Hidden 3 yrs ago 3 yrs ago Post by RoflsMazoy
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What is Akasha Agency?



Akasha Agency is a modern day supernatural Agency RP which draws on Japanese myths to form a different world, which is halfway between our world and the world of the Yokai, almost exactly in fact. The outbreak of a deadly illness known as the Akasha Scourge weakened the walls between the Spirit World and the human plane, allowing Yokai to walk freely among us. At the same time, the illness continues to elude all attempts to completely eradicate it.

Even after 50 years, it still continues to appear every so often, infecting human and Yokai alike. The infected go berserk, and their physiology is irrevocably changed. Those that survive the infection find themselves unlocking a new psychic potential, but whether or not they can realize, or even control that potential is often not up to them (at least, on the surface). In this world, Operatives are front and center in dealing with the new frontier that the Scourge has made rise to the surface.

Whether it's your skill and physical capabilities as a Fighter, your knowledge and expertise as Arts, or your instincts and self-control as a Specialist, the Akasha Agency has a place for you. You'll find help you with your journey and what lies beyond.

You'll face many challenges along the way, but you can do it Operative. We believe in you.



Current Setting: Sentouji City

Our story opens in Sentouji City, one of the first places in which the Akasha Scourge struck. What had once been nothing more than a rural farming town, is close to being a small city. Students of all ages will walk from their suburban houses, past old farms and traditional shrines, as a backdrop of apartment buildings and high-rises begins to fill the horizon. In the North of the city, you'll find it like the heart of metropolis anywhere else. And though modernization has been slow to reach other parts of the city, it's now considered fully modernized and it can no longer be described as "rural".

But there is still a legacy that the city will never forget.

Sentouji City is split into two districts, for a very obvious reason if you know the history of the town. The north-side is where most of the development of the city ended up being focused on, and many of the traditional places and the remnants of 'old town' reside in the south. This is because the North had once been the quarantine zone for the Akasha Scourge.

The quarantine was placed quickly enough to contain the Scourge to a certain part of the city. The phenomenon which allowed the Yokai to cross over from the Spirit World to the Human World was not localized to the North of the city. The south became one of the first Yokai Villages as Yokai fleeing the exlcusion zone sought refuge, and stranded Yokai also found they had nowhere to turn to.

The inhabitants of Sentouji, after initially being fearful of the Yokai, after a while welcomed them as they proved to be a means to fight the Scourge. A type of technique which would later be known as Arts were taught to any with the aptititude as an early defense against the Akasha Scourge.

After the tide of the Akasha Scourge had been eliminated, residents returning to the North of the city decided it would be easier to rebuild it from the ground up. The rest as we know it, is history. The Akasha Agency have a long past with Sentouji. Though the threat of the Akasha Scourge has greatly, the Akasha Agency has never left their post.

The local training center is still one of the largest the Akasha Agency has to offer. It relocated from the south district, it now occupies a high-rise building in the north side of Sentouji, and features several different Fighter Dojos on each level, as well as some of the best Arts training Japan has to offer.

The local scene is also thriving in the South, with many local certified training dojos which offer more specific training and fighting styles to master, and many Yokai in the temples and hidden places of the South District still ready to teach students the ways of Arts Masters.

The Night Mandate


Sentouji City's population of Yokai isn't as numerous as it used to be. The reason is something known as the Night Mandate. Eventually a method had been found to return the Veil separating the Human World and the Spirit World to a more stable state. This meant no Yokai was ever stranded on the other side any longer.

Still, many didn't want to leave. They had good memories of the Human World, and wished to stay. However, the rules and values of the humans and Yokai were fundamentally incompatible. Not all Yokai are inherently 'good', and in the Spirit World there's hardly such a moral compass amongst the more comomon Yokai. The wrong kind of Yokai allowed to live permanently in the human world could cause untold chaos.

To remedy this, the Yokai treated with the Japanese Government and formed something called the Night Mandate. During the day, no Yokai would be able to cross over into the Human World, but at Night the gates are let open, for whichever areas still have them. Yokai can choose to cross over and stay indefinitely if they like, as long as their application is approved by the Japanese Government. But only at night can they make the crossing, and many mischievous Yokai will choose to come along for the ride.

The Akasha Agency helps with managing this issue on the human side. Mostly it's just to make sure Yokai don't get into too much trouble. The Kami passed a decree saying that Yokai entering the human realm must abide by their rules as part of the Night Mandate, but Yokai being Yokai, who can say how effective such a decree really is? Any Yokai caught breaking the rules is returned to the Spirit World to face punishment there, or at least any the Akasha Agency can get their hands on.

