First, I’ll tell you: I really like the way guns are handled in Gamma World. They’re better than standard ranged weapons (light guns are more accurate, heavy guns do more damage), but they require ammo. If you use your gun more than once in an encounter, you’ll be out of ammo at the end of the encounter, while if you use it only once, you’ll still have ammo. Simple, requires little book-keeping, and fairly cinematic. That said, there are a couple of things missing.

Automatic Weapons
Guns are, by default, single-target weapons. That can be described as firing a burst at a single target, but in the game there’s no way to model spraying at an entire area. Luckily, there’s a pretty simple fix.

If you have a gun that would logically be able to spray an area (a submachine gun or assault rifle, for example), you can make an attack that targets a burst 1 within the gun’s range, with a -2 penalty to attack. It targets all creatures within the burst, and if you do it, you’ll be out of ammo at the end of the encounter (so you might as well go for broke). This is, however, an encounter power; it uses up most of your ammo.

Grenades and Grenade Launchers
A couple of the monsters in the game have grenades or grenade launchers on them. The creatures, themselves, contain rules for them using these weapons in the form of powers. They do not, however, detail what happens when a player takes a grenade launcher off of a fallen enemy.

Per the rules, it would probably just be a heavy gun of some sort; that, however, is somewhat unsatisfying. Instead, I’d be inclined to make a grenade launcher statistically equivalent to a heavy two-handed gun, except that it targets a burst 2 within 10 squares (attacking all creatures within the burst). In addition, grenade launchers do not run off of generic ammo the way other guns do. You should track the number of grenades you have, and each use of a grenade launcher uses one of them up (it’s also a minor action to load a grenade into the launcher; it can only hold one at a time).

You might even use rules for different types of grenades. Concussion grenades might have a knockdown effect and some forced movement, while incendiary grenades deal ongoing 5 fire damage (save ends).

For thrown grenades I’d use similar rules, except that I’d cut the range of the thrown weapon down to 5 squares, and I’d make it a one-handed weapon (though I’d keep the accuracy and damage the same).

I had this idea earlier, when a friend of mine said he wanted to play a gunslinger in Gamma World. I told him anyone could use guns, but he said “No, I want to be a GUNSLINGER.” Presumably, the kind that hunts the Dark Tower and carries big, sandalwood revolvers. As I was figuring out how to give him what he wanted, I came up with the idea of motifs.

A motif is what you use when you have a very specific character concept in mind. It eliminates some of the randomness of character generation, effectively choosing a specific origin, and then replacing some of its abilities and reflavoring some of its powers. You do, however, get to play the character you have in your head (though you’ll still have to roll for your second origin, as normal).

Gunslinger
Your cold, hard eyes promise death to those who get in your way.
This motif is a replacement for the Speedster origin. It uses all of the Speedster’s game rules, except as followed.

Line of Eld (replaces Just a Blur): Gain a +1 bonus to Will and a +4 bonus to Interaction checks made to threaten or intimidate.
Always Prepared (replaces Blinding Speed): At the end of any encounter in which you would be out of ammo, roll a d20. On a roll of 10+, you are not out of ammo.
Novice Power: Run and Gun: As Quick Attack, except that it must be made with a gun.
Utility Power: Roll for Cover: As Whizzer, except that you shift half your speed, and if you have cover or superior cover at the end of the shift, the bonus to defenses increases by +1 until the start of your next turn.
Expert Power: Hail of Lead: As Swift Pummel, except that it must be used with a gun, each attack can target a different creature, and the to-hit bonus is Dexterity + your level + weapon accuracy.

If you really want to model Roland Deschain, pair this origin and motif with Engineered Human.

I know, I know; the first rule of adventuring is that you don’t split the party. Regardless, it happens sometimes. What’s a DM to do? When the party splits up, there are a number of pitfalls that you, as the DM, have to navigate. The most important of these are one group hogging the other group’s spotlight, and the dreaded TPK.

Hogging the Spotlight
This is by far the easiest trap to fall into when the party splits up. It’s happened to most of us; the party goes in two (or, Cthulhu forbid, more than two) directions, and you wind up focusing on one group while the other group sits on the sidelines. This is particularly difficult to handle when you’ve planned the encounters ahead of time, and one group heads right for the dragon’s lair while the other group heads along a much safer (read: boring and uneventful) path. There are a couple of techniques you can use to combat this; ideally, you’ll be using more than one of these at the same time.

