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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 1069126" data-attributes="member: 4720">Where in the stat block does it say that, for example, the Sebbecai must have been created by giants?  There is nothing in the mechanics which seems blatantly incompatible with D&D.  This is entirely a flavor issue.  You could just as easily use the exact same mechanics and say they were developed by natural selection, or are the descendents of Anubis' personal guard, who liked to sneak down to Earth for a quickie with mortal women.  Why is this different than, for example, making gnomes in your world the result of an ancient dalliance between dwarves and fairies?  Or making halflings into crazed, desert-dwelling barbarians?Why is changing the underlying flavor assumptions of the WotC PHB somehow easier than changing the underlying flavor assumptions of AU?It's not.  It's a matter of personal preference.  If you don't find the Sebbecai, for example, interesting enough to alter their backstory in order to fit your world (in the same way you might have done for gnomes, dwarves, or halflings), then that is the result of your personal preference and not necessarily a reflection of a lack of quality in the book.Same thing with the classes.  A number of reasonable suggestions have been put forward for the Akashic mechanics to fit into a world without breaking the existing cosmology.  At worst, it would be a minor "behind the scenes" (or maybe "behind the screen") change which would be completely invisible to players unless they really chose to look into it.  And in a world where a geas can be forced upon someone, who's to say that some diety or power wouldn't be impressed enough with someone who voluntarily took on a oath to give them the powers of an Oathsworn?  It's never happened before?  OK.  Simple answer: someone just figured out how to draw sufficient power and attention to himself to pull it off.  Evil necromancers are always figuring out new ways to empower themselves or bring about the apocalypse.  Why can't someone else figure out a way to harness a previously untapped power to some other end?  And maybe a diety of death got sick and tired of LG dieties having the lock on champions of faith in the form of paladins and decided to empower a few Champions of Death.  That's a campaign right there, actually.  Heck, all of the classes seem a LOT easier to fit into vanilla D&D than psionics, IMO.</blockquote>

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