60 minutes of Thoughts: the Geneomancers, wizards of the paternity test

This is a type of post I'm planning on making semi-regularly on this blog  where I write for an hour about something on my mind relating to TTRPGs or wargames, make one round of basic edits and then post it. It's a way to get some writing practice in and force me to actually use this space regularly even if I'm otherwise busy. This should be about a 12-minute read, which'll probably be typical of the format.

This time around, I'd like to share an idea that's one of my favourites from my home D&D setting (well, home Fantasy Heartbreaker setting now I've made my own system for it) of Theon. This is a faction who I introduced very, very briefly to fill a plot hole and allow me to rapidly transition a game from mildly wacky military fantasy into high political intrigue, which rapidly snapped back into extremely dark and vicious military fantasy and then apocalyptic PVP free-for-all as these things are wont to do. I'll tell you about it some day(?) In the process, this group was wiped from existence as was the social structure which made them possible. This is a real shame because they provided a lot of cool ideas to play around with! I do generally subscribe to the actions-have-consequences living-world school of GMing though, so I'm not just going to handwave them back in. Instead, I'll share them with the world in generic form, in hopes that they might be useful to your setting! So without further ado, may I present to you... 

The Problem

Inherited power is the sort of thing it's very hard to get rid of. No matter how many heads you cut off, how many old laws you dissolve, it seems to keep coming back in one form or another. This is precisely because it isn't natural, whatever its current holder may tell you - it's the kind of pernicious socially-constructed hierarchy that programs itself into even the most zealous tyrannicide and makes them think 'you know, I've always treated my son sternly and fairly, but he really is the best man for the job after me!' At least, that's what radical philosophers might tell you - maybe people just love their kids and it's human nature to help them however you can, so if you end up in a position of Supreme Power you're naturally going to want them to do the same. (What could go wrong with inheriting a usurped throne? That has a good record, right?) Or maybe people in a significant portion of small-scale early agricultural societies spend more time around their own children, making it easier to teach them important leadership skills like 'how to ride a horse and kill people with weapons.'

At any rate, monarchies and aristocracies persist. Just because they're good at ensuring that they survive, though, doesn't mean they're good for those living under them. Most of the time, this doesn't matter, because the most discontented people have limited access to swords, spells and the gold to buy more of these things and nobody else wants to rock the boat lest that fact changes in the process. However, these systems do have certain points of failure - moments when people whose opinions, you know, matter are at risk of getting hurt.

One of these moments is succession. Teaching people that they can expect a certain degree of additional power and prestige when their relatives die can have predictable consequences. When two, three, four children, a second cousin and an ambitious lover who's been seeing Lord Grimtooth of Death Tor on the side all want a piece of the estate, you risk a war, resulting in famine (triggered by looting and high taxes) leading to widespread immune deficiency and disease, precipitous population declines and the looming menace of the peasantry (many of them newly experienced in battle) starting to ask to be allowed to keep more of their crops. Or maybe your neighbour, who you've been at war with forever, will roll in and take your land for themself. On the small scale of families like those described above, these issues can generally be avoided through a robust corpus of succession law and the occasional assassination or sidelining of terminally undesirable heirs. But this tends to break down once a monarch dies with no close family, as does happen periodically, and their second cousin once removed through the maternal line and third cousin twice removed are debating the legality of matters. For situations like that, and to avoid general messiness and keep the realm in good order in these trying times, you need...

The Geneomancers as a worldbuilding element

Here's the deal: Royal lineages aren't necessarily naturally good at ruling, but they are often a bit special. There's a strong tendency to intermarry with extradimensional beings of might and awe, because if you're hoping that rule is going to carry on down your bloodline it's nothing but a benefit if that bloodline inherits the ability to shoot fireballs from their hands. And given that these beings often have quite a strong and distinctive essence, you don't need an incredibly complex magical theory of human heredity or particularly fine-grained sensing spells to be able to trace the concentration of the Blood of Salsnagath Defiler of All Souls and pass on the crown to whoever has most of it. Wizards are also intrinsically quite well-suited to preventing tampering and ensuring that everything in the process of transition of power is above-board - even an assassinated heir might just pop back up in a week or so as a very angry Clone, dramatically reducing the temptation of attacking them unless the person making the play is such a competent planner that they'll likely be better for the job anyway. (The Geneomancers can be pragmatic!)

