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Most depictions of anger without color are actually showing frustration instead. Color makes the difference. Image<\/a> by dadaworks<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n This is something of a filler article. The one that I’ve been working on all week on Futuristic and Alien tech is around the 10K words already but isn’t quite going to be ready in time. I thought about splitting it into two, but decided that this would dramatically weaken its value.<\/p>\n My gateway into this subject started with Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade Of Pale” and the descriptive passage seen all too often, “White with fear”.<\/p>\n There are degrees of fear. There’s a slight nervousness, (full) nervousness, afraid, extremely afraid, and terrified. Using the adjective “White” so early in this progression cheapens it when we have the perfectly serviceable “pale” available as an alternative.<\/p>\n Why not save “White” for the more extreme cases, and use “Pale” and a qualifying adjective like “Slightly” in its place?<\/p>\n Slight Nervousness = Slightly Pale Discriminating use of language becomes a code to communicate the emotional state.<\/p>\n Does this track with the reality of human emotional responses? Why “White” in the first place?<\/p>\n Fear causes blood to withdraw from the blood vessels closest to the skin, creating the pallor. This is a survival trait – when we’re afraid, there is a threat present, a threat might be able to harm us, thus the constriction of blood vessels when we are afraid reduces blood loss should be actually be wounded. The more acute the fear, the greater the perceived danger, and the stronger the physiological reaction.<\/p>\n Yes, that makes sense.<\/p>\n This operates in almost exactly the opposite way, Anger causes adrenaline to surge, which signals ‘action stations’ to all sorts of biological processes, all aimed at getting the body ready to take action of some sort. Some of those increase the supply of oxygenated blood to the muscles, and to do that, blood vessels get deconstricted, which also permits more blood supply to get closer to the skin, causing the redness.<\/p>\n But there’s a complication: other causes can have similar effects, for quite different reasons. When our bodies are cold, blood flow increases to the outer surface because it carries heat from the central body to help us resist that cold.<\/p>\n A little colder again, and involuntary mini-contractions of surface muscles cause shivering, with the work expended by those muscles creating additional warmth. And this response is gradated – there’s an occasional slight shiver all the way up to uncontrollable constant shivering, causing the teeth to chatter, and to the point where it actively interferes with the performance of actions, and completely destroys any semblance of precision in doing so.<\/p>\n That happens because the heat loss being experienced by the body has reached the point of being as big a threat, or worse, when compared to anything else that’s out there.<\/p>\n Side-note: GMs too frequently ignore this effect when inflicting cold-powered monsters and threats on characters. Just being around one should cause a drop in attack chances, doubled or tripled with ranged attacks, and maybe a -1 or 2 per hit die loss of HP. And those penalties should become attack bonuses for the creature adapted to those temperatures. I’m not talking about Polar Bears and the like – but things like Cold Elementals, definitely.\n<\/ol>\n This extreme level of shivering doesn’t last very long in terms of external temperature, because the body has another response to more extreme cold than this – it starts to withdraw circulation from the outer limbs both to protect from blood loss in the event of severe frostbite and to prioritize keeping the central systems – heart and lungs and so on – functioning. NOT shivering is a very<\/em> bad sign.<\/p>\n The lack of blood supply cripples muscular responses. We become weak as kittens, basically, and the more extreme the cold, the worse this gets.<\/p>\n The best way to represent this in game mechanics is to establish strata of thermal impact – every 10\u00b0C colder causes STRength to halve, for example. Or it might be 5\u00b0C, or 15\u00b0C – that’s up to you. Or you might use a ratio of 2\/3:<\/p>\n Base -0\u00b0C: STR 18 remains. Maybe down 1 point to 17. At some point, the STR becomes less than what is needed to carry the boy’s weight, and we lose the ability to stand up. At about half that STR, we can’t even crawl. Death becomes ever more certain.\n<\/ol>\n It must be remembered that the human body is a heat engine. It ‘burns’ food for energy, giving it an internal temperature of 37\u00b0C (98.6\u00b0F), considerably warmer than a comfortable external temperature. The body has several mechanisms to keep it within a very narrow window at which it operates most efficiently, so the internal temperature remains relatively consistent as much as possible. External temperatures interfere with these cooling and warming processes by restricting their effectiveness.<\/p>\n The cold response messes up our nice little fear structure by introducing another physiological reaction that makes the skin pale. But we usually get around that by messing up a different emotional state’s description instead – something I’ll get to when I discuss “Blue”.