Humanoids often find the need to travel around. Whether it's for business, pleasure or necessity, the need of traveling is there. However, the world is not a safe place. Outside the safe confined of a city, all kinds of danger might be lurking around. From bandits and dire wolves, to hungry ogres and wyverns. To ensure some basic safety, people travel in groups, often hiring a travel escort group from the town's Adventuring guild. Trained adventurers in scouting and navigating the land, take responsibility for the travelers and get paid by the guild for their services. Such travelling is often done in slow pace as scouting takes time and detours to avoid monsters are often taken. For that reason, roads have never been popular, as they attract enough danger to not make the convenience worthwhile. The adventurers' fees depend on the guild, the distance of the trip and the area.
Sometimes the destination of the trip is across a large body of water. Things become substantially more costly when sailing is involved. Despite Tritons efforts to keep the seas safe, they are simply not enough to safeguard all vessels from the dangers of the seas. Naval transportation has been deemed more dangerous than any other way, and it's avoided unless no alternative is presented. Pirates of Blackden seemed to have found a way to make it less dangerous for them, but their secrets have not been revealed to the rest of the world. Most commercial shipments stay near the shorelines, avoiding the dangers of the deep waters and the pirates.
With both overland and sailing being that dangerous, nation were forced to explore other means. Turning to magic, initially simple Teleportation magic or circles were attempted to be used. Soon enough though they realized that magic coming from the land itself, becomes much weaker over large bodies of water, making the spells falter more often than not. Several nations agreed to work together and establish a gateway network that would allow teleportation between major cities. Early attempts failed as the giant magical portals, called "AposGates", were extremely magic consuming and unstable. After the Unknown was formed, with the distribution of the elven Power Cores, the AposGates worked much better, becoming stable. The amount of magic needed was still extreme, which made their usage very expensive. Each AposGate has a magical frequency which needs to be known to the users of another AposGate in order to connect the two. Some of the nations of Caldar joined the teleportation network, providing safe, fast but expensive travel between them, but some others decided that the magic of their power cores is better used elsewhere. The AposGate in Emberdaine is sometimes connected with an AposGate in the Eratus. Depending on the political situation between the two nations, the gate closes and opens.
Trying to imitate the functionality of the AposGates, some attempts have been made to establish two-way portals between other large cities, but there were no complete successes. Often failures, mishaps and expensive maintenance, have proven that there are project that needs further research.
