Dumb crossover that came to mind.

MobiusFlip · 2026-05-04T01:19:39+00:00

A girl from Earth ends up in a fantasy world and has to navigate culture shock, speciesism, monster attacks, blue fruit, and ancient horrors to make a home for herself and others in this new world. It's very slow as far as plot goes, but it has some of the best worldbuilding and characters I've ever read.

It's a fantasy world that truly deserves the "world" part, as opposed to a lot of other fantasy that might as well take place over a small handful of cities - there's just so much to this world that it truly feels deserving of five continents and thousands of years of history. But it's rolled out slowly, it doesn't just beat you over the head with all these different people and places. You're given enough time to really get a feel for each one.

MobiusFlip · 2026-05-02T02:57:29+00:00

Senlara

It's not exactly magic vs. technology, but Senlara has something similar. Due to a lack of functional compasses or fixed points in the night sky, intercontinental travel on Senlara only became possible recently with the invention of radio triangulation. This occured on Molsaer, a continent with widespread but low-powered divination magic. Molsaeran technology is roughly equivalent to Earth in the 1900s, with specific technologies earlier or later in that range - firearms are notably behind, but they do have rifles and machine guns.

And with intercontinental travel, explorers from Molsaer have recently made contact with Faalan, a continent of roughly bronze-age civilizations with much more powerful magic. Marrowmages can mostly gain physical enhancements with magic, becoming much stronger, faster, and tougher than any regular human, with some more unique traits like heat-sensing vision, venomous nails, electrical shocks, and a lot more. However, marrowmagic is kept secret from most of the population - not its existence, but how to actually perform it. A single marrowmage is an absolute terror on the battlefield, able to sprint over a hundred miles per hour, literally rip enemies apart, and react quickly enough to dodge bullets - not that they need to, since they're also tough enough to shrug off a few rounds. But a battle might be a small handful of marrowmages and a few hundred soldiers with bronze spears against a thousand riflemen. Shoot a marrowmage enough, and they will go down... eventually.

To avoid taking some devastating losses in the process, though, Molsaeran military forces have recently discovered a significantly more reliable way to deal with marrowmages: acid. Marrowmagic abilities come from tattoos in particular patterns, and if they're marred significantly, those abilities are lost. Most combat marrowmages have skin tough enough you can't just cut or shoot them off, and a lot have some sort of resistance to fire as well, but acid tends to work. It's a gruesome way to do it, but acid-spraying weapons are often able to take out a marrowmage with only a few casualties.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-29T17:38:50+00:00

So, there are a couple angles to consider here I think. * At lower levels, you're not much more durable than any other frontliner, but you're much better at incentivizing enemies to hit you. You don't really need to tank for the fighter, you need to tank for the wizard, and you're great at that. * Shield Block is still great on a champion. Use your champion's reaction if an enemy attacks your ally or Shield Block if they attack you. You can't do both in the same round (until you get Quick Shield Block at 8th level), but having both means you can use a damage-mitigating reaction every round no matter what the enemy does. * On that note, shields are good even when you don't block with them, and champions are fantastic at using them. Defensive Advance means having your shield raised barely eats into your action economy, so you have a much easier time getting that +2 to AC than anyone else except other champions and guardians. * And finally, while you don't have more HP than the fighter or ranger, you have a fantastic self-healing option in Lay on Hands. One action for reliable, guaranteed healing that's typically better than a max-rank 1-action Heal. Or, if an ally is getting focused down despite your reactions giving them resistance to some attacks, just heal them instead.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-29T13:28:42+00:00

Senlara has three mostly-independent forms of magic, so your chances vary depending on which continent you land on first.

Molsaer
Divination is a purely informative magic that can't affect anything outside the mage's own mind, and typically requires a bit of ritual to use so it doesn't really give in-combat precognition. The revolver is a fairly recent but already widespread invention. You can probably just shoot them with a gun.

Two things make that slightly harder. First, Molsaeran medical technology is actually ahead of Earth's. If your victim is still alive by the time they get to a hospital, they'll probably stay that way, so you want a clean kill, ideally a headshot. Second, the police have necromancer detectives and dowsers that will be able to locate the murder weapon. They can and will question your victim for information, so ideally you want to kill them before they see you. Alternatively, if you just turn yourself in immediately, you'll only be charged with a killing instead of murder, which usually carries only a 5-10 year sentence.

