Hogwarts School: A Harry Potter RPG

No doubt you've heard tales of the Ellwood-Luxes, being amongst the oldest wizarding families in Great Britain still active today. The line has a clear beginning, with the birth of Lucan Ellwood-Luxe I in 1260 to Delphinus Ellwood and Cristiana Luxe, who decided to combine their names in order to celebrate their newfound prosperity (Delphinus had risen from poverty and into great fortune, due to his discovery of the now-common Draught of Living Death) and to create a dynasty in memory of it.

Though their beginnings were full of optimism and shining hope, the family have developed a reputation as willful, egotistical, and somewhat brash, characteristics which are supported by a vast variety of historical events that, while damning of the moral virtue of the family as a whole, only serve to reinforce the raw power that the family have come to possess in the seven hundred years of their existence.

They are a family steeped in deep-seeded tradition, with rites for nearly every occasion; it will come as no surprise that up until fifty or so years before the contemporary era, marriage to one's cousins was a common practice in order to keep the lines as pure as possible.

The family's main estate is their seat at Disgleirio, located outside of Porthcawl in southern Wales, on the shores of Sker Beach. It was built originally by Delphinus in 1260, but updated in 1500, and again in the 1850s to reflect the styles of the time and the needs of the family. It is a large manor house on a much larger plot of land, mostly heath and lavender fields, that extend down to a rocky outcropping and eventually down to the sea. It is an unplottable property, and has been treated with various anti-Muggle charms over the years.

The most recent events within the family have been harrowing and more than occasionally deadly. In 1937, then-patriarch Marcellus Ellwood-Luxe disowned his only son Cassius on the grounds that they were not related by blood, choosing instead to name his nephew Lysander as heir to the name, a first in the centuries of the line of inheritance, and even more unusual considering that Lysander's elder brother Perseus had drowned in an accident off the estate only months before. Cassius was cast out, and Lysander assumed his station; Marcellus died under mysterious circumstances less than a year later, in January of 1938, which expedited Lysander's ascension to the title of head of family. Lysander married, had a child, securing further his line's future; however, only a year later, in January of 1939, Lysander was shot alongside the Minister's daughter, Ellerie Saint Auxpris, in an apparent assassination-- an event which sped along the arrival of the War.

With Lysander's death, the family was left in a turbulent power vacuum: he had an heir, yes, but that heir was an infant, and Lysander's wife was an outsider. Dissent stirred within the branch families as some called back to the reinstatement of Cassius, while others moved to shift power completely. The war put a considerable wrench in all plans, as members were alternately called to serve or made to evacuate areas; all focus was put on simple survival, and not the politics of who would lead their ancient family.

After years of warfare and directionless sinking, after the war, Cassius was in 1947 finally able to prove his bloodline and reinstate himself to his birthright. He has proven himself to be the controversial head of family outsiders suspected he would be, having married his longtime sweetheart, a Halfblood named Eve Hallows, and enacted several rulings legitimizing or re-legitimizing those in the family who had been either disowned or born illegitimate-- most namely, Nehemius Ellwood-Luxe and his son Dacian.

Peace looks good on the Ellwood-Luxes, and once again the family is prospering despite Cassius' insistence that it take a departure from its rigid traditional values. But there are murmurings in the far reaches of the branch families-- could something be on the horizon?