Mix and Match

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.

Powering Up the Gremlins

If you have the boons to make crazy-awesome hybrid creatures (the 9-dots of Animal, Chaos, Fertility, and Health), then what do you need in order to give them cool powers? F'r example, if your Scion wants to make a species of craftsbeings for their pantheon comparable to dwarves or tengu, or if you want to make fire-breathing jaguarmadillos or make trees that are immune to lightning and capable of storing the electricity from lightning strikes to use on enemies. How do you make that work?

Tough question.   I wish I could give you a better, straighter answer, but I really think its gonna have to be on a case by case basis.  Its definitely something you are able to do with those level 9 powers.  But its something that has to be handled delicately.  And since there are an infinite number of ideas you could add to these creatures, a system either isnt gonna work, or is gonna take forever to come up with.

So some thoughts Id have if someone was bringing this to me.
How powerful does that make the creature.  What legend are they probably?
Is the power something that the maker of the creatures is god of?
Are these creatures going to earth on masse?  How will that effect humanity?
How many of these creatures are getting this power?
How often and fully to they breed?


Id add a legend cost, probably starting at the same cost again of the creating them boon.  And depending on how powerful they are, or more importantly how many of them are, MAYBE add a permanent willpower to give them this permanent power.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more likely the permanent willpower is.  

Then probably some mechanic about when they spend legend, you get fatebounds to their creation story until you have a full cult that remembers you created these beings.

I know that probably wasnt the straight answer you were looking for....sorry.  But theres just too many variables.  Its the kinda thing I could work on with a specific example.  But its also one of the things that I spend a lot of time on as an ST and cant kinda do on a massive for everyone scale.