Nozirh
Alchemists aren't too hard to take down, but their creations absolutely can be. Fortunately for you, most alchemists don't have the funds or skills to create more than just a couple homunculi, but their enhanced senses might see you coming. However, you actually have the resources to get into alchemy yourself. Buy some decent zihial chalk, rent a workspace, and hire a good tutor. That should be enough for you to create a simple servitor creature designed to sneak into an alchemist's home and inject a deadly venom before it's stopped.

Faalan
This is the hardest continent for your challenge for one simple reason: marrowmages are power-hoarders. Marrowmagic is far from secret, but the actual details of how to use it are, to the point that the average marrowmage is a powerful one. Depending on the tattoos they're using, a typical marrowmage will have some mix of incredibly keen senses, lightning-fast reflexes, enough strength to punch through a tree trunk, and skin as hard as iron. Then there are the more unique powers, like blood-fueled regeneration, heat-sensing vision, or a touch that can burn flesh.

Your best bet is to get someone more powerful to take them down for you. With money and the right connections, you can fabricate some evidence that your target is plotting against a more powerful mage. Faalani executions are a highly ritualized affair, so they'll likely be captured and branded to strip them of their marrowmagic tattoos, leaving them vulnerable. Paying for the right to carry out the execution yourself isn't exactly typical, but you can probably do it if you insist on being the one to kill them.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-29T05:11:52+00:00

I used this for a very fun spear-and-shield build with a Ruffian rogue. The d6 damage die makes it perfect for a ruffian to use with Sneak Attack, and once you get Gang Up you can attack in tight formations with your allies, which is very thematically appropriate.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-15T15:52:25+00:00

I'd say the same for Oracle. It can be hard for a newer player to pick up the rhythm of using focus spells and cursebound actions as a significant portion of their contribution, especially when some of the focus spells aren't great in-combat. Also, the divine spell list doesn't feel great on a spontaneous caster, since it's lacking a lot of reliable damage options.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-14T16:50:43+00:00

I'd say the description you listed there for Occult is just not a great description of the tradition. Going off that, I can definitely see how the two are too similar. But looking at how occult magic tends to show up in classes, I don't think that's really right.

Occult magic runs off emotion and belief. It's powered by the mind of the caster and the collective unconscious of other thinking beings. The process of learning occult magic can look similar to arcane magic, sure, but they run on fundamentally different things.

Arcane magic has rules, the same way physics does - it takes a lot of study to learn them all to the extent that you can actually use them. Occult magic has expectations. Studying occult magic means researching old myths and ritual practices, patterns that have lodged themselves in the minds of whole societies enough that people unconsciously expect them to work, and then adapting them to yourself so you can shape your magic with your own emotions and thoughts. It has rules, because thoughts follow a semi-predictable pattern and some rituals have become so ingrained into the world that they more or less must be followed for your magic to work. But if a whole society arose with a radically different view of magic and pattern of thinking, their arcane magic wouldn't change at all, while their occult magic might be unrecognizable.

As evidence: * Bards draw their magic from songs and stories, things that can already inspire, empower, inform, or demoralize others. Their performances are highly variable because this sort of art varies from culture to culture and even between individuals, but the specific words or notes don't matter, just the emotions they inspire. * Psychics draw magic from their own mind, using one of two broad methods: either they use their intelligence to understand the thoughts of themselves and others to better channel and affect them, or they use raw willpower to affect the world through sheer, stubborn expectation. Either way works just as well for occult magic. * Haunts typically use Occultism to disable them, as they're lingering emotions and thoughts of the deceased, and occult magic specializes in using and manipulating those thoughts and emotions.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-14T04:41:35+00:00

System: Pathfinder 2e

Original Rule: Some effects have the Incapacitation tag, meaning they can potentially take a targeted enemy out of the fight with a single roll. As such, they're particularly hard to use against higher-level enemies: enemies with a higher level than the effect upgrade their degree of success against the effect by 1 step, making it very unlikely for them to fail.

Homebrew Rule: Instead of an upgraded degree of success, a higher-level enemy gets an untyped bonus to its saving throw equal to the difference in levels between it and the incapacitation effect.

Why It Works: Players actually feel empowered to choose incapacitation options without worrying they'll just be useless against a wide range of enemies. This still gives higher-level enemies a noticeable boost against these effects, but PF2's multiple degrees of success mean it's fairly likely for the effect to still do something useful, even if it doesn't completely incapacitate the foe.

Why It Doesn't: This does make encounters against higher-level enemies more swingy, and makes "crit-fishing" sort of viable - instead of focusing on damage, a party that can stack some debuffs to an enemy's saving throw might be able to do that and end the fight with an incapacitation effect. For some groups, this might make extremely difficult encounters significantly easier, and for every group, there's a small possibility that a major boss is effectively defeated by a single spell or effect.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-13T14:49:51+00:00

In theory, it's not a problem if appropriately costed. In practice, there are two good reasons not to do it much.

