Thanks for your review!! I always appreciate your thoughtfulness!
About Broken and Tainted, that's an interesting and compelling point, and something I'd want to playtest about to see how it goes over. Making recovering from either of those statuses more beneficial I think would encourage players to engage with it more, but I want to balance that with not punishing players from leaning into never wanting to become Broken or Tainted. Yeah, I'm of multiple minds here, lots to tinker with!
You're spot on about the Alchemist max limits, that'll def be going into v2.
Bastard and Foreigner are in the same design space as Orphan and Scion - more about parentage than about the where. I agree though that in this group of 4, Foreigner is the odd man out.
With Patron, I wanted to capture the idea of a noble being the kind of person that likes (or likes to be seen in public liking) art, but also being very terrible at making it themselves, like the Medicis and Da Vinci or the popes and Michaelangelo. The tradeoff is that Patrons gain the Commission action, which could be quite the game-changer.