Benedict Jacka

An overview of some of the more notable Lesser Houses of the UK.  Due to how many Lesser Houses there are in the UK (they currently number over thirty) this list is deliberately incomplete.

Ashford

A relatively new player on the UK drucraft scene, House Ashford was an obscure minor house from Kent before rising to prominence in the aftermath of the Second World War.  The House acquired a small empire of Wells in postwar West Germany, proceeded to build a similar network of Wells across England, and finally became a Lesser House upon taking possession of an A+ Light Well in north London in 1998.  A specialist in Light essentia, they do not sell to the Exchange;  the majority of their wealth comes from supplying the militaries of NATO, and they have been extremely focused on acquiring Light Wells, to the point that their yearly production of Light sigls matches or exceeds the majority of the Great Houses.  Their sudden rise has earned them many enemies, and relationships between them and their House and corporate rivals are tense.

Blackheath

Another new arrival to the ranks of the Lesser Houses, founded by a London-born entrepreneur who started his first company at 16.  Supposedly, the House was born when its founder was was turned away at the door from a drucraft club on grounds that he wasn’t a member of a Drucraft House.  This incensed him so much that he restructured one of his property leasing companies into a Well leasing company, rechristened it ‘House Blackheath’ after his place of birth, and registered it as an official House with the Board.  According to the story, the day that the registration went through, the newly designated Head of House Blackheath marched back to the club in question to demand entry . . . only to discover that the members of the club in question had that very same morning changed the club rules such that only members of Drucraft House of a certain minimum age could enter.  This started a long-running feud that ended with House Blackheath achieving Lesser House status . . . whether the founder ever got to join his club, the story doesn’t say.

Egmont

The most recent Great House to slip down to Lesser status.  From the late 1990s onwards they were one of the leading Houses to financialise, replacing most of their Wells with stock portfolios and only keeping their family Light S Well to maintain the seat on the Board.  Unfortunately for them, they overreached, and their family companies went bankrupt in the 2008 financial crash.  House Egmont lost something in the region of 90% of its holdings and was forced to sell their Light S Well to avoid total liquidation (the Well is now held by the Asmart corporation).

The House continued to decline throughout the 2010s, shedding Wells and properties, and is currently clinging on to Lesser House status by its fingernails.  As of the early 2020s a new, younger Heir has taken over the House.  He seems to have stopped the bleeding for the moment, but the House is still believed to be heavily in debt and it’s anyone’s guess how much longer it’ll last.

Ingham

One of the oldest Lesser Houses, House Ingham has held Lesser House status for over two centuries.  The family has never shown any ambition towards Great House status, being seemingly quite content with their A+ Well in Norfolk and their modest but secure position in the House hierarchy.  The current Head of House Ingham can trace his lineage back through generations of Inghams, all of whom have presided over the same estate, the same holdings, and the same family tradition.

Raval

An Indian House, the Raval (originally Rawal) family operate the Raval Group, a multinational conglomerate active around the world in various sectors.  One of their companies is a drucraft holding and leasing one;  while relatively small compared to their other holdings, it was enough to enable them to reach Lesser House status in the mid-20th century.  The massive wealth of their parent company has effectively shielded House Raval from market fluctuations, making this a very stable House.  In the past they have tended to be relatively passive, content only to make money, but following the death of the family patriarch in the late 2010s and control of the House passing to a new Heir, they’ve started to exercise some influence on the Board.

Volkov

One of the youngest Lesser Houses, founded by a Russian-Ukranian businessman who became enormously wealthy in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Unlike most Great and Lesser Houses, House Volkov owns very few permanent Wells;  the majority of their income comes from the exploitation of temporary Wells in the UK and in Eastern Europe, with their sole A+ Well (acquired in the early 2000s) being more of a figurehead owned solely to give them a Board seat.  They acquired this Well only with difficulty;  by the time they made the bid, various parties had taken action against them, accusing the House of a variety of illegal activities.  The court cases and dispute proceedings dragged on for years until House Volkov finally settled out of court, paying undisclosed (but widely believed to be enormous) sums of money to establish themselves as the UK’s newest Lesser House.  Their dubious reputation hasn’t left them, and they’re still widely distrusted.  The current Head of House, Gregory Volkov, has no clearly established heir, and most believe that the House will pass away when he does.

