so....how bad is it to marry your cousin

[FailedNormiee]

so yea i accidently married my heir(son) to my half-brothers daughter(half neice?). What am I gonna see eventually? I guess I was more consumed with her high steward stats rather than anything else.

[tHeCeLt21]

if its your half brothers it shouldnt be as big of a deal because its half a brother then another dna grouping so basically only 1/4 your families blood theirfore your chances of seeing imbecile traits or slow traits in children will be low

[Wraith_Magus]

Inbreeding is something that tends to compound over time. If you have one set of cousins marrying, it's not all that bad, so long as it doesn't repeat. I've had several cases of my vassals of my dynasty going out to marry their aunts or cousins (who are also both dukes, so they're doing it to consolidate power to undermine me while undermining the bloodline... urge to kin-slay... RISING!) without there being too much bad news.

You're more likely to see something like "weak" or "slow" than "inbred".

Still, there's a tiny possibility of inbreeding. I've actually had an inbred character result from a marriage where they were only related by their matrilineal grandmother, who wasn't of the same dynasty of either of them, which I had never even thought to check before marrying those two before. (Fortunately, they were branch dynasty, so I could just scrub them from the bloodline.)

[Lightsong]

I try to shy away from doing so unless there are some incredible stats/traits/inheritances to come from it. Like when I forgot that I had married one of my brothers off to a Bulgarian princess as the King of Wales. Without looking for quite awhile I was marrying my daughter (only child to be genius so I selected her as my heir) off when I found my nephew was heir to the kingdom of Bulgaria...plus he was a genius! This is a textbook case as to why cousins marrying cousins was perfectly acceptable during this time period.

[Dr. Cessa]

After playing zoroastrians, I can tell you is really good. And take your daughters as concubines. And...
In the rest of non-zoroastrian world, cousins are not really a problem. Maybe if it were aunt and nephew could be worse (I did it once (or maybe they did it by their own choice?). Their children were all inbred.). But cousins are more apart, so it shouldn't be a problem if you don't repeat it all generations.

[Evil Crusader]

If they are closely related enough (the bright red drop icon), then you should have severely reduced fertility.
Aside from that, the Inbred trait isn't THAT easy to get: you have to try pretty hard to achieve it, much like the noble families of Europe did for the better part of a millennium.

[Dr. Cessa]

Originally posted by Evil Crusader:

Aside from that, the Inbred trait isn't THAT easy to get: you have to try pretty hard to achieve it

And when you finally get it, is not inheritable! What a thing!

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by lordcessa:

Originally posted by Evil Crusader:

Aside from that, the Inbred trait isn't THAT easy to get: you have to try pretty hard to achieve it

And when you finally get it, is not inheritable! What a thing!

Actually, like I said before, you CAN get the "inbred" trait if you're EXTREMELY unlucky with an accidental second-cousin marriage because you didn't thoroughly look at every single relative they shared. In fact, it's hypothetically possible even with total strangers. It's just super-rare without marrying aunts several generations in a row.

The game has a DNA string for each character with 11 characters. 5 are from the mother, 5 are from the father, and 1 is randomized. If you just so happen to match up two people who have similar game DNA (which is much more common than real-life because there are so much relatively fewer permutations of the "genes" in the DNA) you can wind up with DNA close enough for an inbred trait to be produced.

Also, the game doesn't always give you the inbred trait when you inbreed. You can get something like slow, dwarf, or weak, instead.

Oh, and finally, the inbred trait can be inherited, but it just has a low chance, like the genius trait does. If your family continues inbreeding, of course, the chance goes up further.