In one of the Jimmy Neutron/Timmy Turner crossovers, Jimmy Neutron gets hold of an "Auto Poofer" It's a magic wand of sorts that lets the user magically teleport back to Timmy's bedroom. Jimmy takes the Auto Poofer and wires it to a hand-held video game, and uses the circuits of the video game to allow him to use the Auto Poofer to teleport him anywhere. That's clearly combining magic and technology. He uses the video game as a GPS of sorts to tell the Auto Poofer where to take him. Can anything like that be done in this game? I've asked about combining magic and psionics, what about other areas? Bionics are used to enhance body skills, so thats combining body and technology, what about the other areas?
I guess I should clarify the purpose of the Auto Poofer. Timmy Turner's fairy godparents gave him the Auto Poofer so that he could escape from any situation, by teleporting back to his bedroom. Timmy winds up in Jimmy Neutron's universe and after fighting with Jimmy, Jimmy accidentally gets the Auto Poofer, and sends himself to Timmy's universe. The thing is, the Auto Poofer will ONLY take him back to Timmy's bedroom. He can't use it to get home. So, Jimmy wires it to the video game, so that he can use it to take him home.
EDIT: The Jimmy/Timmy Power Hours, as these are called, are pretty cool movies. This is from the first of three. Jimmy Neutron has to use his video game/Poofer combination to get to Fairy World to engage professor Crocker who is trying to destroy the place, and Timmy Turner has to battle a mutated version of Jimmy Neutron's robotic dog, Goddard. Very cool movies.
Answer: obviously, devices which combine aspects of multiple bias areas are possible; the question for the referee is whether the result is a device operated within a single bias area or one which requires multiple skills to operate.
The example of bionics is one in which the single bias area result is generally best. If I a robotic arm like Michael di Vars or a Cybermetric eye like Joe Kondor or a Jarvik 7 heart, I am operating a technological device to achieve a biological function: the skill is technological. If, however, I use that device as part of the performance of a clearly bod-based skill, such as a martial arts attack, I have a double skill: in low tech universes a roll will have to be made to determine whether I can make the arm work, plus another roll akin to a martial arts weapon skill roll to see whether I can perform the bod skill using the device.
My character on this board carries a steampunk-world type lightning gun. It is evident to any careful examination that the device itself has sufficient power to create a spark; the lightning that fires from it is produced by magic. When I use the lightning gun, it is a double roll: I perform a tech skill of producing an electrical spark with this device and then using that as a component I perform a magic skill which creates lightning. Because the tech skill must work for the magic skill to work, the magic skill is bonused.
The Jimmy Neutron crossover opens a significant parallel question which is beyond my ability to address in full here: are the things he is using actually technological and magic? I'll give a couple of examples.
In the Mythadventures Book they frequently use a "D-hopper", a sort of rod which when activated takes you to another dimension. It has to be properly calibrated for the dimension to which you wish to go. Theoretically it's one of many magic devices used in the book, but there are reasons to believe that it is not magical at all. Although when Skeeve uses magic he taps into force lines (this suggests that in that corner of the multiverse supernatural energy is tapped because it leaks into the universes through these lines), but Ahz cannot perform magic thanks to a curse placed on him by Garkin as a gag--yet Ahz can use the D-hopper. It looks to me as if it is actually a tech device sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic, and that is probably how I would treat it in my games. In the same way, even though Timmy Turner got that "wand" from his fairy godparents, that does not necessarily mean that it is not, within that world, a technological device.
On the other hand, when I was in the steampunk world the first thing I noticed was that the giant fans on the deck blowing wind into the sails were actually driving the ship forward. My immediate reaction mentally was that all physics as I know it were suspended in this universe. It was a world in which many things were built which looked technological and indeed had technological components, but they worked by magic. Jimmy Neutron builds a lot of things that are, at least based on what we presently know, impossible. It is a plausible argument to suggest that his home-made GPS is an entirely magical device made from components which appear technological. After all, GSPS stands for Global Satelite Positioning System, and as such it won't work even as near away as the moon, never mind in some other dimension, because it needs to read the signals from the satelites to calculate its position. A home made GPS-type device that can tell you where you are without the benefit of reference points--well, such a device might be created, say which identifies specific radiation bands from stars (whether or not these are visible) and calculates by angular direction just where in the universe it is (although the database for this would be immense, and there would be a good possibility of error based on misidentification of stars); but I am much more inclined to think that it's a magic device which performs the spell Jimmy expects it to perform because he performs the correct (very technological-looking) ritual and expects this result.
So I could run that device as
- A pair of tech skills so advanced they appear to be magical;
- A pair of mag skills one of which is designed to look like a tech skill;
- A pair of mag skills combined into one skill but for which the proper activation of a tech skill is an essential component.
--M. J. Young