An overview of the current Great Houses of the UK.

Barrett-Lennard

House Barrett-Lennard is the only House in the UK to own title to an S+ Well, which is located in their family estate in Colchester, Essex.  It is the second-most powerful Light Well in the entire world, and the amount of wealth it represents is so enormous that it’s difficult to measure.

For House Barrett-Lennard, their fantastic wealth has proved more of a curse than a blessing.  Over the course of the 20th century, bitter rivalries sprung up within the family, eventually leading to a massive succession crisis.  The fighting dragged on for decades and could easily be the subject of an entire article in itself, involving as it did everything from financial manoeuvring, marriage alliances, and court cases to kidnapping, blackmail, and assassination attempts.  As of the 2020s the conflict has bogged down into a stalemate, with the two principal heir-claimants of the family both unable to oust the other.  In the meantime the House’s day-to-day affairs are run by a board of trustees, who have so far been able to keep the House just about functional despite the ongoing civil war amongst its owners.  House colours are red, black, and gold.

Cawley

House Cawley is both the newest Great House (they are currently the only Great House to have achieved that status this century) and also the youngest (dating their founding to some time in the 1920s).  Their roots are in Northern Ireland, around Belfast, and the majority of their Wells are still from there.  House Cawley have a somewhat turbulent history, due to having been caught up in the Troubles;  the political violence during this period frequently spilled over into the drucraft sphere, resulting in the House receiving more than their fair share of experience with raids.  House Cawley, however, seemed to thrive in this environment, to the extent that they were able to purchase one of the UK’s four S-class Matter Wells in 2003.

The symbol of House Cawley is a red lion rampant on a background of white, and their House colours are red and white.

Chetwynd

A moderately old House hailing from Shropshire and Wales.  House Chetwynd claims that their family Light S Well is the oldest S-class Well in the UK;  while this is disputed, it is certainly very, very old.  Renowned for their skill with Light essentia and for the beauty of their estates;  Chetwynd sigls are sold only to a very exclusive clientele, and command a premium price.  House colours are blue and gold.

De Haughton

House De Haughton is notable for being the only House in the UK to control not one, but two S-class Wells.  Like House Chetwynd their specialty is Light essentia, but they’re somewhat less exclusive and their sigls are featured prominently in the Exchange.  They sell very well to the tourist market, and the House is, unsurprisingly, enormously wealthy as a result;  they’re commonly believed to be the second- or third-richest House in the UK.  So far they’ve managed to avoid the devastating succession wars that crippled House Barrett-Lennard, though if rumours are to believed their internal politics can be somewhat rough-and-tumble;  one prospective De Haughton heir died under mysterious circumstances and another was ejected from the family with no official explanation.

A very old House, De Haughton’s ancestral holdings are in Lancashire.  Its symbol of a red rose has remained unchanged since the fifteenth century.

Hawker

House Hawker claims to be the oldest of all of the Great Houses, though for most of its history it was an obscure family of little note.  It rose abruptly in power and influence in the 20th century, attaining Great House status with its acquisition of one of the UK’s only two S-class Motion Wells.  For most of its time as a Great House, House Hawker has been primarily a military supplier;  nowadays it continues to do most of its business with the UK armed forces and other NATO militaries.  It does not sell its sigls openly on the Exchange.

Ancestral holdings are in Somerset, though many of the family emigrated to (and subsequently returned from) Australia.  House colours are silver with red trim.

