An extended family portrait from Eastpoint Florida, circa 1898 to 1912. Specifications and public domain provenance: Wikimedia Commons, cropped and resized by Mike

I’m a fan of the history/biography show, Who Do You Think You Are?, as I have explained a time or two in past articles.

Watching some episodes of the show recently, a recurring thought concerning the abbreviated family trees they show finally coalesced into the concept for an article.

That article changed and morphed several times in the process of development. Initially, I was just going to offer one tip, one insight, on family structures for RPG characters. But that led to another, and then another, and before I knew it, I had an entire system for developing perfect families for NPCs and PCs alike. The structure of the article will walk you through this development, because each stepping-stone adds an important concept to the process. It’s possible that I won’t get it finished in one part, though I’ll do my best!

“Perfect”?

The term “perfect” needs some explanation in this context. I’m not interested in creating the sort of plastic ‘perfect’ families that you saw on some 1950s and 1960s TV shows; “perfect” in this case means “perfectly suited to their purpose”.

That purpose is to explain, support, and embellish the personality of the featured character while adding plausibility and realism. It’s also important that the family contains negative space – deliberate holes in the background, some of which the character knows about, and some they don’t, from which future encounters, family situations, and plotlines can be hung.

Family Ownership

That means that, past a certain point of development, the entire family has to be turned over to the GM if the family is attached to a PC. The GM is then free to revise, embellish, or extend the members as he sees fit, provided that the player’s perception of the family remains unchanged. When the player uses this (or any other) system to create his character’s family, what he’s really doing is describing the family from his character’s point of view; these are NPC seeds for the GM to use to add some personal interest and supporting cast to the campaign. The family belongs to the GM – but the PCs perception of them belongs to the player, and can’t be messed with by the GM.

Foundations

I want to start with the diagram shown in figure 1. This shows how family trees on TV shows like “Who Do You Think You Are?” are usually depicted.

At the bottom of the tree, you have four individuals. One of them will either be the featured person or a significant ancestor of theirs – significant in terms of the family as the featured person knows it. That could be an important person in the family, or in their childhood, or it might simply be as far back as they have been able to trace their lineage.

The convention is that these are four siblings, in order of their birth, oldest to youngest.

Above them are their parents. Again, it’s fairly traditional for the father to be on the left and the mother on the right, but sometimes this gets violated to simplify the tree structure when second wives / second husbands and children born out of wedlock are important to the structure.

This abbreviated tree then proceeds through three generations of ancestors who were significant only in terms of their place within the tree. These are nothing but names in the context of the focal point, that key individual. Sometimes, that’s because their contributions to the family story have been described in a previous segment in the report.

The lack of importance in terms of the current story segment is indicated by their ‘names’ being faded or grayed out in this representation; that’s usually not the case in ‘real’ family trees, because you start with the names of ancestors and relatives, not knowing whose stories will be interesting or relevant to the family.

This tree describes the ancestral relationship between the featured individual and a famous or important ancestor, in this case, their Great-times-3-grandparents (sometimes abbreviated ‘GGGgrandparents’).

To make this relationship clear, everything not relevant to it has been left out, and that was the starting point for this article – I started thinking about the things being left out.

A more complete tree

Figure two depicts a more typical family tree. If the person of focus has children of their own at the time, these are shown in the bottom row, and they are one of the two parents shown on the second row up, with the other being their spouse. If not, then the person of focus is on the bottom row. To simplify descriptions, I’m going to assume that the focal point is once again on the bottom row.

That means that the POF (person of focus) is on the bottom row, and the second row shows their parents. The third row then shows the parents of each parent, in other words the four grandparents of the POF; and the fourth row shows the eight great-grandparents.

Things get more interesting with the fifth row – while some of the 16 GGgrandparents are shown, four couples are represented as unknowns, symbolized by the question marks. This is probably more extreme than most real-life cases, but maybe not. I knew only one of my Great-Great-Grandparents, for example. But if I had talked with the three grandparents who survived to the time of my birth, they would have known their parents, and many of their parents’ parents.

This tree traces ancestry back one more generation, into the 32 GGGgrandparents. Once again, there are three question marks, and (of course) the question marks from the 4th generation trace back no further – as a result, only 10 of the 32 GGGgp’s are shown.

