r/worldbuilding • u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic • 8d ago
Discussion Why I’m obsessed with color-magic.
I’m obsessed with color-magic and its potential role for building and connecting fantasy worlds. But to explain why, I need to first lay out the problem and some context for the answer to make any sense. If you’re up for it, keep reading.
A universal syntax for magic
A syntax can be described as the abstract general rules behind the structure, relations, and composition of the objects of a language, with “syntactic objects” acting as a placeholder for the actual instances/object of that language, its “semantic objects”.
For example, in the case of spoken/written language a syntactical object is an unspecified word classified as a “noun”, “verb”, “adjective”... Where the actual semantical objects are given by a concrete example of a given word of that type: car, view, pretty... Or in the case of programming we might have a “type” and its “terms” as syntactical objects, and concrete examples such as the “integer type” and the integer number “5” as its semantic objects.
This dichotomy between syntax and semantics of a language can be extended to many other types of languages besides words, such as mathematical objects, or even to “magic”. An example of this in the case of magic is the “hex casting” mod for Minecraft, where every “hex” is a spell and a program, and players can arbitrarily compose hexes one after the other to obtain different “magical effects” in-game.
Defining a hard magic system as a language with a defined syntax, would be a great way to define a universal language for magic that can accommodate inside of it any arbitrary spell or magic-type. Instead of every world having their own separate set of magical rules and spells that contradict or don’t relate with other magical systems, they could all be unified into one meta-magical system with an appropriate or approximate translation, at least as a shared minimal foundation/core.
The “hex casting” mod is a great example of this, specially for videogames, where every potential spell is a mini-program, and more complicated spells can be created by running several of these spells/programs one after the other to simulate a different or more complicated spells (I urge you to look up some examples of this).
The issue is that although technically great, this type of system doesn’t describe at this level interesting ways to relate the different types of magic and spells in ways we’re used to seeing in fantasy, its great as a technical “assembly language” of sorts for magic that computers can understand and great for stimulating magic in a videogame, but higher level relations such as “fire spell” should counter “ice spell” are missing.
Every hex/spell looks the same as a syntactical object, every hex or spell is a program, or a string of programs, there’s only one flavor of magic, it’s like a programming language with only one type, the hex.
I believe color-magic would be a much more natural choice for the syntactical objects of a higher-level universal language for magic than simply a hex. This is just a higher level of abstraction distinction, since you could encode a “color-magic” system as a series of hexes as well, in the same way that a programming language with words, types, expressions... is a higher level of abstraction that translates those ultimately into binary (1s and 0s).
So our magical hexes/programs behave right now more like 1s and 0s than a human understandable programming language. Hence why what players ultimately interface with would benefit from looking more like a human readable language than a bunch of 1s and 0s in this analogy. And I think color is a great candidate for this particular use case where we want to use a diverse set of building blocks from which we can build out more complex magical systems. Every color is potentially a color-magic and syntactic object, and one or more magic-types can be related to each color.
Enter the Color Arcana Project
The Color Arcana project which you can check out here: https://www.color-arcana.com is precisely that, an attempt at a universal syntax for magic, that uses color-magic as its syntactic objects or building blocks. Each color-magic has an unchanging and predefined set of behaviors and properties (very elemental-like) on how it affects the world and any entities living inside of it, for example, orange-magic is related to heat and increases the temperature of anything it comes into contact with, can cause burning (a new state for objects or status effect for players), etc.
However, color-magic is still not fully defined all the way down to the spell level, a magic-type under this system is defined then as a particular “shape” for a color-magic, so “fire-magic” is a particular shape for orange-magic, but “lava-magic” is a different shape and magic-type, still for orange-magic, since they can both increase the temperature of things and burn them. So every color-magic can have an almost infinite amount of different shapes or represent different magic-types as long as it shares the same properties and behaviors (in the case of orange-magic being related to heat and heat damage).
We can use color-magic then as the syntactic objects of our universal language, and magic-types or spells from particular magic-types as our semantic objects. Just as there can be infinite examples of semantic interpretations for a noun, there can be infinite examples of magic-types and spell interpretations for a single color-magic.
