This is specifically about changing a character's ancestry due to Transmigrate.
The adventure itself doesn't quite specify if the PCs are aware of the fact that the rank 5 Transmigrate ritual can change their ancestry. (As far as I could find at least)
Is that knowledge supposed to be purely meta for the players or would it be okay for the entire town to know this in-character? And additionally, would it be okay for certain NPCs to actively choose their new ancestry? (Perhaps through some additional magic?)
This would only effect 2 NPCs in my town:
- So-Jin, who is forlorn in my adventure and is simply tired of watching all her loved ones die. She'd wanna become some shorter-lived ancestry and age like everyone else.
- The adoptive sister of one of the PCs, who is secretly a jorogumo (only her family knows) and secretly the daughter of Ren Mei Li (only RML knows this so far, but it'll be revealed during book 3). The sister doesn't want to be a jorogumo princess and would want to become anything else, in an effort to hide from RML.
Would it be okay for them to actively do this, or should it rather be handled as some kind of fateful luck that made these NPCs reincarnate as something they wish for?
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I can't see any reason why they shouldn't be able to do this if they wanted to. Whatever feels appropriate for the story you are telling with these NPCs should be the way things go, I think
So I didn't continue my campaign after book 3, the transmigration and conquering death itself felt like such a natural and powerful place to end the story at.
But when I was still entertaining running book 4 I came across that bit with letting PCs change their ancestries, and my take can be more or less summed up as "Why?". As in, I don't see it serving any real purpose that is worth all the questions it raises.
I think you have a good idea going on here! With letting transmigrated individuals reincarnate as what they desire to be. For most people this would be "I want to still be me", fear of change etc. But for those who harbor a desire to be something other than what they are, this let's them reincarnate as something else.
You could offer this to the players, but if it was me, and if I had no reason to think that any of my players would want to change anything anyway, then I would keep that part secret and use it for some scenes where some familiar NPCs are suddenly another ancestry, and they are happy about it to boot. Leaving it unexplained could help make the mystical reincarnation ritual even more mystical.