Past lives for Ar-Kaïms revisited

In an older post I gave some thoughts on past lives for Ar-Kaïms. I wrote that before I started reading Codex des Ar-Kaïm, which provided some rules in this regard already!

The third edition rules suffered from space constraints, so some key parts of character creation had to be placed in the Codex for each magical race. This includes "Past Points", which players used to purchase magic items and spells for their PCs that were acquired over the course of their past and retained into the present era. Ar-Kaïms gained a Lineage parameter that determined how many times they'd previously reincarnated, with each level representing one generation or ~3 decades. This only went back to 1900, the start of the Great Awakening. So they didn't have the ancient past lives like Nephilim and Ex-Nephilim Selenim had.

However, the fifth edition rulebook briefly recaps their fluff in one chapter and specifies that they've existed for centuries at least but were concealed by the Romani (Bohemiens in French).

How exactly would you represent an Ar-Kaïm that old? Unlike the Nephilim, they serially reincarnate across the generations of their occult dynasty without spending any intervening time in stasis. Stasis items work fine for Ar-Kaïm but were only invented sometime during WWII according to the Codex, so that's not an option. Even with house rules to allow pre-20th century past lives, you'd have to posit that the Ar-Kaïm forgot vast swathes of their incarnations... although this is assumed the case for Nephilim anyway, so it's not that much of a stretch.

One idea I've been playing with for my campaigns, using the US version but adapting Selenim and Ar-Kaïm (and thus not burdened by the French's metaplot), is that there are stasis items for Ar-Kaïm in circulation for centuries. For example, the Holy Grail is rumored to be Jesus' stasis item (if not an Elixir made from His blood). Jesus is speculated to be Ar-Kaïm in the French, though never definitively confirmed. As Ar-Kaïm can only reincarnate in their descendants, His survival into the present (if any) would be contingent on a "Jesus bloodline." Nephilim already made mention of the Priory of Sion and Merovingians in all editions, so it's easy enough to go full Da Vinci Code and say the Merovingians are the Jesus bloodline. I'd go even further and say that this bloodline is prone to its members spontaneously awakening as new Ar-Kaïm (or other Immortals), a parting gift to the Immortals from Jesus.

I'll need to work on it after I finish translating the codices... Hope you enjoyed!

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