I don''t see the problem really. If two players consent to have their characters have a child (one player must be female, and one must be male), then they can go to a tavern in a town and simply choose a special option when choosing their room: "Mate" which lets them have the afformentioned child (Let''s say gestation takes one night, for continuation of play). The next morning they have a child, gender is randomized, and the child has inherent affinity to both it''s parents skills (or whatever). Then the players decide who gets to keep the child.

Here''s where it gets cool, the female has a +0.5 bonus to deciding where the child goes, then for every child a character has they get a -1 modifier. So if they have the same number or the male has more, the female decides, otherwise the male decides.

The character who gets it can then override the natural decision and give it the other parent.

So once the child has been left to one of the parents, that parent can do one of four things:

1. Retire the old character and use the new one with all the old items
2. Leave the Child in a nursery (special building found in towns) so that if the elder character dies, he/she will be transfered to the child.
3. Leave the Child in a nursery for trade. A document item is given to the parent. Anyone may make a request which must be confirmed by the controlling parent, so the document must be traded, after that the child is transfered to the requesting character (note that this is the same as giving the child to a friend if you trade the document for nothing).
4. Leave the Child in a nursery as an Orphan. So the first person to make a request recieves the child and may do as he/she wishes with it.

There should be child tax as well (which rises exponentially with each added child), so characters are not inclined to keep hundreds of powerful children as trading tools.

you could also have inter-racial breeding to generate more interesting children.

You might even create "digital Genes" for the purpose of determining the outcome of the mating process. Maybe green skin is a dominant gene.

George D. Filiotis