Advisory: Midge the Tree's "Hereditary Supernaturalism"

Well, it seems that y'all don't want to talk to me right now. But because I'm not good at taking hints, I'm going to post anyway.

So I tried Midge the Tree's "Hereditary Supernaturalism" (found here) because as you probably know by now, I just love having supernaturals in TS2. And on paper, this mod sounds good. Children have a chance of inheriting Mom's and/or Dad's supernatural state? Cool! We've all seen Teen Wolf, right? Who wouldn't want that, if only to spare themselves the extra hassle of going out of their way to befriend a Pack Leader, ask Dad to bite their necks or get Mom to cast Magus Mutatio on them every generation?

Well, problems started rearing their ugly heads as soon as Carmilla von Carstein ate some cheesecake and gave birth to twins.



Those of you who keep track of me and my fifty-billion Simmy screenshots may know that Carmilla is one of my oldest Sims of this Simmy installation. She's a Vampire/Witch and a Romance Sim, and she periodically WooHoos someone from her rather large stable of lovers, both men and women alike. This time, it was her non-supernatural manservant Clarence. And since he lives in her household, that random chance of WooHoo resulting in pregnancy is fully enforced. Enter, their two new sons, Sigfried and Vladislaus von Carstein.

Childbirth went well, and so did the infancy stage. Then the twins hit toddlerhood, and right away, oopsies started popping up: the boys started doing weird and broken-looking animations, like levitating themselves up in the air and drawing one arm across their faces. "Oh, wait," thought I, "that almost looks like that one idle animation that vampires do! But toddlers can't normally become vampires, right? Maybe Maxis didn't think to give us vampire animations for toddlers...." Oops. And their portraits were them doing weird-looking "T poses," which I now suspect was the result of the game looking for "vampire toddler" portrait poses and finding none, so it just threw up a generic T pose.

But as if the broken animations weren't damning enough, by the time the twins went two seasons without filling a single blip in their age progression bars, I remembered that vampires don't age. And who wants to be stuck as a frackin' toddler forever? Toddlers can't use the Creature Shack, so I couldn't check the boys' supernatural statuses that way. It was time to break out SimPE again.



Sigfried had only inherited his Mama's vampirism, but Vladislaus had inherited both her vampirism and her witchiness; he even had a spellbook and a cauldron in his little toddler inventory! But, try though I might, unchecking those lifestates availed naught; their weirdness remained.



(I also noticed that an inordinate number of my Sims also had Lycanthropy checked, even though they weren't werewolves themselves and never were. That would explain all the weird "Turn [Sim] into a Werewolf" Wants! I wonder what's clicking those Lycanthropy boxes.)

But, nil desperandum; I had other resources to call upon. The Sim Blender works regardless of a Sim's age, so I aged Vladislaus and Sigfried up to the Teen stage, the stage at which they normally could become vampires and witches. Then, having done that, I could send them to use the Creature Shack.



(Honest to SimGod, I never used a mirror or a vanity on Sigfried even once! He just has a wholly natural "Christopher Lee playing Count Dracula" look!)

(And come to think of it, why did Dracula settle for being a count, and apparently a count who answered to a Hungarian king at some point? You're a friggin' super-powerful arch-elder-vampire, Dracula! Counts are small potatoes compared to dukes, archdukes and kings, and you killed a bazillion Turkish foot soldiers with your mighty moustache and a few pointy sticks, so you deserve better! So be a king! How is the King of Hungary going to stop you when you can just turn into mist, waft into his bedchamber and turn him into a Capri Sun pack? Sure, the rules for 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons prescribe a 30% chance of a King declaring war on a neighboring and/or subordinate Count who promotes himself to King, but King Hungary there had better bring some high-level Clerics to that rumble because you're Count Frackin' Dracula and the Lord of All Vampires,* dude!)

(* ...unless we're playing Vampire: The Masquerade, in which Dracula isn't even a third-stringer to Cain, who murdered his brother Abel, got cursed by God to become the very first vampire and walk the earth till the end of time, and started spelling his own name with an E on the end to...I dunno, dodge Biblical copyright issues or whatever. Besides, we've already established that we're playing D&D — not V:TM — so shut up and get with the program! )



So then, having stripped them of their troublesome vampirism and witchiness, I de-aged Sigfried and Vladislaus to Children, but not to Toddlers because they had already been Toddlers for far too friggin' long. And then Midge's Hereditary Supernaturalism mod mysteriously ended up in my computer's Recycle Bin, and it was consigned to the mists of Oblivion from there. Sorry, Sigfried and Vladislaus, but you boys are just going to have to wait for your Teen days before you ask Mom about the cats and the bats while she's talking to you about the birds and the bees, just like Simmy Teens normally do.

So there's that. Use Hereditary Supernaturalism if you want, but let the Simmer beware.