Meath

House Meath takes their name from County Meath in the Republic of Ireland, though the family emigrated and settled in the London area in the early 1800s.  They hold a Light S Well but are more famous for their wealth, which is mostly derived from financial holdings, and they are commonly viewed as an investment banking family that just happens to manage a drucraft business on the side.  Known to lend out money to struggling drucraft families, to the point that some Houses make reference to the ‘Bank of Meath’.  Said loans often seem to be made on very generous terms, leading to various rumours about why the Meaths appear so casual about repayment.  Primary House colour is turquoise.

Reisinger

Full name is Prideaux-Reisinger, though Reisinger is the more commonly used version.  An ancient House originating from Cornwall whose history has been complicated by various marriages to French and German Houses over the centuries;  the full family tree of the House is exceedingly complex and they have relatives all over Europe.  House symbol and colours (black chevron on a white shield) are based on the Cornish location of Prideaux, but members of the House nowadays reside almost entirely around the capital and possess no significant holdings in their county of origin.  They hold a Light S Well in central London.

Winterton

Based in Lincolnshire and holders of a Light S Well.  Notable in the past for a long and bitter rivalry with House De Haughton;  the two Houses raided one another for decades, and at times the fighting escalated enough to require Board intervention.  This is now mostly ancient history, however, and the Houses have been (more or less) at peace for a full generation.  Insofar as the two Houses still compete, it’s on the pages of the Exchange catalogue, where they both try to displace the other as the dominant provider of Light sigls sold to private purchasers.  House De Haughton tends to outsell Winterton due to their larger reserve of Wells, but the market is big enough that both can exist comfortably.

Although their House Well and family estate is in Lincolnshire, Winterton is unusually widely spread for a House, and branches of the family can be found scattered around the UK and the world.  Principal House colour is green, with red, gold, and white trim.

Houses in the United Kingdom are divided into three categories:  Great, Lesser, and minor.  Great Houses are those which possess a Well of class S or S+, Lesser Houses are those which possess a Well of class A+, and all other Houses are classed as minor.

While in the past the Great and Lesser Houses had various special privileges under the law, these were chipped away at over the centuries, and most of the remaining ones were effectively nullified by the Oakenshott ruling of 1927, which set the precedent that House membership did not grant any special status in criminal or civil proceedings.  Great and Lesser House status does still give the House the right to a seat on the Board, but corporations and private individuals with appropriate Well holdings also qualify for Board seats in exactly the same way.  Nowadays the only legal benefits unique to the Houses are extremely minor and antiquated ones, such the right to a certain term of address or being entitled to wear a particular item of clothing to Board meetings.

By the mid 20th century, it was commonly believed that the time of the British Houses was coming to an end, and that they would dwindle into insignificance.  While many Houses did indeed suffer this fate, others proved more adaptable, and successfully made use of their Wells, sigl traditions, and inherited wealth to carve out a niche for themselves in the modern world.  Most of the current Houses of the UK are weaker than they once were, and in absolute terms the fraction of the British economy that they control is small, but they command an amount of influence out of proportion to their size and a House surname still carries a good deal of social weight.

The Great Houses

At the time of writing, the Great Houses of the UK number eight:  Barrett-Lennard, Cawley, Chetwynd, De Haughton, Hawker, Meath, Reisinger, and Winterton.  There are currently nineteen S+ and S-class Wells officially registered in the United Kingdom, and these Great Houses collectively own just under half of them.

These Wells rarely change hands, and as such the number of Great Houses rarely rises or falls.  This is partly due to special UK regulations that restrict the sale and purchase of S+ and S-class Wells, and partly because the Great Houses are all fantastically wealthy – for a new Great House to rise, they’d have to buy an S-class Well from its existing owner, and said owners generally have little motivation to sell.  The last time that the count of Great Houses changed was in 2009, when House Egmont sold its Light S Well to LLV Holdings, relinquishing its Great House status in the process.  The roster has remained steady since then.

A brief overview of the current Great Houses can be found in Chapter #18.

The Lesser Houses

Lesser Houses are those Houses of the UK who own a Well of class A+.

