Gonzoron of the FoS wrote:Closest I can think of is for Harkon himself. His children whose mothers are wolfweres are Greater Wolfweres, while his children with human mothers are merely regular wolfweres. (but never full human). So at least for "big daddy" wolfwere in Ravenloft, wolfwerism is dominant over human genes. Of course, that may be specific to him...jamesfirecat wrote:(there are no books/cannon material subjects on how human wolfwere interbreeding works to my knowledge)
Okay, I was reading these statements in the other thread, and something hit me. I can't believe that I missed the part about Akriel being an ordinary WW! That really lends a lot of strength to one of my former players' headcanons about Harkon. His DL origin story seems really lame--he gets a domain for being a more organized version of an ordinary wolfwere?! Something's missing here, and in our group, we often say that the writers of RL will often go strong on the gothic dark stuff at first and then wimp out on execution. We like to read between the lines and see what we can come up with to compensate.Gonzoron of the FoS wrote:Only two that we know of, but there must be others out there, otherwise Greater Wolfweres wouldn't exist. (Akriel's isn't one, and I don't know if it was ever confirmed if Casimir was.)jamesfirecat wrote:Also hasn't Harkon only had like two children (Casimir and Akriel) that I can recall which is a pretty small sample size (or did he only have two children who were interested in pretending to be human for considerable lengths of time?)
Take the case of Akriel. In the original RoT box, one of the cards was for the Old Kartakan Inn, and it had room 7 as "Akriel's Chamber." It says, "A beautiful girl named Akriel sleeps in this room. She is considered a servant, but no one has ever seen her working."
Anyone else getting a vibe from that last phrase? Put the air quotes around the work "working," and see if you get my drift. Seems clear that Akriel was originally intended to be Harkon's lover/mistress, but was then retconned into his daughter for FoG. This is one of the things that we point to when we talk about writers wimping out. So you can have Harkon regularly torture and murder people in his basement, but can't give him a regular mistress?!
The retcon also has an odd feel. Why would Harkon's daughter be considered a servant? That room writeup sounds like the scuttlebutt from other servants--common knowledge, etc.--so why would Harkon allow people to think that Akriel was his mistress? This would only make sense if it was not common knowledge that she was also his daughter. But even then, why put his daughter in a position of servitude at all?
Upon learning that Akriel is not a greater wolfwere--meaning presumably her mother was human--something finally clicked. What if Akriel was his daughter AND his mistress? What if this was Harkon's crime all along--incest with his own normal wolfwere children, to produce the "master race" of Greater WW's?
In this version, Akriel was raised by her human mother without any knowledge of who her father was. Harkon knew, though, and around the time she came into her powers, he seduced her in the form of a wandering bard, took her away to the Old Kartakan Inn, and put her on the books as an unspecific "servant." He fosters the children that result into the community, but takes very good care of them, and watches closely from a distance, just as he did with her. Eventually she discovers that he is not only her lover and mentor in the ways of wolfwere-ism, but also her biological father. Cue the revulsion and the rebellion that lead to FoG.
Of course, she would be too old to have been his original victim that earned him DLship, but I really think this was his real crime. Where other wolfweres were happy to have children by unsuspecting humans, Harkon actually sought to breed with other wolfweres. To that end, he may have raised his children himself, and groomed them to be the parents of a master race that would rule over human and wolfwere alike.
It's incomplete, but this would suggest why he only gets one human form for each sex: it's part of his curse, because his original tactic was to take one form as a parent and another form as a lover, so that the child did not know they were committing incest. He can't do that any more, which is why he has to foster his kids out, watch from afar, and then seduce them.
So I'll be filling in the holes in this story as I go, but it feels right to me. Harkon's real crime was calculated incest, to create the greater wolfweres.