So... when are these breeding programs going to take place? You're apprenticed from 10-25 and are sterile at 35.
Mundane women breed from 12 to when the die, very few make it to old age. Have to check when the age for marriage was increased by cannon law to 12.
While magi have magic to mitigate the dangers... it's only slight mitigation.
Just because someone's daughter isn't gifted doesn't mean they're going to be sold as a birthing cow in a laboratory.
When are you going to raise the kid... there goes a lot of lab work, cant adventure for a few years. Going to give your newborn to a mundane? yah sure, not with the death rates of children. Not with Faeries that want the kid, demons/infernalists that want the kid, other magi that want to kid... Better avoid Bonisagi, guess what... Your kid is someone else's lab rat, thanks for the apprentice.
It's something interesting to play out, maybe too much inter breeding between magi families leads to bad side effects, like most of the european families.
a) I usually start out at age 30, and put off longevity until 40. Still, it is only a 10 year window. You have a point.
b) Mundane women did not start breeding at 12. That is a common misperception. On occasion, girls as young as 13 would get married, sometimes to much older men. But this was usually political, and sex was put on hold for the first five years. Women of the middle ages, like modern women, started reproducing in their mid to late teens. Usually not until age 18.
I like having the Gift breed relatively true: Your children are more likely to have the Gift if you do than if you do not. This is similar to the way the children of blacksmiths tend to make good blacksmiths, to the way that the son of the king ought to be king because it's in his blood, and so on.
But....
I also like Gifted people to have a hard time having any children at all, even without a LP.
In the game I don't run, I think that a magus who creates a breeding program for the Gift should succeed! And reap an appropriate harvest of regret should he survive what he has sown.
Avoiding eugenics is the reason for my preferences as well. So for 'magic in the bloodlines', I hold the stance that 'there-may-be-something-to-it' camp to justify stories we may want to tell, while simultaneously asserting that the current ability to exploit it is firmly in the 'damned-if-we-can-figure-it-out' camp,... to make an actual eugenics mostly a waste of time.
If without EXTREME measures taken, you get chances around 5-10% how the heck are you expecting to use that for "breeding programs"?
You need a mage and a maga without LRs and a decent magic aura just to get that high.
Gonna try persuading every single maga around you to have 20+ children?
Or are you going to force someone to get a warping point per month or season for the better chance(if you can even find a place with 9 or 10 strong auras)?
Oh some are certainly going to TRY! And very likely cause havoc in the process.
In an old post i wrote the idea for a Magic or arcane marriage, a variation of familiar binding between Magical Humans and Magi.
The thing is that the Code don't forbid the marraige, but yes the oath.
