Question: This is somewhat related to your previous posts on new powers/planning ahead for godhood - I have a Scion of Sekhmet that will eventually become a goddess of (ionizing) radiation. Trouble is, there's no real rules for things like radiation poisoning in the books, much less any boons for it. There ARE some in Sun and Health that could be altered, but since there's no precedent for how the damage would work outside of that, my ST and I are at a bit of a loss. Maybe you guys could help?
Okay, five days of Ragnarok, five hours of sleep, back on the horse. Let's do this thing.
The easiest thing to do for your nascent deity of radiative death is probably just to keep the existing Health and Sun boons you're thinking of and rewrite their flavor text to reflect that they cause their damage and effects through radiation instead of other afflictions. In particular, Infect, Wither, Epidemic and Plague can easily be tweaked to always cause their illness through radiation (in fact, I wouldn't even call that a tweak, just a stunt of an existing boon), and all the more potent if you want to go the full no-healing route and invest in a little Vow of Pestilence. Heatstroke can easily be rewritten to cause the effects of radiation instead of heat without having to touch the mechanics, as can Burn, Solar Prominence and Bleach. You don't really need to change the mechanics of most of these things at all; simply stunt or rewrite them so that your Scion is irradiating the living shit out of the landscape instead of giving it cancer or heatstroke, and presto.
If you feel like dipping into any other purviews outside Sekhmet's usual haunts, the Stars boons Red Star and Starfire could also be reworded to have a distinctly heat-radiation feel to them, and you might consider taking some Death boons, like Delay Rot or Destroy Dead, and reversing or tweaking them to fit the concept (an Accelerate Rot boon certainly wouldn't amiss... eww). Some Fire boons, particularly those that cause low-grade damage from close contact, might be appropriate as well. I think there's a lot of fun room to mess with stunting existing powers as effects of your powers over radiation; many Perception knacks (Broad-Spectrum Reception, for example) might be accomplished through your irradiative might instead of mere affinity for noticing stuff.
The main reason irradiation and radiation poisoning aren't addressed directly in Scion is that they're probably assumed to fall under the environmental damage rules, but unfortunately the environmental damage rules in the original book are pretty terrible and have no hope of damaging anyone who buys, say, at least one dot of Epic Stamina. I would suggest quantifying how you want irradiation or poisoning to function in every power you use that involves it, so there's no confusion and no need for a separate system that the Storyteller has to keep track of on the side.
Incidentally, while I think the content of the supplement is pretty hit-or-miss, White Wolf's French imprint Biblioteque Interdite put out a free supplement a while back that detailed a Titan of Death that was primarily focused on nuclear radiation and deterioration. You might find some of the ideas interesting; if you care to take a look, there's an English-translated PDF here.
You could also raid Saturnine Night from White Wolf's Promethean: The Created line for radiation mechanics. Obviously, the rules were written with the assumption that you don't have fistfuls of health levels, but it might be as good a starting point as any, and the Irradiation Transmutations might be a good starting point for any custom (albeit likely low-level) boons your character might want to make.
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