SEVEN (colors, not sins)

[DrPraetor]

This is a color-wheel meant for an RPG setting, not a CCG.

I want seven colors first because it's the next odd number after five (which is too few), and second because Isaac Newton had a mystomagical hardon for it, so there you go.

First problem, basically is that Red/Orange and Cyan/Indigo don't have a lot of conceptual differentiation, being basically hot colors and cold colors. So I'm doing a bit of a kludge to differentiate them, by making Orange and Indigo darker shades, so that they are clay/earth (thematically "Brown") and twilight color.

Second problem is assigning them to what they should actually do:

Color	Newton Name/Modern Name	Basis	Biome
Red	Red	Fire	Barrens
Brown	Orange	Earth	Desert
Yellow	Yellow	Agriculture	Farmland
Green	Green	Trees	Forest
Cyan	Blue/Cyan	Day Sky	Alpine
Indigo	Indigo/Blue	Evening Sky	Chaparral
Violet	Violet	Corruption	Swamp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome

Some modern color wheels try to add another "Indigo" between Blue and Violet.

This raises the third problem, which is that Cyan and Green kinda want to switch places, and some of the enemy sets also seem odd.

Anyway, the basic setup is that:
Fire dominates Forest
Forest dominates Pestilence
Pestilence dominates Agriculture
(we're good so far...)
Agriculture dominates... Twilight
Twilight dominates... Earth
Earth dominates... Day-Sky
Day-Sky dominates... Fire

The bully of my bully setup is what nominally drives the alliances.

So we fill out the conceptual space in order to make those make sense. Twilight gets faeries and pre-cultural stuff that is in turn dominated by Agriculture. Earth gets being-easily-tricked which Twilight can exploit. Earth on the other hand gets stability which dominates wind, that Day-Sky also gets thus Day-Sky dominates Fire on that basis.

[OgreBattle]

Where do cities fit in this? Part of agriculture?

Swamps actually get dominated by agriculture IRL:
https://www.filtersfast.com/articles/Im ... tlands.php

[Thaluikhain]

I had to google chaparral, it seems a bit niche. Unless that's what you are going for, of course. Seven seems like it might be a bit many.

[Username17]

An issue that terrain based magic has is that it wants to survive by moving to different latitudes and that's often hard to define. It also wants to survive moving inland or off to nautical adventures, which is also hard to define.

In the original MtG formulation: Plains, Forests, Swamps, and Mountains are all good choices and Islands is the odd man out. Islands is fucking awful and you end up with deeply stupid shit when your adventure becomes city focused, desert focused, or pirate themed (all of which have happened even in the last few sets). None of the "Islands" in Amonkhet or Ravnica are pieces of land surrounded by water, because such formulations don't make sense in those contexts.

Anyway, Barrens and Deserts aren't actually different things, and Farmland is a use choice made on top of already existent terrain. So like Incan Terracing is Alpine Farmland, while cranberries come from Swamp Farmland and apples come from Forest Farmland.

As L5R showed, the use of brightness and hue can make it easy to visually distinguish Yellow from Orange (Dragon and Lion) and even easy to distinguish Blue from Different Blue (Crane and Crab). But it's still better to use faction names, because Cyan and Indigo aren't verbally different because both are just synonyms of "Blue."

-Username17

[Chamomile]

The big issue here is that these are supposed to be factions, not powersets, and I see no reason why I should care who wins in a free-for-all between these seven. Red's basis is "fire" and they live in the barrens. Okay? Cool for them, I guess? If they got in an existential war with Brown, I'd be picking who to side with based on my favorite color.

[Mord]

I had to google chaparral, it seems a bit niche. Unless that's what you are going for, of course. Seven seems like it might be a bit many.

The hard part about this isn't picking seven biomes that are well-represented on Earth, sufficiently distinct as to offer meaningfully different physical conditions, and easy produce distinctly themed cultures for. Look, I can do it right now:

• Desert - Sahara, Arabian Desert, deep Australian Outback; they ride camels and dress like Berbers.
• Tundra - Siberia, Greenland, Finland, Yukon Territory; they ride caribou and dress like Inuits.
• Steppe - Mongolia, the Iranian plateau, the Ukraine, Nebraska; they ride tiny, stubby-limbed little horses and wear felt hats.
• Rainforest - Amazon Basin, Congo Basin; they don't ride anything at all so they have superhuman running power and dress like Aztecs.
• Savannah - Sub-Saharan Africa, the more habitable Outback; they ride zebras (or ostriches!) and dress like the extras in Black Panther.
• Alpine - Himalayas, Rocky Mountains, Andes Mountains; they ride giant goats or llamas and dress like Airbenders.
• Temperate - the North European Plain, the US east of the Mississippi; they ride normal-ass horses and dress like normies.

