> > > 4. All Heortlings take marriage partners from another clan.
> Beyond this,
> >
> > This is to prevent incest, unwitting and otherwise.
>
> This is properly a pedantic anthropowanky aside on my part, but
> exogamy (marrying outside your social group) and incest (the ban on
> sex with close kin) are very, very different things.
I keep seeing this "marriage outside the clan" thing, and feeling
puzzled, and today I actually pulled out KoS and looked it up.
P250.
"Bloodlines are exogamous, which means that members of the same
bloodline can never marry or have sex with each other".
And yes, those are two different things (though I believe marriage
normally involves a vow not to have sex with anyone but your partner?)
But surely this only translates as "only marry outside the clan" if your clan has only one bloodline? Which may be a reasonably common situation, but certainly isn't the only possibility.
The way we run it, the adulthood initiation ceremony is what ties you to your bloodline: normally you join the bloodline of your mother's current husband/protector, who may or may not be your RW genetic father. (Take a look at Minaryth Blue's story for a really nasty example of this: the poor kid had been orphaned at least twice by my count before he reached adulthood). Once that's done, that's your bloodline. Glorantha is magic. RW genetics does not apply. And choosing, and being adopted into, a bloodline other than this, is entirely possible, although unusual. (Having Ducks adopted in, like we've done, is probably pushing things a bit too far: I have to tell players they're chatting up the wrong person not because she's the wrong species, but because it's incest).
Yes, marrying someone from outside the clan is a good way of doing inter-clan politics. But quite often, you don't want to lose someone to another clan: the women are the ones who know how to appease the local spirits, after all. Keeping their local knowledge local has its advantages. So they marry into another bloodline within the same clan. Their children will still be in the same clan, though members of a different bloodline from their mother.
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