Involve both groups. If one group goes right into the maw of some slavering beast and the other is studying the (unoccupied) library, make something exciting happen to the group that isn’t fighting. It doesn’t have to be a fight (though there’s nothing wrong with a band of bugbears or an evil wizard and his zombie majordomo bursting onto the scene). You could spring a complex trap, or you could improvise a quick skill challenge if the party is looking for specific information. The important thing is that you don’t allow one group to sit around for too long before giving them something to do, and you don’t want to make one group feel like they’re not doing anything of use.

Use initiative order. Even if there are no fights going on, or if only half the group is in a fight, it can be useful to impose initiative order on the entire group. Cover each player in initiative order, and if they’re not in a combat, skill challenge, or other structured type of encounter, give that player a minute or two to describe what they’re doing, make skill checks, and so forth. By running things in initiative order even when combat is not ensuing, you ensure that everyone is going to get spotlight time, and that everyone’s spotlight time is going to be more-or-less equal. If you don’t want to break the initiative down into individual players’ turns, you could lump an entire group into a single initiative turn (similar to the way we do so for monsters), though this has the risk of not giving that group enough spotlight time, or too much. It can be helpful for more freeform sequences, though.

Allow interaction through consequences. What do I mean by this? Let’s say one group is fighting some trolls while another group is attempting to figure out a complex, and possibly trapped, mechanism somewhere else. Perhaps, once the mechanism is disarmed, it disables all of the alarms in the dungeon, meaning that the trolls, when they try to call for reinforcements, cannot. Similarly, if the group botches disarming the mechanism, it sounds an alarm, plunging them into combat and making the fight a little harder for the other group. This can allow the players to feel connected to each other, and like they are interacting with each other, even when they’re not physically together. This can be particularly effective when only one member (the rogue, for example) splits off from the rest of the group. Don’t overuse this technique, though; if ever encounter that one group participates in affects the encounter the other group is participating in, it can start to feel a little artificial.

Fudge things. I don’t mean fudge dice rolls here. What I mean is, don’t be too committed to playing your adventure exactly the way it’s written. Maybe half the party is in that library, and you don’t have any encounters planned for the library. So what? Do the players know that? If there’s an encounter elsewhere in the dungeon that would work, throw it in there instead. This also works for encounters that are simply too strong for a diminished group. If the fighter and the wizard run into a band of orcs that was meant for the whole party, you don’t have to stick to your guns and make them fight all ten of them. Break the group up, and maybe throw some of them at the other half of the party. The key is to realize that your adventure is meant to challenge and entertain the entire group. If you have to alter things on the fly in order to do that, then no harm no foul. The players will likely not know the difference, and you’ll look smart for having planned for their antics.

The TPK
Much of the advice above will help minimize the chances of a TPK. Allowing interaction through consequences is a great way to allow one group to help out another that’s having a tough time, or to allow one group to challenge another that’s having too easy a time of it. You can also avoid TPKs by liberally applying fudge to your adventure; in addition to being tasty, it helps you ensure that your encounters are balanced for the smaller groups.

You also have to take into account the makeup of the different groups. If one of the groups includes a rogue and a ranger, a fight against a gaggle of minions is going to be tough. This may be what you’re looking for, and that’s fine. You might also want to allow them to shine a little bit by throwing a couple of standard monsters at them, or an elite, so that they can make use of their high damage output.

Also remember that, if the party has only one leader, then it’s likely that one or more groups are going to be short on healing. You can make up for this by providing some extra healing potions in the loot from the first few encounters that those groups go through, or by adding in some environmental effects that can allow for mid-battle healing.

After reading, and then playing, the alpha document of Bulldogs!, something stuck with me. In Bulldogs! as, I imagine, with most FATE games, there’s an understanding when it comes to skills. Namely: the cooler something is, the easier it should be to do. Difficulties for skill rolls needn’t conform to what is realistic, or even to what is possible; instead, if an action would make the game more fun for the entire group, and is it least somewhat plausible (read: doesn’t break everyone’s suspension of disbelief), it should be well within the realm of possibility.

This mentality can be carried into many other games, D&D included. Adopting does not mean you should give your players free reign to do whatever they want, circumventing entire challenges and combats with a single clever skill roll (though I think it’s okay if this happens now and again, for particularly clever ideas). Rather, gauge the difficulty of the skill roll on how fun it’s going to make the game.

