Abstract: Synthetic homotopy theory is a general framework for constructing interesting contexts for doing homotopy theory: using the data of a spectral sequence in some category $\mathcal{C}$, one can construct another category which can be viewed as a deformation of $\mathcal{C}$. The motivating example is the fact, due to Gheorghe-Wang-Xu, that ($p$-complete, cellular) $\mathbb{C}$-motivic homotopy theory can be described as a deformation of the ordinary stable homotopy category, simply using the data of the Adams-Novikov spectral sequence. Burklund, Hahn, and Senger used this framework to study $\mathbb{R}$-motivic homotopy theory as a deformation of $C_2$-equivariant homotopy theory. In joint work with Gabe Angelini-Knoll, Mark Behrens, and Hana Jia Kong, we give (up to completion) a different synthetic description of this deformation, which generalizes to give a deformation of (Borel-complete) $G$-equivariant homotopy theory for other groups $G$.