Re: Secret History of the Beast Riders?

From: David <blerg2_at_...>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:20:28 -0000

Keith Nellist wrote:
> Waha! ancestry - an interesting fact that Khans must be able to
> prove their descent from Waha! I wonder how many Praxians are
> descended from Waha!, and how many were in different periods
> of history. I presume this is through the male line.

For descent from Waha, substitute RW descent from the Prophet among Arab and part-Arab Muslim tribes, or four generations of nobility on both sides for tourney knights in the 14th century, and you can understand this better.

Lots of Arabs have just a bit of descent from Mohammed, because it became a prestige thing among Muslims to claim it, making daughters cheaper to deal off when someone had an excess, converting them into an actual asset. Also, simple time has spread the descent around, just as English families supposedly now have about a 1/3 chance of descent from Edward III.

Also note that the "prove" descent really should be in quotes, because past HeroQuests could also change ancestry; it might well be that an effect of surviving the Khan Qualifying Quest (killing some Chaotic in the Devil's Marsh) is to "prove" such descent even for someone who cannot otherwise prove it, by having Waha adopt the survivors in some weak-reality spot of the Marsh if they were not already descendants of his.