If the fighter wants to try to push a wall over onto the bad guys before combat even begins, that might be a really cool image. The net result, though, is that the combat ends before it begins, and nobody but the fighter gets to participate. You shouldn’t just shut down the fighter’s idea; let him try. But the DC for the check should be appropriately difficult.

If, on the other hand, all of the other players start getting in on the fun . . . well, then, that’s another story. Say, for example, the fighter knows it’s going to be really hard to push the wall over and hit everyone. The warlord steps in, using his knowledge of architecture, to find the weakest point in the wall. The rogue sneaks around and scouts out the battlefield, looking to see where the monsters are in relation to the wall. The wizard then creates a clever illusion designed to lure the monsters into the kill zone, allowing the fighter to push the wall over and crush them all. Yes, they’ve circumvented your combat, effectively turning it into a skill challenge, but they’ve all had fun doing it, and everyone got to do something cool. It makes for a great story, and it makes for a great game; therefore, it should stand a fairly good chance of succeeding.

This is also a great way to encourage crazy stunts and out-of-the-box (read: power card) thinking amongst your players. If, rather than simply going with an auto-hitting magic missile, the wizard asks if he can use mage hand to dump a burning brazier over onto the the orc chieftain, don’t get hung up on the fact that mage hand isn’t an attack power, or that it can’t be used to deal damage. A low-DC Arcana check that unlocks a special, one-time attack that deals significant damage and maybe some ongoing fire damage is a great way to reward that kind of thinking, and encourage your other players to get in on the action.

The bottom line is, when players see that they’re going to be rewarded for creativity, and that their out-of-the-box thinking is likely to succeed, they’re going to start doing that stuff more often. It’ll make for a more creative, more energized, and more dynamic game.

As an aside, I’m coming up on my 500th post on this blog. I’d like to do something special, but I’m not sure what. If anyone has any ideas, I’d like to hear them!

I picked up Famine in Far-Go the other day, and I’m digging it so far. Here’s the thing about it though: it adds twenty new origins to the game. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. However, it does mean that, when rolling your origins during character creation, you have to refer to two books at once. It would have been nice of WotC had included all of the origins on the table in Far-Go, rather than just the Far-Go specific ones, but sadly that is not the case. They have released a very nice automated character sheet, which is a nice step, but if you’re playing somewhere without internet access (like most game stores), it’s not that helpful.

My solution was simply to create a sheet that I can print out and keep in the box that has all of the origins included. It’s not pretty, but it’s functional; here you go: Gamma World Character Origin Sheet (341)

If anyone would like to pretty this up for me, I can send you the original spreadsheet. Contact me via a comment on this post, and I’ll upload the new, prettier file, and you’ll get credit for your work. Otherwise, enjoy.

I am an avid collector of WotC’s Dungeon Tiles; they’re sturdy, attractive, and versatile, and I use them in every game. As such, I have quite a few of them. I have at least one copy of every published set except for, I believe, Hidden Crypts (no longer in print). I also just purchased the City Master Set, though I do not yet have either the Dungeon or Wilderness Master Sets (though I’ll likely pick up one or both at some point). I also just recently picked up the Monster Vault, which comes with a metric buttload of monster counters. In addition to that, I have the counters from the Red Box, as well as counters from an earlier starter set. All this begs the question: where the heck do I keep them? I’ll tell you, with pictures.

This is my storage solution. There are two craft carts here, stacked one on top of the other, and the whole thing rolls. I obtained both of these from JoAnn Fabrics, where you can buy one for around $70 (I got both of mine at half price). Some of the drawers are empty, but I’m going to show you what’s in all the drawers that are not.

On top of the cart is the box for the City Master Tile set. I store all of my urban, sewer, and building interior tiles in this box, for easy of reference and transportation. I’ll probably do the same with the Wilderness set when I get that.

In the top drawer, which is divided into neat compartments, are all of the tokens that come with the Monster Vault. There are quite a few, as you can see, and I have them divided into categories for easy searching. For example, dragons have their own compartment, as do fey creatures, elementals, and undead.

The next drawer down contains the tokens obtained from the Red Box and other sources. These ones aren’t sorted in any way. See, each of these tokens has one monster on one side, and a completely different monster on the other; this makes sorting them by type pretty much impossible. I’m treating these tokens as spares, for when I need a few more of a given bad guy. Nice to have, but not my go-to drawer.