The result is a fairly clean, pristine, depiction of the direct ancestry of the individual.

But a family is more than the direct ancestry. Quite often, that’s the least part of it.

What’s been left out to achieve this nice, neat, picture is the extended family – the siblings of every one of those parents and grandparents and GGgrandparents and so on, and their spouses and children.

When I was growing up, on my paternal side, there was my grandmother, and my father’s four siblings; who (one by one) married, and in most cases, had children of their own – my aunts and uncles and cousins. In the direct line, there was my great-grandmother, from whom I think I got my love of city life, and at whose place I taught myself to read. There were also my grandmother’s sisters, and their children and grandchildren (and now great grandchildren and maybe more). There was another elderly relative and her husband but (without getting out the family archives) I’m not sure of the exact relationship – my GGmother’s sister, I think. We simply knew her as “Aunty”. On my mother’s side, there were two brothers and a sister, and their spouses and children – more aunts and uncles. These families formed four or five major ‘local clusters’, two of which overlapped in my home town, and there were a couple of branches in odd places.

While this large extended family came together regularly, I could say that there were only fifteen or sixteen or seventeen that I knew well and saw every week or so. There were others that I saw every year or two (sometimes more often), and a fringe beyond that who were little more than names most of the time. As I grew up, there was a gradual diaspora and the number of clusters grew and grew. Sometimes, family passed away – it happens to us all – but their places were taken by new arrivals (more cousins).

On top of that, there were relatives of my mother’s sister’s husband, who formed a sort of extended-extended-family.

Almost all of those relationships are left out of that neat diagram. In fact, if you were to follow every descendant, family trees don’t grow up like this one, they grow down like tree roots from one ancestor. Adding a new member to that family – which happens every time a member gets married – adds a whole new and growing hyper-extension to the family.

In a more abstract way, this diagram attempts to illustrate the results of the process of hyper-extension over four generations starting with a single couple (who, for the sake of simplicity, have no known siblings).

• Gen0: The couple with no relatives
• Gen1: They have children;
• Gen1: Most of those children get married, adding in not only the spouse but the spouse’s siblings and other relatives, and those relatives’ spouses as well.
• Gen2: Most of those couples have children.
• Gen2: Most of those children get married, adding in not only the spouse but the spouse’s siblings and other relatives, and those relatives’ spouses as well.
• Gen3: Most of those couples have children.
• Gen3: Most of those children get married, adding in not only the spouse but the spouse’s siblings and other relatives, and those relatives’ spouses as well.
• Gen4: Most of those couples have children.
• Gen4: Most of those children get married, adding in not only the spouse but the spouse’s siblings and other relatives, and those relatives’ spouses as well.

Let’s assume 3 children per couple on average, which means that each generation also contains 3 spouses. Each spouse has 2 parents, 2 siblings, 2 aunts/uncles, 6 cousins, 2 brothers or sisters, 2 spouses, and 6 nieces and nephews. There may also be 4 grandparents and 8 great-grandparents, but there might not be – so let’s assume a 50% grandparents survival and 25% great-grandparents – so 2 grandparents and 2 great-grandparents. Those grandparents (both living and dead) have 4×2=8 siblings, 4 of which also survive; and the great-grandparents (both living and dead) have 8×2=16 siblings, 4 of which survive. I think that’s everyone! Adding those up, we get 1+2+2+2+6+2+2+6+2+2+4+4) = 35.

So, the chart shows:

• Gen0: 2 people at the top;
• Gen1: 3 children;
• Gen1: 3×35 = 105 spousal relatives.
• Gen2: the children, cousins, and nieces/nephews all have 3 children each, so 3x(3+2+6+6) = 3×17 = 51 children.
• Gen2: Each of those 51 add 35 spouses and spousal families, so 51×35 = 1785 people.
• Gen3: the 35 people include 17 who will have children, so that’s 51×17 = 867 children.
• Gen3: Each of those 867 add 35 new relatives by marriage, so 867×35 = 30,345 people.
• Gen 4: 867×17 couples have 3 children each: 14,739 sets of three children, or 44,217 children.
• Gen 4: Each of those 44,217 bring an additional 35 new relatives into the hyper-extended family, or 1,547,595 people.
• Adding all of these up, we get 2 + 3 + 105 + 51 + 1785 + 867 + 30345 + 44217 + 1547595 = 1,624,970 members of the hyper-extended family.