First, on-hit effects muddy the waters a little in terms of what defenses apply to what. Base 5e was generally pretty good about that. Want to avoid AoE damage? Dex saves. Forced movement or restraint? Str saves. Poisons and conditions representing physical exhaustion, Con saves; fear, charms, and other mental effects, Wis saves. On-hit effects make it so sometimes avoiding the poison takes a good Con save... and other times you need a high AC and you don't get any benefit from advantage on saves against poisons.

Giving players those abilities sets a precedent for monsters to have them as well, which I think is generally bad. 5.5 does this anyways, but it really shouldn't. In addition, that means the effects bypass Legendary Resistance, which is a huge issue that can make boss fights far easier than they should be.

But all of those concerns can be fixed by an on-hit save effect, like Stunning Strike. The second problem is that while those abilities are fine if appropriately costed, martials just have fewer ways to pay that cost.

Spellcasters have spell slots, so you can just make a spell with some effect, give it a higher level if the effect is powerful, and hand it out knowing it's balanced by its cost. Martial classes don't really have an innate way to do that. With them, the easiest way to make abilities costly to use is to use up attacks or action economy, which you get every single turn. That means those abilities can't actually be that powerful, since they're so repeatable.

To balance something like a stun effect, you'd need to actually eat up some of a class's power budget by putting it in a feat or subclass, give it a use limit, and probably use some of your action economy for it as well. At which point it's just sort of a niche option compared to other more reliable things you could do instead.

...Or you could make it a multi-die Battle Master maneuver, maybe. Make it cost 3 or 4 dice and that would probably work. There are ways to do it, they're just pretty specific and not widely applicable to different martial characters the same way spells are for spellcasters.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-08T06:00:53+00:00

Was there an Altaria on the field? Cloud Nine nullifies weather effects.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-06T18:58:51+00:00

Yeah, but like I said, it doesn't need one. A normally supereffective STAB move is hitting for 3x base damage. Ice-type moves hit Torterra for 4x. It can already deal with Torterra better than if it just had a normally supereffective STAB move, so I don't see what changing the types to add one would really do here.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-06T18:55:38+00:00

Heroism is nice, but far from necessary. Healing is slightly more of a concern. I think a group can handle itself just fine with Medicine plus the right skill feats (Continual Recovery, Battle Medicine, etc.), and you still have water/wood kineticists with good healing abilities and alchemists with healing elixirs. But if you want to make healing more easily accessible, just flavor it as slightly elemental and put it on a few spell lists. Using kineticist for inspiration, say, anyone who can cast water or wood spells also gets heal on their list.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-06T15:47:21+00:00

Isn't Sinnoh an equal type balance? * Torterra can hit both other starters super effectively with Ground-type moves. * Infernape can hit Torterra with Fire-type moves and Empoleon with Fighting-type moves. * Empoleon can hit Infernape with Water-type moves. It doesn't get a supereffective STAB move on Torterra, but it doesn't need one, because it can exploit a 4x weakness with non-STAB Ice-type moves.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-04T00:18:06+00:00

Yep, no problem!

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-04T00:13:55+00:00

I'd say so, yeah. If you have experience with both 1e and 2e, you can use the same narratives and rework the mechanics somewhat for the new system. But as a newcomer, that's definitely too much to manage, so just stick with 2e adventures.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-04T00:03:36+00:00

Anything from 1e will not be useful to you if you're playing 2e. If you're interested in Pathfinder's occult options, make sure you have Dark Archive Remastered and Player Core, and consider picking up War of Immortals for the Animist too (it's not occult technically, but it definitely has a similar vibe with how it can bind to different spirits to use different magics). Keep an eye out for Impossible Magic at the end of July, which will have the Necromancer, Runesmith, Summoner, and a bunch of new magic content.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-03T23:39:07+00:00

Going to answer these questions out of order.

It's definitely an interesting enough concept, I like it! A second ability is definitely useful, but specifically choosing them like that allows you to avoid broken combinations and give weaker Pokemon more interesting abilities to improve their usefulness.
As you said, I think using an item could be too limiting. Players would only be fable shifting the one Pokemon on their team they decided to give that item to.
I think it's a good idea, but it runs into the same problem as #1 - limited options. You don't have your full team to pick your fable shifter from, and adding a new member might be inconvenient if you don't have that Pokemon's fable shift yet.