A+ Wells in the UK are highly valued.  The legal restrictions on their sale are much less onerous than those on the sale of S-class ones, and while acquiring an A+ Well is still a difficult and expensive process, it’s a realistic goal for a sufficiently wealthy House, corporation, or individual.  Lesser House status also grants a seat on the Board, automatically making the holder a player in UK politics.  As a result, competition for these Wells is fierce.  A minor House will fight tooth and nail to own one, and a Lesser House won’t sell theirs unless utterly desperate.  It’s almost unheard of for a House to own more than one A+ Well, and very few corporations have succeeded in purchasing one (though not for lack of trying).

Unlike the Great Houses, Lesser Houses see a fair amount of turnover.  While some of the current Lesser Houses have held their place for more than a century, there have been just as many new arrivals who owe their places to a meteoric rise (often followed by an equally meteoric fall).

There are too many Lesser Houses to list in detail, but a few of the more notable ones are described in Chapter #19.

The Minor Houses

Any House whose most powerful Well is of A-class or below is considered a minor House.

There is no significant barrier preventing a family from declaring themselves a minor House.  In theory, anyone with a D-class Well in their back garden could draw themselves up a coat of arms and start calling themselves ‘House Something-or-other’ – they’d be laughed at, but they could do it.  In practice, though, most minor Houses are quite old, with family trees and ancestral holdings tracing back hundreds of years.  Often they end up outlasting Great and Lesser Houses vastly more wealthy than they are, simply because they aren’t notable enough to draw unfriendly attention.   

Minor Houses often have a strong connection to their family Wells and lands.  A typical minor House will have held land in a particular county for hundreds of years, and it’s not uncommon for them to have groundskeepers or Well tenders or shapers whose great-grandparents worked for the great-grandparents of the current Head of House.  It’s common for minor Houses who’ve recently made the jump to Lesser House status to place heavy emphasis on this family history, as if to remind everyone that they haven’t forgotten their origins.

But while most Minor Houses are old, many aren’t.  It’s surprisingly common for a new House to be founded by some locator or investment banker or car salesman who by some strange set of circumstances came into possession of a Well and decided to make a go of it.  Most of these new-born Houses disappear within a generation or two, but others take root and grow, and over time come to develop histories and traditions of their own.

A sigl won’t work without a bearer. 

The least-studied of the Five Limits, the Limit of Operation is often treated as more of an afterthought.  For the most part this is a reflection of the attitudes of drucrafters – drucrafters are typically very interested in how they can increase their own power, and as such have tended to focus on those limitations that most restrict that, such as Euler’s Limit and the Blood Limit.  The question of whether a sigl would work without them doesn’t usually strike them as terribly important.

However, the Limit of Operation does have major implications for the use of drucraft in many fields, particularly industry, exploration, and warfare.  The 20th century saw increasing use of automation, with humans being replaced by computers, robotic systems, and drones.  The Limit of Operation meant that such automation could not be replicated in the field of drucraft.  And since many of the things that drucraft could do couldn’t (and still can’t) be done any other way, this meant that in an age of increasing mechanisation, the profession of drucraft remained solidly human.

Reasons for the Limit of Operation

The Limit of Operation is an interesting one in that it reveals an important facet of how drucraft works.  After all, if one thinks about it, there’s no obvious reason why a sigl should require a wielder.  A fire will burn so long as it has fuel, an electric circuit will continue to work as long as it has electricity, and even the most sophisticated of machines can continue to run so long as they don’t break down or run out of power.  They do need oversight and maintenance, but in principle, there’s no reason that it should have to be a human hand shovelling the coal into the furnace, or a human mind troubleshooting the operating system of the computer that runs the factory.  It’s just that it’s usually more practical to do it that way.

So why doesn’t the same apply to drucraft?  Why can’t you put a sigl somewhere, and have it draw essentia on its own?

The short answer is that while it may not seem that way to a novice drucrafter, it turns out that living, conscious creatures are actually quite good at channelling and directing essentia.  Learning to sense and channel is hard, but with enough time and effort, it’s possible.  Getting an inanimate object to do it in your place isn’t.  The exact ways in which essentia interacts with consciousness are complex and still not fully understood but the short version is:  if you want a sigl to work, you need a conscious mind using it.