This approach doesn't produce quite as much stability as an immortal monarch, but it carries a lower risk of being the target of a crusade by the Forces of Light and Goodness than most commercially available methods of immortality, and allows devout monarchs to go to their Eternal Reward whilst bringing in new(ish) blood with new(ish) ideas. As such, it can be very competitive model for a hereditary power structure to follow.

Of course, it also carries risks! It places a lot of trust on the Geneomancers as an institution, tends to select for in-breeding even more than the average system of succession law, and occasionally means that if the king and all his lineage gets wiped out they go off and track down some coincidental confluence of bastard and morganatic families who turns out to be a peasant living in a foreign nation rather than, as might be more conventional and less risky in such circumstances, the local magnate with the most support. Thus, it tends to be an approach taken only by nations where the monarch has somewhat limited power to fuck things up but is an essential keystone in ensuring nobody else fucks things up - or where that used to be the case and the power-structure is too ossified to change with the times!

What can they do?

A Geneomancer probably isn't a good PC unless you're playing a very specific sort of game, and not just because of the ickiness of their purpose. (I'm all for amoral, immoral, and resolutely-moral-in-a-way-that's-vile-to-everybody-else PCs). Their primary focus is on divinatory magic - both detecting the presence of a certain sort of otherworldly power within somebody's spiritual composition (you probably want to think about the metaphysics of how such influence works in your games) and detecting people over long distances so that they can track down candidates for testing. They likely also have enormous tables of ancestry to keep track of who they need to test, so they might well have magic that facilitates searching and storing information effectively. Finally, they're probably good at body-control and protective types of stuff, so as to keep their charges safe. 

In terms of what they can do for you narratively as a GM, they're a great excuse to pull PCs into power-politics if it turns out they or somebody they know has a tie to a noble family they didn't expect. Alternatively, if you're going to be running a game that's entirely about backstabbing noble politics they might be a good way to keep often-clear objectives somewhat concealed: if you don't know exactly who's heir, and once you have found out they're protected by some cloistered-but-powerful wizards, there are more barriers to the 'just kill everyone' approach which can sometimes derail intrigue games. Finally, if you want to underline the dangerous alienness of nobles' self-concept without just making them Obviously Evil, one good way to do this might be for them to have a Eugenics Wizard or two around the place.

Inspiration Tables

Organizational Structure (d6)
1 - Clergy. The Geneomancers are chosen from amongst the priesthood of the God of Order, taught the secret laws governing the passage of otherworldly power through physical life at a young age in order that they may maintain peace in the realm. They dwell in an isolated monastery and take strict vows of celibacy lest they abuse what they have learned.
2 - 'Scientists'. Geneomancy is an academic department in your local magical university. It tends to attract people who are fascinated by human(oid) diversity... in much the same way as a 19th-century ethnologist. They're constantly trying to synthesize supernatural inheritance, which is more like ongoing contagious irradiation with magical energies, with the limited amounts they know about however humanoid genetics works in your setting.
3 - Secret Society. At court, one can sometimes see a person sweeping through the halls in blood-red robes and a blank white mask; geneomancers, gathering from the various corners of the realm where they lurk and observe for a meeting. They will compare their notes, argue about current probable heirs, and then vanish again.
4 - Diviner Career Option. Sure, maybe your passion is in showing people their future, guiding them away from danger, even treasure-finding - but everybody knows the real money is made in Geneomancy. Oh, you're only needed occasionally, but if a dozen nobles are paying you insurance to make sure their holdings don't disintegrate when they die...
5 - Court Magi. A queen has her chancellor, steward, marshals, chaplain ... and her Geneomancer. It's a political appointment, no different than any other. There's a book on how to do it; the basic spells aren't really very hard to learn. Often the Geneomancer comes from a distant land, to avoid any close ties to court factions.
6 - Kept Scholars. The security of the realm is essential, and so well-paid stipends are given to the Geneomancers who in turn sacrifice all their autonomy and take magical marks that kill them if they harm their masters. In their spare time between successions, they act as archivists and heralds (in the heraldry-artist sense), confined to a small complex of rooms somewhere in the back of the Palace. This was the version I originally used.)