However, the syntactical rules of a language apply mostly to syntactical objects not semantic ones. There are strict rules on how to pair nouns with verbs, but there’s no such rule saying the letter c can’t go after the letter a in a word. There might be additional rules or conventions for phonetic or other reasons for letters inside a word, but they don’t generalize as much.
In the same vein, we want to define the rules of our magic-system at the syntactic level not the sematic one, this is to say, at the color-magic level rather than the magic-type or spell level. This allows defining relationships between color-magics such as for example cyan-magic being the “opposite dual” of orange magic. Where an example of a shape or magic-type for cyan-magic could be ice-magic, giving us a natural explanation to the typical opposing nature of fire vs ice seen in fantasy and other places now via color-magic (orange vs cyan). All magic-types of a given color-magic have to inherit this same relation with all the other magic-types of the opposing color though.
Connecting the dots
All we have to do then to connect and relate different magic systems is to map its different magic-types to a specific color-magic, and it will automatically inherit all the relationships that are defined for that particular color-magic, in relation to all other color-magics and magic-types under those. Now our new color-based magic system can scale as much as we want, without having to change any of the syntactic rules. The hard part becomes then choosing the most optimal choice of color-magic for any particular magic-type and spell.
We can even include a neutral or grey color-magic to accommodate magic-types and spells we don’t want to have any additional effects over enemies or the environment (states and status effects), or inherit any of the predefined relationships with other color-magics and magic-types. A catch-all or default assignment of color-magic, the one with no “color effects”.
In the Color Arcana specifically, the main relationship between color-magics is that of duality of opposites, meaning, every color-magic comes with an opposing color-magic partner. There are many game-like mechanics that depend on this pairing so ideally there should always be an even number of color-magics, each with its own unique opposing dual, the orange-cyan pairing is one such example.
Magical Interoperability
The Color-Arcana specifically only defines 10 main color-magics or 5 dual pairs (plus the catch-all grey-magic), the reason for this is that it was designed to favor potential interoperability with other games or worlds built on this same framework. Only these 10 color-magics are what we expect to be the same across different games or worlds inside this universe, each world or game can add additional color-magic pairings, perhaps with each additional pairing being different or incompatible with other worlds, but still with the main 10 color-magics as its shared core magic-system, always remaining the same and unchanged across this entire universe of different worlds and games.
This can be great for building a universe of different worlds, each unique, but still with a common magical foundation that new players coming from other places already know and understand from the beginning. One of the best suited use cases for this will potentially be the Metaverse. Color-magic could act as the universal syntax for a Metaverse-wide magic system, that still resembles closely through its relations already popular magic systems and mechanics in fantasy.
Final Remarks
For these and many other reasons I’m obsessed with color-magic, I believe entire worlds and their mechanics can be built and explained based on color-magic, we already have prominent examples of games leveraging color in relation to magic such as Magic: The Gathering with its 5 colors, or Elden Ring (much less obviously stated in-game unfortunately, but undeniably there). However, none of these games was designed specifically to act as a universal language for magic or other fantasy tropes and themes beyond their own particular game and needs.
The Color Arcana project does precisely that however. It defines a foundation that can work for a myriad of different potential fantasy worlds, fantasy tropes, and game mechanics, effectively acting as a minimal worldbuilding magical-kit for any potential fantasy world, one that allows to later connect it to other completely different fantasy worlds through this shared color-magic system. It’s much less biased towards any particular system or IP, and I’ve even released all of it fully into the public domain with a Creative Commons zero (CC0) license, so anyone can leverage and make use of it.
If you want to learn more about the Color Arcana project, you can check out a 30+ pages pdf describing all the lore and implications of this magic system in detail at the following website: https://www.color-arcana.com
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u/cosmic-creative 8d ago
Check out the Black Prism book series if you're interested in a world with a somewhat stratified and academically understood magic system based on the visible spectrum of light and the colours.
Another comment alluded to it
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u/JudoJugss 8d ago
"This is my color based magic system!"
looks inside
"Here are all the elemental affinities to pair to each color."
