And disowning/rejecting family.

And I completely misread it, of course.

This gets the Revan Stamp of Approval. It also strongly tempts me to play again... very strongly.

I acknowledged my Kalas ancestry, and the result of: "He is a second generation member of the Great House of Kalas by marriage" seems a little strange. Is a new designation for these situations possible, perhaps something like: "He is a second generation member of the Great House of Kalas, having acknowledged his (father/mother)'s ancestry"?

Also, FAMILY TREE LOTHRINGEN no longer says I was born into the Great House of d'Murani, something I assumed couldn't change.

'By marriage' would be a bug. To the latter:



So I'm not sure what you're seeing?

Oop, had myself gagged! My mistake.

Woah, didn't see that change. Does that mean children can pick which of their parents' families to join? If so, great. I thought the system was looking alright but I thought it hadn't dealt with that kind of thing, which was the biggest problem with the old system.

Yes - back in January we re-designed the House system (because it's long been something we wanted to change). Part of that was deciding what in the family system needed changing - Estarra brought back a thread on the topic and we picked through what was asked for, and fit with our intentions for the Family system. It wasn't a very easy change (particularly for such a rigid system), but we managed to make it work.

We also changed it so you don't need both parents and the child at once to start a consideration - though both parents must each go with the child to the bloodline registry at some point for the consideration to truly begin (and that's just not something we're willing to bend on).

How would that work though, once you marry, don't you automatically become 'inactive' in your former family?

Yes - but a long contention has been when parents divorce, children are left in the primary family. While we don't necessarily believe that to be a problem or wrong, it was irksome that when Bob and Sue went and founded a family of their own, their children did not go with them.

When a couple divorces, the person who 'married in' returns to his or her original family.

Ahh, ok. Though for a moment, I had my hopes up that I could finally get Orvi's maiden family viable again.

Don't be silly, we've had this worked out for a while now. The Skyplumes get the artists, and the Shevats get all the scientists. NO STOP POINTING TO ALL THE CONTRADICTIONS DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND TRADITION??

But now I'm a little worried. The family I've had my eye on has a gallery too, but the member of that family who is what I am most interested in is not an artist. I mean, with my luck I'll probably never have enough people active in my freaking family for historical, but is having a Master Artist in the family going to be a sort of doom mark that you'd be stuck as a Culture House? Because that's...most of the notable trill families in Hallifax, right there.

Yeah, I can understand that, and I also understand spouses having to marry out, and also houses not becoming relevant historically or whatever. Any compromises there would have been a bonus on top of fixing the old honour system of "serenwilde gets 500 power a weave, end of story."

So I'm glad you did change that, good job.

I assume they will take into account other historical things, such as mention of this family in the Taint wars and what they did then. I don't think one Master Artist is going to ruin the scientific name of the family if you can point out multiple historical examples of scientific family members (and current examples in the city, too).

I also think it depends a bit on the current family too, since when we applied for Shevat, we had to prove how the current family aligned with the historical account (mostly lucidians, Nihmriel, Saaga, Ileein all prominent scientists, Arel good at pretending to be a scientist). So if you've got the history and cannon stuff to back up your claim and the current family structure also supports it, you'd probably have a good case to make to the patron for scientific.

My advice is if you are going to go for a scientific family, you should pick a family with heavy scientific connections - you should not pick the only lucidian family with heavy artistic ties/gallery, nor a trill family much esteemed for their artistic renditions and abstract sculptures.

In Hallifax, trill tend towards artists, and lucidian towards scientists. There are, however, exceptions - and the spread in terms of city denizens displays it pretty well. Lucidian families of artists were uncommon, but not non-existent.

Who said I was going for scientific?

Hoo boy, trying to be a Hallifaxian family that isn't science or art. (we're boooth. And bureaucrats. We're a family built on Hallifaxian societal values, not a preference for science or art over one another!)

I'm not sure how to take that. Depending on what the final decision on the Shevat orientation is, I may be back to troll you.

For those confused about Hallifax family styles, ze graph shall help.