Travel Runes would allow a character to teleport directly to any town with a gatekeeper. These could go into a sort of rune book. It would solve many lag issues caused by having to travel through densely populated, or known lag causing areas.
Each gatekeeper could provide a quest for travel runes (eg: 5 spell shards and 5 essence orbs). Depending on the location, the tier of the runes would increase (T1 regions could require sandstone spell shards/dim essence orbs and so forth, through T5).