Realistically, there is no way that you would ever get to know most of these people. And most of what’s left might be known by name only. But any one of them can find themselves part of the immediate circle of relatives of an individual.

There is, similarly, no way on earth that any player or GM, no matter how detail-oriented, will create and individualize 1.6 million (plus) NPCs.

That’s the inadequacy of a typical family tree – it leaves too many important things out

Of course, it should be noted that the assumptions are completely unrealistic. Some couples will have more than the assumed three children, some will have less, some will never marry, some will die young. Wars and plagues or pandemics will take a substantial share.

The Splintering Of Families

What actually happens is that families break up into smaller clusters, each of which belongs on its own extended family tree. On my side, for example, the Galvins form a large cluster of their own – I’ve met some of them (all of them and many of their spouses in a specific generation, sometimes a number of times, sometimes only once or twice). But I wouldn’t place a bet on my ability to name all of my first cousins from this cluster – they are outside my immediate family. But 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins, 4th cousins, 4th cousins by marriage No.

That entire cluster can thus be reduced to an abstract ‘pool’ of relatives, some known and some not. I know of the existence of each of my family clusters, and have the occasional social engagement that connects me to them and renews the bonds – but these are few and far between.

A family can thus be considered to be a series of nested ‘family circles’ – the immediate family in the innermost circle, the innermost core of the most immediate clusters in the outermost circle (which includes any ex-members of the innermost circle who have lost contact with me but know who I am), the rest of the family in a third circle, and so on.

How much I know about the family members is a function of the circle they are in – I know a fair bit about the inner circle (with some more central, who I am in regular contact with, and some more out on the fringes); I know who the members of the second circle are, and have vague ideas about how they are doing and their personal histories; and I have little or no current information on the few members of the third circle whose names I even recognize. (Social Media has enabled me to reconnect with some distant cousins who had almost completely vanished from the second circle into the third).

Including the outer fringes of the immediate family, these days, there are probably 50 members or so. And my family is both large and strongly socially-connected compared to many.

Cluster Hubs

Every family cluster has a hub around which the cluster revolves. Sometimes these are Matriarchs, sometimes Patriarchs. Two secondary hubs may form around Handymen and Archivists.

Clan Matriarchs

It’s been my experience that families all have a Matriarch or a Patriarch. These are the hubs around which social activities take place. When I was a child, the Matriarch was my Grandmother; she was the person everyone kept in touch with, the link connecting the clusters and regularly hosting or visiting those remote cousins, aunts, and uncles. When she passed, the family broke into two clusters, and my Great-Aunt became the Matriarch, largely because she moved into a very central location in the Sydney CBD. When she passed away, there was a further fracturing. For a while, it looked like my Aunt would become the new family matriarch, but she found it to be more than she could keep up with – and that’s how a fracture occurs. Nevertheless, she occasionally steps into that role, and definitely still occupies it with respect to the family cluster that remains in my home town.

Meanwhile, my mother has become the unofficial matriarch of her side of the family, though they have largely scattered into their own remote clusters. She’s even tracked down a branch of the family that none of us knew existed, still living in England.

Matriarchs aren’t all the same. Some exert direct veto over family affairs, some are micromanagers, some are gatekeepers, some are social animals who summon remote family clusters to renew ties with them whenever they start to drift, some are simply the type of person who keeps in touch with everyone, the disseminator of family news. But they are the nexus around which a cluster orbits, the person who has to be invited to a family function to make it “official”..

Clan Patriarchs

Some families don’t have a matriarch, they have a patriarch. And some have both. A Patriarch can serve exactly the same function as a matriarch, or can be the glue that holds a cluster together for some other reason – in the old days, money used to be a major one, and social status another.

Clan Handymen

There’s almost always one person in a cluster who is the person you call upon when you need help – it might be putting in a new window frame or a new roof or whatever. It used to be my uncle Stan, but he passed away too young of a heart attack. My Uncle Dave occupied this role in more recent years – until his retirement, seemed to do as many family jobs as he did paid ones, these days he still does family work but is otherwise retired. My father is slowly assuming this role in another family cluster.

