Lately I've been fascinated by the idea of body part lego, where bodies can be systematically designed by snapping together the appropriate parts. For example, we might have an RPG game where character creation allows you to create a two-headed cyclops centaur whose hind legs are steam-punk prosthetic machine legs. The idea isn't to just have a list of body plans like minotaur and mermaid, but to give the players a system for building up their characters out of pieces, like putting an extra hand growing out of their character's forehead, or an arm coming out of the middle of his chest.

The whole system would be computerized so that an RPG game could determine the capabilities of a character using rules based on what sort of body they have. The game would be able to calculate how fast a centaur would run based on how many legs it has, and it could have mechanics for how amputations affect gameplay.

Another possibility for such a system would be to automatically construct a 3D model to represent the person. It shouldn't be hard to take existing 3D models of people and break them apart so they can be re-assembled in any way imaginable.

Even though this is a simple concept, the details of such a system can be daunting. How does one make a list of all the places where someone might have an extra limb, especially when each extra limb adds more places. How do we organize all this information so that it's easy to understand and ready to use for a computer?

Has this already been done somewhere? Has anyone heard of something like this, or made something like this already?