Usurper Reborn · published
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 first time you walk into 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.
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.
When you talk to one of your grown children, the Chat slot swaps to a parent-flavored topic pool. You can ask:
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.
A new reputation tier appears on your [%] Status display, alongside Dread / Renown / Sellsword Hall. It is derived live from your adult-children set:
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.
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:
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.
The 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:
Blood ties beat friendship ties. An adult child you are temporarily estranged from still gets the Family band.
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:
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.
If you have taken the throne, a new royal action 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:
Costs 50 Fame. Only eligible adult children (level 20 or higher, not already in court, not already faction-aligned) appear in the picker.
A new 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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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. 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 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 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".
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:
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.
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.