam, the forces became too much, and the gate gave away. Stones five and six feet in diameter were carried miles downstream, and some only four feet square never were found.
In fact, anything that might cause a commotion could be sent through such a portal. Cast the spell at the bottom of a small depression, and then run anything you might send through into that depression. Packed zombies? Pannicked bison? A dragon is too large to fit through a Circle, but a gorgon is not. Any large creature that can be inticed to charge a spellcaster right before they open the portal is fair game in such an attack.
— Aspgall the Gated, Fourth Mage of the Septiaryintti
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