Erfh: Information Age: Motifs Chart

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Magic vs Earth

Magic's color pie focuses more on antagonism and duality. That makes for great flavor and conflict. However, that doesn't fit Earth's flavor and design goal. Abstract ideas like good vs evil, fire vs ice, nature vs artifice, smart vs dumb, give wrong ideas about earthly beings. Instead, Earth will emphasize the specialties of each motif and the unions of those motifs. That is, Magic has colors and conflict, whereas Earth has motifs and unions. That said, color and motif will sometimes be used interchangeably for this project. Moreover, while Earth doesn't play into the allied vs enemy colors, we will still organize them in such a way to allow cycles and half cycles.

Aspire to victory

How to divide the motifs? One influence are civilization simulation games. Civ games basically allow five different paths to victory: domination, technological, cultural, diplomatic, and economic. We translate these to five major traits: dominance, knowledge, creativity, community, and production. This not only fits perfectly for human civilizations, but also for other biological ecosystems. For instance, rats and cockroaches aren't selfish and evil (hence black). They just excel at adapting to their environments (creativity). Magic's red creatures fight because they're dumb and rash. Earth's beings fight because they crave conquest, are territorial in nature, and want to display their superiority (dominance).

This method of division grants depth to each motif, and each motif is well-defined. Also importantly there is no meta-color. For instance, in Magic, many new unexplored mechanics and abilities are dumped into blue's pie because it is the meta-color. Without such a meta-color, we can avoid situations where one motif hoards too many abilities while other motifs become too shallow.

Motifs Chart

The following chart shows the five motifs' central characteristic, as well as their main victory goal and relationships with other motifs.

Reading the chart

The 1st layer are the central trait of the motifs and the color shorthand in parentheses. The 2nd layer further divides the traits. The 3rd layer shows the relationships and unions with each of the four other motifs. One of those unions also signify the motif's victory type. For instance, Knowledge's aspires for a technological victory, which is somewhat influenced by the Production motif.

There no hard-wired allied or opposing motifs. However, for the sake of visual aid, organization, and cycle design, the order here put the motifs closest to their own ideals. For instance, Creativity are closest to Knowledge and Community, since Creativity's main goal is cultural victory, and that most closely aligns with technological and diplomatic ideals.

Mechanics distribution

Updated on 12 Nov 2018 by amuseum