What about a border between subuniverses that is a sliding scale from the bias rules for one verse to the bias rules for the next verse.
Forex: You are in Happy Suburbia, and you enter the front door of Haunted Mansion, and your PDA starts to malf. Upon reaching the living room, you notice odd cold drafts, and your flashlight sputters. Getting to the kitchen, you see letters in blood write a note to you on the wall...
"Don't open the door." And you think you spot something, and try to load and fire your mechanically wound crossbow, but it doesn't operate.
You pick up a pickaxe, and light a torch from the kitchen's fireplace, and open the back door to enter the Land of Monsters.
The Tech Bias is dropping and the Magic Bias rising as you go further into the Haunted Mansion. When you cross the threshold of the back door, you're in very low tech, and high magic Nightmare World.
The door slams shut behind you of its own accord.
Interesting, but it sounds like it should quite quickly change, or the referee will need copious notes.
This would require at least five sub-universes: one for Happy Suburbia, one for the Land of Monsters, and three for the Haunted Mansion (foyer, living room, kitchen). I would prefer to do this another way.
One thing that occurs to me is a three-universe approach. Happy Suburbia is mid-high tech, no magic; the Land of Monsters is negative tech, high magic; and the Haunted Mansion is all one sub-universe with mid-high tech and high magic, with the gradual failure of technology as you get closer to the gate into the Land of Monsters achieved by steadily increasing magical penalties against the use of technology.
I prefer that approach because the only way to have the bias change is to cross a sub-universe boundary. If you want the bias itself to change "gradually," like the pitch in a chromatic scale, you would need a separate sub-universe for each note. Doing that not only results in a counter-intuitively large number of universes, it is also likely to have side-effects you don't necessarily want.
I really need the referee rules. I am told I can likely get it next month! Hurrah!
I'd like the sliding scale, but Brock and Wodium both have separate but good points. I'd thought a bit of Brock's point. It could get quite difficult to keep track of the effect.
I'll take Wodium's idea, I expect with one caveat. In my example, you get more and more noticeable and hopefully higher bias magic as you go further.
At the door--no magic.
Living room--cold drafts.
Kitchen--Letters in blood writing themselves (not illusionary which makes this possibly fairly high bias magic.)
Eric is trying to stretch the boundary itself, and create rules for being "on the line" between two sub-universes.
Scott's right: the lines don't have spatial dimensions unless they are also sub-universes.
Also, the effects you want on technology probably require either bias blocking or power blocking. Most of the tech devices you name have @1 operation skill, so although they would be difficult and less reliable, they would still be functional. Your crossbow is more likely to misfire, and your flashlight might flicker, but try enough times and you can fire the bolt and get the light back on. (Note that in Haunted House the failure of tech devices is caused by skill use by the ghost: he physically tampers with your flashlight to cause it to fail.)
--M. J. Young
MJ,
Exactly so.