Mythology Buffs, looking for an example of....

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

Hephaestus has his automatons. Automaton is actually a pretty good keyword to search if you are looking for attempts throughout history to create robots, fraudulent or otherwise. Not necessarily mythology specifically but if you are simply looking for something to make reference to that could potentially be a good alternate source that may be less on the nose as Hephaestus.

If you want to move outside of real world mythology and into fiction, the Church of the Broken God of the SCP universe has all sorts of cool mechanical stuff, ancient or otherwise, to draw inspiration from.

Hephaestus was what I was thinkin of, though on the subject of Automatons, I have always loved these things and have a collection of them. My grandmother had a mechanical bird Automaton and after seeing this one:

https://www.fi.edu/history-resources/automaton

I actively started seeking them out to collect. My grandmother left me her bird, but I also managed to get a weird cat, two clocks, one with people and one with a bird, a monkey and a strange mechanical robot, all of them are mechanical. I also have a variety of music boxes and some electric ones, but I don't find those nearly as interesting.

 

[irishda]

Humanities professor here, you're kind of out of luck on this one. There are various gods of crafting and metallurgy you can certainly use, but none of them have any historical myths that speak to a sort of steampunk, copycat creation of man in a mechanical sense. The closest you get are magical constructs like the golem or Talos. There are instances where people are made from various items, but it's inevitably just a foundation that is transformed when they are brought to life, like the Spartoi or I believe there's a nation in Africa that had people made from ivory.

 

[Asita]

Humanities professor here, you're kind of out of luck on this one. There are various gods of crafting and metallurgy you can certainly use, but none of them have any historical myths that speak to a sort of steampunk, copycat creation of man in a mechanical sense. The closest you get are magical constructs like the golem or Talos. There are instances where people are made from various items, but it's inevitably just a foundation that is transformed when they are brought to life, like the Spartoi or I believe there's a nation in Africa that had people made from ivory.

True enough, but the transformation route can be quite useful for these purposes with a little creative liberty. Take for instance the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. Strictly speaking, the name Galatea itself is a bit of creative liberty, as the story never actually names her, but that's beside the point right now. Basic story is well known enough, master sculptor Pygmalion creates an incredibly beautiful statue of a woman and falls in love with it. Aphrodite responds to Pygmalion's prayers and brings it to life so they can be a true couple.

Here's where creative interpretation gets interesting. Imagine how you could use the character of Galatea...if you assumed that Aphrodite had turned her into a living statue rather than a mortal human. Perhaps she's timeless and as beautiful today as she was when she was sculpted. Perhaps her body has started chipping over the millennia. How would either of those affect her mental state? For that matter, considering that she was modeled after mortals, how would she cope with being so much longer lived than them? There are so many hooks for the character that arise from that one little tweak that would allow modern characters in Happyninja's RPG to meet her.