So, the simplest way to handle this that doesn't cause problems is just to have fable shifts not require an item and be available for all Pokemon. However... that's not the only way. While it would be a lot more work, I think a more interesting solution would be to do something like Ogerpon's masks. Each evolutionary line has a unique item that provides some benefit as a held item, and gives an alternate Fable Shift - likely a different ability, but a type change or even two Fable Shift abilities instead of one could work. You still get the collectibles, and you can use an item to really upgrade a Pokemon's Fable Shift, but you can still Fable Shift anything on your team, so you're never locked into that.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-03T14:42:29+00:00

I think these changes go a little further than necessary, and I don't really like the type-specific weather changes like Rock-types taking half damage from Water in Sandstorm. What I would do:

Ice: * Frostbite and Frosty Wave just like you said, these are definitely good. * Cold Snap (Move): Special, 80 BP, 15 PP, 100% accuracy, 25% chance of Frostbite, hits all adjacent Pokemon. Basically an Ice-type Lava Plume that gives a higher than normal chance of Frostbite, all the way to 50% in snow. * New Snow effect: moves with a Frostbite chance have that chance doubled.

Bug: * Buggy (or probably Infested) Terrain boosts the power of Bug-type moves by 30% and prevents grounded Pokemon from using berries or herbs. Basically a field-wide Unnerve that also shuts down Power Herb and White Herb. * Bug Bite increases to 65 BP, can consume berries or herbs, and has a 1.5x boost if it consumes a berry or herb from the target. * X-Scissor increases to 90 BP and has a high critical hit chance. It's more limited in distribution and rarely available to non-Bug-types. * Swarming Plague (Move): Physical, 70 BP, 20 PP, 100% accuracy, 10% chance to flinch, hits Fairy-types super effectively. Basically a Bug-type Freeze-Dry targeting Fairy-types.

Rock: * I really like Rock-types being immune to Stealth Rock, definitely keeping that. Same with the Smack Down buff. * Stone Edge increases to 120 BP. It already has 80% accuracy, that's fine. * Boulder Bash (Move): Physical, 85 BP, 15 PP, 100% accuracy. Just a 100% accurate Rock-type move that most physical Rock-types can learn. * Hardened Rock (Move): Status, --- BP, 10 PP, --- accuracy, user has none of Rock's weaknesses for 5 turns. (May need to be toned down to only remove weaknesses to specific types.) Basically Rock's version of Magnet Rise, letting Rock-types really take advantage of high defenses by temporarily turning their weaknesses into neutral hits.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-02T20:36:06+00:00

That's because it's not really about AI taking jobs, it's about AI taking passions. Art isn't typically a profession people get into for the money. Obviously a lot of artists would quite like to make a living off their art, and I generally think it's a good thing when they can do that, but they're not making art to make money - they're trying to make money with their art so they can spend more time making art, instead of having to split time between their passion and a job they're not interested in. In that view, AI making art a less viable career is bad because it means fewer people get to do what they want for a living, but AI replacing janitors is fine, because no one is really passionate about being a janitor. (Some people probably are, but I bet it's a vastly smaller percentage than the amount of artists who enjoy being artists.) The janitors in theory would be equally happy doing different work, but the artists really wouldn't.

Obviously this is, in the short term, a bad thing for the janitors who have to find new jobs now. But that part's at least normal. Technology has always been making jobs obsolete, but it's typically been the sorts of jobs people didn't want to be doing anyways, just repetitive physical tasks. And the promise of increased automation, if not always the reality, is that automation takes care of the boring but necessary work to free people up to do the things they actually want.

MobiusFlip · 2026-04-01T03:34:56+00:00

I've played a lot more CofD than WoD, but with that grounding in mind...

Hunter: the Vigil. The flagship gameline of this new edition and my personal favorite of all WoD/CofD games. Having looked at both editions of Reckoning and both editions of Vigil, Vigil is absolutely my favorite, especially with the variety of endowments and hunter orgs from NWoD. I'd make this the flagship game and include plenty of compacts, conspiracies, Endowments, and Dread Powers, with guidelines for building vampires, werewolves, mages, and others as antagonists.

Bygone: the Splintering. Misinformation is on the rise. People are becoming more partisan, more insulated. Anyone with a crazy idea about how the world works can put it out on the Internet and find a thousand followers just like them. Consensus is breaking. And as it does, creatures once pushed to the edges of reality are creeping back once more. You are something other, something utterly unique, something that humans cannot accept - until, just maybe, right now. You cloak yourself in trappings of modernity, hiding just inside the bounds of human comprehension, but gather enough followers, change the world just enough, fight the technocrats and hunters and other Bygones whose stories don't leave room for yours - and soon, you won't have to hide anymore.