After a few empty drawers, the next two drawers contain my minis. I’ve grouped them by size, but there’s not really any other organization here. I don’t have a lot of minis, and they’re easy to pick out visually, so I don’t think I need any more organization.

In the bottom cart, the top two drawers are both divided into compartments. I used these to sort and store my small, fiddly tiles, so that I could find them easily.

This drawer contains my underground/cave tiles. I only have a few sets of these, so a single small drawer suffices.

The next drawer contains my lone home-made dungeon tile, an airship that belongs to the party. As I create additional custom tiles, they’ll go in this drawer. I made this tile by printing it on card stock and mounting it on foam board.

In this drawer I have my various poster maps, obtained from a variety of sources, as well as a dry-erasable, fold-up, blank battle map that I can use when my tiles simply won’t cut it. I love poster maps, and I’m very happy that WotC is starting to include them in their products again.

This big, deep drawer contains all of my generic dungeon/crypt-themed tiles. I have quite a few of them, so if I wind up getting the Dungeon Master set, I probably won’t be able to keep them all in that box, or even in that drawer.

These are all of my outdoor and wilderness tiles. I’ve got a few sets of these, and the Athas tiles are in here, too. When I get the Wilderness set, I’ll probably put my wilderness tiles in that box and separate the desert tiles out into their own, smaller drawer.

The final drawer contains all of the three-dimensional tile elements that I’ve collected so far. If I get more, I’m not sure where I’ll put them; I guess I’ll have to start a new drawer.

I got Gamma World for Christmas, and at this point I’ve read most of the book and all of the cards. In the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t yet read the monsters or the introductory adventure, but I’ve read all of the rules and, as I said, all of the cards that came with the box. Also, this isn’t really going to be a full review. That’s been done a lot already (I am late to the party on this, after all). Instead, I’m going to talk about some of the things within the game book that struck me, and what I think about them. Overall, my impressions of the game are pretty positive.

Character Generation
This is a pretty big departure from D&D, despite being built on the same game system. Virtually every aspect of Gamma World’s character generation system is randomized. You roll two random origins and get powers from those origins. Your origins determine one or two of your ability scores, while you roll randomly for the rest. You get to choose your armor and weaponry, but all of your gear is randomly rolled. You roll a random skill to be trained in (though the concept of skill training, as such, doesn’t exist in the game), and get bonuses to others from your origins. All of this random rolling, combined with the absence of feats, means that character generation is, in theory, very fast.

This is largely because there is little decision making to be done from a mechanical standpoint; your origins determine the powers you get (though you can play around with the order in which you get them), and there are no feats, so you’re not making a lot of decisions like you are in D&D. That said, even though you’re not making a lot of mechanical choices, you still get to do a lot of customization in terms of role-playing choices. You randomly roll two origins; these origins are things like “android”, “seismic”, “telekinetic”, “hawkoid’, or “yeti”. There are twenty-one of these origins and, as you might expect, you can roll up some pretty wacky combinations.

That’s where the fun comes in; you have to try to reconcile these two potentially disparate and possibly contradictory origins (Pyrokinetic plant, anyone? How about a seismic rat swarm?) and come up with a character concept that makes sense within the world. This is an exercise in creativity, and means that your character can look, quite literally, like just about anything. It’s a cool feature that I like quite a bit.

Gear
This narrative customization extends to the gear you carry, too. There are three types of armor in the game: light, heavy, and shields. You choose which one you get, and you get to describe what it looks like. Are you wearing a heavy leather duster? An umpire’s padding? A conglomeration of road signs soldered together? Medieval plate mail? It’s really up to you.

Weapons get this treatment, too. There are melee weapons, ranged weapons, and guns, and each comes in a light and heavy flavor and a one-handed and two-handed flavor. If you’re a big tough character with a high Strength, you’ll probably want a heavy melee weapon, and possibly a two-hander if you don’t need a shield. That said, it’s not that interesting to just say “I have a heavy two-handed melee weapon, and I hit the mutant badger with it.” What does that weapon look like? Is it a stop sign? A chain saw? A bastard sword? A cash register? Again, the details are left up to you.

No Money
The game lacks any system for money. In the postapocalpytic world, everything operates on a barter economy, so if you need more ammo, you’re going to have to trade something you have for it. This means that the random junk you find can potentially buy you life-saving gear (like food, ammo, water, armor, or gas for your truck), so you’re going to want to scavenge as much as you can. Luckily, there’s a big random table of Ancient Junk in the book that makes generating mundane scavenge pretty easy.

