Constructing Family Trees

You know what’s a crazy project to work on? Fictional family trees. It’s extremely time-consuming, but also fascinating and educational. In many ways, it changes how you think about generations and time.

Take the tree I’m working on right now, for example. It’s for a character who is the 9^th individual in their line of succession – although they are only the 7^th of their name. So, I figured I needed at least 9 generations, and that it would be somewhere in the range of 400-500 year time-span. Boy was I wrong.

After building out the main family line – oh, and by the way, family trees just keep getting bigger and bigger as they branch off! – I started putting in the years, and tracking the line of succession, and I ran into a massive snag. If a parent lived a long and full life, their child wouldn’t be ruling until they were seniors! Not only that, but there was the potential that the seat of leadership could pass over an entire generation. On the flip-side, a shorter-lived ruler with no heir could result in their sibling inheriting – meaning that two people in the same generation could hold power, meaning that – unless I rebuilt the family tree – I had to steal that position from a whole other generation.

Well, I eventually sorted the whole mess out, balancing the leadership and generations, and was amazed to find that my 9 generations all fit snugly in a blanket of 200 years. Only 200! Through this, I learned that generations squeeze far closer together than I had ever anticipated – if only because I didn’t sit down to do the math ahead of time.

And remember how I said the family tree just grows and grows? I was erring on the side of keeping family sizes small, even going so far as to end entire branches. Yet, over the span of 200 years, a family that started with one couple grew to have 63 individuals in it (including spouses)!

So, naturally, now I’m off to finish naming 63 people, and giving them all birth and death dates. And all I can say is, thank goodness for noble households who like to pass on names through the family.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.