Implications of the Limit of Operation

The Limit of Operation has far-reaching implications for the drucraft world.  Much of human technological progress over the past two or three centuries has focused on the construction of mechanisms capable of independent action.  Such machines need maintenance and direction, but a good deal of their utility stems from the fact that they can function on their own power.

The Limit of Operation means that this doesn’t work for drucraft.  You can’t have sigl-powered automatons, and you can’t have the sigl equivalents of things like streetlights or cars or washing machines, and you can’t have the drucraft versions of things like ammunition or bombs, where the energy is stored up when the thing is created, ready to be released at the pull of a trigger or touch of a button.  If you want something to be done with drucraft, you need an actual human being there to do it for you.

This effectively puts a minimum floor on the cost of doing anything with drucraft.  Drucrafters are rare, and drucrafters with a specific type of sigl are rarer still, meaning that if you want ready access to a particular drucraft effect, you need to keep a drucrafter with the appropriate sigl on hand.  And if they’re there, they can’t be somewhere else.  This, over time, has caused drucraft presence and expertise to concentrate in small enclaves, while everyone else can easily go their entire lives without seeing drucraft being used, or in fact even knowing it exists at all.

Workarounds

Much like the Primal Limit, there is one area where the Limit of Operation doesn’t fully apply, and it’s pretty much exactly the same one.  You can’t make a torchlight sigl that works without a bearer, and you can’t make a mass-reduction sigl that works without a bearer, but it is possible to make a Primal sigl that works without a bearer . . . with some caveats.

Calling these items “sigls” is somewhat misleading.  They don’t have a kernel, they don’t contain personal essentia, and they can’t generally do the same things.  They’re very bad at direct effects, and if you want to manipulate light, or matter, or anything else in the physical world, they’re pretty much useless.

What these items are good for is redirecting essentia.  They can shape essentia currents over an area, causing it to gather in a certain location, or run along certain channels.  This process is slow, and as such these items are generally incorporated into parts of a building or landscape.  When used in such a way, they are referred to as wards.

The main use for wards is to protect and enhance a Well.  A properly designed warding arrangement can allow a permanent Well to replenish itself slightly faster when depleted, and make it less likely that the Well will be weakened from prolonged or excessive use.  It’s even possible to use this method to strengthen a Well over time, growing it incrementally year by year.  Raising a Well’s class in this manner is a very long-term project, one measured in decades if not generations, but it’s one of the only known ways to actually increase the power of sigls you can produce.

Many Drucraft Houses in Britain have family legends claiming that their family Wells were grown in just such a way, and some have records of Well strength dating back to the Middle Ages.  While such stories are often exaggerated, it does seem likely that many of the most powerful Wells throughout the world owe their existence to exactly this kind of slow, patient work done over hundreds of years.

You can’t change a sigl after it’s made. 

The Limit of Creation states that sigls can not be modified or redesigned.  Once they’re created, that’s it – if you want them to do something different, you have to get a new sigl.

Although this restriction might seem uncontroversial, it has been the focus of quite intensive study.  In fact, the Limit of Creation is probably the second-most-heavily researched of all of the five, outmatched only by the Blood Limit.  This is unsurprising, as the two are closely related.

The Sunk Cost of Sigls

A sigl represents an enormous amount of time and resources.  This is particularly extreme once you go up the ranks;  while D-class sigls are relatively cheap, a single A-rank sigl costs millions.  Of course, for those wealthy enough to afford it, that can actually be quite a good investment – while a high-grade, professionally made solid sigl comes at a fantastic cost, it’s a one-time cost.  Since such a sigl can be expected to last for its wielder’s entire lifetime, in practice the benefits it gives, spread out over thirty or forty years, can easily outweigh its price tag.  But what about afterwards?

