also i was going to respond to this and forgot, bc i think this could be interesting to combine the lore from both franchises. would this be stat based or no? i know the power scaling/leveling would lend itself to that but i could see it going either way.
also, re: your issue with jcink. yeah, that sucks man. jcink's got a wicked learning curve, and i feel like the wiki that john set up to help people code for it needs to be updated/overhauled, bc it's kind of hard to navigate and is otherwise just outdated. like the last i checked it doesn't even have the right stylesheet on it lmao