At 08:49 PM 4/5/2003 -0600, Kenneth Gauck wrote:
>Its likely that bloodlines would be not unlike other heritable traits. Some
>traits would be derived from fathers bloodline, some from mothers, and
>some from grandparents which were not manifest in mother or father, but
>whose potential were present.
There are a few examples that would suggest that not only are bloodlines
heritable in the way that the rules spell out, but that blood abilities are
as well. Several of the Sielehrs guardians (BoM 80) are descended from a "patriarch" who has the Long Life blood ability. That doesnt mean they
didnt get their blood abilities randomly since there were dozens of scions involved in the events described in that items history, but it could be
taken as evidence. The Blood History ability needn`t be inherited either
necessarily, but it would make sense.
The question is, if one wanted to reflect blood abilities being inherited
how might that be reflected in a set of rules? One could use d4`s and do a
little dominant/recessive, Mendel kind thing, assuming that the stronger
parental bloodline is the dominant allele (bloodallele?) in which a blood
ability is inherited only when the dominant “bloodgene” does not
appear: The Punnett square would then look like:
BB Bb
Bb bb
So Table Xx: Blood Ability Inheritance would be:
1-3 Inherit parent`s blood ability.
4 New blood ability.
New blood abilities might also be the dominant factor, meaning the results
of the table above would be switched. That would probably be more in
keeping with frequency of inheritance as presented in the published materials.
Or one could assume that the “genes” of a blood ability from both parents
are similarly dominant and that new blood abilities appear when the
bloodalleles appear heterozygously on the Punnett square, which would make
Table #Xx look like this:
1 Fathers blood ability. 2-3 New blood ability. 4 Mothers blood ability.
Of course, there`s no reason to assume that bloodlines really ascribe to
Mendel, and it opens up the concept to the prospect of certain blood
abilities dying out while others get selected more and more successfully,
but it is an amusing possibility.
Gary
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