Plot Hook (d5)
1- Slouching Towards Bethlehem... The King is dead, and the Geneomancers convene. For three days, they remain locked in their chambers, and when the doors are finally forced the bodies are found - poisoned. A further investigation reveals that they took the poison willingly. What did they see? Who is the true heir - and can they possibly be selected, given this mortal vote of no confidence? The old king's favoured courtiers certainly think so, whilst the great and the good of the land are eager to use this as an opportunity to take the throne themselves. The answers may lie with a single apprentice Geneomancer who fled rather than take their own life - but do you want them?
2- The End of a (Lord's) Dream. A Monarch subverts the Geneomancer/s of an upstart and popular noble, who work in secret to sterilize (see spells below) them whilst other agents subvert or remove their potential heirs. The PCs learn of this plot; if it is revealed, it will trigger a crisis of faith in the Geneomancers' art and an international wave of succession wars peaking in about one generation's time. Can a noble's 'rightful' inheritance be worth such suffering?
3- Made Man. Your local up-and-coming merchant prince is not in fact a prince, and would like to be. Alas, what money can't buy is a bloodline, and the only available princess, though otherwise interested, is determined not to sacrifice her children's potential future claims to the throne by reducing the concentration of influence. She's asked the Geneomancers to check whether the man has any old royal relations; the merchant hires the PCs to sneak into their archives and plant fake documents to suggest that he does.
4- Rising Star. A lineage traditionally tied to a powerful demonic lord and with at least a small group of Geneomancers wants to forge a new supernatural alliance with a wandering star-god of great and strange wisdom, whose cult is now more relevant in their realm. The Geneomancers aren't consulted; those who fear wholesale dismissal or too much hard work relearning their magic to apply to the new lineage begin to plot to scupper the match by increasingly extreme measures, stoking the otherwise quiescent cultists of the demon until holy war threatens.

5- My Fourth-Cousin's Keeper. The heir is... not going to be popular. They're a snivelling fourteen-year-old, and worse yet a foreign noble's bastard (who could the father have been?) Worse yet, second in line is handsome, charming, capable in war and magic, and blatantly, puppy-kickingly evil (several obvious competitors have already gone missing). It's going to be a massacre. The Geneomancers send the PCs to train the heir so that he might hold the throne and avoid a reign of terror, but in the process the spare gets wind of what's going on and begins to take an interest.

Spells (systematize to taste) (d6)
1- Sensing of the Blood. By touching a person, the Geneomancer detects how strongly their blood is influenced by a particular supernatural power and how recent the influence is. They are usually looking for influence from the initial point of the lineage; more recent influence, if direct, can entirely mask this, so families reliant on Geneomancy often use intermediaries to deal with their lineage's patron.
2- Mother's Milk. By ingesting a small portion of blood from somebody of the same otherworldly bloodline, a subject gains some of their skills or qualities. Quantities of blood grow exponentially larger the more must be taught, up to every drop of the person's extant blood to learn everything they knew and gain all of their supernatural power. A more powerful version can be used by people not of the bloodline, though only temporarily.
3- Passing Down. Casting an heirloom from somebody's dead parent into the air, it begins to fly towards them at high speed. It might be tied to a stick to use as a compass, or a message might be tied to it.
4- Sterilization/Fertilization. This spell prevents or guarantees conception as an outcome of sex for a period of time determined by its power, up to being permanent. It is not uncommon for Geneomancers to serve as official royal family planners in addition to their other duties, but targets of this spell need not necessarily be willing.
5- Turning of the Blood. By channeling a source of influence diametrically opposed to the lineage's original supernatural influence, the Geneomancer entirely shuts down their powers and causes them great pain within a sphere around themselves. This is a forbidden power among many schools of Geneomancy, because monarchs who hear about it tend to jump to all the wrong conclusions...
6 - Family Tree. Two people touch a blood-fed tree, the Geneomancer casts the spell, and a map of the family tree between the two is burned into the bark. Other relatives are noted only if their position is essential to the relationship, and along relevant branches between the two. Even then, no names or other details are given.