The hard part is picking seven biomes that aren't so drastically and immediately defined by their extreme latitudes that you can't imagine them actually coexisting in any geographical area smaller than "the entire planet." I can't imagine a plausible planet layout that results in a Berber-expy culture and a Sami-expy culture being close enough for meaningful diplomatic relations, much less military conflict.

The more you chop off the extremes of latitude, though, the more homogeneous your remaining biome/cultures become - it's a lot less easy to come up with easily grokked visible differences between the rival peoples of the Xeric Shrubland and the Semidesert, or the people of the Montane Forest and the Alpine Tundra, or the Monsoon Forest and the Subtropical Dry Forest.

Warhammer Fantasy managed to pack a lot of visible differentiation into a geographically small and reasonably plausible space by taking IRL Europe and using archaic names for shit; they were thus able to lean on the audience's preconceived national stereotypes to make the appropriate assumptions regarding terrain differences. "Everyone knows" the French/Bretonnians are from rolling hill country, the Germans/Imperials are from a dense forest, and the Russians/Kislev are from a cold plain. But if you start from a biome map of Europe without any prior knowledge about the people who live there, you see that Europe is pretty uniformly temperate broadleaf forest and that gives you no good way to differentiate your Russians, French, and Germans. (You would still be able to differentiate them from your Spaniards and Italians, but good luck telling those two apart.)

It's kind of a shit situation to be in. Swamps are iconic and all, but no one lives in them on purpose and getting rid of them is one of any emerging civilization's highest priorities. Fucking malaria.

[DrPraetor]

The big issue here is that these are supposed to be factions, not powersets, and I see no reason why I should care who wins in a free-for-all between these seven.

No, these are supposed to be power-sets: cosmic forces. The idea is that you don't want any of them to win, because they're inhuman spirit forces and they'll paint over the entire world in their choice of theme.
They correspond to factions only indirectly, so as in MtG tribal keywords are associated with some mix of colors.
Well, maybe as a human you want Yellow to win; but, in fact, organized civilization and the agricultural transition had a far from universal basis of support historically, and that's in the real world that doesn't have fire spirits.

Where do cities fit in this? Part of agriculture?

Swamps actually get dominated by agriculture IRL:
https://www.filtersfast.com/articles/Im ... tlands.php

Yes; and, the idea is more that cities are dominated by plague.

Draining of swamps was a relatively late development, but the last 200 years would be a total victory by Yellow - Paul MacCready used to talk about the relative weight of human biomass in that period.
I'm modifying the biome part to better fit what I care about anyway.

So...

I had to google chaparral, it seems a bit niche. Unless that's what you are going for, of course. Seven seems like it might be a bit many.

I lived in chaparral as a small child; so, faeries live there, right ?
But I'm dropping the biome link as unfeasible.

(terrain stuff)

(terrain stuff)

Agreed, dropping it.

But it's still better to use faction names, because Cyan and Indigo aren't verbally different because both are just synonyms of "Blue."

Meh. I like the color wheel, and I really don't think people will have a problem with Cyan and Indigo. MtG was quite successful in gathering a bunch of disparate elements and branding them together as "Green", and I don't see any reason not to exploit that branding with the added caveat that I've added Yellow and split Blue. That's both honest and, I think, a transform on the established color wheel that will be relatively easy to swallow.

Now, that said, I really want Green and Cyan to swap positions, because this list just makes more sense to me:

Color	Newton Name/Modern Name	Basis	Channeling Aesthetic: Like ...
Red	Red	Fire/Warfare	Being Near a Giant Bonfire
Brown	Orange	Earth/Sterility	Being in a Vast Empty Place
Yellow	Yellow	Agriculture/Civilization	Cheering In a Crowd of Thousands
Cyan	Blue/Cyan	Sky/Storms	Watching a Storm Front Roll Over in Big Sky Country
Green	Green	Trees/Wildness	Forest Bathing
Indigo	Indigo/Blue	Evening/Faeries	Half-Waking from a Dream
Violet	Violet	Disease/Insanity	Climbing Out of a Pit of Pink Writhing Guts

And do I really care if the allied colors are always adjacent in wavelength? No, I don't.

