@TheMushroomLord I was more going for that they are known, but I just didn't list them. It's a bit more like.... well, real life, where you start learning 'science' with like Chemistry and Physics but later on you've got a ton of other fields like geology, psychology, climate science, and that sort of thing. Only I guess it'd be a much broader field than science is.

I guess Literature and some of the humanities is a more fitting comparison. You can have general english and general literature and you'd consider that like your intro, or the general kind of knowledge you'd need at a certain level in the Akasha Agency. At the same time there's a lot of random fields like Egyptology, Ancient Literature which is different, world history, political history, specializations in specific literature movements (like the enlightenment and whatnot), etc.

So the idea is that there's a general knowledge of the 'basic' arts (which I'm loathe to really define, since it's not something I feel needs to be defined if it's assumed that anyone can know it, and characters' expertise with it is going to vary anyway.), and then there's a bunch of specific Arts schools you may or may not have heard of.

Maybe actually I'll define an extra layer for Arts. So you have your broader 'Schools', you would consider them schools of thought, so all Arts under that School have a sort of basic premise that applies to all of them under that school. But a person will have a specific 'Style' of Arts which is the way those Arts are specifically cast which differentiates one group from another under the same school.

For example, under the Sonshō(損傷) school, you may have learnt spells under the Hibari style, which emphasizes large area of effect spells, or something along those lines? Kinda spitballing here but that would give it a more specific structure which you and others may be looking for?

I am Dog. I shall read what you have, soon.

@RoflsMazoy That makes sense. I was more thinking along the lines of human knowledge of arts, or at least the basics that are taught to everyone, practitioners or otherwise, being more likely to be derived from a scientific breakdown of arts and whatever got officially recognised by humans during the war and thereafter, rather than whatever methods the Yokai used to cultivate their knowledge and from that perspective 50 years being a relatively short period of time for those more niche specialised fields to develop. Especially considering that without a decent understanding of how arts work it makes little sense to group them into fields that may not actually be correlated.

On the other hand, this way makes more sense if human knowledge of arts has since its discovery been more been derived from being taught by or directly copied from Yokai, which looking back now seems to be how it's done. So ignore me I'm an idiot.

Just to throw an idea out there, I still think it makes more sense for members of the agency and probably to a lesser degree the general public to have been taught a little about arts and yokai from the perspective of human scientific breakdown as well as some specific examples of arts. Simplified stuff in similar to the sort of things one might learn in basic highschool science. Hence one of the first things new recruits into the Agency or practitioners of any form of art would need to learn would be to abandon their oversimplified preconseptions.

@TheMushroomLord Oh yeah, so like, there's a little bit of that, but it's more like Arts is currently, say, an elective in school rather than something like a core unit. Consider it a bit like the early days of computers, possibly equivalent to the 1980s or 1990s. Not everybody knows how to program, and learning how to do computers isn't for everyone.

But if you know how to start you can start really early, and do pretty well. Realistically Arts' timeframe and circumstances are quite similar to computers, so they should realistically be about as advanced and as part of human society as computers is today, but Arts hasn't reached that level of development yet (mostly because it's just easier to not have to think about it that way...), so Arts users are relatively in the "minority" still, but they're increasing in number thanks to the adoption of more early learning programs (perhaps, kinda depends on how much need for it there really is). It's something that's likely to be advancing rapidly in the background already, but such changes would take a while to translate into full societal shifts for a while.

I imagine a lot of information about Yokai is public already considering most people living right now will have interacted face-to-face with at least one at some point in their lives. The kind of scientific studies that are publicly available now on similar stuff in the real world is probably equivalent in that aspect as well.

The Akasha Agency and Arts teachers probably also have a vested interest to keep students from forming misconceptions in the first place about Arts, because it's quite a task to teach anything in the first place. If it's at all like learning science, you shouldn't be learning anything in an overly simplified manner because it's a type of continual education which'll continue right back up at the place where you left off if you decide to pursue it further.

There may be such preconceptions if going from something that is completely removed from, or has no traces of Arts. Because in such a situation you'd only know what you've heard through word of mouth or far off exposure.

Or actually, if it were more akin to IT then it probably would like that now that I think about it. Maybe that was just my IT teacher though but IT was pretty over simplified for me before getting into it in university.

Question, can fighters use guns?

@Dog Yeah, it is kind of harder to get guns in Japan though (going by real world rules for this one)

Yeah, it is kind of harder to get guns in Japan though (going by real-world rules for this one)

Can't the agency just go buy some firearms for some agents?

<Snipped quote by RoflsMazoy>
Can't the agency just go buy some firearms for some agents?

I just read up on it a little bit, and it looks like it's currently only law enforcement and military are allowed to carry guns. I think for something like the Akasha Agency it's certainly possible but they're in essence giving guns to civilians. It'd be a big problem if they gave them to the wrong people who were there just for the guns. It's also sort of implied in the history that they didn't need to use the guns as the iniative was successful enough even in it's early forms. That said, there's still a couple of avenues for a guns character?

I might make it so that they allowed civillians to get gun licenses for self protection, especially in rural areas who likely won't have had as much protection in the early days.

The other is perhaps a policeman character who transfers to the Akasha Agency as part of a new program to begin to integrate the police into the Agency. Perhaps they take like team leader and help mentor the younger agents.

What kind of character are you thinking of making?

