Zeroed E-Kiln File

Probably more of an urban fantasy sort of thing.

If we’re going “classical elements”: Black is earth, cyan is water, yellow is fire, and magenta is air/sunlight because plants need magenta light? 83.89

If we’re assigning numbers to colors: K = 0 & M = 2, don’t know about the other ones.

Cyan:

• Water-related, maybe?
• Option that looks strong because usable-for-violence, but actually isn’t really better than guns and body armor? We need something to make sure the random violent people don’t pick yellow and go all bioterrorist.
  • Maybe “non-mages think it’s strong/mages think it’s weak/experienced mages know it’s not that simple”
  • If we’re going with that, how about “lets you alter the velocity of objects and maybe also create force shields, but the force shields must be still relative to you”.
  • This probably lets you go all flying-brick with some effort, and maybe take your friends with you on a force platform. Should be fun.
  • Magic courier service, limited mostly by eyesight?
  • Blue (CM) teams working together for courier things should be common-ish. Low-emissions, and the magenta person can make satellites count as eyesight for the cyan one.
  • No eyesight = Problems. You’d want to wear force goggles constantly, but you can’t do this because eyes need their own oxygen. Yellowmage mods for more blood vessels in the eye to fix this?

Magenta:

• is electricity because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-discharge_lamp (see nitrogen). And computer-y stuff.
• Symbol is a circuitboard.
• Randomly cutting power to things should be common.
• Actually, cut the illusions. You get green light and that is all.
• You get some storage and computing stuff in your head. 1GB of storage and half a GB of RAM is the absolute maximum I’d give. Relatedly, very small operating systems as well as compression algorithms are just better here. Also, this means there was a bit of programming happening before any computers existed, so we can probably get a 2016 computing level a few decades earlier.

Yellow:

• could maybe be healing because “wealth”, “noncombativeness”, and “blood plasma”.
• Maybe also faking biometrics and doing some custom bioengineering? Which should be theoretically powerful but also take weeks at the earliest because plants don’t grow that quickly. Also, you probably are limited to modifying existing organisms.
• Yellow mages probably skew fairly trans (and towards other, rarer types of biohackers), and also are likely to have a past history of genetic disabilities of the sort that could be fixed with yellowmagery.
• Symbol: Droplet or double helix, probably.
• …pricey to hire, noncombative, likely to skew altruistic, likely to skew trans, is this the rationalist mage subtype?
• Also, radishes are edible and grow quickly and you can grow them indoors, but they’re not a super-popular vegetable so it’s not super-likely that kids will eat them when you’re not looking.
• Why is yellow better for self-modding one’s genome and so on than for modifying other people’s? Maybe you have to be in contact with the organism the entire time, and you’re always in contact with yourself? Should still let plants be easy because they’re sm0l and can be safely strapped to your skin.

Key:

• Symbol is a black key because duh.
• Should definitely let you pick locks. But wait, if magic is well-known people with really valuable stuff will need an alternate locking mechanism. You can also make locks that only people with specific (cryptographic?) magic keys can open. Probably still brute-force-able, but you’d have to spend at least 48 hours next to the lock messing with it.
• Let’s give black mages illusion magic. Light, ofc. Also sound. This can get PAINFULLY LOUD but not to the point of damaging any well-made structure. Teeechnically you can also use it to shield yourself from loud stuff, but multiple effects are hard. Many black mages wear heavy-duty ear protection.
• Probably involved in some myths. Explains why dragons

Do people get one color or two colors? Probably just one, but cooperative casting should be common. Combining any two of CMY gets obvious results. CK = teal, MK = purple, YK = …beige? olive? bronze? brass?

You probably get magic around 20 or so? This shouldn’t be a hard limit, but I don’t want people to be born with it. People should definitely be able to choose their magic type. Also, it should be rare. Do we have magical creatures? Possible magic-acquisition method is “finding (pretty minor) magical creatures and doing nice things for them such that they choose to give you their magic upon death”. I don’t want the existence of magic itself to be secret.

“If you want to solve a problem… {tell a cyan mage you’ll be impressed when they solve it,
- find a yellowmage likely to consider it a problem according to their values, talk to them, and wait a year - .”