Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="drnuncheon" data-source="post: 1068916" data-attributes="member: 96">I don't see how any of that can't be pulled out, though, just like you could easily remove, say, the dwarf/elf antagonism.  Especially if you're not using the default setting, you're going to have to rethink the racial relations anyway.Sort of like the D&D Vancian magic system, eh? Another system with presumptions about magic that clash with just about any existing fantasy setting.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> The only reason the akashic record doesn't seem to fit is because it wasn't a default assumption at the beginning of the game.  Maybe you're lucky like Piratecat and going to play the same campaign for 10 years, but most people restart with new games after a while...But anyway, I don't see how the akashic record concept would clash with most settings - not when you've got spells like tongues, find the path and legend lore.  Spells like that could have been developed (perhaps unknowingly) to tap into the record.  You could even make Tenser's transformation such a spell, calling on the memories of great warriors of the past.The Akashics themselves could be an isolated sect/temple/monastery somewhere in the Flanaess or Faerun - living in the archetypical secluded mountain valley, keeping apart from the world.  Maybe they even use some kind of akashic effect to keep the memory of their existence out of the record so that they are not easily found.So, now we've got a deeper explanation for some spells (better than "uh, it's magic"), we've got a new location to explain our character class, and we've got some plot hooks - why did this monastery choose now to send people out into the world?  Or do they know about this akashic-trained person who has left?  Has he been sent out to learn? Did he escape?  And I can't believe that such a scenario wouldn't fit into most "standard" D&D worlds.Actually, I said that it could replace or it could exist side by side.  I wasn't "mandating" anything.The magic system was designed to be an alternate system.  There's no way to do an 'alternate system' yet have it be the same as the existing system (or if you did, it would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?).Other books have done this - Sovereign Stone and Midnight come to mind, as does Elements of Magic and almost the entirely of the Mongoose Encyclopedia Arcane series.  Are they not "compatible" with D&D because they have a different magic system? I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that.  They might not be compatible with a specific campaign - but 100% compatability with your specific campaign is not what was promised (and even the core rules don't deliver that.)What would a variant magic system have to do to be "compatible" in your view?  Or is that just an impossibility?Oh, come now - I can't think of a single product from any publisher that didn't have some "debatable balance points".  By that line of thinking we should be debating the "total compatability" of Savage Species, the ELH, and half the stuff in the splatbooks.J</blockquote>

Verification