This takes us to the likely scene of where our protagonists will be, the night of May 4th, 2020. The Akasha Agency's local Shokuden職田 for the night, the place where our Operatives will be assigned their very first missions. Shokuden職田 are repurposed civilian facilities which serve as the local hub for missions in a particular area. This particular Shokuden職田 is located in the South side of the city, close to an area which has proven to ne a popular place for Yokai to appear.

It promises to be an eventful night for our Akasha Operatives. If their skills are up to the task, they may make it just as uneventful a night for the townsfolk as any other night for them is.

((Sentouji's Shokuden職田 doubles as the training facility for Specialists. At night Fighters can challenge the local more physically inclined Yokai in Yasugi Park for training. Arts users can come to the local shrine for training in a selection of Arts, including Seihon(製本), Sonshō(損傷), and Uranai(占い).))


Akasha Operatives


Akasha Operatives are the Agency's elite agents, sent directly on the field to combat the Akasha Scourge. Or at least they used to be. Now it's a much more widely reaching field of experience, separated into three distinct classes depending on the field they most excel in. Each class corresponds to a certain type of expertise which each represent one field which the Akasha Agency has jurisdiction over when it comes to its affairs.

Fighters specialize in direct combat and pure fighting skill. They are the frontline in a squad of agents. Assignments that require Fighters are ones that require the quick application of force, which often can't be achieved as easily by other classes.

Arts is an umbrella term used to describe the various techniques and types of Magic the Akasha Agency employs on its missions. It can be anything from exorcism, divination, seals and talismans, to direct elemental manipulation and the like.

Arts practitioners generally take on a more expertise heavy, investigative role compared to Fighers. Bringing their unique knowledge to solve problems which may have more to them than meets the eye.

Specialists are unique, in the sense that this is the class for those who have Mutations. Mutations from the Akasha Scourge can make it difficult to practice Arts, and while it never stops them from being Fighers, their methods for engaging in combat often go against the grain and require a different kind of training.

In the past they were vital to rooting out the Akasha Scourge due to their ability to sense it. However the role hasn't vanished because it was discovered that Mutated humans possess a sort of intuition. If it's something at all remotely to do with the Akasha Scourge, they tend to gravitate towards it. Not to mention that their unique abilities mean, more often than not, they can suit any team composition.

An Operative can train in all three styles if they are so inclined, (Specialist's have an extra condition of if it's possible), but career Operatives can also specialize in a single one.

The purpose of this system is to be able to quickly determine a prospective agent's strengths and weaknesses, streamline the process of assigning Operatives to missions. Each Class has a standardized baseline to compare with other classes, and separates the various levels of strength displayed in each Class via Rankings, starting at Rank 1 and going up to Rank 9.

Breakdowns on each class, including how to write one into a character sheet are listed below.

Fighters



Arts



Specialists


General Class Addendums





General RP expectations

This section will contain some of the early RP structure and some general expectations going into the RP. I'll go through the expectations first, but there might be some stuff that slips through to other sections so it's better if you read all of it. Being 'General' expectations there's always gonna be exceptions to the rules, so don't take them as a too set in stone type of thing. It is mostly an advisement type of thing anyway, though.

1. Be in it for the long haul.
While the RP may move quickly in the beginning, a lot of us can get busy after a while, or maybe something about our mental health might just snap and it gets difficult to continue posting for a while. That's why I advise you set your mentality to be in it for the long haul. Momentum inevitably fizzles out at some point, but as long as enough players remain, the RP doesn't dies. Which is why a good secondary expectation to set is...

2. Communicate.
You perhaps don't need to be talking all the time, but if you never raise concerns then they'll never be heard. Feel free to judge anything and everything about this RP, including maybe the way it's conducted and even any elements about the story you really want to because at the end of the day...

3. Everything about the story is made up.
Anything can be changed if people want it to be changed. Sometimes it needs changing, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's not necessary to change it, but the story would be better if we did change it. You'll never know unless you ask, and we start a discussion about it.

4. Just don't be a dick. Please.

Thank you.

Structure

A lot of expectations are tied into how early stuff is going to be structured, also the stuff above is kind of the most important and I can't quite spare the brain power to separate these out properly right now. Anyway, this RP is going to follow a sort of Mission-based structure, in sort of one-night story arcs. All of the missions take place at night, since that's when the Shokuden is open. We will largely not be RPing the daytime. I'm aiming for a tigher sort of story structure with smaller things going on in general on a night by night basis, and slowly over the course of several nights the mystery will be revealed.