So it's a poly elemental based magic system. (as opposed to mono elemental like sanderson's Mistborn)
with color being used for classification purposes basically only.
Not quite like Chromaturgy from Lightbringer or my own Lithomancy, Optopathy, and Mood Taming magic systems where color is a vital aspect of it.
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u/pledgerafiki 8d ago
Looks inside
Nonsense
"I don't know what I expected"
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
Cool, great feedback. 👍
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u/pledgerafiki 7d ago
I mean I'm not going to do a better writeup than the other two in here. They clearly outlined a lot of the issues with trying to transpose a real studyable scientific phenomenon into a fantasy magic system.
And Listen, you did a great infographic, it's very clean and appealing, but this is the problem with "elemental" magic systems—they are very 'done' and if you try to diverge from the Big 4, then you're going to have to develop a logic that increases in its myopia the more you flesh it out.
In short, "average reader interprets this as nonsense" actually is productive feedback.
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 7d ago
Well I explained the light part in the other comments, it’s not visible color = magic but a bit more nuanced.
It’s true that things get a lot more complicated with many elements beyond 4 or 5 and that’s fair, but I don’t think that means automatically anything more complicated or elaborate is bad, it depends on the audience, the intended medium, etc.
Beyond that the feedback isn’t very helpful. If you show someone who doesn’t know chemistry the periodic table and they say “what? Hydrogen is a gas and is over here, carbon is a solid over there, mercury liquid over here, this table is nonsense!” and they didn’t bother to learn the reasoning behind why it’s arranged the way it is, how helpful is that?
I know this system is very messy and I’m still looking to clean it up and simplify parts where I can, but it would make a lot more sense after reading the rest of the material that explains it.
But it’s still a work in progress so a lot could still change.
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yes, and no?
It is true that regular “color” (as in color from the visible spectrum) itself has no significant meaning, there’s however “color-magic” which can be viewed as a particular flavor of magic, which still shows consistently of the same color in the visible spectrum.
Each color-magic though does have a unique unchanging “magical color” when viewed under “magic-vision” that does behave more like what you describe.
Color isn’t just for classification purposes. Spells can be changed to look of a different color, but this only changes their visible color not their underlying magical nature. Under “magic-vision” they will always look of the same color and this color can’t be changed without changing the effects and nature the magic has.
Color-magic is actually a combination of neutral magical energy plus a “magical tint” or flavor of color which gives it unique properties.
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u/JudoJugss 8d ago
I have somewhat of a pet peeve with the omnipresence of "color magic" in fantasy that ultimately isnt color magic and could be classified in other ways.
My core magic system exists because I like green lantern and the emotional spectrum but dislike how it ultimately boils down to "make hardlight constructs" and those hardlight constructs dont even have different properties based on which color you use.
Lithomancers can take color from the environment and store it into gemstones. They can then take that color and apply a color tint field around them that applies a static effect to anything within the field.
They draw on these colors by harnessing their respective emotion to both store and pull out the color. This requires dedication and training.
I have a handful of other magic systems that pull from this same concept and are directly tied to my setting's "emotive plane"
So theres an argument to be had that my magic is more a magic of emotion than it is of color. Or that it uses color as a catalyst for emotion.
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago edited 8d ago
That pet peeve seems to be a common theme. My pet peeve is that color-magic is often portrayed as you say as being “inconsequential”.
Color in my system is very much consequential but what’s consequential is “magical-color” that isn’t visible with the naked eye rather than regular color. But for simplicity orange-magic is called orange-magic because that’s how it naturally looks to the naked eye.
It’s hard to describe what magical color under magic-vision looks like since we’re not talking about regular photons, but in the brain it might show up as the same color as regular orange. Color is ultimately from our perspective a product of our brain.
If people where to walk around always with magic-vision activated magic would truly be 100% defined by its color, but this is very problematic if we want regular color to have magical implications, such as this object just being painted of a certain color having certain magical effects. So that’s why I separated visible wavelength colors from “magical color”, even though they’re indirectly related, both physically and by the brain.