Cards
A lot of people have made a lot of noise about Gamma World being a collectible role-playing game because of the included Alpha Mutation and Omega Tech cards, and the fact that you can buy booster packs of them. I can understand where people would get that impression, but having looked at the cards and read the rules, I can tell you this: you don’t need to buy a single booster pack if you don’t want to. The two included decks have plenty of stuff in them, and they give you a booster pack to customize your decks a little bit. I haven’t yet decided whether or not I’ll be buying any boosters, but I can tell you this: if I do, it won’t be for a while; certainly not until I’ve played the game a few times first.

As for the cards themselves, I think they’re great. Alpha mutations are encounter powers or passive abilities that range from extremely situational (like a power that counters life-leeching) to extremely potent (like an attack power that deals 7d8 points of damage). There are no level restrictions on these powers, and they’re randomly drawn, so you can potentially get something really powerful at first level. The catch is, you won’t have it for long. During every short rest, your alpha mutation changes, so you’re going to constantly have new powers to try out and use.

Omega tech is a little more dependable; it’s gear that you find, and you keep it until it dies. Each has a consumable power or an encounter power, and if you use an encounter power, at the end of the encounter you have to roll to see if you’ve used that item’s last charge. Many items can be salvaged if you’re high enough level, and salvaging omega tech gets you some pretty nice swag. Typically these are suits of armor, weapons, or mundane items that are more potent than what you can get otherwise, but they’ll never be as powerful as they were when they were omega tech. Again, there is no level requirement for using these items (though there is for salvaging them), and they’re randomly drawn, so you could wind up with something pretty potent from the get-go.

Lethality and Healing
There is no healing magic in Gamma World. There are no clerics. A couple of the origins have healing powers or powers that grant temporary hit points, and some of the alpha and omega cards do so as well, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll see any of that. This makes for a pretty lethal game. To combat this somewhat, some concessions have been made. Your second wind, for example, now allows you to regain hit points equal to your bloodied value (half your hit points), and costs you a minor action. There are also no healing surges in the game; all healing is effectively free (though uncommon). A short rest heals you completely and refreshes all of your powers (there are no daily powers in the game), making it about as good as an extended rest in most situations. In fact, the only reason to take an extended rest is to level up (you have to take an extended rest to level up), and to shuffle the discard piles back into the alpha and omega decks.

Another note on lethality: your character may very well die (and there is no resurrection in Gamma World, so if you die, you’re gone), but as I mentioned earlier, making a new character is a pretty quick and easy process. This means that your character might be dead, but you’ll probably have a brand new one ready before the next encounter.

I recently got together with my friend Dean to have a brainstorming session about a couple of RPG ideas that we had. We had gotten into a conversation on a previous get-together about game design (apropos of Bulldogs! and its upcoming release), and he mentioned that he had an idea for a game that he wanted to run by me. I listened to his idea (which I thought was awesome), and then ran an idea past him (which he thought was awesome). We made plans to meet the following week (today) to brainstorm for our ideas and see where we could go with them.

I’m very pleased to say that the brainstorming session was extremely productive for both games. We’re both energized now, and I think we may actually wind up designing these things to completion. I feel like, when I’m designing, it helps me a lot to have a partner. I like to do things collaboratively, and it helps a lot to bounce ideas off of someone who’s just as invested in the game as you are, but might be coming at it from a different perspective. It also helps to have a partner who’s enthusiastic about the project, because enthusiasm is contagious and it keeps me on track.

Now, I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on either of these games. Both may wind up changing quite a bit between now and when we’ve got something finished that we can playtest, and there’s always the fear that someone might steal our ideas and publish them first (though I know that nobody who reads this blog would do such a thing). I will give you some teasers, though.

Anabasis (working title) is a game about crossing hostile territory, isolation, and zombies. It’s got some collaborative world-building elements, and is suited for long-term, campaign-style play, though it might not be quite as long-form as something like D&D. We may also wind up using Saga for the rules. This one is Dean’s brainchild, and I think it’s fantastic.

The other one, which we’re currently calling Doppelganger, is also about isolation, but also paranoia and negotiation. There’s a lot of table-talk in this one, and it’s designed to be a one-shot, playable in one or two sessions. It also incorporates a lot of board game elements. This one was my idea, though Dean offered a lot of great ideas when we were brainstorming it.

