Hand Off

Question: Hey, I know this may be a weird question, especially since I am mixing up two genres, but how open are you to the concept of relic robotic limbs? I mostly got the idea from the Irish and the idea that you have to be perfect. The particular tale I was thinking about was with Nuada losing his hand and having one crafted from silver before he got a flesh one again. I was mostly wondering if in mythology of other pantheons this can be allowed, or if it's a taboo.

It doesn't come up very often, actually. There are surprisingly few cyborgs in ancient myth. There are pantheons that are more concerned about physical perfection than others, though, so we can make some guesses about who would have a problem with it and who would probably not mind!

Alas for Nuada, but unfortunately having the silver hand did not actually solve his troubles; no matter how cunning and useful it was or how much it allowed him to avoid suffering from the handicap, it actually didn't restore him to "physical perfection" status. He remained considered maimed and imperfect until his actual flesh was regenerated, and only then was he able to become High King of the Tuatha again. Irish mythology's emphasis on physical perfection is closely linked to the idea of face, which implies that one's physical appearance and form is directly affected by one's honor and reputation, so those who are perfectly honorable and heroic are always physically perfect, and those who are physically imperfect are assumed to have some flaw of character or behavior that prevents them from achieving true greatness. Of course, Nuada's deformity was an injury, not his own fault, but that law is there to make sure only the most worthy can serve as king, so even with a fancy prosthetic he was barred from the post.

Now, this doesn't mean it's impossible to have a relic limb or prosthetic as a Tuatha Scion, but it does mean that other Irish gods and heroes may make assumptions about you. They might wonder what's wrong with you that you were deformed in the first place, or even decide on what that flaw might be and spread the rumor of it to others among their people. Young Scions who didn't grow up in ancient Ireland probably won't always cling to that idea and be more likely to be sensitive to the physical challenges of their fellows, but it'll probably always be a stumbling block when dealing with the old guard.

The other pantheon that will probably be a big old bucket of asses about a robotic fixture is the Theoi, which is made up of gods with a serious fixation on physical awesomeness. In their case, it's not a matter of honor and moral fiber but rather the result of an obsession with ultimate excellence in all things, including physical athleticism and appearance. The Theoi don't accept less than the best, and anyone with a physical handicap is, by their reckoning, automatically less than the best; that's why Hephaestus got hurled off of Olympus at birth, because he was physically unfortunate and his mother automatically rejected him. (Unless you prefer Homer's and Apollodorus' versions, in which Zeus is the one who threw him off for trying to prevent him from punishing Hera, which is less about physical perfection and more about Zeus being a dick as usual.)

The Theoi take it one step further; they don't just view people with physical handicaps as failures, they view anyone who doesn't approach physical awesomeness as a failure, meaning that even if you have all of your parts in working order they'll still look down their noses at you for having a poor Appearance score (or, god forbid, negative Appearance). They're probably not going to praise you for having the ingenuity to rock an awesome Skywalker-esque cyborg arm; they're just going to pity you for having the epic patheticness of a permanent injury or congenital defenct. Hephaestus might be understanding... but even he lives in that culture of peak physicality, so it'll depend on the Storyteller's take on him.

But despair not, you intrepid pioneers in the field of robotic replacement! There are plenty of pantheons with less of a fixation on your physical perfection who would have no problem with relic body parts, especially if they're particularly artist or useful. In fact, some pantheons have examples of magical prosthetics in their myths already; Vishpala, a legendary warrior from the Rig Veda, lost her leg in battle and had an iron replacement made so that she could head right back in and continue kicking ass, and of course the Egyptian story of Isis creating a golden penis replacement for her castrated husband is one of the most famous myths among those gods.

We've had a few prosthetics among our characters, as a matter of fact. Tyler Hamilton Orton, missing his right arm, has a hammer grafted on to render him the most efficient face-smasher around, John Shimoda and Sora Sato have actually had their entire bodies replaced by robot parts, and several young Egyptian Scions have started out with a magical eye in place of their original organs. We haven't had anyone go fully ambitiously robotic yet, but I feel like it must be only a matter of time.