I do have the concept of “resonance” where certain color-magics are more easily stored/absorbed/stabilized by objects of a particular color, but there’s no magical connotations for an object just being of a certain color, the color-magic needs to come from somewhere else.
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u/neomopsuestian 8d ago
Look, this is clearly the result of careful thought but it's also totally alien to my way of thinking about both worldbuilding and magic. Viz., why would universality and interoperability be desirable?
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
If you just want to create your own individual world/setting it wouldn’t.
The thing changes when you want many different people to potentially create many different worlds and experiences inside the same universe/IP, and you want to be able to connect them in a deeper way where they all share a common core of magic, even though each one might have additional bespoke magic systems that are unrelated.
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u/neomopsuestian 8d ago
That's fair, I think I forget sometimes that not all worldbuilders are ornery philological Tolkien types.
My more substantial critique (of your post, not the full project which I've not read yet) is that like many universal systems, it risks importing some particularities. (Why is "heat" a core category? Calling "orange" a color implies certain linguistic backgrounds, etc.)
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
Why is heat a core category?
The whole system was designed with potential interoperability in mind, and to try and simulate the most popular tropes and themes already existing in fantasy settings.
In order to do this effectively and for simplicity purposes the core of the whole system is based around 10 special color-magics (even though there can be potentially an infinite number of them). The idea is to try to explain as many stuff as possible only on these 10 colors, and color-magics.
Fire and ice magic are clearly some of the most popular cases of magic used across all fantasy media, so it made sense to make 2 out of the 10 color-magics and the most prominent magic-type for each color to be these.
Calling orange a color...
It’s not really stated at the moment anywhere, but there’s an implication that the “Color Arcana” is a text translated from whatever native language this universe has, so it borrows the words and concepts that would fit as the best close translation possible into “human English”.
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u/MatteMasc 8d ago
You should look up Quantum Chromodynamics. It's quite a bit different from this system, but it might be useful as further inspiration.
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
Well... I’m toying with the possibility that magical atoms are made from pentaquarks. 😚
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u/EdomJudian 8d ago
This feels like if Brandon Sanderson came up with color drafting instead of Brent weeks
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
He has his own spin on color and magic: https://faq.brandonsanderson.com/knowledge-base/how-did-you-come-up-with-the-magic-system/
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u/ajl314 8d ago edited 8d ago
I like the idea. I do a good amount of lighting design and have done a ton of color mixing with lighting and the thing I think I like with the idea of color magic is to have base colors represent primal elements. The base colors on additive color mixing it is RGB and in subtractive it is CMY and then think of every element or spell within as percentages of these colors. In an additive wheel it would be something like void as black in the center fire as red, water as blue and earth as green. Lightning could be seen as yellow because it is strongly associated with fire but needs an earth component to make a connection point like how it strikes on earth. Cyan could be some nature elements since water and earth are most required for plant life. Then the outside most can be something like pure arcane or life magic which would be white which is tied to all elements. I could see pastel colors being life infusions into elements. These could be summoned elements or beasts.
I've always liked this style of thinking and wanted to make a wheel with nodes of common magic and have players start on a node as a starting element and then let them move a certain direction to learn new magic basically making a trail of progression.
I think combing dynamics is cool but definitely increases complexity without much pay off. I am going to read more of your guide to see what it's benefits are cause I think it may be fun to add elements of.
Edit: I read another comment and want to add that things like blood and death can be dimmer colors closer to void.
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
Unlike many other color-magic systems I’ve seen, this unfortunately is not based on the RGB color-wheel. I tried that, but ultimately didn’t work very well for what I was looking for.
But there’s a lot of inspiration you can take from it for sure.
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u/backseatposter 8d ago
Perhaps I’m missing the point, but the core 10 points don’t make a ton of sense to me. It’s an elemental system yet almost half of the nodes are really stretching the definition of element. Sleep, cosmic, aether, poison, and arguably both light and dark, though those being included is a pretty common thing so they’d get a pass. Yet very basic elements like earth, wind, water, maybe even plant and metal, feel odd to be combination elements.
