“Let’s do it again!”
—Snik, Grakken Freebooter hand
Warp Time is a signature Witchwarper warp spell, a focused burst of temporal manipulation that lets you “tilt” the timeline inside your quantum field for just a heartbeat. It is subtle compared to galaxy-shaking magic, but in the tight corridors and split‑second decisions of Starfall, that single heartbeat often decides who walks away.
Witchwarpers call it many things—the stolen instant, the skipped frame, the heartbeat between bullets—but scholars across the Spiraltides know the technique as Warp Time. Inside an active quantum field, a Witchwarper can reach into the Yom, the invisible timeline lattice that underpins causality in Starfall, and tug just hard enough that one moment refuses to behave.
Sometimes that means a shot that should have landed instead streaks through where you were a second ago; sometimes it means an ally seems to “remember” how to duck a fraction of a second before the impact. To outside observers, it looks like a flicker: motions slightly out of sync, afterimages lagging behind, sounds arriving a breath too early or too late. For the Witchwarper, it feels like stepping sideways into a nearby version of now and dragging everyone else a few centimeters along with you.
Warp Time Focus 1
Source Player Core pg. 380
Cast (One Action)
You temporarily alter the timeline within your quantum field. Choose one of the following effects.
Rewind You rewind your personal timeline to an earlier point in your life cycle. You gain 10 temporary Hit Points, which last for 1 minute.
Fast Forward: You accelerate the personal timeline of a creature in your quantum field to the end of its natural life cycle. The creature takes 1d10 void damage with a Fortitude save.
Critical Success The target is unaffected.
Success The target takes half damage.
Failure The target takes full damage and is enfeebled 1 for 1 round.
Critical Failure The target takes double damage and is enfeebled 1 for 1 minute.
Heightened (+2) Increase the damage by 1d10 and the temporary Hit Points by 5.
Warp Time temporarily alters the timeline inside your quantum field, forcing a creature in that zone to deal with time “misbehaving” for an instant. It is built to cast quickly, slot into a round easily, and be tightly tied to your reality‑warping playstyle.
How Warp Time behaves at the table
Mechanically, Warp Time targets a single creature within your quantum field and forces a Will save as you twist its personal sequence of moments. On a failure, the target suffers a temporal distortion—losing actions, stumbling at the wrong second, or otherwise having its immediate future scrambled, while on a success the effect is reduced and a critical success shrugs it off entirely. The exact numbers and text stay identical to the original Starfinder 2e version; only the Starfall framing and visuals change.
Because Warp Time is a focus spell, it uses Focus Points instead of spell slots, is always cast at your highest focus rank, and is regained by performing Witchwarper‑appropriate refocusing—such as meditating on alternate outcomes within your anchor or reviewing “what might have been” in your quantum field. Being an anchoring spell also means it directly rewards maintaining your quantum field in play, reinforcing that your best tricks happen where reality is thinnest.
In Starfall campaigns, Warp Time is an ideal signature of precog‑leaning Witchwarpers or anyone whose paradox plays with causality, missed chances, and second tries. Consider:
Visuals: The target’s outline lags, multiple ghost‑positions stutter around them, or their next movement “rewinds” and plays again, but worse.
Sound: Echoed footfalls, doubled gunshots, or voices that briefly overlap themselves, as if time tried two options before committing.
Roleplay: Your Witchwarper might describe the effect as “choosing the timeline where they hesitated” or “elsewhere they dodged, here they didn’t”—leaning on the idea that you are browsing possible presents and locking in the one that serves your goal.
GMs can lean on Warp Time in Starfall to spotlight temporal anomalies: using the spell in proximity to Riftstorms, Chronologist facilities, or unstable relics might cause strange side effects, foreshadowing deeper time‑weirdness to come. Used consistently, Warp Time becomes part of your Witchwarper’s legend—the little stutter in reality everyone starts to recognize, just before everything goes very right for your side, and very wrong for someone else.
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