(01-03-2015, 10:17 PM)C Wrote: Keeper males are rare (I can't remember where, but I read something where the ratio was somewhere between 1:5 and 1:20), so a purely monogamous Keeper family would have to have a ton of children to make up for all the females who wouldn't be having kids at all.This is actually kind of how I imagined things to go >_>
The Matriarch is the only one who has children, and she keeps having children until she has at least one son (or at least a son and a daughter, on the chance she has a son first). Having a son is what guarantees the next generation, and she will trade sons with an unrelated/distant Matriarch so she'll have an unrelated male to 'give' to the daughter that succeeds her. Remaining daughters are encouraged to stay around to act as a court to the new Matriarch, but no-one really keeps them from wandering off to possibly find a 'free' male or whatever (less competition/opportunities to backstab). If a Matriarch dies before her mate and before she has a viable successor, one of her sisters can claim the now-free male and become the new Matriarch.
... I guess in a way what I was picturing was a sort of reverse of what the Seekers have when it comes to breeding rights -- a Keeper Matriarch is like a Nuhn, and all her sisters/daughters are like Tias. Since the breeding pool consists of one male, it -is- a monogamous relationship. There's just potential that a male could have multiple partners over the course of his breeding life because he got traded to a family that is prone to drama and backstabbing >_>
