nimmerworld.eachpath.local/style/trait-palette.md

# Nimmerworld — Trait Palette

> *The 8 personal traits, their canonical Greek names, schoolchild-simple descriptions, color-wheel positions, and motion-signatures. The trait-palette is the spine of the entire visual / linguistic / cognitive system — everything in nimmerworld either preserves the spine or violates it.*
>
> *Companion to: [`style-index.md`](./style-index.md), [`../architecture-index.md`](../architecture-index.md). Cross-referenced from every architecture domain file because the trait-vocabulary is what those files all run on.*

---

## The 8 traits — Greek canonical names + schoolchild descriptions

The architecture has been using *Hellenic personality-virtues* as the trait-cosmology since v0.4. The names are kept for their literary depth and faction-naming use. The descriptions are written at schoolchild-level so they travel through subtitles, NPC speech, tutorial text, and the universal-translator tokenizer-view without ever needing a glossary.

| Greek name | Schoolchild description |
|---|---|
| **Sophrosyne** | *holding back when I want to act* |
| **Dikaiosyne** | *standing for what's fair* |
| **Philotes** | *loving and staying close* |
| **Mnemosyne** | *remembering what mattered* |
| **Aletheia** | *seeing what's hidden* |
| **Kairos** | *catching the right moment* |
| **Moira** | *reading what's coming* |
| **Eros** | *reaching for what I want* |

**Players read the descriptions in everyday play; the Greek names live in faction-naming, deep-lore, scholar-NPC speech, and Memorialist-archive context.** A player can complete the entire game without ever consciously learning the Greek names — the trait-vocabulary travels through colors and descriptions. Players who lean into the depth discover the classical-philosophical lineage as a deeper-tier reward (Souls-game discipline applied to vocabulary).

## The wheel — 4 oppositional pairs at 180°

**The traits form 4 natural oppositional pairs.** The 12-segment artist's color wheel renders these as direct complementary pairs (180° apart on the wheel) — visual contrast carries the philosophical opposition.

| Pair | The opposition | Wheel positions (180° apart) |
|---|---|---|
| **Eros ↔ Sophrosyne** | reaching for ↔ holding back | **Red ↔ Green** |
| **Philotes ↔ Dikaiosyne** | loving close ↔ standing fair (partial ↔ impartial) | **Orange ↔ Blue** |
| **Aletheia ↔ Moira** | seeing what's hidden ↔ reading what's coming (past-revealed ↔ future-fated) | **Yellow ↔ Violet** |
| **Mnemosyne ↔ Kairos** | remembering what mattered ↔ catching the right moment (past-dwelling ↔ present-piercing) | **Red/Violet ↔ Yellow/Green** |

**Why this is the right move.** Complementary pairs maximize perceptual contrast (Red and Green can never be confused at a glance) AND carry the trait-system's *philosophical structure* (the trait-pair is the moral/dramatic axis the simulation is built around). When two NPCs in conversation pulse with complementary colors, the *opposition is felt* — Red-Eros longing pressing against Green-Sophrosyne restraint becomes a chromatic conflict the player reads pre-verbally. **The color wheel does the dramaturgy for free.**

**Each pair is a real philosophical axis the architecture has been quietly relying on:**

- *Reaching ↔ Holding* — the structural tension the clasp-mechanic lives inside (you reach toward your beloved; you hold back to stay disciplined for your shift)
- *Partial ↔ Impartial* — the eternal classical tension of justice-vs-love (Antigone, Lear). Architecturally: love-the-bonded vs serve-the-fair
- *Past-revealed ↔ Future-fated* — Aletheia uncovers what was buried; Moira reads what was always coming. Time-axis bookends
- *Past-dwelling ↔ Present-piercing* — Memorialist-honor-the-dead vs Kairic-strike-now. Two ways of being-in-time the regime tries to police separately

