Sorry for the somewhat obscure title, one of my players reads these boards regularly, and I am not sure of the code to make a spoiler tag.

Okay, this is probably easily found in the books somewhere, but I haven't found it yet, and I know you guys will have the answer. Can a person be related to various meta-types? For instance, can a Troll and an Elf be third cousins?

I am starting up a new campaign in which the character(s) are hired to eliminate the bloodline of an ancient mage in order to release a free spirit he had trapped in a previous age/world. The characters won't know why they are being asked to eliminate what will seem to be random people, but it should cause an interesting moral dilemna. And they too are related, but will be among the last to "disappear" unless they should refuse the assignment, then they will be the hunted.

If related people can be different meta-types that will aid in throwing the players off the trail for awhile. Or it could become an interesting clue if they can't be related.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Yep, they could be related. A family line may tend towards certain metahumans, but the return of magic may have fractured the bloodline and had one side go off in goblinization, while the other went the way of UGE, and that's not even accounting for the possible other metatypes, or surges that happened along the way.

Sounds like a hella interesting concept though.

Hell, an elf and an ork could be siblings, or more likely, parent-child. It's rather unlikely in the sibling case since some metatypes are far more likely to express than others (ork is very dominant), but the metatypes can interbreed and people don't express as obvious "half-breeds" or anything, so it's actually inevitable in inter-meta unions that the child will be different from one (or potentially even both!) of the parents. The only thing really stopping it from being common is social barriers. Which brings up the rather disheartening possibility of an ork/elf relationship producing ork children in which case the elf parent faces the very real possibility of outliving their entire immediate family by a wide margin.

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Just don't put any spaces between the word "spoiler" and the opening/closing "[ ]s"

Thanks much for the replies. I had a feeling that it was possible, but I wanted to be sure so as to keep continuity in the game.

And thank you Kyoto Kid for the directions on the spoiler tag, that will definitely be of use to me in future posts.