The major distinction between Clan Handyman and Clan Patriarch. is that the former go to the family branch, the latter brings the families to him.

Clan Archivists & Scribes

Most family clusters have one of these – the keeper of the records, the person who know the most about the family history. Quite often, these family members become the Matriarchs or Patriarchs of a family cluster, simply because keeping abreast of that family history implies regular connection with the different branches.

Successors

Most of the time, any objective review will identify the person most likely to succeed one of the holders of these unofficial positions within a family hierarchy. These are people who find themselves attracted to some function of the role – my cousin loves to cook, and is likely to become the hub of the immediate family of my hometown cluster as my Aunt gradually hangs up her metaphoric spurs. She’s been seeing how it’s done for many years. When my mother passes, my sister is likely to become the family archivist, while I expect to be pushed into the role of family scribe, simply because I write quickly and efficiently – my mother has already called me into service a time or two when she’s needed assistance.

What they have in common

It’s fairly rare these days for a clan hub to exercise control over a family cluster. What they do is provide the ‘glue’ that holds the cluster together, socially, forming the hub of the network of family contacts. When my Grandmother died, there was no longer a living relative directly linking my side of the family with the Galvins, and their cluster began to drift away from my immediate family. But the legacy she left behind in terms of forged social connections was still strong, and that enabled my Aunt Muriel to step into the (completely unofficial) role. Every family member who came to Sydney had to stop in to visit her, and many made such trips for no other reason than to do so. When I first moved to Sydney for University studies, I live with her; when I moved back to look for work, I used to visit her every Friday night.

So, here’s the contention that came to me while preparing figure three, which I’ll come to shortly: that outside of the immediate family circle of a character, the only people that you need to define for a family are the clan hubs. Individuals outside of that might connect to important personal anecdotes, but those aren’t necessary to character creation – though writing up one or two such can greatly humanize a character.

A more realistic family tree

The graphic above is my first attempt at distilling all of these thoughts into a coherent structure, one that was capable of containing the kind of extended family that I had experienced. Right away, there was one problem – this is a static picture, a snapshot that is only true of a particular period in family history.

It depicts the family from a character perspective, and describes what the specific individual knows, or thinks he knows, about his family and their history. Which means that whole areas of it might be incorrect.

Family members in yellow are part of the immediate family cluster for the individual. Those in green are names that he will recognize, and about whom he might have a personal anecdote.

Despite appearances, there are only four generations shown – there wasn’t enough room at the top to show the parents of spouses of the third generation, so I had to use a second row for them.

Four primary hubs are shown – the current Matriarch is shown with a red border and the capital M; the current Patriarch is the Matriarch’s son-in-law. The matriarch-in-waiting is the granddaughter of the current Matriarch (lower-case m), while the former patriarch is shown with a crossed-out lowercase p – but when this was drawn up, no distinction was made between the role of Patriarch. and the Handyman.

Boxed off to the right of the diagram is a secondary cluster. Despite appearances, a sibling of the current “Handyman Patriarch” is the only formal connection between this boxed-off family cluster and the main family group; the grandparents of the spouse of this sibling are shown with the main family because they were close family friends with the former Patriarch-handyman, which – no doubt – is how the younger couple came to know each other.

To the left, three children are grouped into an oval with unknown parentage who were adopted, one of whom went on to marry his stepsister or brother. This is not strictly illegal in most places, but it’s unusual, and the sort of thing that gets gossiped about in families. The asterisks on the couple who adopted these three (in addition to two children of their own) indicated that this couple collectively form a secondary hub for the family as the family historians.

At the top, you can see that one person has married twice, having children with both partners, and that both of these children were then married to the children of another couple. This is another unusual fact, and suggests that everything left of the capital M represents a ‘black sheep’ branch of the family.

Once the current Matriarch passes away, there will no longer be a direct connection between the cluster to the left (boxed off in blue), and they will begin to drift away from the primary family. They won’t become a separate cluster until they develop their own primary hub, however – or perhaps it might be more accurate to suggest that when they begin to drift away, someone in the new cluster will find themselves ‘pressed into service’ as a primary hub! At the same time, this will cut the primary family group off from the old secondary archivist hub, so there is a significant risk of the loss of family history when that happens.