On a given night, Operatives will either conduct missions, or do some training.

Missions follow a certain structure, so let's start with that.



Once the mission actually begins, things might start to look a little different from the usual.



Missions will basically be a 1x2 kind of deal(as opposed to 1x1) where I as the GM provide the background and setting for you to traverse into for the specific mission you're in. That's about it for missions, so I'll go over training next.

Training


Training is sort of like a mission but a little more free-form, and a little more about personal development. I personally run games on a sort of 'soft-exp' format where we take into consideration whether we've spent enough time and really 'done enough' to level up our abilities. Training will help out a lot with this, and Specialists in particular will need to go through with it for the program.

Here's a little skeleton breakdown for how training should likely go if you decide to do it for a particular night.

  • Start with a direction for your character to go in for the training. It could be as simple as wanting to try out a new move you've come up with(this could be sort of using the training as an excuse to 'debut' the new move in the RP), or it could be something to do with your character's story arcs and/or motivations.
  • We'll once again, skip ahead a little in the first post. Unlike with Missions, training may only be one or two posts depending on the purpose of it (look to the above examples as... well examples of that).
  • If you're training to gain experience, it may be to fight some enemies, or even spar with an ally. In the case of NPC enemies, you'll have to ask the GM for those. That's about it!


You can decide to do training for a particular night instead of doing a mission if you want you want some alone time to develop your character. There are other reasons but that's about the intended purpose for these. You can also use it not as a set of posts, and instead as a 'break' for your character, so they'll be training for the particular night/multiple nights until you feel ready to come back.

The purpose of training is to develop your character, and flesh out some of the things they can do, so they're a little more free-form, and much shorter than mission posts most likely. Rope in some other characters to have some fun shenanigans with, because you may be done long before a given mission will finish.

Different towns will have different training grounds. Training isn't specifically restricted to those grounds, but those are basically the defined stuff we have at the location to give an idea about what's available in the immediate area. You could perhaps find a way to train in other ways than the ones listed, it'll depend on the GM most likely. The current training grounds locations are listed underneath the town description (in case you missed them).



Character Sheet Template




Here's a to do list for those who stuck it out to the end so you all know what I still have left to complete.

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Hidden 3 yrs ago 3 yrs ago Post by Hyyde322
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WIP

Name
Sumi Okada

Age
18

Appearance
Black, black, and more black. Seeing Sumi wear anything that does not have some sort of mixture of black is rare. Black jeans, black shirt, black jacket, crop top, tank top, dress, she'll wear it in any color as long as it is black. Sumi stands at 5'4 and weighs 116 lbs. Her hair is black which she keeps at neck length. Sometimes she will die the tips of her hair different colors...well...darker shades of colors. She can usually be seen in a long sleeved shirt, ankle high boots, and form fitting jeans. Her skin is a fair complexion and her build is slim, maybe a little too slim for someone her age.

Personality
Dealing with Sumi is not easy. The best way to describe her is someone's shot of whiskey, take her or leave her. She can seem sort of stand-offish and in most cases she usually is. Her attitude varies with who she is dealing with, or what is going on at the time. To people who have a sunny outlook about everything expect sarcasm, sass, scowls, and jealousy more sass. To others with a more serious demeanor she gives grunts and dry sentences.

History
Backstory time! You can combine Personality and History into a single Biography section, if you so wish.

(Side note, if you're planning on keeping secrets within your backstory, know that you don’t necessarily have to tell me if it's not going to be immediately relevant. You don't necessarily have to tell me about it at all, unless you think it may need approval for some element which might impact the world as a whole.)

Class Name
Arts/Specialist

Character Specifications One
<Seihon>-Thanks to the spirit that inhabits her body, she has the affinity towards seihon. While she does not have the effectiveness with seihon as her host, she can hold her own in a fight. She mainly uses it for attack and in a lot of cases, defense.
  • <Scatter shot> Sumi is able to launch fire imbued projectiles by splitting them into fragments which allow her to hit a wide range. The effectiveness of this technique is best used against multiple enemies, or while at the cost of losing potency can be used to strike an enemy multiple times. She can only use this technique with objects of solid matter.
  • <Riot gun> A technique used for short distance, Sumi can emit an explosion of force from her hands made from fire
  • <Electric Judgement> By performing the right hand gestures, sumi is able to release a blast of electricity from her hand that splits into fragments. Applied use of this is mainly for multiple enemies and can be used at mid to long range


Character Specifications Two
This is where you'll put the second part of Character Specifications which will usually be the specific things your character can do as isolated moves/attacks/spells. Replace the words "Character Specifications Two" with the specific title/s of the section for your character.

