I was really intrigued by the Onmyodo tradition of magic, but unless I'm blind I can't seem to find out anything about ritual calligraphy. If someone could help me out here I would really appreciate it. Which secondary ability catagory does it fall under and what attribute is used for it? Looking forward to an answer and thanks in advance!

 Me and my friend(usually gm but not for this game) are twin onmyodos of shivat, and we use Art for Ritual Calligraphy. 

Sounds reasonable to me, and could even call it out as a Specialty, if you wanted to go that far. I'd defnitely put it under the Creative skills, if you want to make it it's own skill. The precedent for that would be the Puppetmaking skill for the Puppetry Ars Magnus.

If you are interested in seeing such magic in anime, to use as inspiration, might I suggest the anime series Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan? You can watch the entire series on Hulu for free, and there is a character who uses such magic.

 I forgot to mention that our twins "share" the soul of Amaterasu's wife. 

I consider Ritual Calligraphy as a Specialization of Art.

Sincerely I use all secondaries of Gaia and Prometheum Exxet as specializations of other Secondary Abilities, since I don't like adding stuff to the character sheet.

 Well I'm pretty certain the Gaia skills are in the DE and Core Exxet character-sheets.

PE stuff…. to be honest I don't have PE, so I can't say if it has a character sheet of its own, or if they appear in the Arcana Exxet sheet.

 I just checked Core Exxet and Dominus Exxet and Gaia secondary abilities aren't there. Besides there is such a huge collection of secondary abilities that I feel rather confident that any other "secondary" can be considered a specialization of those in the base rulebook. But that's just a way of handling things, not necessarily the only way or even the best.

Fair enough.  Worth checking.

The thing about choosing to treat them as a specialisation, rather than a separate skill, is that you get bonuses for specialising.  That means you're effectively getting those skills on the cheap.

Not such a big issue for the more Social-related stuff (although suddenly becoming an expert in Law seems a bit… odd), especially if everyone in the game is getting the same benefits.  But for the PE stuff, where you can start making practical working artifacts more easily, could shift the balance a bit.

But I'd have no problems with Windrider Piloting being a specialism of Ride, for example.

To each their own houserules though.  :)

I definitely agree, Beadle, about everyone using his/her house rules. Despite granting a hefty +40 bonus with specialization, which is cool, I treat specialized skills as if the character is suffering from an indentical penalty when NOT specialized. For example, if a character had 60 Ride and was specialized in Windrider Piloting, I'd make him use only 20 Ride when using it for any other kind of mount.

Besides, if a character is interested in using Runes (which I consider a specialization of Forge, for example, and modified it a bit to my liking, like most other ways of imbuing powers in artifacts, actually…), it's probably going to take a natural learner and place his natural bonus on it, so the "fixed" +40 bonus won't likely make much difference by Level 4 or 5.

Anyway, one could choose to apply the usual "secondary abilities limits" described in the GM toolkit, INCLUDING the specialization bonus in it. This should address the matter pretty well.

Elric of Melniboné said:

I tought the "specialization" rules says excatly this: +40 for the speciality, -40 for everything else with this skill. Else, an specialitzation would be to mighty, because it doesn't cost any points, and I would get an instant bonus for one "part of my skill", without a penalty.

So long,

Yes, I believe you're right, F3nr1r. And this is the main reason why I don't consider Specializations so great.

Sakara said:

That is a great anime, and I watched a while ago, I think a lot of skills can be "inspirired" from there especially if you are into ritual like skills jocuri fotba