@RoflsMazoy I'm pretty sure most largely knowledge-based fields end up being like that to a certain extent. Highschool tends to teach things that are for the most part correct but it definitely tends to simplify concepts and it can take a bit to adjust to proper methodologies and all the rules that you weren't told about or else the exceptions to the ones you were taught about. Using a similar analogy to yours, there is a very similar complexity jump between highschool biology and university biology.

I'm not actually sure if one could expect the same degree in development as seen in computer. Time frame wise yes they're only 20 years apart but you'd also need to take in complexity and how well they build off existing fields. Computer hardware for example while substantially different from physics still builds off of physics in terms of its basic function. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure each of the example schools violates a modern understanding of physics in some way. Then again, that's ignoring the yokai which already had arts to study so maybe that equalises things.

I've also been assuming here that the Yokai didn't really have knowledge of the scientific method and arts were developed through trial, error and extrapolation from observations kind of like how alchemists are thought to have made most of their discoveries or how I assume martial artists developed and refined their skills.

One last question for the time being. Too what extent is culture and society in this setting different from real modern world culture?

[Insert Long Wall of Text Involving Guns]

A former U.S soldier coming to join the agency.

For my own comments on structure and the like, I think it's more Arts compared to Fighters. Fighters have a fairly limited framework of so many talents and well-defined techniques, related to their rank. Arts characters have general schools and as many spells as they can get away with. It's sort of strange to me that we have a comparison of one class/path that's very rigidly defined in what you can have and all based on rank, and a second that doesn't do that.

I suppose it makes me wonder just how much rank and the like will matter to things, and how/if there's an expectation of character progression and levels like a tabletop RPG.

As for ranged combat fighters, if guns are out, just go traditional and use a bow. There's as much room for weird archery tricks as there is gun kata, anyway.

@Vega7285 that's a fair criticism of things. Higher ranks in Arts is supposed to translate to more complex and more powerful spells rather than restricting the amount of spells. It probably feels strange because both class systems were kind of off the cuff... But you're right in that fighter feels a bit restrictive and Arts feels a little too free by comparison.

Would it be better for fighters to have more freedom or arts more restrictions? I'm not the one that's affected by the decision so I need to put it to you all.

@TheMushroomLord I wanted the culture for Japan in general to be like it bounced back after the initial period of chaos, to be close to what it is now in real life. There's some clear differences with the presence of Yokai and stuff like Arts being an everyday thing. And that people are probably more physically capable compares to the real world. There's possibly a couple more things that'll come up with the mutations breakdown, but that's about it for Japan.

For the world as a whole though, I wanted to leave it undefined for the most part, because I haven't exactly decided what to do with it yet. There could be all kinds of things happening out there, or there could be nothing. I honestly just haven't thought about it.

@Dog I suppose there could be a kind of exchange program between the US and Japan. They send a few US soldiers to sign on with the Akasha Agency in various regions to introduce them to the program, and they may be testing how allowing small amounts of military personnel affects operations.

[Insert Another Piece of Text]

Sounds good! Time to shoot monsters with bullets.

Honestly, if there's nothing deeper to read into it and it's just off the cuff stuff, it's probably fine.

I do like some of the ideas for Fighters, by the way. Like describing their techniques in detail so they can be a kind of keyword or shorthand and people don't need to describe in detail every strike they make in every post. I like that.

Actually, speaking of, how mystical or supernatural can one get with fighter-style things? I'm guessing, because this is already very modern fantasy anime flavor, the answer is "yes", but still, can't hurt to ask. I assume fighters can do things like move inhumanly fast, leap great distances, launch blade waves or maybe summon elements to enhance their strike,s that sort of thing.

@Vega7285 The setting's super grounded as far as how things actually occur, but I was gonna leave it up to you all on why your character can do some of the things they can do. On relfection though, it does feel like at some point a person just becomes an Arts/Fighter mixed class. Since elemental magic is mostly Arts in this setting... Maybe I'll add a little extra section on Fighters who mix Arts into their technique? Since to become a proper Arts operative takes more knowledge than in just one school of Arts. It takes a lot to be both fully a Fighter and Arts operative, after all, so it's not a complete cross class without a lot more training.

Q u e s t i o n, are any of the agents vtubers?

@RoflsMazoy
do Half-Yokai people get discriminated by humans?

@Dog Uhhhh... there could be? I don't personally have any plans for it

@sassy1085 I want to say not definitely not in the modern era. I would say if it existed back then (which it probably would have) it would have fallen off quickly over the years. I wanna say partly due to the Gods coming down and telling them to get along, but mostly because at least a decent amount of movement was trending towards reconciliation in the first place. Places like Sentouji already had good relations with the Yokai beforehand due to their shared history together, so there would've been less before such movements existed.

what kind of gods are there? Are there gods with evil motives, or are they all good. Are there gods tied to dark arts?

@Hyyde322 The gods are the literal gods of Japan, so Izanagi, Izanami, Amaterasu, Susano-o, and all that sort of stuff. They don't worship them and stuff nowadays though. IRL and in universe the Kami haven't touched the Human World in a very long time, not until the Scourge happened. If you do want to know though there are very few evil gods, although there are some deities where it's up for debate. I'm probably sticking pretty close to IRL for this one but still, don't expect it to come up much if at all, and the Kami themselves aren't teaching Arts directly to humans.