Inevitably, sigls outlast their wielders.  Sometimes the wielder dies from old age.  Sometimes they perish unexpectedly, from accident or illness.  And sometimes they’re relieved of their sigl involuntarily.  However it happens, those who inherit the wielder’s property (legally or otherwise) are left with a sigl – potentially a very valuable sigl – that they can’t use.  An incredible amount of value and power, right there in the palm of one’s hand, yet totally inaccessible.  It’s intensely frustrating, and quite naturally, drucrafters have spent enormous amounts of time and effort trying to solve it.

Unfortunately, solving it is easier said than done.

Difficulties in Modification

The first problem with modifying a sigl is that shaping a sigl is less like assembling a machine, and more like sculpting a piece of pottery, where the clay can be easily moulded when wet, but becomes hard and rigid once fired.  In the same way, essentia can be freely sculpted while in its natural state, but becomes hard and unyielding once transformed into aurum.  Modifying a sigl thus requires the targeted section (and only the targeted section) to be first transformed into free essentia, then altered, and then turned back into aurum again.

While doing any of these three things on their own is not particularly difficult, doing them together, in order, and without damaging the rest of the sigl in the process, is very, very hard.  What makes the problem worse is that, as mentioned in the previous chapter, sigls have three layers:  the shell, the outer core, and the kernel . . . and the part of a sigl that drucrafters generally care most about is the kernel.  This means that before you can start on any modifications, you have to get through the sigl’s shell and outer core first, and you have to do so without doing irreparable damage to the sigl along the way.  This is so difficult as to be, in many cases, functionally impossible.

Workarounds

Despite all these problems, the twentieth century saw a vast amount of research poured into circumventing the Limit of Creation.  The prospect of taking the same A-class or S-class sigl and using it over and over again was simply too tempting to resist.  Finding a practical solution to the problem would effectively nullify the Blood Limit and break the drucraft economy wide open.

Although many avenues were explored, the most promising one, and the one upon which research eventually came to focus, was “modular sigls”.  The idea was to design a sigl with a removable kernel, where the kernel could be extracted and replaced.  Thus, by “swapping out” kernels, the same sigl could be used by different people.

Modular sigls worked.  Their development caused great excitement in the drucraft community, and many predicted that they would become the new industry standard.  However, more than fifty years on, this has not happened.  In fact, modular sigls have almost entirely fallen out of production, for several reasons.

First, the modular approach required various compromises in the sigl’s design.  Since the kernel couldn’t be fully integrated with the body, much of the sigl had to be built in a less efficient manner.  Second, despite their best efforts, the researchers into modular sigls were never able to make them as stable as solid ones.  The “sealed sphere” design for sigls is the standard for a reason – it’s exceptionally durable.  Modular sigls thus had a shorter lifespan than traditional ones, negating much of the benefit to building them in the first place.

But the biggest reason for the failure of modular sigls was that they were never a true workaround.  You can’t convert a standard sigl into a modular one – for it to work, the sigl has to be created as a modular sigl in the first place.  This means accepting substandard performance in exchange for the (not at all guaranteed) possibility that someone else will be able to use the sigl in the future.  Unsurprisingly, most drucrafters were unwilling to make this tradeoff.

As such, modular sigls fell out of favour, and are nowadays only used as curiosities or for certain very specific purposes.

Starting Afresh

The final “workaround” to the Limit of Creation is simply to remake the entire sigl from scratch.  You sublimate the sigl into free essentia, then use that essentia to make a new sigl – essentially the same process that shapers use to create a sigl out of pre-existing aurum.  However, this is subject to the same inefficiencies as creating a sigl from aurum, and in any case is basically the equivalent of melting something down for raw materials.  Most people would consider this “destroying”, rather than “changing”.

You can’t use someone else’s sigl. 

More than any of the other four, the Blood Limit shapes the drucraft economy.  It is the primary reason that sigls are so expensive.

