There is a pleasing direct vividness about colour words appearing in book titles, monster names, or fantasy geographies. 'The King in Yellow'. Red Mars. Purple Worm. 'The Masque of the Red Death'. Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight. 'The White People'. The Silver Chair. The Black Speech. And so on.
The reasons for this are not very complicated, I suppose. First, we are so alive to colour as such that it instantly appears in our mind - one need only see the word 'red' to immediately see vivid red in one's mind's eye. No mental effort required.
Second, colours often have connotations. Silver feels mysterious; white feels cold; red suggests blood or fire; green suggests nature or spring, and so on. There is a lot of semiotic significance packed into these single words.
And the third is the blunt effectiveness of these often monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon-sounding terms. Which of these is more evocative: The Blue Mountains or the Mountains of Syllrabiastra? It is the former for a whole arsenal of reasons, but one of them is simply that 'Blue Mountains' has a ring to it. 'Blue' is a good, solid word that anybody can understand; it also doesn't beat around the bush. It goes straight at you, in your face. Most colour words - certainly the simple colour words that we learn as children, or when learning a new language - have this quality. They don't mess around.
It follows that if one wishes to add some spice and vividness in worldbuilding, one can't go too far wrong with creative use of colour in the naming of things. This perhaps shouldn't be overdone, but it is surprising how much life can be breathed into even the most hackneyed concepts with a fresh hue. Instead of the Goblins of Elrexinfrax, go for the Purple goblins of Elrexinfrax. Instead of the Dwarfs of Undermountain, go for the Blue Dwarfs of Undermountain. Instead of the Empress of Yeffinfeff, go for the Red Empress of Yeffinfeff. And so forth.
The important point here is not that the goblins, dwarfs, or empress are necessarily actually purple, blue or red (though they may be). Perhaps the blue dwarfs are called such because they mine blue-tinged iron to make their weapons. Perhaps the purple goblins make a violet dye from some strange fruit and use it to colour their skin, or for tattoos. Perhaps the Red Empress is known for bathing in the blood of virgins. Whatever. The colour both generates an evocative name - and a reason to pique the curiosity of the players - but also gets the creative juices flowing.
To this end, I recommend using this technique before coming up with any details in advance. While stocking your hexmap you decide that this area of land is populated by a race of giants known as the Yellow Giants. Why are they yellow? That's what gets the ideas flowing.
The setting of my current campaign goes in for a lot of use of color words, partially inspired by Oz as it is. The names of the 4 countries of the land have names that at least reference colors (like Virid), and monsters are occasionally known to be different colors in different places.
ReplyDeleteScattered thoughts:
ReplyDeleteFirst, that, yes, one shouldn’t overdo the colour use. WHF’s Winds of Magic go a way to avoiding this, despite their regularity. https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2021/03/sprezzaturra-on-breeze.html
Second, that there’s something a little arbitrary-sounding about colour designations. Yes, ‘seeing red’ or ‘green about the gills’ - or even the White Keep and the Red Fort - all make sense. But ‘the Red Team’ or ‘the White Company’ or even ‘the Blue Lancers’ is far more generic than ‘the Royal Scots Borderers’, &c. (See also red label tea or black label whisky). This is something I’ve seen used occasionally to effect – as once, decades ago in a Garth Nix novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shade%27s_Children#The_Overlords and (less notably) the names in Punth. Of course, even symbols that once had quite robust meanings can change dramatically: see the White Hart or the Blue Boar.
Third, there’s a hint of the late 19th century in uses of colour thus. One thinks of the Decadents and Aesthetes; the Yellow Book and the Green Carnation. There’s a push against (or a different emphasis to) Realism or the attentive study of nature in the Pre-Raphaelites. This at least overlaps with fantasy via Lord Dunsany (and those quite directly influenced by him) -and Lang’s Fairy Book’s (Red, Blue, Violet, Olive….https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Langs%27_Fairy_Books#Books). To say nothing of something fantastical like Beardsley’s illustrations for Salome. Would The Worm Ouroborous have the same tone without this?
Fourth, colour can hint at something un-nameable – as Spell Schools.
https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-best-of-all-possible-worlds-spell.html?showComment=1647447698187#c6047870872464232404
There’s the possibility of this sounding very grand and exotic if carried to a certain extent, via translations from the Far East as ‘The Jade Emperor’…though I sometimes wonder if such associations might be mistaken, and the Amethyst Princess or the Sapphire Over-King should have the same staid, traditional – even reactionary – ring as ‘Their Most Catholic Majesties’.
My random generator for NPC places-of-origin for Planescape, which is, uh, unnecessarily large, is about one fifth colours for preceding adjectives. But I think a lot of easily-understood adjectives have a similar effect - at least for placenames.
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