When I started work on this diagram, this article was all set to be about family structures and the four types of ‘hub’ – social, authoritarian, practical (handyman), and archivist, and the theory was that those, plus the rest of the immediate family, were all that a PC or NPC needed. Everyone else could be assumed, or would be the subject of a family anecdote.

But by the time it was finished, the ‘family circles’ concept had evolved, and while it doesn’t disagree with that concept, this diagram lacked the capacity to display those. There was only one thing for it – a more complete diagram. So I started putting one together…

The Circles Of Family

…but by the time I had finished, a matched pair of new concepts had arisen – the Significant Person and the Fog Of Distance. Fortunately, this diagram permitted the expression of both – but I’ll get back to that in a moment.

The place to start in understanding this diagram is at the bottom. The person of focus is the red square. That is the PC or NPC who this family is about. Their siblings and parents form the immediate family.

Surrounding that immediate family are the P/M extension, which includes all family members (and their spouses) in a direct line between the Person of Focus and the current Patriarch or Matriarch of the family, shown in pink and blue. The fact that the blue box is off to one side while the pink is directly above the parents and grandparents of the current character implies that this family has a Matriarch, not a Patriarch.

One of their children is labeled R3, indicating that this person is the record-keeper of the family.

Since no Handyman is shown, it can be presumed that this is the function of the Matriarch’s husband, a subordinate Patriarchal role.

The family members outside of the P/M Extension are divided into two categories – those on a direct line back in time and their siblings (above the Patriarch/Matriarch couple) and extended family (below), which are grouped into two branches.

Next, I would draw the reader’s attention to the two purple boxes in the middle of the diagram. The larger one shows the family as it was when the previous Matriarch was the hub, and the smaller one shows the additions to the family while they held sway – long enough for another generation to be born (great-grandchildren), and in all but one case married – but not long enough to be presented with any great-great-grandchildren.

The previous Patriarch / Matriarch are shown, of course (in purple and orange), and the current holders of those positions within the family were well and truly inside the family at the time. The fact that both are centrally located suggests that this was a far more equal position, which – given how long ago it was, and that there would have been a lot less casual travel, is not too surprising. One thing that the modern communications of the latter 20th century have given us is range; before long-distance phone calls became routine, and affordable, physically migrating to a different locality almost certainly meant distance from the family in the social sense, as well.

There is also an earlier ‘keeper of the records’ (R2), the younger brother or sister of the current Matriarch.

In the Ancestors, which takes the family tree of the current POF back to their G6-grandparents (Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandparents), three people are colored – one couple, who are family legends as a previous Matriarch/Patriarch, and R1, the first keeper of records within the family, whose work was inherited by R2 and subsequently passed on to R3.

What’s missing: Spouses of the siblings of the current Matriarch/Patriarch, and siblings of every generation prior to that generation. Either there were none – it’s not impossible for the children of two single-child couples to marry – or those clusters have split off and are nothing more than names in the family archives, at best.

The Fog of Uncertainty

These groupings become the defining limits of each successive family circle, and the wall of ignorance that they represent. If this is filled in as a series of more and more intense fogs of uncertainty, then the family tree becomes as shown in figure 5:

The POF knows his story, and the story of his siblings. He has some idea of the story of his parents, and knows who they were. He also knows his Maternal Grandparents, one of whom is R3, and the current Matriarch/Patriarch, but knows less of their personal stories. He knows a number of uncles, aunts, and cousins in the extended family by name, and has an anecdote about most of them, or some piece of family lore. Above the current Matriarch, though, things get decidedly vague. He knows that R3 inherited a mess of stuff from the brother or sister of the current Matriarch (R2), and that R2’s parents used to be the central figures of the family until the current Matriarch took over. There are a couple of family legends about their ancestors beyond that point – and that’s about it. Most of the family are shrouded in fog, lost in the pages of history. They can logically be assumed to be there – and that’s about the extent of it.

It is this fog of uncertainty that shows that most players (and GMs, if it comes to that) go far too far when generating families. They attempt to produce something akin to figure 4, in which everyone important is named and specified, to at least some extent – when what they should be aiming for is figure 5.

The other thing that stands out, as a result of the work done in designing and generating these family trees, is that it is not the identity of the people in the tree for the most part that matters; what’s significant is not Who these people are as the Relationship between the Person of Focus and any other individual.

