Reality Warper / Tabletop Games

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• In Aberrant, high end Novas are this, with the thin veneer of 'lol physics still matters' being the only limiter. This includes planet-busting energy beams, creating planetary scale amounts of matter from nothing, linking every mind on the planet up to a hive-mind, time-traveling, and making brand-spanking-new universes. Then again, the power Planck Bubble allows PCs to generate a space in which whatever they can imagine will occur and can persist following the end of the Bubble effect.
• Most of the divine-level magic in Anima: Beyond Fantasy has shades of this, particularly the creation path. The main paths and sub-paths of magic give the user complete control over whatever the theme of the path is, be that fire, light, illusion, or even blood. Those spells are kept in check from being a Game-Breaker by limiting them to extremely powerful supernatural beings, though a sufficiently dedicated character could theoretically gain those powers eventually.
• Chronicles of Darkness:
  • Mage: The Awakening: This is the central ability of Mages. The most powerful mages can reach the full extent of the trope, even changing reality retroactively.
  • Some Changelings can also do this, albeit to a much more limited extent, by manipulating Glamour.
  • Demon: The Descent: The God-Machine subverts this. It's stated that it is not omnipotent, and actual reality warping is outside its capability. What it can do however, is to make use of multitude of loopholes, exceptions and hidden laws of reality, both physical and magical, to bring forth effects that even the real Reality Warpers would find impossible to recreate.
  • In the fan-made line Genius: The Transgression you have the Unmada, geniuses who believe their own theories are really how the world works and that everybody else is crazy or deluded. When they stay in one place for too long, their Mania starts warping the world around them to reflect their beliefs.
• Similarly to Nobilis, most miraculous PCs in spinoff game Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. The Reality Syndrome Miraculous Arc is particularly notable for this: if taken in one of the "wishing" variants, such as the Engine itself, this is executed much like whatever you wanted was being written into the GM's notes.
• The "Language" Madness Talent from Don't Lose Your Mind, a supplement for Don't Rest Your Head, lets one of the Awake alter reality by speaking the secret language God used to create the universe. If they become a Nightmare, they're at risk of becoming the Omnipotent Third Person, a mindless, disembodied narrator who corrupts and twists reality by describing it.
  • Several other Madness Talents provided in that book are narrower Reality Warper abilities — "Teddy" in particular lets you harm or destroy things by harming a teddy bear you possess — and since the player is free to come up with their own Madness Talents, they can make their own that are also Reality Warper abilities.
  • The game actively encourages this; in Don't Lose Your Mind it's stated that any good madness power deployed at full power is going to be functional omnipotence, omniscience, or both. And that this is entirely intentional and completely expected; swinging six madness dice is you telling reality to sit down and shut up, and your madness power determines the fine details of how you go about it.
    • This is partly due to the fact that Madness Talents work on dream logic — someone with Super Strength is strong enough to lift a car, smash steel, or bend metal bars if they put enough dice into it, sure... but they're also likely strong enough to lift someone's spirits, smash corruption, and bend the truth. And, yes, the mental image you might have gotten of a guy with veins and muscles bulging and straining, teeth clenched as someone near him pulls out of depression is probably exactly what one of the more abstract, dream-logicy applications of a Super-Strength Madness Talent would look like.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Magic and psionics are typically much more functional, but spellcasters and psionicists can pull this off with a few abilities and spells, including Limited Wish, Wish, Miracle, and Genesis.
  • High level Wizards are especially prone to becoming like this.
• In Eclipse Phase, characters with the psi-chi or psi-gamma traits have minor psychic abilities, conferred by infection with the (apparently) benign Watts-MacLeod strain of the exsurgent virus. Exsurgents, transhumans who have been completely taken over by the less benign strains of the virus, possess the much more powerful psi-epsilon sleights, such as telekinesis, thermokinesis, the ability to transmute matter, shut down electrical flow in their near vicinity, control electromagnetic fields around them, and generally tell the laws of physics to shut up and sit down.
• Numerous beings in Exalted are capable of some degree of this (especially Raksha and Primordials). However, the Solar Exalted are by far the most capable. Not only are their Lore Charms able to impose order and structure on the Wyld to create beings, objects or places, but at higher levels they can access a Charm that allows them to fundamentally alter the universal principles that apply to the things that they create. Through an extremely difficult mechanism called a "Miracle Shell", they are capable of applying such alterations to Creation itself, allowing them to redefine or add anything to it.
  • The most basic reality warping Solar Lore Charm, or its Abyssal/Infernal analogue for those Exalt types, is something a newly Exalted character can know. With that Charm and the right two artifacts (one can't be used by a non-Solar, the other can't be made or maintained by non-Solar) it's possible for even a very inexperienced Solar to warp reality anywhere.
    • With the right Charms and under the right circumstances Abyssals can use parts of the Solar Charmset, although the consequences of doing so are extremely unpleasant for the Abyssal., and a Solar can use parts of the Abyssal Charmset without repercussions. An Abyssal might be able to use those Solar Charms and artifacts, but definitely won't enjoy it. An Inferal most definitely can't because they can't use any part of Solar or Abyssal Charmsets, or Sidereal Martial Arts (which both Solars and Abyssals can learn).
• In Grimm, any character with Imagination as their iconic core trait becomes one in the Grimm Lands, able to manipulate the imagination-stuff made real of the Grimm Lands through sheer force of will and creativity. Dreamers, however, are better at it than anyone, having a higher starting Imagination and getting it as a free iconic core trait in addition to their normal one. They can even put their normal iconic core trait into Imagination as well, making them even more potent — when spending Imagination to alter the Grimm lands, each single point spent counts as two.