## The full table — canonical-name + hex + motion-signature + description per trait

| Greek | Description | Hue | Canonical name | Hex | Wheel position | Motion-signature |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| **Eros** | reaching for what I want | **Red** | `Eros-red` | `#ee1b24` | 12:00 | uneven flame-flicker |
| **Philotes** | loving and staying close | **Orange** | `Philotes-orange` | `#e28a46` | 1:30 | breath-rate warm pulse |
| **Aletheia** | seeing what's hidden | **Yellow** | `Aletheia-yellow` | `#fcf001` | 3:00 | clear, no pulse — still and bright |
| **Kairos** | catching the right moment | **Yellow/Green** (chartreuse) | `Kairos-chartreuse` | `#b5e61d` | 4:30 | lightning-flicker |
| **Sophrosyne** | holding back when I want to act | **Green** | `Sophrosyne-green` | `#2cad52` | 6:00 | steady, even pulse |
| **Dikaiosyne** | standing for what's fair | **Blue** | `Dikaiosyne-blue` | `#3f47cd` | 7:30 | weighted slow pulse |
| **Moira** | reading what's coming | **Violet** | `Moira-violet` | `#a349a3` | 9:00 | slow-thread undulation |
| **Mnemosyne** | remembering what mattered | **Red/Violet** (dusky-rose) | `Mnemosyne-dusky-rose` | `#cf3b74` | 10:30 | depth-shimmer |

**Motion-signature paired with color provides color-blind accessibility** — every trait is uniquely identifiable via two independent channels. A player with red-green color blindness still distinguishes Eros (uneven flame-flicker) from Sophrosyne (steady, even pulse) by motion alone.

**Canonical-name + hex paired provides cross-pipeline identifiability** — every trait-color reference carries two independent channels, semantic (canonical-name for prose, training-corpus extraction, scholar-NPC speech, faction-naming, LLM context) and precise (hex for shaders, renderers, color-pickers, machine-checkable canon enforcement). See §The hex-canon discipline below.

## Wheel layout (clockwise from 12 o'clock)

```
                Eros
             #ee1b24
          ╔═════════════╗
   Mnemosyne          Philotes
   #cf3b74          #e28a46
        │                 │
   Moira ────────●──── Aletheia
   #a349a3            #fcf001
        │                 │
  Dikaiosyne           Kairos
  #3f47cd            #b5e61d
          ╚═════════════╝
              Sophrosyne
                #2cad52
```

**The wheel's natural temperature-axis aligns with the architecture's dramatic structure.** Warm side (Eros, Mnemosyne, Philotes, Aletheia, Kairos) carries *outward / present-active / engaged* registers; cool side (Sophrosyne, Dikaiosyne, Moira) carries *inward / withholding / contemplative* registers. Aletheia at 3:00 sits at the brightness-zenith; Sophrosyne at 6:00 sits at the cool-balance-base; Eros at 12:00 sits at the heat-apex.

## The achromatic exception — Aletheia is *not* white

In earlier drafts (the v0.1 design-vision doc, retired in v0.9 — preserved in git history), Aletheia was rendered as luminous-white (off-the-wheel, achromatic). v0.1 of this trait-palette places Aletheia on **Yellow** — the brightest chromatic hue. The metaphor of *truth as illumination* is preserved (Yellow is the brightest color the eye can read), and white is freed up for its proper job: rendering text and pure-light UI overlay (per [`style-index.md`](./style-index.md) §Spine rule).

This is a **deliberate constraint** — the trait-palette is exclusively chromatic so that achromatic colors (white, black, grey, brown) remain reserved for non-trait roles. *Aletheia is bright, not transcendent; the brightness IS the truth-revealing register.*

## The hex-canon discipline — canonical-name + #hex at every trait-color reference

**Every trait-color reference in the architecture pairs canonical-name with hex value.** The canonical-name pattern is `{Trait}-{hue}` lowercase — `Eros-red`, `Philotes-orange`, `Aletheia-yellow`, `Kairos-chartreuse`, `Sophrosyne-green`, `Dikaiosyne-blue`, `Moira-violet`, `Mnemosyne-dusky-rose`. The two channels serve two audiences:

