v0.63.0 -- Bloodlines

For years (in-game), the game has tracked your children from cradle to adulthood. You watched them learn to walk. You taught them right from wrong. You fought their custody battles after divorce. You shaped their souls with every parenting choice you made. Then at 18 they graduated into the adult NPC roster and the game quietly forgot who their parents were.

Your grown-up daughter walked off into the world with no idea you raised her. You could not recognize her on the street if you tried. The family roster at home stopped showing her the day she turned 18. And worst of all, the game would happily let you walk her down the aisle at the Church and have a baby with her.

This release closes that gap. Adult children now remember who their parents are. The game labels them "(your daughter)" / "(your son)" when you talk to them. Your home shows a "Grown Children" roster of every adult you raised. They recognize you when you cross paths for the first time, with a one-time reunion scene that is warm, bittersweet, or cold depending on how you raised them. They have their own conversation topics. They show up at Team Corner as the cheapest recruits in the list, because blood ties beat friendship ties. When you finally permadie, the eldest passes into your estate before the world forgets you exist. If you reach the throne, you can elevate them to your court. And NPC children remember when you kill their parents, with consequences that ripple for the rest of their lives.

Every marriage, intimacy, and pregnancy path now refuses incest, with refusal flavor instead of stony silence. Every loophole that was bypassing the existing guards is closed.

The reunion moment

The first time you walk into [T] Talk with one of your grown children, a one-time cinematic plays before the normal conversation begins. The scene is keyed to the child's Soul at graduation, a snapshot taken the moment they turned 18, so it reflects the parenting choices you actually made.

• Virtuous: "You see them across the street and the years collapse. The little hand you used to hold became this hand." They speak first: "Father... mother... you came back."
• Neutral: "It takes a moment. They have grown into a stranger's face, and then the eyes settle on you, and you know each other again." They speak: "It has been a long time. You look older. We both do."
• Evil: "You recognize them a half-beat before they recognize you. Whatever you taught them about the world, they learned it well. Their eyes are colder than you remembered." They speak: "So. You are still alive. I wondered if I would ever see you again."

The cinematic plays exactly once per child per cycle. After it ends, the relationship seeds at a parental band so the next time you talk it is not stranger-grade. Family overrides Dread: a dark-aligned player at Nightmare-tier reputation that makes lesser NPCs flee on sight will not make their own kid flee. Family wins.

Adult-child conversation

When you talk to one of your grown children, the Chat slot swaps to a parent-flavored topic pool. You can ask:

• "Remember when you were small?"
• "How is your mother / father?"
• "What's your trade now? How do you fill your days?"
• "Are you well? Truly well?"
• "Do you need anything? Coin, a word in the right ear?"

Each topic has three tone-keyed responses and two variants per tone, so you cycle through plenty of unique answers before any repeat. A virtuously-raised daughter might say: "I remember everything. Even the things you do not think I do. The lullabies. The way you used to read by candlelight when you thought I was asleep." A child raised toward evil might give a short laugh with no warmth in it: "Oh, I remember. Don't worry about that."

The flirt, intimate, proposition, propose, and confess menu options are hidden entirely when you are talking to an adult child. Not just refused if you press them: removed from the menu so they are not an option at all.

Dynasty standing

A new reputation tier appears on your [%] Status display, alongside Dread / Renown / Sellsword Hall. It is derived live from your adult-children set:

• Founder (1+ living adult children): +5% reaction bonus
• Patriarch / Matriarch (3+ living adult children, gendered by player sex): +10%
• Bloodline (5+ adult children, all raised to the same alignment band): +15%
• Dynasty (5+ adult children + Bloodline purity + at least one grandchild): +20%

The Bloodline and Dynasty tiers reward consistency: a player who consistently raised their kids the same way preserves the moral arc of their parenting as a real standing, instead of averaging it out to mush with one outlier.

Inheritance on permadeath

When your character runs out of resurrections and the soft-mode revival does not save you, the death cinematic now includes an inheritance beat before the Veil closes:

• 50% of your current gold passes to the eldest living adult child.
• +500 XP as a determination buff for the heir.
• News entry: "The estate of {player} passes to {heir}. ({gold} inherited.)"

You see one last cinematic line: "Your estate passes to {heir}. ({gold} gold delivered.)" Then: "Whatever {heir} becomes, a piece of you walks the world in them."

If you have no living adult children at the time of death, the inheritance step silently short-circuits. The regular permadeath cinematic runs unchanged.

Adult children at Team Corner

The [R] Recruit NPC flow now treats adult children as their own band. They sort to the top of the recruit list above your friends, render in bright magenta, get a family tag, and cost half the base recruit fee:

• Family (adult child): 50%
• Friend (Friendship / Trust / Respect): 75% / 85% / 95%
• Neutral: 100%
• Rival (Suspicious / Anger): 115% / 140%
• Refused (Enemy / Hate): cannot recruit

Blood ties beat friendship ties. An adult child you are temporarily estranged from still gets the Family band.

