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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,../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 — color + motion-signature + description per trait
| Greek | Description | Color (canonical hue) | Wheel position | Motion-signature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eros | reaching for what I want | Red | 12:00 | uneven flame-flicker |
| Philotes | loving and staying close | Orange | 1:30 | breath-rate warm pulse |
| Aletheia | seeing what's hidden | Yellow | 3:00 | clear, no pulse — still and bright |
| Kairos | catching the right moment | Yellow/Green (chartreuse) | 4:30 | lightning-flicker |
| Sophrosyne | holding back when I want to act | Green | 6:00 | steady, even pulse |
| Dikaiosyne | standing for what's fair | Blue | 7:30 | weighted slow pulse |
| Moira | reading what's coming | Violet | 9:00 | slow-thread undulation |
| Mnemosyne | remembering what mattered | Red/Violet (dusky-rose) | 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.
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 §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.
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 §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.
Version: 0.1 | Created: 2026-04-26 | Updated: 2026-04-26