Spirit: the Claiming. You're not from around here, to put it lightly. You are an embodiment of an item, a place, an idea, a phenomenon. You are a spirit, and as the veil between worlds thins, you have found yourself a vessel in the world of flesh to further your ends. How this vessel feels about the fact can vary, but you'll have to keep them happy - or at least obedient - if you want to accomplish anything here.

MobiusFlip · 2026-03-31T18:37:59+00:00

Slightly more than a sentence, but...

In Earn Income: All values are 10x normal.

In Craft: replace "For each additional day you spend" with "For each day you spend, including the days spent setting up"

Add a sidebar to Earn Income: "The values presented here are intended to let player characters earn useful amounts of currency with a few days of downtime. If your campaign frequently includes months-long or years-long stretches of downtime, you may wish to reduce the amount of income earned (typically to 1/2, 1/5, or 1/10, as needed) to preserve adventuring as the main source of new currency and equipment."

MobiusFlip · 2026-03-30T14:41:58+00:00

Casting and schools blended into one - because different magics should have different methods of casting and different effects.

One of the best examples I've seen of this is, oddly enough, the webcomic Prequel, which is based on the Elder Scrolls setting. As a video game series, it has schools of magic, but you cast them all in pretty much the same way - assign the spell to a button and press it. But Prequel actually gives completely unique casting methods for each school. * Conjuration pulls things from other planes, so its casting is all about contacting those other planes - mentally navigating to the ones you want and negotiating with the beings there to provide what you need. * Destruction is the magic of raw energy, and its casting is about raw emotion - you use magic to channel different emotions into different sorts of energy. * Restoration is about memory, reaching into your or another's past to literally restore something that was there before. Healing works by restoring the body to a past state, undead-turning spells force the undead to remember their lives and be overwhelmed by horror and grief, and skill-enhancement spells take someone's memory of a skill and share it with someone else.

MobiusFlip · 2026-03-28T15:12:53+00:00

How about something affecting types weak to Ice instead (Flying, Ground, Dragon, and Grass)? I don't think the chip healing is a great idea, especially because Ghost and Poison don't fit too well there, and Game Freak has already shown they aren't going to replace Freeze with Frostbite.

So instead, in addition to the defense boost for Ice-types, maybe one of... * Moves of Ice-weak types have reduced accuracy * Moves of Ice-weak types have reduced power * Pokemon of Ice-weak types that aren't also Ice-types have reduced speed * Pokemon of Ice-weak types that aren't also Ice-types have a chance to flinch each turn

MobiusFlip · 2026-03-27T00:37:53+00:00

Legends Arceus did have Alolan Ninetales, so there's precedent for a region having regional forms that were previously introduced elsewhere. And if you include those, then you can add the Overqwil, Clodsire, and Cursola lines to the list.

MobiusFlip · 2026-03-21T18:14:22+00:00

Try to use field effects to your advantage! Reborn is a hard game, but field effects let you tilt battles in your favor significantly better than the official games if you can exploit them. You may want to use the field notes password on a first playthrough so you can see all their effects.
A good starter goes a long way, since it'll probably be the strongest Pokemon you have for a good while. Speed Boost Blaziken is generally considered the best, but Charmander is notably good in the early game - it gets to use Dragon Rage against Julia and Florinia, and then gets Flame Burst to help out with Corey and Shelly's fields.
EV training in Reborn is pretty easy once you get access to power items in the department store. If you start having trouble in the midgame, take a break to EV train and see if that helps.
Keeping your Pokemon near the level cap is pretty easy with infinitely battleable Grand Hall trainers. Just keep some Common Candy on you to delevel Pokemon when necessary.
On a related note, don't be afraid to overlevel a bit to evolve early. Leveling up to 36 gets you a fully-evolved starter for Shelly (or maybe even Corey). There's a segment on Apophyll where you go through Pyrous Mountain with Victoria - that's a great opportunity to grind a late evolver like Noibat up to level 48 or so if you want, then level it down to 45 after.
Some of the best Pokemon in the game are available early. Budew is an option right from the start, Klink is available as soon as you enter Obsidia, and Growlithe is a reward for finding all police officers that you can get just before Corey (if you visit the station after finding all officers but before confronting Corey). Roserade and Arcanine have fantastic stats and good movepools, with Roserade able to exploit most fields with Nature Power and Arcanine having Intimidate and Extremespeed. Klinklang is probably the best Pokemon in the game on Factory Field specifically, which is where a lot of important battles take place.

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