>>30387310Alright, so I had time to mull over the idea, and I think we can implement is somewhat easily, and with each faction having a distinct method of attaining this "elite" rank.
1. Axelotls: The simplest of the four. As I personally would put a lot of weight on their strength and battle prowess, adding on top of that their canine inspiration, a way to attain even more power would be through an "alpha gene" activation. This gene would activate only when an individual faced, and surpassed great adversity. Upon activation, the individual would then experience a rapid growth spurt over a year or so, growing larger, muscle mass increasing, all that fun stuff. This would make him an Alpha. Now, not every jarl is an Alpha, but many of them indeed are. Some jarls might even have individuals that attained the rank of Alpha under them as retainers, and sometimes even just normal individuals, not even fighters, can attain the rank, since the activation conditions vary from person to person.
2. Magmates: unlike Axelotls, whose transformation would be purely natural, they would instead artificially better themselves. We already talked about this. Hand cloaks. Essentially, any magmate alchemist could undertake a hand cloak ritual, in which they would fuse themselves to an extremely advanced golem. If, IF they survive, they would officially be accepted into the upper echelons of The Guild, and be privy to information normal, cloakless members would never see. This process could be repeated as many times as one wished, attaining additional hands with each successful ritual. Most, however, would stop at 1-2 rituals.
3. Altventurers: kinda iffy on this one, but I want to keep the elite rank limited to the royal family. Basically, a normal altventurer could have kids that display full, some, or none of their traits, like blue skin and small horns, if they had, for example, a Magmate partner. The royal family, however, would have extremely dominant traits that would always be passed on, no matter who the partner was. This way there would be little to no "watering down" of the bloodline, specially their Voice(yes, it's exactly what you are thinking of if you watched Dune, just not quite as op.)
4. Vestiges: Here I wanted to lean either into a "secret society" type of deal or a more mythical origin. Either a select noble would get visited in the night by the silent spectre, and be granted it's blessing, or a council of the oldest nobles would send out an invitation to a new initiate, who would then literally feast on the immortal, sleeping body of their founder, attaining the last vestige of his power. Either way, I really liked the idea that while the general masses would be ignorant of the meaning behind the name "vestiges" the select few would know of the full name. "the immortal vestiges of our honored father, the Silent One."
Alright, back to work. See you in 3 hours!