At any rate, I just wanted to share my excitement. I’ve been wanting to get back into designing my own stuff for a while now, but I just haven’t been able to motivate myself to do so. As I said, enthusiasm is contagious, and now I’m ready to go!

Yesterday, I ran a playtest for Bulldogs! that went quite well, from my perspective. The group seemed to have fun (I certainly did), and I got an idea about what works and what needs work within the system.

One thing that struck me, though, was how effective my preparations were. In general, I think I prepared fairly well; I knew the system, and I had in idea of where things were going. There were areas where I think I over-prepared, and others where I feel I didn’t prepare enough.

The chief area where I was over-prepared was simply in the length of the adventure. We played for a good three and a half hours, and got through about half of the adventure. In a more traditional, longer-term play setting that might be fine, but in a one-shot playtest, it’s really better if you can get through the entire adventure in one sitting. I decided partway through that I was going to cut some of the fights out of the adventure because it simply didn’t need it, but we still weren’t able to finish (I had to get home and feed the dogs, after all). I think the reason that I prepared so much was simply because I’ve never run a FATE system game before, and I had no idea how long it would take to resolve a single conflict. Practice, I think, will solve this problem.

Bulldogs!, like any FATE game, is fairly easy to improvise with; it gives you a lot of tools with which to adjudicate player actions on the fly, and doesn’t require nearly as much preparation as, say, D&D does. In fact, the adventure that I prepped (the one that was too long) was only two pages long. I also had a set of cards with character stats and notes on them, though that stuff could have easily been included in the adventure document, and would likely only have increased its length by half a page or so.

It was pretty easy to run the adventure from this document, but I could definitely see areas where I could have prepared more. For example, simply putting stress boxes for the enemies on the document would have saved me a lot of time that I spent hand-drawing them before encounters. I also think that some of the fights that I planned were a little too hard for the party. This is partly due to inexperience, I think, and partly also due to the fact that it’s difficult to gauge how difficult an opponent should be for a particular set of PCs.

Despite these hitches, I do think that everyone had a lot of fun. I really enjoyed running the game (and I had a good, creative set of players), and I’d definitely run it again.

It’s no secret that 4th Edition D&D has a lot of powers available for PCs. Many of these powers do extraordinary things, such as creating fire, transforming people from one thing to another, or teleporting a person instantaneously. In any game, it pays to think about how the existence of certain powers or types of powers might affect the world at large; how might laws change, for example, if people are capable of hurling fireballs and summoning lightning bolts?

This particular post is going to focus on teleportation. In D&D, most teleportation powers are the purview of either PCs (who do not represent the norm in a D&D world), or powerful monsters (again, not the norm). This makes teleportation, at large, relatively rare. However, there is one form of teleportation that is much more common: namely, every eladrin in the world is capable of fey stepping multiple times per day.

What happens, then, when an eladrin must be incarcerated? Since he could just teleport out of the cell and escape (or even out of his manacles before he’s put in the cell), some sort of safeguard must be in place. In the world of Eberron, there is a working class of minor mages known as magewrights. These magewrights light magical lanterns, create minor magical goods, and so forth. Perhaps this concept makes sense in any D&D world that includes a sizeable number of eladrin, if only so that jails, banks, jewelry stores, and so forth can be warded against teleportation on a regular basis. Another possiblity is that, perhaps, there are magically treated manacles that prevent the wearer from teleporting.

Terrain Effect: Teleportation Ward
A teleportation ward is usually used to protect a room filled with valuable or dangerous goods, the room of an important individual, or a jail cell. At heroic tier, it is a 5×5 area; at paragon, it is a 10×10 area; and at epic, it is a 15×15 area. Any power with the teleportation keyword used within the area still creates any non-teleportation effects, but any teleportation effects fail to work. A teleportation ward can be suppressed with an Arcana check (hard DC, standard action); if this is done, it is suppressed until the end of the character’s next turn.

Magic Item: Anchor Manacles
Level 1 Wondrous Item (360 gp)
Anchor manacles are used to prevent prisoners from teleporting, and are frequently used when incarcerating eladrin and other fey creatures. Any creature wearing a set of anchor manacles cannot teleport. A creature can escape from a pair of anchor manacles with an Athletics or Thievery check (hard DC, standard action).