NPCs reflect on you

Adult children you raised who reach public milestone levels (10, 20, 30, 50, 75) now spawn a follow-up news entry tying their accomplishment back to you as their parent. The tone splits on how you raised them:

• Virtuous: "Rumors reach the city: {child}, child of {parent}, has earned a name at level {N} for honest work and a steady hand. The parent's craft, carried forward."
• Neutral: "Word spreads: {child}, child of {parent}, has reached level {N}. The world remembers their parent at the sound of it."
• Evil: "Rumors reach the city: {child}, child of {parent}, is whispered of in darker rooms at level {N}. Whatever the parent taught, it took root."

NG+ Charisma bonus

A new lifetime counter tracks how many adult children you have raised to level 20 across your entire playthrough history. Each completed family arc grants +5 starting Charisma in your next cycle's character, capped at +25. Carryover survives NG+ via the same pattern that already preserves your Sellsword contracts and lifetime charity donations. Your last life's dynasty makes your next life's character a more compelling presence.

Royal sponsorship

If you have taken the throne, a new royal action [Y] Sponsor Heir to Court lets you elevate one of your grown children into a court position. The track is decided by the child's alignment:

• Virtuous (Chivalry > 200): Faith ordination. The child joins the Faith faction and takes the Royal Chaplain court seat.
• Evil (Darkness > 200): Shadow Spymaster. The child joins the Shadows faction and takes the Royal Spymaster seat.
• Neither: Crown Advisor. The child joins the Crown faction and takes the Royal Advisor seat.

Costs 50 Fame. Only eligible adult children (level 20 or higher, not already in court, not already faction-aligned) appear in the picker.

Bloodlines of the Realm

A new [Z] Bloodlines of the Realm action at the Castle shows the top 10 family lines in the world by descendant count. Read-only display, mirroring the existing Hall of Heroes and Pantheon screens. Visible to royalty and commoners alike.

When your kids kill their parent's killer

NPCs now remember who killed their parent. When an NPC dies, every other NPC whose lineage points at the deceased (parent, child, sibling) records a "lost family member" memory; if there was a killer, every relative also records who that killer was, and the killer goes into each relative's Enemies list.

Downstream consequences fire through the existing memory and enemy systems:

• The relative refuses to talk to the killer.
• The relative refuses to join the killer's team.
• If the relative is dark-aligned, they attack on sight.

A player who builds an empire by killing the dynasty heads of a long-running rival family is now going to face a wave of children with grudges in the next generation. The simulated world has a memory now.

The incest gate

A new helper computes the family relationship between any two characters: None, Self, Parent, Child, Sibling, Half-Sibling, Grandparent, Grandchild, Adoptive Parent, Adoptive Child, Adoptive Sibling. Anything except None blocks marriage, intimacy, and pregnancy. The gate is wired into eight code paths:

• The Church marriage flow.
• The Castle royal marriage flow (was bypassing every guard before).
• The Castle royal candidate filter.
• The Love Corner marriage flow.
• The Visual Novel dialogue marriage proposal.
• The pregnancy check (defense in depth against legacy spouse/lover records from before lineage data existed).
• The NPC-to-NPC marriage compatibility check.
• The NPC affair partner picker.

Each refusal is localized with a relation-specific flavor line, keeping the tone solemn instead of preachy. Adoption is treated as blood for the gate. Sibling marriage is a hard block.

Polish folded in from v0.62.1

The 0.62.1 release was tagged but never shipped. Its five fixes ride along here:

"A Ooze" / "A Imp" article bug. Encounter messages were emitting "A Ooze attacks!", "A Imp guards the boss room", "A Orc traveler arrived". A new helper picks the right article with the standard English exception lists (silent-h "honest" / "hour" / "heir" take "an", yu-sound "user" / "unicorn" / "European" take "a"). Eleven message sites fixed. Also picked up a related double-determiner bug: "A The Crown sympathizer" now reads "The Crown sympathizer".

Equipment comparison stats showed up in random order. A loot drop could list current and new stats in non-matching orders, with Constitution / Intelligence appearing at random spots depending on the code path. Every stat-bonus list now sorts alphabetically before rendering. Twelve display sites fixed in one sweep.

Team Corner showed options that did nothing. [A] Apply to join a team stayed in the menu after you joined a team and just bounced. Now removed. The rest of the menu now gates by team state: Create / Join only show when you are not in a team; team-management options only show when you are.

Team Corner showed online-only features in single-player.

Password

and [M] Send Message were appearing in single-player. Now gated so they only appear online.

Dev debug screens were shipping to players. Two visible debug surfaces had escaped to production: an inline [DEBUG] Relationship Stats: block at the top of every NPC conversation showing raw integers, and a [9] (DEBUG) View personality traits menu entry that dumped raw floats. Both removed. The useful information (orientation, relationship band, romance status, abstracted personality) now surfaces through the Level Master's Crystal Ball as an in-fiction oracle reading: "They count you a friend" instead of "Relation Level: 40"; "Brave to the point of recklessness" instead of "Courage: 0.82".

