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    Blood history and inheritance, how would you play it?

    I'm still running my Pathfinder/BR game. The group is about to have a big (well, small) battle and Final Showdown with a blooded troll who rules some land adjacent to theirs.

    Presuming it's one of the scions who offs the troll, someone's going to suck up some divine essence. I suspect further, that troll regeneration makes it more likely that someone is going to use coup de grace to finish him off, there could be a big increase in someone's bloodline strength-- enough to earn a new minor blood ability. (I've already crunched numbers, using normal and bloodtheft possibilities.)

    One of these scion PCs has a bloodline that could have the Blood History ability, and guess what? The troll already has that.

    IF the right PC (the ruler, BTW) finishes off the troll, and IF she does it the thorough way, would you as a DM:
    1) say that she absorbs or inherits the Blood History ability, or let her roll her own chances on the random table.
    2) but whose History-- the troll's bloodline's, or her own ancestry?

    Perhaps #2 should hang on whether her bloodline derivation (Vorynn) switched to that of the Troll (Masela)?

    Opinions?

  2. #2
    Site Moderator AndrewTall's Avatar
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    Legends of the Hero Kings had a rule for bloodline corruption in the ogre adventure -page 70. The player rolled 1d6 for every 6 points of bloodline strength, the DM rolled 6d8 for the ogre (bloodline 48, quite why the dm didn't roll 8d6...) the higher roll was the bloodline which then dominated.

    Personally I'd think that personality/alignment/etc of the person should have some bearing - a PC who acts in a way that is similar to the personality of one of the ancient gods should, in my view, be slower to lose a bloodline of that old god but swifter to gain it.

    Also while 2e was often all about random-ness, other games have used a tracked-taint approach, I quite like the idea of a rainbow-bloodline where you have traces of all bloodlines, reflect only the strongest (usually) but somehow keep some sort of running total of other bloodlines - probably unworkable in practice but I keep coming back to it.

    With regard to the specific power of blood history, if the old bloodline remains dominant then the history should come from that line and vice versa, of course the bloodline may have gone through many lineages so if the PC does take on the trolls bloodline, the blood history gained may have the memories of ancient sidhe, goblin or anuirean heroes in their soul - although a troll ancestor memory-spirit who continually urges you to take on trollish ways could be faintly amusing!

    It does however beg the question, if the memories include those of a hero of some race, then the only way to "restore that hero to their people" is for the "right sort" of person to gain the trolls bloodline and be dominated by it - could have interesting possibilities.
    Last edited by AndrewTall; 01-14-2014 at 08:56 PM.

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