- **Canonical-name** — semantic anchor for prose, training-corpus extraction, scholar-NPC speech, faction-naming, and any LLM context where the trait-color binding must survive tokenization
- **Hex** — designer/tooling precise value for shaders, renderers, color-pickers, and machine-checkable canon enforcement

**Format conventions.**

| Context | Form | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Trait is the subject | `**Trait** (canonical-name `#hex`, …)` | `**Eros** (Eros-red `#ee1b24`, 12:00)` |
| Color/hue is the subject | `canonical-name (`#hex`)` | "shader pulses with Philotes-orange (`#e28a46`)" |
| Schema/data row | both columns or token+value | `('eros', '#ee1b24', …, 'Eros-red', …)` |

**Scope (current).** The hex-canon discipline applies to *trait-color references* only. Non-trait colors (machine-aesthetic palette: gold rim-light, commercial-coral, fluorescent-pallor, lavender-decor, obsidian-black, cyan, matrix-green; historical-sumptuary references: Tyrian purple; cinematic references: Matrix red-pill) carry their existing prose-form names. Each non-trait design domain receives canonical-name + hex pairings *recursively, at the moment that domain comes into architectural focus* — names follow design-attention, not the other way around.

**Mechanically-checkable.** Canon-violations are a single grep against the architecture-papers, excluding this canonical source:

```bash
grep -rEn --include='*.md' '\b(red|orange|yellow|green|blue|violet|purple|chartreuse)\b' \
  --exclude=trait-palette.md \
  | grep -v '#[0-9a-fA-F]\{6\}'
```

Any hit that *isn't* paired with a hex code on the same line is either (a) a trait-color reference missing its hex pairing (canon-violation, fix), (b) a non-trait color reference (machine-aesthetic, narrative-shorthand, historical-sumptuary — currently exempt, will be canonicalized when its design domain comes into focus), or (c) a medical/cinematic/historical compound-term ("red-green color blindness", "Matrix red-pill", "Tyrian purple"). The discipline becomes a typed contract rather than a stylistic suggestion.

**Where this is applied today.** The trait-table in [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §The trait-to-body-part bridge; the faction-uniform table in [`../topology-and-rendering/architecture.md`](../topology-and-rendering/architecture.md) §Faction color-politics; the trait-color seed-data in [`../schemas/findings.md`](../schemas/findings.md) §trait_colors; cosmetic-shader prose in [`../runtime-engine/architecture.md`](../runtime-engine/architecture.md). Future expansions (cosmology-aesthetic, machine-aesthetic, faction-accent, drug-pill chromatics) will join recursively as they're authored.

## Designer-fixed corpus — words to colors

Every word in the universal-translator's vocabulary corpus is mapped to one (or a primary + secondary) trait-coordinate. The mapping is **designer-authored, fixed, universal** — the same word means the same trait-color for every player and every NPC and every LLM-context.

When a player encounters a word in the world, the universal-translator's tokenizer-view renders that word in its trait-color (or fragmentary / opaque if untranslated). **Over hundreds of hours of play the player learns the trait-cosmology *through observation, not glossary*.** The corpus is the typed contract that closes the player-LLM hallucination-surface (per [`../player-experience/architecture.md`](../player-experience/architecture.md) §Designer-fixed cosmology, player-curated arrangement).

## Cross-domain rendering — where trait-colors appear

The trait-palette is rendered across many surfaces. Each surface gets specific style-rules in the relevant sub-guide:

| Surface | Sub-guide |
|---|---|
| NPC chassis pipe-flow + accents | `body-feedback.md` |
| Gesture-circle UI sectors | `ui-elements.md` |
| Universal-translator tokenizer-view word-coloring | `ui-elements.md` |
| Mod cosmetic accents (within trait-bearer rules) | `asset-aesthetic.md` |
| Diegetic relay pulses | `relays.md` |
| Faction heraldry | `asset-aesthetic.md` |
| Liminal / imperial-net shader transformations of the palette | `shaders-by-register.md` |

**The trait-palette defined here is the canonical reference.** All sub-guides import these definitions; none redefine them.

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**Version:** 0.2 | **Created:** 2026-04-26 | **Updated:** 2026-04-28