What’s the Color Arcana?

The Color Arcana is a must read for every aspiring student of magic. There’s a hidden pattern of connections behind magic and reality, an organizing principle that unifies and relates all, its influence unavoidable and pervasive, and this pattern is—color. By understanding the 10 primordial colors as a foundation for magic and reality we can understand everything else more clearly.

The Color Arcana is a tool for worldbuilding with the help of color that’s conceptually similar to what the popular game Magic:The Gathering achieves with its 5 color system, as a way to classify many of the world and mechanical aspects related to that game under the unifying theme of color; but expanded into a 10 color system instead, and more fitted for modelling a full fantasy videogame or virtual world with much richer game and world mechanics rather than a simpler card game. Colors are also much more physical and interactive in the shape of color-magic, and the Color Arcana is a lot more explicit on how they affect the world around them, what they’re associated to, and how they relate to worldbuilding.

‍The entire framework/IP we call the Color Arcana has been released into the public domain under a creative commons zero (CC0) license, so you can make use of it and build upon it for your own works as you see fit. If you have trouble with reading or accessing the Color Arcana from the button above, you can check out a copy stored on the Internet Archive.

Who is the Color Arcana for?

The Color Arcana is an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to explore the relationship between magic and color. Artists and worldbuilders in general will find its content very useful for creating new works of art and worlds with the help of color. Color-magic and specifically the 10 color-magics this system is based upon are leveraged as a taxonomy or classification system for many relevant worldbuilding concepts, themes, and mechanics.

You can imagine the provided framework as a sort of minimal scaffolding for building a particular type of fantasy worlds. The Color Arcana talks in particular and in detail about 3 types of systems common to many fantasy worlds: RPG systems, World systems, and Magic systems. RPG systems or more broadly leveling/gameplay systems are related to mechanics such as HP, mana, or leveling via experience points (xp). They define when can magic be casted. World systems reflect how magic interacts and changes the world, which can act on either living beings, objects, the environment, etc. They define what are the effects of magic. And Magic systems reflect all the rules, constraints, and workings around the use of magic (typically spells or magical abilities), for example the rules that describe your prototypical hard magic system. They define how magic works.

These 3 types of systems used in worldbuilding are defined, related, and unified in terms of the 10 defining color-magics of the Color Arcana.

How does the Color Arcana help you build with color?

The Color Arcana describes in a lore-friendly manner how a particular set of magical laws based on color-magic can give rise to a variety of fantasy worlds (including all their prototypical tropes and elements such as: magical objects, magical beings, spellcasting, superpowers...), each one different and unique, but all under the same universal core set of magical laws. We can imagine in this way color-magic as a sort of “assembly language” for more complicated magical primitives.

The Color Arcana describes how these and all the basic systems necessary to build your prototypical fantasy world are defined and related to color-magic. There’s a minimal set of primitives, elements, and systems who’s relation to color-magic is already pre-fixed (for example, orange-magic is one of the 10 types of color-magics defining this framework and is always related to heat and fire magic). In this way the Color-Arcana defines through its magical laws and lore a “minimal viable fantasy world” that looks and feels like most fantasy worlds you already know, but one which can be further expanded upon and customized without eroding its foundation.

It was purposefully designed to be as flexible and universal as possible for worldbuilding purposes, while still being sufficiently constrained by its magical laws and lore to give rise to a single core believable and intuitive magic system, where most aspects of these worlds are highly interconnected with one another through color rather than defined in isolation, and giving rise to a very rich system and blueprint for adding more content by worldbuilders, by making it relatively easy to assign a color or color-magic to any potential new element, and therefore relating and connecting it directly or indirectly to everything else already present in a clear and unambiguous manner.

What do Color Prospectors do?

Color Prospectors research how the 10 primordial color-magics influence reality and relate everything together, they build upon the foundation provided by the Color Arcana. We recommend that you familiarize yourself first with the contents of the Color Arcana, and then join if you wish our community on reddit: r/colorprospectors

How is the Color Arcana related to the Metaverse?

The Color Arcana was originally conceived and optimized as a philosophy around how to build interoperable fantasy worlds for the Metaverse through the concept of color-magic. The metaverse has not arrived yet, but you can learn more about my particular philosophy around what we need to build a truly interoperable Metaverse on my personal blog here.