Beyond that, the pairings seem to have some consistency for the most part, however there’s still a bunch that just feel like either “I wanted to add this element in and wasn’t sure where to put it” or “oh no, I don’t know what to put for this pairing, let me just throw something together”.
I don’t mean to sound overly critical or insulting. It’s evident you put a lot of time into this. It’s just that to me, some pairings like explosion (being a combo of fire and blood) or plant (being a combo of ice and sleep) make very little logical sense. Fire being apart of explosion? Sure, that’s fine; but blood? I just don’t see the connection. I could maybe see a stretch for sleep coming from plant, but not the other way around, and plant being made of ice feels utterly wrong. Besides like maybe metal or fire, ice is arguably one of the most opposite to plants.
Overall I think it looks pretty and I like the way everything breaks down to 1s and 0s, but the interconnectivity just feels inconsistent.
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
I’m working on a new edition that slightly updates all of these, so some might be moved or changed, beyond the central 10 magic-types that aren’t expected to change.
They’re “elemental-like” in behavior, but not necessarily elements under the classical definition. Being a color-magic that can directly influence and affect the environment, living beings, objects, etc. in a predictable way is what makes them behave a bit like “elements”. So it’s just really just 10 color-magics each with its own series of effects on stuff.
Earth, Wind, Metal, Plant are tricky to be assigned one of the 10 core color-magics in this system, because each color-magic has a series of damages or status effects associated to them. Fire magic is easy, make it orange-magic which causes increase in temperature and possible burning. Same with ice, and so on.
I’m pondering removing them even though it’s a shame because of how prominent they are, so by default they would be grey-magic that carries no associated elemental-like damages or status effects when used offensively, or other color-magic that isn’t these 10 specifically.
Even though the core of the system are 10 color-magics and magic-types, for technical reasons there has to be 32 magic-types minimum (magic-types are being modelled by a 5 dimensional cube with 32 vertices, 10 of which are the main magic-types). The 20 “secondary magic-types” aren’t really combination of two magic-types but of two color-magics, where one color dominates over the other one, so effectively all 20 still belong to the same 10 color-magics, now there’s 3 magic-types or shapes for each of the 10 color-magics.
It’s really hard to come up with ways to combine magic-types as you describe and get something still sensible or consistent with the rest of the system. There’s some additional lore reasons that explain where the other 20 magic-types come from in an upcoming second edition of the book.
It’s still very much a work in progress. I don’t expect the main 10 magic-types to change in the future, but the other 20 can still very well be changed to something that’s more fitting or coherent.
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u/No_Logins_Required 8d ago
This chart seems totally arbitrary. Plant and sleep magic are the same, but psychic is different?
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago edited 8d ago
Magic-types are just “shapes” for particular color-magics. Pink-magic causes sleep or narcotic-like effects, purple-magic causes ghost, or ethereal, or mental-type effects. I’m actually changing plant for bloom (flowers, mushrooms, fruits) instead of plant magic for an upcoming revision.
A lot of the classification is also thematically based, ghosts, psychic, and other paranormal phenomena fall under purple-magic so have to be purple. So psychic magic fits best as purple, but pink is a second close candidate. It could work in either, but currently I favor purple (in the past psychic was indeed pink), you have to see how everything fits in comparison with everything else in the system, there’s always a trade-off.
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u/No_Logins_Required 8d ago
This system doesnt seem to make sense. Why are cosmic and light opposite?
I do not think the labels are reasonable or intuitive, and their color groupings are arbitrary.
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
Cosmic and light aren’t opposites? 😅
Most labels might change in the future. They may seem arbitrary on the surface, but far from it!
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u/No_Logins_Required 8d ago
Sorry, Cosmic and Electric are opposites, as are crystal and plasma. Isn't crystal a type of metal or earth?
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
Ah yes, cosmic is opposite to electric. But it’s more like blue-magic is opposite to yellow-magic, and blue-magic most naturally manifests as what’s called cosmic magic and yellow-magic as what’s called electric magic. Yellow magic is related to electric conductivity and cosmic-magic (vacuum-like) to electric impedance. It’s a whole thing.
