Pull the Leviathan on a Fishhook

Question: Can I ask you about the Leviathan and how to actually make him usable in a Scion game? The build that the book uses for him has that stupid "immortality" power attached.

Sure, you can ask us about anything. It says so above the question box, even.

Leviathan in the books is a bit of a mess, really, which is about par for the course. We're not really sure why that weird immortality power is even in there; sure, Leviathan is epically badass and the Old Testament cannot shout loudly enough about how indestructible he is, but it means indestructible (unless you're Jehovah), not destructible-but-regeneratable. Equally confusing is the weird clause about the Leviathan becoming the servant of anyone who defeats it. We're pretty sure that one's an extrapolation from the monster's description in the Book of Job, where God makes a point of emphasizing how awesome he is by reminding Job that he would not be even remotely able to tame or defeat Leviathan, taunting him by asking repeatedly if he could overcome the beast and make it his servant (no, obviously. Job has a lot of problems even without sea serpents to bother with). And finally, after all that buildup, he doesn't even get a different stat-block from your common garden-variety dunkleostos? Now it's confusing and boring.

How to use and stat the Leviathan really depends on what you want him for in your games. Are you planning on using him as an antagonist? A Titan? Is he something the PCs will run up against, and if so how difficult do you want it to be for them to deal with him? Are you running Judeo-Christian myths as true? If not, how much grain of truth is there in them? Is Leviathan exaggerated in Jewish lore, or is he every bit as crazypants insane as they say he is? Is he a fish, or a sea serpent, or a dragon, or something else entirely?

If you're not planning for him to be the truly giganormous monster he is in the Jewish scriptures, it's fairly easy to stat him as a Typhonian beast of dangerous size and leave it at that. I did just make fun of the books for not giving him a separate writeup, but if you want to use any other dragon or sea creature's stats as a starting place, you'll probably save a little time. If you have a copy of the Bible or Tanakh close to hand, opening it to Job 41:1 will get you a description of all his monstrous qualities and probably be a good source of ideas for how to implement them.

If you are running heavy on Jewish mythology, then Leviathan needs to be a big deal, however; he is the Jormungandr of the Middle East, and he should be accordingly insanely powerful and dangerous. You could just slap Jormungandr's stats from Scion: Ragnarok on him and call it a day if you wanted to, or you would be pulling pretty close to the source if you just used our writeup for Bahamut in the Alihah supplement. Yes, that is a giant dead ringer for Leviathan that is named the same as Behemoth but in Arabic. Welcome to Middle Eastern Mythology, the show where everything is made up and the points don't matter.

And, of course, if you'd rather ignore Leviathan, you can always pretend that he doesn't exist with a reasonable amount of success. There could be plenty of explanations for a giant sea monster legend in the Middle East, starting most obviously with Yam, the Canaanite god of the sea and dabbler in the ways of the serpentine and ship-sinking, whom the Hebrews disapproved of intensely. Or Jormungandr went for a joyride down there one day, or Illuyanka from nearby Hattusia paid a visit, or whatever you want. If you're not into Leviathan and you're not doing much with Jewish mythology, there's no reason to worry about the fish and his stats.

But if you are into Leviathan... we suggest looking at the midrash legend of the Leviathans. In the beginning of the world, there were two of them, but seeing that they would breed and take over the planet, God destroyed the female, keeping her meat to feed to his chosen people on judgment day. Sounds like a serious motivation for mayhem to us!