I'm not perfectly happy with this one, either:
Fire is enemies with Storm and Tree (that's okay)
Earth is enemies with Tree and Faerie (that means it has to be dead earth specifically)
Agriculture is enemies with Faerie and Pestilence (that's okay)
Storm is enemies with Pestilence and Fire (that's okay)
Tree is enemies with Fire and Earth (so it has to be sterile earth - Pluto is Brown while Gaia is Green)
Faerie is enemies with Fire and Agriculture (workable...)
Pestilence is enemies with Agriculture and Storm (likewise workable.)
but, it works.

Mars is ambivalent to Agriculture and Faeries. Okay.
Grome is ambivalent to Storms and Disease. Sure.
Saturn could plausibly by enemies with forests, but right now he's ambivalent to Trees and Fire.
Marduk is ambivalent to Faeries and Dead Earth, which seems fair.
The Great Forest Spirit is ambivalent to Agriculture (again...) and Disease; a forest spirit favoring stalemate between those two forces makes sense, actually.
Oberon is ambivalent to Fire and the Day Sky. That seems fair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erra_(god) is ambivalent to both Trees and Dead Earth.

This owes more to WFRP or The Wheel of Time than to MtG, but it's important for my purposes that channeling be a trippy, intense experience of itself. That is, I don't much care if Green magic is stronger in forests or on a boat but I want channeling Green to feel like being in a deep forest.

[Chamomile]

The big issue here is that these are supposed to be factions, not powersets, and I see no reason why I should care who wins in a free-for-all between these seven.

No, these are supposed to be power-sets: cosmic forces. The idea is that you don't want any of them to win, because they're inhuman spirit forces and they'll paint over the entire world in their choice of theme.

You say "no," but then you go on to elaborate that yes, actually, these are factions with specific goals, which means you do need to tell us what those goals are. Like, if indigo wins, everything is now "evening." But, okay? What does that mean?

[DrPraetor]

If Red wins, everything is on fire; also, the fire is constantly at war.

If Brown wins, everything is austere, barren rock.

If Yellow wins, everything is farmland and human settlements; so, basically, the 20th century happens.

If Cyan wins, it is day all the time everywhere, but with rapidly changing weather; also, something something laws.

If Green wins, the world is covered in the magic forest from Princess Mononoke; and, the animals talk to you.

If Indigo wins, it is perpetual twilight, and also flooby like a lava lamp and things don't make sense.

If Violet wins, the ground is made of suppurating flesh, and also flooby like a lava lamp and things really don't make sense.

but, the premise of the setting is that total victory by any of these forces is unlikely, maybe impossible because Cosmic Balance. So if you channel Green, you have some advantages you get for furthering the magic animal forest agenda.

That is, the PCs are all partisans for the Veil Baron of Urkush, and the party can have Green Channelers and Red Channelers who are friends and the tension between the cosmic forces they embody does not force them to fight to the death. Likewise, Violet magic is pretty awful but the people using it are not required to be villainous.

So the colors are-not-factions in that sense, which is the sense that really matters for an RPG.

[Thaluikhain]

So, when you say "wins", you don't mean "wins", you mean the cosmic balance falls over and drops, say, red over everything? And without getting that far, you'd have varying degrees of each in a location which'd effect things?

That seems like a sound idea, but it'd be the getting it to work that'd be hard.

Do you need trees, agriculture and earth to be separate things? I might recommend swapping agriculture for industry there. If I'm understanding Earth/Sterility right, you might want to call it something like "Stone".

[DrPraetor]

The color magic is meant to be an important part of the setting, but the scale of conflict that happens in game is not between the colors, until you get up to the higher tiers which I might not even bother to write up. At the Epic Tier, you would have a dominion and a personal finger on the cosmic balance. Ticking things in an individual hex (overthrowing the violet Channeling Veil Baron! - thus moving his personal hex +1 towards yellow) would be the goal of an entire campaign at the adventuring tier.

In general - the player characters are not fighting Cyan, they're fighting this particular Storm Giant who has a treasure trove they want. The entire party can channel Cyan and no-one is perturbed; maybe it's a bit padded-sumo vs. an alternative mission where you went and murder-stabbed some Bog Wight and his skin hounds. Five members of the party can channel Cyan and one can channel Violet and they're not going to turn on the Violet guy and murder him for being gross, right?

The conflicts that drive the game are between the player characters and the bandits they've been hired to eliminate.

BECAUSE OTHERWISE, you can't have a sky mage and a death knight in the same party, and that is right out. They're wielding opposing cosmic forces but they are not on opposite teams even a little bit.

[erik]

I notice a tragic lack of team frozen.

