Do you take an AppleTV or anything with you while travelling? If you're on the road with a laptop you can just run a VPN client on there directly, you don't really need a separate networking device.
The setup I'm looking for is to be able to set up an IPSec tunnel to a home machine to be able to a) access machines and b) watch videos.
dd-wrt does not support IPSec (not without recompiling and having to fiddle with a bunch of stuff) so that's why I was thinking about terminating in a server acting as VPN endpoint.
PS. PPTP is not a consideration due to its security flaws.
I'm having trouble finding/defining iptables rules that can forward IPSec traffic from a dd-wrt to a server acting as a VPN endpoint.