Question: Why do you need Unintended Purpose rather than Breath of Life to create human/machine hybrids with Human Hybrid?
Well, the flippant answer is that Breath of Life didn't exist yet when Human Hybrid was written, but we'll get more in-depth for you.
There's a fundamental difference between the way Artistry creates things and the way other purviews create things. Artistry, for the most part, doesn't create life; instead, it creates things, and only the most powerful of creator gods are able to use Breath of Life to invest those things with thought and purpose. Artistry is intended to be the purview of arts and sciences, craftsmen and builders, but it is not the set of powers intended to create living things. Those powers belong to the purviews associated with life; Fertility for the growing of plants, Animal for the husbandry of beasts, and Health for the life of humans. The Breath of Life boon is intended to give life to something that is already unliving, that was created without the spark of existence in it, but it was never meant to participate in the creation of life on its own. It can make your creations live, but it cannot give you the power to force your creations into other living things.
But, you say, Chaos isn't meant to create life, either! And that's true, for the most part. Unintended Purpose is a creation boon in the limited sense that it can reform things into new things, but it isn't supposed to make living creatures, either. However, what it is supposed to do is change and combine old things into new things; it is doing the same thing as Human Hybrid (and Impossible Hybrid over in Fertility and Hybrid Chimera in Animal), just with inanimate objects instead of living ones. So, since they're all doing the same basic thing - combining things that didn't go together into new things that now do - they're the boons that can cross over.
Could breath of life and enough epic int allow you to create cyborg hybrids? The brain would be unchanged, but the body could be added to or adapted with tech. I'm thinking that artistry and/or enough smarts would allow you to make the changes compatable as long as you already have a living animal or person to work on.
ReplyDeleteSince cyborgs are just humans that have robot parts in them, I would say you don't need to get this complicated. Just use normal Artistry to create Borg implants of some kind that can be surgically grafted onto humans, and then once they're applied to a person, you have a cyborg. Alison has done similar a lot, with creating technology that hooks into her spine or brain to extend her perceptions.
DeleteI wouldn't let it create a "race" of cyborgs who all reproduce with metal parts, though, but you could still Borg-ify countless humans with the parts you create if you want.
That sounds good. I'm down to make phyrexians one at a time for now.
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