Also I think it is a mistake to go rainbow rather than using the more evocative white and black colors. This gives us an opportunity to ditch Cyan so it can stop triggering printer ink flashbacks. I don't care if I'm out of fucking Cyan, I'm printing in black and white, ghostdammit!

Mostly I'd go a different way for about everything so I don't know how helpful I'd be for input.

[Thaluikhain]

Also I think it is a mistake to go rainbow rather than using the more evocative white and black colors.

Or restrict it to just red, green and blue, with values ranging from 0 to 255.

Sorta serious there, you could easily colour code how much of each type of magic is present somewhere. 50 red, 10 indigo, 20 green and some violet is hard to imagine in terms of colour.

[Foxwarrior]

The colors should be micro, infrared, ultraviolet, x, and gamma.

Sure, to most players they'd all look black, but that's what people get for using eyes to see.

[Orca]

Also I think it is a mistake to go rainbow rather than using the more evocative white and black colors.

Yup. Snip out brown and cyan, replace with black and white respectively and you have a more memorable list IMO.

[Username17]

I notice a tragic lack of team frozen.

Also I think it is a mistake to go rainbow rather than using the more evocative white and black colors. This gives us an opportunity to ditch Cyan so it can stop triggering printer ink flashbacks. I don't care if I'm out of fucking Cyan, I'm printing in black and white, ghostdammit!

Mostly I'd go a different way for about everything so I don't know how helpful I'd be for input.

In general, it's a terrible idea to have Team Hot or Team Cold, because those are defined directionally. That means that if the action is set in the North or the South, one team or the other can't play. Similarly, it's problematic to have Team Coast or Team Inland, because again the action is going to move in and out.

Team White and Team Black are deeply problematic because it's really hard to make them morally neutral on account of them literally being Black and White to begin with. Also they aren't colors.

-Username17

[Grek]

Why do you even want an odd number? The six colour wheel works perfectly fine. People are Opposed to their opposite colour, Allied with sextile colours and Neutral with trines. Red is Opposed to Green, Allied with Orange and Purple and Neutral with Blue and Yellow.

Colour	Land	Themes	Opposite	Allies
Red	Hills	Violence, Madness, Discovery.	Green	Orange & Purple
Orange	Wastes	Revelations, Revenge, Honour.	Blue	Red & Yellow
Yellow	Plains	Order, Truth, Tyranny.	Purple	Orange & Green
Green	Forest	Tranquility, Oaths, Confusion.	Red	Yellow & Blue
Blue	Valley	Secrecy, Serenity, Chaos.	Orange	Green & Purple
Purple	Mountain	Freedom, Isolation, Savagery.	Yellow	Blue & Red

[Thaluikhain]

Why do you even want an odd number? The six colour wheel works perfectly fine. People are Opposed to their opposite colour, Allied with sextile colours and Neutral with trines.

That makes colours neutral to their enemies' allies, and to their allies' enemies, though.

[Chamomile]

Yes. That's generally the preferable way to do things, unless you want all-out war, in which case you still want an even number so you can chop things up evenly and have two equally matched coalitions, or unless you want intrigue, where you want an odd number so that whoever wrangles the bigger coalition has either already won or at least has a significant advantage in the final confrontation. This doesn't really sound like an intrigue setup, and is explicitly not total war, so we want the option where enmity is relatively restrained: People have that one guy they really hate, but the general norm of keeping the peace is strong enough that people don't automatically hate anyone who's friends with that one guy they really hate. Red isn't plotting to murder Green or anything, so Yellow and Blue have no strong reason to hate Red.

[Yesterday's Hero]

I notice a tragic lack of team frozen.

Well, you do have "team desert". So perhaps those guys are adept at using heat AND cold magic.

[Thaluikhain]

Yes. That's generally the preferable way to do things, unless you want all-out war, in which case you still want an even number so you can chop things up evenly and have two equally matched coalitions, or unless you want intrigue, where you want an odd number so that whoever wrangles the bigger coalition has either already won or at least has a significant advantage in the final confrontation. This doesn't really sound like an intrigue setup, and is explicitly not total war, so we want the option where enmity is relatively restrained: People have that one guy they really hate, but the general norm of keeping the peace is strong enough that people don't automatically hate anyone who's friends with that one guy they really hate. Red isn't plotting to murder Green or anything, so Yellow and Blue have no strong reason to hate Red.

Ah, ok, if they are opposed to, but not actively always fighting, that'd make sense.

I notice a tragic lack of team frozen.