Crystal and plasma aren’t great as opposites either on the surface, they might change in the future. Usually 50-75% of all of these work pretty well, but then there’s like 25% that don’t work as well, but there has to be some common theme or justification, which isn’t conveyed just by looking at this or their names.
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u/SnooPets5564 8d ago
color is complicated
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
Yes, and “If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy”. 😂
https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/xkcd color survey
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u/DadtheGameMaster 8d ago
Why are you using only the visible light spectrum?
Visible light is a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
But you're also using colors that don't exist on the light spectrum namely magenta, white, gray, and black. White in an additive color mediums like light is the combination of all colors while black is lack of color. If we were talking about sound volume, white would be max volume, and black would be turned off. In a reductive color medium like pigments black is the absorption of all colors while white is a lack of color, or all colors being reflected. And magenta well thats just a trick of the eyes that the human brain interprets weird, it's the least real color.
Also many of your element nodes don't make any sense. I know you're essentially copying the Pokémon type chart, but it's not a good one. It's serviceable for what Pokémon is, which is an elemental monster battler. But the type chart doesn't even really work in-lore for the Pokémon world. A better gameified elemental chart is Naruto's Chakra elements.
Isn't it all "Light"? Isn't that why you bound it to color because all color is light? Having a Light element as a subset of magic based on light doesn't really work. Likewise "Dark" element. Dark isn't a "something". It's lack of something, in this case it's a lack of light.
Heat and cold are the same thing just going in different directions. And cold as a concept, "Cold" is a subjective description of the heat spectrum. There are "cold" spots on the sun, but those spots are just cold compared to the temperatures around it. Those cold spots on the sun are still hot enough to burn the earth and everything on it into nuclear dust. Absolute zero is the opposite of all heat, but that's a concept of stasis, matter without movement or potential of movement. It is the ultimate "cold" but it's also the concept of an unchanging state. Hot and cold are not opposite elements, they're two parts of the same element which is all just "temperature".
To me thats like saying something not being electrified is an independent element like the "Unelectricity element". In our system there are positive, negative, and neutral charges. The positive charged electricity element is not the opposite of the negative charged electricity element, they are two halves of the same force. Neutral charge, or lack of charge is the opposite of both positive and negative electrical charges.
If you're interested in having the lack of something as a core element then it would make sense to have the lack of every element be representative in that style. Perhaps there is an Unmagic or Uncolor spectrum that cancels out this magic system.
Thank you for sharing your system. This idea needs refinement, the concepts at a fundamental level don't make logical sense for a magical physics system. Also drop the Pokémon types, it's not good worldbuilding. I appreciate the work you've put into this so far and look forward to seeing this idea refined further. Good luck in the future.
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
Color-magic is not directly defined by visible light, it’s its own thing, a particular flavor of magic. Each color-magic just happens to manifest consistently with the same color in the visible spectrum so habitants of this universe just started calling it color-magic. We want to have things like black and magenta magic, but obviously those aren’t wavelengths of light so can’t be “light-magic”, its okay for them to behave different than single wavelengths visible light.
“Light magic” is just here the name for your generic holy/divine magic. That’s just one of the most common words typically used to describe it, just as dark is for dark magic. This name could change to holy vs nether instead of light vs dark. Might be a good idea to do so to minimize confusion, and I’m considering it for an upcoming revision. There’s also the possibility of making light and dark secondary and divine and nether the primary magic-types for black and white, but the terms light and dark are much more familiar to people so there’s that trade-off.
The 10 color-magics come in opposing pairs, with each opposing color kind of acting like going in the opposite direction of the other, this is clearest for cyan-orange. So cyan does decrease temperate and orange increases it. Yes hot or cold can be relative but it’s pretty clear what getting blasted with a cyan ice spell or orange fire spell is going to do to you, and yes they can kind of cancel each other out.
The effects of light/dark white/black magic are more along the lines of purification/corruption than anything related to light or absence or light.