Just like the gemstones they resemble, sigls can last a very long time.  They’re short-lived in geological terms – aurum naturally sublimates into free essentia, and if left for long enough, a sigl or a lump of aurum will wisp away into nothingness.  However, ‘long enough’ on a human timescale is a very long time indeed, and a solid sigl can easily last for thousands of years.

This raises an obvious question – why isn’t the world filled with sigls?  Nowadays the vast majority of sigls are threaded rather than solid, with exponentially shorter lifespans, but even if only five percent of the ones made each year were solid ones, that’s still an enormous number that would only continue to accumulate century after century.  So why are they in such short supply?

The simple answer is that a sigl made for one person won’t generally work for another.   There are indeed vast numbers of sigls in the world, sitting in museums and bank vaults and private collections – it’s just that the vast majority of them can’t be used, since they were made for wielders who are now long dead.  Thus, while the absolute lifespan of a sigl can be measured in thousands of years, its practical lifespan is, in generational terms, very short.

Anatomy of a Sigl

Sigls are comprised of three layers.  The outer layer, known as the shell, is an ablative and largely inert coating designed to protect the sigl from erosion and damage.  The middle layer is referred to as the body or outer core, and comprises the majority of the sigl’s mass.  However, it is the inner core, otherwise known as the kernel, that is the reason that the Blood Limit works the way it does, because a small but critical fraction of the kernel is made up of the wielder’s personal essentia.

Shaping a sigl with someone’s personal essentia is something like forging a lock with a human key.  It’s the only reason that sigls work at all.  Making a sigl without any personal essentia just produces an inert lump of aurum, and trying to use a sigl whose personal essentia doesn’t match yours is impossible.

This means that if you want a sigl, you can’t buy one second hand.  You have to either make one yourself, using your own personal essentia to shape the kernel, or have a professional shaper take a sample of your personal essentia to make one for you.  Most people pick the second option.

The result of this is that the drucraft economy doesn’t work like the markets for manufactured goods such as jewellery or furniture, where the products can (in theory) be maintained indefinitely.  Instead, it follows a cycle where new sigls are created, remain in circulation for a finite time, then disappear.

Workarounds

The Blood Limit is probably the most extensively studied of all of the Five Limits, and the workarounds to it are well-understood.

The simplest workaround is to have the shaper, when they create the sigl’s kernel, mix in someone else’s personal essentia with their own.  Creating such ‘mixed sigls’ is inherently more complex than creating a pure one, but the techniques for doing so have been exhaustively practised over the centuries and the procedure is now quite routine.  However, you don’t get something for nothing:  the more of someone else’s personal essentia there is in a kernel, the weaker the sigl will be when you try to use it yourself.  This method is thus less of a true workaround and more of a compromise.

The second (and more famous) method is to use a sigl belonging to someone whose personal essentia is sufficiently similar to yours.  This generally requires the sigl’s creator to be a blood relative, the closer the better.  In this way sigls can be passed down from parent to child, or from sibling to sibling.

This method is not infallible.  The closer a blood relation two people share, the more similar their personal essentia tends to be, but there’s still variation.  Parent to child or brother to sister almost always works, but it’s not a guarantee, and as the relationship becomes more distant, the chance of the sigl working drops like a rock – two ‘steps’ in the family tree is usually the realistic maximum.  And this assumes a pure sigl, rather than a mixed one.  If the sigl was shaped by someone else, the  personal essentia in the sigl is effectively diluted twice over, reducing the viability even further.

Still, even with its drawbacks, the ability to pass sigls down to the next generation is incredibly powerful.  Even if you can’t get more than two generations worth of use out of a sigl before it becomes useless, that still represents an enormous advantage over anyone who uses a sigl for only one.  The concept of inherited wealth takes on a whole new meaning when children can inherit not only a house and money from their parents, but magical powers as well.  This is a major reason for why the equivalents of Drucraft Houses developed independently in so many places around the world . . . and even in countries with no House traditions (or in ones where such practices are specifically banned) family-run corporations and political and financial dynasties fill the same role, passing down their wealth in exactly the same way.