It’s not for the player to give details about any of them; these are NPCs who might never appear in the campaign. That makes them the GM’s province; what is necessary is for the player to define the relationship, and for the GM to respect that, and the creative limits that it places on those identities. Specifics should only be provided – should only be generated – when they become relevant to game-play.

For the most part, except for names, a lot of that generation can be done on the fly by most GMs. I except names because they are often the part people struggle with, so it can be advantageous to have prepared them in advance.

Which takes us full circle to the very first family tree diagram (figure 1), but now the significance has changed. This shows the immediate family of the person of interest, and their parents; the grandparents, Ggrandparents, and GGgrandparents are just names on the page, but there are two GGGgrandparents who have been relevant to a plot at some point, and so have been fleshed out.

How Long Is A Piece Of String?

How many roads must a man walk down? How many wishes must be made before one comes true? Deep philosophical questions with no more than abstract meaning in the real world, and the important question about to be posed is often seen as another of them: How long is a generation?

People in their thirties can have children – and by the time those children are ready to have children of their own, close to 50 years will have passed. If those children also wait until their thirties, two generation can stretch over 70 years; this puts the upper limit somewhere around the 35-40 year mark.

At the other extreme, it was not all that uncommon in years gone by for children to be married at 14 or 15. Because it’s an easy number to work with, let’s go with 15.

So a generation can thus be assumed to be somewhere between 15 and 40 years.

A strict averaging of these extremes gives 28½ years. But that presumes that the curves are symmetrical about this point, that it’s just as likely for a couple to be childless until their early thirties as it is to have a child at twenty.

Right now, because of advances in medical science, that may well be the case, especially in the upper-middle-class. But go back in time a very short distance (perhaps one of those longer generations) and childbearing skews younger – and go back two or three times that, and the skew is even more pronounced.

The current generation may well be 30 years long (rounding for convenience); the previous generation, it may have been 25 years long; before that, perhaps two generations spanning 45 years between them; and prior generations are likely to be 20 years long, on average. Always with the same lower boundary; it’s the upper limit that shortens.

Let’s see what that means for the family tree in figure 1. The person of focus can be one of the parents, who have a total of four children – that puts their year of birth at one generation plus 4 years, minimum, or plus eight years, maximum. But if you are at the upper extreme of a generational limit, you won’t have four children – you need to start earlier to have such a large family except in unusual cases, like quadruplets. If anything, those 4-8 years need to be subtracted from the upper bounds. Splitting the difference, we get 6 years – which drops our generational window more or less back to the 25 year mark.

So, 25 years before the birth of the first child marks a generation – the birth of the POF. The three ‘grayed out’ generations are 25, 22½, and 22½ years long, respectively (maximums). The birth of the highlighted couple was a generation earlier than that, 20 years. Add those up, and you get 115 years.At most, this tree depicts 115 years of family history. Subtracting these generations and comparing the total to average lifespan gives some notion of whether or not the Person Of Focus could have known the highlighted characters at the top of the tree personally – the answer is, ‘not likely but not impossible’. 115 years less 25 is 90 – so the people at the top would have been 90 years old when the Person of Focus was born.

If we take the minimums of each generation, a different story emerges. four generations at 15 years is a total of 60 years – so there was every chance that at least one the people at the top would have known the person of focus for some years. But this is also unlikely, so it doesn’t change the overall answer.

In practical terms, ‘Living Memory’ extends back three or four generations, no more, except in unusual circumstances. This puts a maximum depth on family trees – the living memories of the eldest survivors, or six or seven generations – to the 4Ggrandparents of the current youngest children. Beyond that lies only myth and family legend – and the archives of the family record-keeper.

This is the last central concept that we need to embrace before we can get to the generation system that I have devised to short-cut the process of generating families for RPG characters.

But it also carries me WAY past publishing time (I might have made it had I not taken a nap – but I was nodding off, which is why I needed the nap, so I might not have done).

Next week, in part 2, I’ll take these conceptual building blocks and construct from them a system for the (relatively) painless quick generation of families for PCs and NPCs alike. One final note: these observations are, for the most part, entirely genre-less. They apply to Fantasy games as much as to modern or sci-fi gaming. See you then!