> > > Even if we accept this statement at face value, that all "legal"
> marriage
> > > is exogamous in this sense (never mind that it needlessly contradicts
> > > significant amounts of earlier sources, canonical and otherwise).
> The non-canon is the truckload of fan material (e.g. Tales 18, to take
> but one example) based on the more natural reading of ROTO, which in
> one passage explicitly talks about exogamous _bloodlines_. (I don't
> have the exact source to hand.)
Well, quite. At some point someone (I don't remember who) decided that each clan only had one bloodline, happily contradicting all the clans we'd all created, and things just went down-hill from there.
> And why would such pregnancies be ipso facto "unwanted"?
A pregnancy today is "unwanted" if either the mother's health would be seriously affected, or if the parent(s) would be unable to support the child due to shortage of money, time, or interest. In a clan-based structure, the second of these seems unlikely, and given magical healing, I'm not too sure about the first, either.
> If anyone could quote me a remotely comparable RW example of a society
> which is anything like this restrictive about _either_ sex or marriage
> (i.e., none of either within 1000 people and several kilometers) I'd
> be most pleased and enlightened. (Once again one is forced to raise
> the "what did they breed with, rocks?",
"Of course we meet the next clan down the valley: we raid them twice a year!" Yeah, sure, that's going to provide enough opportunities to choose a mate! Remember the old "what my father told me" bit in the Glorantha boxed set? The boy is being told to look at the girls not just in terms of their looks but to judge their value as a wife. And there's no suggestion that they're from another clan, or that looking at them is only on special occassions.
The clan my campaign runs in is very strict about no marriage between bloodlines (the question of sex outside marriage within a bloodline hasn't yet arisen). The clan has four bloodlines, each of which has certain notable characteristics. At adulthood, children decide whether they want to join their mother's or father's bloodline (father's is normal), or in cases like orphans adopted by the clan, they can pick from all four. And then, Glorantha running by magic not genetics, they tend towards the characteristics of their new blood line. There are even stories about young men trying to get adopted by another blood line so they're free to court a lady who would otherwise be forbidden.
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