Proposed character would be Born Noble, Arcane Devotee, City Student, Rouge Wizard. The 9 trait points would be allocated to Mark of Privilege, Base Humility, Gifted, Rabble Rouser, Spooky, and Fey Blood to represent the half elven nature with the free elven common trait of First Born.
As page 160 indicates that such a character follows the human life paths, and the First Born trait indicates that it is the reason that elves can weave their songs (as well as raising their Perception cap and their stride) should such a mage be able to learn Skill Songs and/or Spell Songs?
I thought it was against the rules, but I haven’t been able to find where.
I imagine that character coud learn them, but since they don’t get any Elf lifepaths, or have access to skills marked for Elves only, they’d have to find an Elf willing to teach them. And since they don’t have Grief, they’d be limited in what they could actually learn.
I think he is planing on an affiliation, relationship, and reputation with both sides of his characters family for just that reason (plus gangs and crews).
Affiliations don’t grant additional Circles, they just narrow the ones you have. So, you’ve got a weird situation where there are Affiliation dice, but no LPs that would actually grant access to the Circles that the Affiliation covers, right? Taking a custom Die Trait could grant you access to Circles outside your LPs, but a beginning character might not have enough points to swing that.
Not to totally skew the thread from your original point, though. It’s one of those weird areas in the RAW where things start getting complicated.
a) Character is half-elven with absolutely no real contact with elves. Okay, then, Circles doesn’t cover elves, finding them might be major story points.
or
b) Character had plenty of contact with elves. Just make a custom lifepath that reflects this, maybe “Born Noble But Also Half-Elven So I Totally Visited The Citadel A Lot”, identical to one of the current lifepaths but also giving access to one of the Elven settings for circles.
I missed the Relationship. Which is totally okay, IMO. Maybe that Relationship would teach some songs! Of course, if it were me, I’d probably not have the rest of the Elves be super happy about that…
There are times when you exceed the ambit of explicit rules, and sometimes that’s when you go into territory where the rules have an explicit general case that probably wasn’t intended to cover your situation. Like here, I think.
So what do you think is more interesting? A half Elf with Sorcery and songs? Or a case where all that First Born magicalness either manifests as Sorcery or is subsumed into Sorcery. There are reasons to prefer it either way, and it depends in part on the rest of the group and characters, the big picture, and so on.