Jane Williams:
> Not quite sure who was quoting who here?
Me quoting John Hughes.
> 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.
Or that the statements "bloodlines are exogamous" and "clans are exagamous" could best be explained by rationalising the second as "subsuming" the second. (As opposed to, the two contradict, therefore either practices vary, or one of them (ideally the less sensible of the two) is declared to be wrong.)
Like David D. in a different context, I don't expect this to be rectified in TR2, or whatever, but there's sometimes a certain theraputic value to bitching about it, and who knows, this might be of use to helping to "validate" someone else's campaign. (I note to my wry amusement that Barbarian Adventures seems to crap all over the briefly-canonical "bloodline property", though, so who knows where counter-revisionism will strike next?)
> > 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.
And I'm not even arguing that they'd necessarily not be unwanted, merely that they not necessarily be...
> 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.
One does hope that Dad isn't making a "Troll joke" here. ("Don't look at _them_, either!")
> 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.
I suspect that to pull off that last, you'd just about need to HQ to change your actual ancestors (or "remove" them, Humakti-style). But by and large that's very much how I run it. Your own bloodline is "presumptively incestuous" -- consult your local Lawspeaker if you want a lengthy lecture on why, or the faint chance of an exception. (The "real" definition might for example be, within 5 (or 4, or 6, I dunno) degrees of relation, which will typically include your entire bloodline and quite a few outside it). Looking for a mate in your own stead might not be technically incest (they could be of a different bloodline entirely), but would come within Tony Soprano's delightful "Don't shit where you eat" dictum -- unacceptable socially, 'genetics' notwithstanding.
If none of the above apply, IMG there's no reason not to have a "marriage" within your own clan. Though as I've commented before, it's legally something of a non-event, other than the vow of monogamy.
Cheers,
Alex.
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