• GURPS also has a variety of reality warping spells, including (in ascending order of power): Lesser Wish, Wish, and Great Wish. They're all ridiculously expensive to cast, especially Great Wish (duh), thus you can only create one by hard work over a long period of time. (But if you find an item with a Wish enchantment already on it, you can activate the spell with ease.)
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Planeswalkers, which includes you, the player. Being able to travel the Multiverse, summon creatures of massive power (including, as of the Theros set, literal gods), use ancient artifacts, and even create their own universe aside from rewriting others. You, the player, are a Planeswalker having a little scuffle with others. The cards represent creatures, spells, and artifacts you are summoning into reality powered by Mana.
  • In-universe, the event known as "The Mending" dampened the abilities of planeswalkers. Especially Teferi, who funneled magic from an incoming inter-planar attack to phase his entire homeland out of existence for centuries.
  • Ixidor was not a planeswalker, but still possessed the unique ability to sculpt reality. Originally a Master of Illusion, he gained this ability when his illusions became real. He used this to create a small kingdom in the desert and transformed his own arm into Akroma, the Angel of Wrath.
• In Mutants & Masterminds, the power of choice for Reality Warpers would be Animate Object - which can be used to bend the air to your will. Combined with Create Object and Transform, you can very nearly manipulate every aspect of your environment with a thought.
• The Nobles of Nobilis. The game is about playing as one of them. In addition, there are also the Imperators, who empower the Nobles, and the Excrucians, who stand opposed to reality's very existence.
• Old World of Darkness:
  • Mage: The Ascension gives its characters the ability to bend reality, but they're usually kept in check by Paradox. The Marauders, however, are not; due to their condition, they have the ability to flout Paradox, making it hit other mages instead of themselves. On the other hand, they get Quiet, which reflects just how much reality disagrees with them; if it hits a certain point, they're exiled from this world and free to run merry in realms of their own madness.
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse has a class of banes called Nexus Crawlers who can warp reality.
  • The Haunters of Wraith: The Oblivion have a limited capacity to warp reality thanks to their connection to primordial chaos, manifesting as the ability to create strange effects and warp space and time on the local level. This usually translates to "haunted house shit," but the higher levels of their distinct Arcanos allows them to manipulate time — and some particularly devoted Haunters want to use it to undo their own deaths.
• An alarming number of NPCs — including several Big Bad candidates — in Over the Edge.
• Pathfinder: First Edition, being effectively a continuation of Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition, brought Wish and other spells like it over from D&D. Second Edition nerfed these spells as part of its efforts to combat Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards. Wish was now limited mostly to doing anything a weaker spell could do, which wasn't as much as in First Edition, as a lot of the really powerful effects became Ritual Magic. A Wish could do greater things, but only if the Game Master allowed it. When the Remaster rolled around, Paizo recognized that this severely limited the stories that could be told using a wish, and made "duplicate the effects of a weaker spell" a different spell entirely. Wish is now the most powerful ritual. The Wish ritual can do absolutely anything, and alters reality to the degree that even the gods can't reverse the spell. The downside is that it comes with nasty side effects unless you are very lucky.
• Certain non-Euclidean aspects of thulhu from Pokéthulhu, including an example from the sourcebook that has the ability to trap people and thulhu in a Pocket Dimension.
• This is why residents of Vechor in the Ravenloft setting are glad their darklord-king, Easan the Mad, is usually too busy with his deranged experiments to notice them. If he does, he may decide they would be happier with, say, three extra arms or a river of grape-flavored wallpaper paste flowing through their backyard.
• Stealing Stories For The Devil: Every player has the ability to tell lies that come true, and can specialize in either lying to people to change their minds, lying to objects to change what they are, or lying to the past to change events. Lies will always come true, however the more outrageous the lie is the more psychic damage you'll take, which will inhibit your ability to do other things (and the more the GM can screw with what you said). It's part of the game's "build the world as you play" design.
• In Tales from the Floating Vagabond, characters with the "Escher Effect" shtick can make a Luck roll to temporarily ignore the laws of physics. The Referee is encouraged to have the power go off at inconvenient times if the players try to abuse it too much.
• In Toon: The Cartoon RPG, characters can take the power of Cosmic Shift, which allows them to warp reality on a minor scale to achieve any of three purposes (or because the Animator thinks it would be funny):
  1. To deal damage to an opponent.
  2. To prevent damage being dealt to their character.
  3. To advance their character's Beliefs and Goals.
  • There is also a smaller form, in that failing a Smarts check allows you to do something blatantly impossible because your character is too dumb to realize they can't do that.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • High-level psykers, known as 'apex-levels', have the ability to change physical reality by thought alone. Unfortunately, human minds were not designed to handle so much exposure to the Warp and these individuals are inevitably driven insane the moment they awaken to their powers, with catastrophic results.
  • All the Necron C'tan, ancient physical gods, can bend reality like a pretzel, but none of the C'tan are more famous for this than The Deceiver.
  • Ursarkar Creed, with his special rule to give the Outflank ability to anything (not including cavalry, but including skyscraper-sized Titans), is jokingly alleged to be Reality Warping by the community.
  • The ultimate goal of all Chaos followers is to ascend and become an immortal Daemon Prince with absolute mastery of the Warp. They spend most of their time ruling Daemon Worlds, planets where physics is a fun joke you tell your friends and the only law is the will of their masters.
  • Orks, if only to a very limited extent. Orks possess a gestalt psychic field, very much similar to the aforementioned human psykers. If there is a large number of Orks in close proximity (and they usually are) and believe something should happen, it will happen. For example, the majority of regular Orks, Ork Mekboyz and the Kult of Speed believe that "da red onez go fasta!" and indeed if a vehicle is painted red, it will go faster. Orks have also been known to use weapons and technology that just shouldn't be able to function, like ships that work without fuel and "guns" that fire despite merely being gears, wires, and pipes in the shape of a gun.

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