Bug-fix pass against the romance and family backlog

The relationship system and NPC pipeline both had a long backlog of small bugs that had been accumulating across several releases. This release closes 27 of them. The full list:

Romance, marriage, and intimacy

• Permadied lovers stayed in your Current Lovers list forever, and jealousy entries kept ticking against dead NPCs. Now all spouse / lover / friend-with-benefits / jealousy / affair records clean up immediately when an NPC permadies.
• Spouse death did not clear jealousy entries. The jealousy loop could keep ticking against a dead spouse and emit phantom divorce news.
• Player-NPC marriages were being triple-registered. Copy-paste cruft from a fix two years ago. Collapsed to a single dispatch.
• Player-side pregnancy was not recording the father. A v0.54 invariant that protects affair pregnancies during divorce was silently broken because the father field was never being set in the first place.
• The jealousy loop could trigger divorce news against a dead NPC. Defense-in-depth null and IsDead guards added.
• Castle divorce could leave the marriage half-finished if the spouse NPC reference had drifted. Now resolves the NPC by ID first, with name fallback.
• You could end up with an unlimited number of lovers. Now capped at five, with a player-facing refusal: "{name} would be yours, but your heart already carries too many lovers. The bond falters before it begins."
• Affairs that ended in marriage were silently aborting because the old marriage record was still in the way. The affair-to-marriage flow now divorces the old spouse before trying to marry the new partner.
• Faction-tension dialogue flavor was firing against your spouse in non-online contexts. Fixed.
• Flirt success count could double-bump in a single flirt action depending on which success branch fired.
• The dialogue layer could operate against a permadied NPC if a menu render raced the death cascade. Guarded.
• Love Corner divorce had the same NPC-resolution bug as Castle divorce. Same fix.
• Love Corner marriage could deduct gold before checking whether you were already married. Now refuses up-front.
• Reading your spouse's name was secretly mutating relation records to clean up dead-spouse state. This fired side-effects from places that should have been pure reads (BBS status line, /who list, dialogue render hooks). Now a pure read; cleanup runs at login.
• The "you accepted my confession" state could get overwritten by a subsequent state-write pass.
• Affair-to-marriage did not clear the jilted spouse's jealousy. Fixed.

NPC, family, and graduation

• When an NPC permadied in combat, spouse bereavement was not firing. The check was gated on a flag that had been permanently disabled per a v0.53.11 cleanup, so the bereavement code path had been unreachable.
• Child custody after divorce was not recomputing the parent's child count correctly. Both parents were reporting 100% of shared kids post-divorce. Now honors the custody-access flags: each parent reports only the kids who live with them.
• Two newborns named at the exact same tick could collapse into one record if both had empty parent IDs. The dedup key now includes parent names too.
• The online dashboard summary showed "Unknown" for children at Kidnapped or Away status. Now distinguishes Home, Orphanage, Kidnapped, and Away.
• Newborns did not get a surname until a deserialization migration caught them on next load. Now the surname is set when the child is named.
• Late-pickup orphans were spawning as Human regardless of parental race. Now uses the parental-race determination the rest of the pipeline already had.
• NG+ disown was not immediately persisting to the shared world state, so a concurrent world-sim tick could re-attach the disowned children.
• NPC aging could push a race to extinction if the population was already at the permadeath floor. Now consults the race floor and extends the lifespan by a week if the race is on the brink.
• Widow cleanup was not clearing the legacy Married flag, leaving the player in a half-married state some quest and dialogue paths consult.
• Family-tie memory wiring extended. Earlier work only wired parent death to children. Now every relative (parent, child, sibling) records the loss, and the killer goes into every relative's Enemies list. Birth events also write a positive memory in every living parent and sibling.
• Castle royal marriage was filtering out the player's own teammate even though Church and Love Corner allowed it. Castle now allows your own teammate while still filtering rival-team-loyal NPCs.

Graduation pipeline fixes (the bugs we caught in passing)

Three pre-existing bugs in the child-to-NPC graduation pipeline were caught while building the lineage system, and fixed inline:

Graduated adults were spawning with secretly-zeroed stats. The graduation code set the live stat values but never set the underlying Base values. The first time anything recalculated stats, the Base values reset to zero and zeroed everything else. Result: a graduated adult NPC had real stats at the moment of graduation and 0-stat husk values forever after.

Graduated Magicians had 0 mana. Graduated Clerics had 0 wisdom. The graduation code was skipping Constitution, Wisdom, Dexterity, and Max Mana entirely. A graduated Magician had zero mana to cast spells with; a graduated Cleric had zero wisdom so their heals scaled catastrophically. Now both methods populate all nine core stats plus Max HP and class-appropriate Max Mana.

Orphan graduates were not getting orientation reconciliation or faction assignment. A female orphan who rolled the same-sex orientation band stayed mislabeled "Gay" instead of being reconciled to "Lesbian" (the v0.61.7 fix never reached this code path). And orphan graduates never got a faction assignment at all, while immigrant NPCs did. Both now run.

Save compatibility

Pre-v0.63.0 saves heal themselves on next login. The lineage fields on existing NPCs are filled in by walking the Child registry on load: for each graduated child record, the corresponding adult NPC's lineage fields get populated from the child's parent records. The backfill is idempotent (safe to run every login) and logs a per-run summary.