FANTASTIC FAMILIES Legacy heroes (and villains) and inheriting Powers
Fantastic Families are heroes who form a family and have children. Sometimes, very often in fact, the same strange energies and workings of fate that produced the original hero are passed down as a Legacy to those who succeed them in generations to come.
Legacy can be added as an Origin type or simply acknowledged as a fact. Legacy means a hero (or villain) is the descendant of at least one super powered character and inherits at the bare minimum a version of their costume and possibly their same powers.
The presumption here is that Powers are dominant genetically and will manifest in the children of a superbeing. Or, if the powers are in a Gimmick, the workings of fate will give the children some version of the same Gimmick, and so on.
To change this for your own game if you think it’s producing too many spit curled godlings simply treat a roll on the chart below of 65 or less as a roll of 01, ie the child does not inherit.
If there is only one descendant or the player is choosing all the powers for the characters in a family then that’s fine and good. However, it might be that at some point there are either too many different family members to easily choose for or there is another reason why randomizing what powers a descendant inherits from a super powered ancestor.
When the time comes to roll up a random inheritance for a family, use the chart below.
The same process can then be used for GRANDchildren and so on, to see if they take after their parents or grandparents, and so on down the line. If both of a child’s parents are super powered then roll on the Fantastic Families chart TWICE, once for mama and once for papa!
That accounts for inherited powers. But what about FASERIP? For each of the statistics, including Wealth but not including Karma, Health or Popularity, roll 1d6. On a roll of 1 or 2, the character inherits their father's Rank in that statistic. On a roll of 3 or 4, the statistic is random. On a roll of 5 or 6, the statistic is at the same Rank as the character's mother.
Inheritance is all about families so what some people do is create a genealogy, a family tree, for their superheroes (and supervillains). Genealogy fascinates and entertains some people and if it is something you enjoy, by all means do a family tree for your characters!