Well, you do have "team desert". So perhaps those guys are adept at using heat AND cold magic.

Wouldn't that be "team dessert" instead? Hey? Hey?

[Username17]

In an arbitrary fantasy setting for a defined story, you can define the regions and the terrains however you want. There can be a faction that gets their power from Volcanoes or The River Orm or some shit, because those locations are exactly where you say they are.

In a more open ended scenario, such as an RPG, you need the power sources to be things that could plausibly be available wherever the players happen to go. So something like Vampire where the Nosferatu get their power from Slums and the Toreador get their power from night clubs is fine, because any city you ever go to has slums and also night clubs. But something like "Tundra" or "Rainforest" wouldn't be a great setup because if you go far enough north or south, those things vanish completely.

Now just the fact that someone is getting their power from "Mountains" means that you're talking about shit on a really big scale. Power nodes are things you find in hexes that several kilometers across, not in the feng shui of your house or even the level of affluence of your neighborhood. That gives you some degree of freedom, because it means that your power source terrain could be like 50 kilometers away and have that still be "present" for whatever degree of presence your game is requiring.

But presumably you're still going to want to have terrain types that plausibly could be on hand within 50 kilometers at whatever latitude your adventure is taking place. Which means that if you get power from Wastelands, you want to be able to accept both a snow covered permafrost wasteland and a scorching desert sandy wasteland.

-Username17

[erik]

I thought DrP left the biome theme so now this is more like Pokemon power sources where some oppose others. For the most part my critique of DrP's idea is that it seems more like half an idea. It's pretty under developed.

As for white and black not being colors. Just cuz that's so doesn't mean people don't think of them as such. B&W don't have to be monochromatic, despite... you know.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯


White could easily be team ice, because without the biome concern there's certainly no rule against ice and fire people working together.

Black being too evil, well, Dr. P already has one color being all about disease and insanity. I see a match. Black could just as easily have been something dark but still morally ambiguous like demon binding, ghost medium, hex slinging, shadows, holiday shopping, re-animation, night/star/celestial, underground, abyss (underwater), serpents, or whatever.

I just rummaged through some dusty google docs to find this 7-power source wheel for an undeveloped fantasy setting (apparently some sort of harry potteresque magic academy). I know you were doing enemy rather than counters, but it's an imperfect world.
[/td][td]Power Source[/td][td]uses:[/td][td]Strong vs.[/td][td]Weak vs. [/td][/tr]

Pact	binding	Ancestral	Septimus
Ancestral	ghost	Rune	Pact
Rune	symbol	Cthonian	Ancestral
Cthonian	earth	Draconian	Rune
Draconian	dragon	Bestia	Cthonian
Bestia	beast	Septimus	Draconian
Septimus	probability/fate	Pact	Bestia

[JigokuBosatsu]

One thing I'd like to see in a setup like this is that it would be impossible or nigh impossible for a single color to entirely dominate. If one color "winning" means it's allies are also ascendant to a lesser degree, that could make for interesting faction dynamics.

For (a crude) example: Blue is winning and they are aided by Indigo, as the vampires are cool with Blue's eternal darkness, and their own flesh pits becoming more powerful. But while Green's power level will increase in this scenario as well, they resist because the loss of the forests is unacceptable, no matter how big the bats and hedgehogs grow.

I can't pretend to keep track of the actual color details but hopefully my point is legible. And maybe some colors are particular in other ways... Red never cooperates with anyone because fuck you?

[Username17]

To the extent that it matters that your magic flavors are colors rather than symbols or animal totems or funny words it is for describing how glowing power lines look and defining outfits for various teams.

Now from a power glowing standpoint, Black and White are extremely shit. If someone is "glowing black" that just means they are less well lit. While white light is definitely a thing, it also doesn't play nicely with any other kind of light because white light is just "uncolored" as far as it looks. You can really see this every time Magic the Gathering tries to make a power prism or color wheel or whatever the fuck it looks like hot garbage.

From a sartorial standpoint, White, Black, Gray, and Brown are deeply problematic because those colors aren't often the result of color choices so much as materials. Leather simply is brown or black. Wool and cotton are white or gray unless you take active steps to dye them some other color. People are going to wear black and white things without being members of the black or white faction simply because those are colors that things factually are.

From a design standpoint, colored spaces are defined by black or white lines. Sports teams have uniforms and they have white and black stuff on them without those specifically being their team colors. Firstly because obviously those aren't even colors, but also because it's hard to even delineate colors you do have without white or black lines, borders, details, and highlights.

-Username17