Relationships - Optional
Feel free to add any existing relationships your character may have to other characters. This goes for before the RP and during the RP, it'll be nice if you keep it updated but it's likely something we'd remember anyway, which is why it's optional.

Other
Anything else you can think of which isn't covered by this template.
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Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Crowvette
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I have a few ideas I'm mulling over. How many people are planning on half-yokai? I feel like that would help me narrow things down.
Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by RoflsMazoy
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Well if you wanna know at least on the NPC side I don't think I'm planning to have any. Not for any particular reason, I just don't envision one amongst the NPCs I already have in mind.
Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Bartimaeus
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I'm planning a Half-Yokai of sorts. Werewolf type deal based on the offspring of Horkew Kamuy.
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Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Theyra
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I am not planning on making a Half-Yokai
Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by RoflsMazoy
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Alright I did a few updates to the character sheet skeleton. Basically I put all of the different stuff that actually falls under Character Specifications 1 and 2 inside the skeleton so it's easier to find without needing to go up and down the post.

Also there's a little bit about maybe keeping your backstory closer to your chest in terms of personal character stuff because we can reveal that kind of thing IC! And I think it'd be funner if we found them out organically, if that makes sense. You certainly don't have to do it, but it might make it easier in the short run for you since you won't have to write too much backstory if you don't want to.
Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Hakbert
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Finally read through everything. Just deciding on what to go for.
Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Vega7285
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Haven't really sat down to work on things here, but still got the couple ideas I'd mentioned earlier. I'll hack something together eventually.

And to answer the question, no real plans to do half-yokai stuff at the moment. I'd roll an oni if I could, but that's probably a bit unfeasible.
Hidden 3 yrs ago 3 yrs ago Post by Bartimaeus
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gonna post my work-in-progress, maybe it'll help others get the gears turning ^^

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Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by RoflsMazoy
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Oh right, I forgot, you all, but you should put what rank your character is in for each class next to the class name. So like saying Arts Rank 4, Specialist Rank 4, that sort of thing. Also reminder that Rank for Specialists in the early stages (1 to 4) sort of does also correlate to how well they can control their powers, but (this part is new) it could also just be that they haven't been in the program long enough since there's like, a mandatory period of coursework they have to do.
Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by TheMushroomLord
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On the one hand, my current idea is for a specialist, but at the same time literally, everyone seems to be making those and it'd be a shame if the other classes don't get representation given they're really cool. Then again arts has some representation already and I prefer not to play melee characters so it's probably fine. I guess this group will just be really specialised in specialists.
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Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Vega7285
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Some good advice I recall from playing D&D and similar: don't worry about what the party "needs" or things like that. Instead, make the character you want to play.

So yeah, no big deal if there's a bunch of specialist types. They do also seem the most likely candidate for "cross class" set ups anyway, where one is Specialist/something else for combat role.
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Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by RoflsMazoy
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@TheMushroomLord oh it'd be a hell of a lot funner for me if you were all specialists :D. The first night has a really fun setup which I don't want to spoil, but it's likely something only the specialists will get to deal with. Take from that what you will
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Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by sassy1085
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I'm making a fighter character
Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Crowvette
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I was considering a brawler type myself (maybe half-yokai). I'll try and put together a sheet in the next day or so.
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Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by YummyYummy
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Well I'm certainly manifesting interest when there's this much care put into a premise with well-defined parameters. I'll also have to agree with what's been said about specialists, it's going to naturally be the primary pick for many given the big appeal here is the supernatural side of things, no need to feel obligated to cover other roles. I'm inclined to make one myself, although I'll give it a little thought first. There's no big deadline right now, is there?
Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Dog
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I will pew pew pew everything since I still plan to do that U.S soldier idea.
Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by RoflsMazoy
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@YummyYummy Yeah, there's no real set deadline yet. I am gonna be a little busy for a while, but realistically the deadline to start is when everyone's more or less finalized characters and I also have everything set up as well. I'm anticipating being ready before you all finish character sheets, since I don't actually have a lot left to do. The sooner we can start, the better it is, but taking our time is also fine. :D
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Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Vega7285
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Man, I'm not sure why, but I am having trouble coming up with solid Fighter techniques and things. Or maybe just cool, evocative names for stuff.

Then again, names are a tough thing in general for me, so that's par for the course.
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