Spoilers abound for Seven Days to the Grave and The Skinsaw Murders
I've noticed a weird thing in Seven Days to the Grave. in "Concluding the Adventure" it is revealed that the immunity several Varisians have to the blood veil is due to their shared bloodline, they are all "descendants, however far removed, of a woman named Kasanda Miromia-Foxglove, wife of the failed lich Vorel, whose death lead to the creation of the disease Vorel’s phage and ultimately to blood veil." Now this is strange, for several reasons:
1) In The Skinsaw Murders we learned that when Vorel tried to become a lich and failed in 4644 (64 years before Seven Days to the Grave), "Kasanda tries to escape with her child, but is infected with the disease as well and spreads it to her kids and servants; they all perish within minutes of contracting the horrific disease." So... where do all those descendants come from, if she and her daughter died within minutes of first contact to the disease?
2) And even if there were other children, isn't the number of descendants implied in Seven Days to the Grave a bit high for 60 years? They couldn't be much more than her grandchildren, and if they all were first (or even second) cousins, wouldn't the Urgathoans have figured that out?
3) And what does "descendants, however far removed" mean? Descendants aren't removed, they are in a direct line.
I'm confused. :)
Creative Director
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First of all... Kasanda may have had a few children before she married Foxglove. But more to the point, the relationship isn't really intended to be a "genetic" one, but a familial one. Varisians have HUGE families, many of the members of which are only distantly blood related (if at all). The idea was that fragments of Kasanda's spirit was watching over the members of her families, and members of other families who over the past 60 years have mingled with her own family. We didn't want to go into too much more detail, since mapping out how many Varisians are "related" to her is kind of pointless; easier to say that a certain subset of all Varisians are related.
In other words... there's a heavy dose of magic and spiritualism mixed in with the genealogy here.
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James answers this in the 7 days to the grave GM questions thread
"The fact that Kasanda and her daughter perish to Vorel's Phage is in fact the reason her spirit now protects certain Varisians of her bloodline, in fact. And by her "bloodline" we don't necessarilly mean her offspring (although it's absolutely possible she had other children to other lovers before she married Vorel). Varisians have a much looser definition of "family" than most people; Kasanda's "bloodline" thus means all of her extended family. Her parents, her brothers, her sisters, her cousins, and beyond that, the parents and brothers and sisters and cousins of the other biological families who were a part of her community before she left that world behind to become Vorel's wife.
Her spirit does not follow a strict biological roadmap, in other words, to determine who she protects from blood veil. We probably could have been a bit more clear on how this works out in the text, I suppose, but it's already a pretty crunchless bit of flavor that the PCs are very unlikely to discover in the first place that its vagaries won't really impact actual play of the campaign."
Doh! Scooped by him as I found his answer in the other thread!
OK, I can accept that. "Descendants" just implies something different. Thanks for clearing it up, James!