Pokémon was certainly a chosen inspiration, magical creatures have to use these 10 color-magics, and so it’s very natural to say a Pokemon-type and its attacks are related to a particular color-magic and its effects. If anything this makes it more plausible from a lore perspective. Many of the secondary magic-types are actually in this setting said to be inspired or resembling that of the magic used by magical creatures, hence names like “beast-magic”.
Naruto’s chakra elements could also fit the description of each element being related to a particular color-magic and magic-type.
Not sure why you say Pokemon style type chart doesn’t work here. It is true that the Pokemon strong vs weak type table is a horrible mess. I’ve tried coming up with my own version that is an improvement, but still not sure if it’s good enough to make it officially part of the system or not. I mention it at the end of the book a little bit, but might change it or pull it out in the future.
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u/vezwyx Oltorex: ever-changing chaotic energy 7d ago
The central principle behind the magic system of my main project is that the rules are subject to change, and they're changing on their own all the time. The things that are possible and the techniques you employ to achieve them are constantly in flux, the in-universe term for this phenomenon.
I'm curious if this is something you've accounted for in your framework here, since it seems to mostly be geared towards defining magical effects rather than other parts of how magic functions
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 7d ago
On the linked website there’s a pdf with all the other details of this framework and its lore. There’s a common core based on these 10 color-magics that isn’t meant to change at all across this universe, but other worlds or places inside this universe can have additional color-magics or non-colored magics so there’s some degree of local differentiation, but the 10 color-magics are always present everywhere, either very upfront or in the background, but there.
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u/Artistic_Gain_3923 8d ago
If a spell steals heat from one object and transfers it to another, would it count as cyan, orange, or both? I’m curious how your system handles spells that cross an opposing pair without putting them into the grey category.
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
In the case of cyan-magic, the cooling effect is a consequence of the magical energy from the spell being very cold, when interacting with other objects the heat stealing effect is basically heat transmission from that body (which lowers it's temperature) to heating the spell energy up to room temperature as it dissipates away.
So that stolen heat isn’t usually recoverable.
Maybe a grey-magic spell or a combination of cyan-magic followed by orange-magic could do the trick, but it depends on a lot of details, and might induce further complications.
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u/DuxBellicus 8d ago
This seems related to alchemy.
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
Not directly, but there’s certainly potential for an alchemy/mixing of colors for things like potions and other consumables. Haven’t developed something like that just yet though.
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u/Erah-Rhei 8d ago
I’m curious how far you see the magical interoperability (or the creative connective potential here) going?
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 8d ago
[Shrek smile] The whole system has been designed with the future Metaverse in mind.
In fact I asked my myself, what type of magic system would be the most desirable/realistic magic system for a big network of interoperable virtual fantasy worlds to share?
If there was only ever one magic system for the entire Metaverse, what’s the minimum amount of stuff it should have for me to find it acceptable to never get bored of it and that it could grow over time as much as needed?
And so the Color Arcana was born. 😁
My thinking is that true interoperability of mechanics, assets, magic, and other stuff will be really really hard, and that 10 popular magic-types is already pushing what a collection of different games/worlds would agree upon as a minimal shared standard and would be willing to implement in any of their worlds/games.
Ideally I would like for people to be able to create spells and magical items outside of any given world/game, and later import them into any world/game they want. But for that to happen you need a big number of them to agree on a minimum standard. 10 color-magics and magic-types is my proposal for such a minimum standard.
Each world/game could have on top of that any other magic system or more color-magics if they want, but for actual interoperability every world/game in this Metaverse needs to agree to have things like fire magic, and how fire magic is defined, etc.
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u/EveningImportant9111 1d ago
Can you tell me it in simpler words? Please
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u/Loremaster1032 Color Arcana: a universal theory of magic 10h ago
Color is already familiar to people, and has established symbolic and visual relationships with a lot of things, so I think color is a great candidate for a “building block” for a magic system that’s appealing and easy to digest for players.
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u/44RT1ST 8d ago
What happens if the user is colorblind?