Plastic Surgery

Question: In Scion, how would one go about trying to create the Frankenstein Monster?

Well, that depends on whether you want to do it the way Frankenstein did! Scion has more than one way to try to do this sort of thing, so there's no question that you can do it - of course you can! - but rather a question of how close to Frankenstein's method you want to cling.

If you want to do it exactly the way it's done in the classic novel, with the quintessential mad science approach of building machines and using the power of brains, then you want to approach this bad boy with Artistry. Lords of divine buildery who have the Breath of Life boon can simply cobble the monster together, point their fingers at it and say presto, and it'll be a one hundred percent genuine, living and moving creature, albeit one made of kind of icky stuff. This is how Scion would allow you to do exactly what Frankenstein does - build it with weird science and press the on button.

And before someone comes in complaining, "But I don't want to have to be Legend 11 to build Frankenstein's monster! He was just a human!," first remember that Dr. Frankenstein is a fictional character and not part of Scion's universe, so his Legend rating or lack thereof is pretty irrelevant. We don't have to try to assign a Legend level to things fictional characters do when they're in different universes from Scion's, because that is crazytown and we could spend the rest of our lives trying to do that without succeeding. (Although you can, of course, bring as many fictional characters into your games as you want to. They just aren't part of the default setting so the game won't necessarily be balanced for them.)

However, not wanting to have to wait until you're a master of the universe to make Frankensteinian horrors is a legitimate gripe, so let's explore other ways we could do that.

Artistry's still a strong contender here, actually; you just may have to put your back into it a little more than you would need if you were already at the level of going to Freemason meetings with Ptah and Svarozhich. You could build an automaton or moving robot, from pieces of corpse if you really wanted to, with the normal rolls for crafting something magical, and build an artificial intelligence into it in order to make sure it could speak and make decisions like Frankenstein's famous monster. Of course, AI isn't quite the same as giving something independent life... but then again, is it? When you can make magical items and crazy super technology, is it really far-fetched that you might be able to create an AI that is its own life form? Only your Storyteller and the difficulty they impose on your attempts can say for sure. (It should go without saying that this method involves a lot of dedicated work on the project, though. Which is okay, because it took Frankenstein his entire life, so it's not unreasonable for it to take Scions a while.)

Another option, since you're reanimating dead body parts to walk and live again, would be the Death purview. While the boons in that purview that can convince dead people to get up and run around were written with raising a single one-piece zombie in mind, we might be willing to let a Scion who carefully sewed together parts from various different corpses use Unquiet Corpse to create a zombie from the newly-made composite body. If you or your Storyteller aren't down with that, or you just want something with a little more zazz than a shambling and mostly-mindless zombie, Revenant is specifically designed to let Scions create undead creatures with powers and intellect of their own. Frankenstein's monster isn't a very ancient critter like a vampire or a wight, having been invented recently in nineteenth-century literature, but we would still probably let a Scion take a swing at it.

And, of course, the Health powers of Human Clay and Human Hybrid could create or alter new humans to look a lot like Frankenstein's monster. They wouldn't be exactly the same - Health can't reanimate the dead, and it can only create mortals, not supernatural bananas creatures, unless you combine it with something else - but you could still get the same general feel.

So if you're all about putting together weird patchwork dead people and then awakening them to become your mortal enemy, you can definitely do that. Just be wary, lest you, too, end up in a kill-or-be-killed existential struggle.