<\/p>\n Anyway, getting back to Red, excitement and embarrassment can also cause skin to flush red. Excitement is easy to understand, because that can also cause an adrenaline rush. Embarrassment is a little trickier – I suspect that it triggers a fight-or-flight response to escape the situation, and that in turn triggers adrenaline, and away we go from there.<\/p>\n The last cause of reddening of the skin are fevers and inflammations. A fever means that the body is fighting off an illness or infection internally, and one of the ways it does this is by raising the internal temperature to the point where reproduction of the invading pathogen is compromised, even though doing so also compromises the body’s ability to function. As the infection worsens, this response gets increasingly worse, to the point of induced delirium and even the risk of death – because a risk of death is better than a certainty of death, and change of survival is also better than a certainty of death. So extreme measures are justified when the danger is great enough.<\/p>\n When the internal temperature goes outside the range of ‘normal’, a different biological response takes place – additional blood gets rushed to the extremities. not to warm them, but to cool them. Physiological responses are often tugs of war between two outcomes because a nuanced increase on one side or the other permits a higher level of control over the net effect.<\/p>\n Skin inflammation occurs when the immune system responds to triggers like allergens, irritants, infections, or injuries, resulting in rashes, redness, itching, and swelling. In most cases, this is localized to the site of contact, but some poisons can cause heart or breathing difficulties, which the body attempts to combat by increasing heart rate, rapid breathing, etc. One of the communication mechanisms used to do so is a release of adrenaline – either as a primary response, or an associated response, it doesn’t matter. So you get the usual physiological effects of that response, including a flushed appearance and more rapid breathing.<\/p>\n Oh, and a post-script – some people are naturally red-faced, having “ruddy” complexions. A ruddy (reddish) complexion is generally caused by increased blood flow to the skin’s surface, chronic sun damage, or underlying skin conditions. Common factors include rosacea, acne, extreme temperatures, alcohol consumption, and genetic predisposition.<\/p>\n This introduces cultural impacts into the picture, just to complicate things further. If it is the culture – because the populace live in a colder environment – to have a shot of alcoholic spirits with each meal for the warming effect – that naturally predisposes the populace to a ruddy complexion, or rosy cheeks, for example.<\/p>\n In fantasy milieus, this is exacerbated by the fact that people avoided drinking water as much as possible, because it wasn’t what we would consider ‘clean’. As a general rule, in England in the middle ages, it was far safer to drink beers and ales, because the process of producing them killed the pathogens in the water used. Those that followed this prescription had a greater likelihood of surviving. So this cultural impact was very real.<\/p>\n In general, then, a flushed or reddish appearance can have many causes, and we typically look to other clues to distinguish between them – in particular, facial expressions, speech inflections, and environmental and cultural factors.<\/p>\n Being “Red With Anger” is a conclusion. As such, GMs should avoid using the phrase unless they want to imply that the character observing the condition has also noted these other clues.<\/em> If you can’t make that deduction for whatever reason, it’s better to simply describe the effect – a face flushed red – and be prepared to manifest the clues in roleplay to let the characters reach that conclusion on their own.<\/p>\n It also has to be said that this opens the door to misreading of situations, where the characters fail to note a particular clue for whatever reason, or misinterpret one, and so arrive at an incorrect conclusion – and that’s something the GM also has to be ready to deal with.<\/p>\n Feeling “Blue” is a cultural and psychological association that derives from 18th- and especially 19th-century literature. Blue is a “cool” color, often associated with the coldness of ice, water, and low, gloomy skies, which people psychologically link to cold, distant, or sad emotions.<\/p>\n But that’s only true of darker shades of the color – a bright sky blue has entirely different connotations, which generally get ignored.<\/p>\n Because the association is an artificial one, without a physiological basis, and because the color is generally associated with being “cool” toward something, the color is often expropriated to symbolize coldness and the reaction to cold temperatures.<\/p>\n This also means that the association is only generally true of Western cultures, and other cultures can have an entirely different interpretation. In a nutshell, then, the color blue is messy, and using it to describe an emotional state invokes the intersection point between the culture of the observed and the culture of the observer.<\/p>\n Unless a point is made of this, though, the observer will almost always ascribe the emotional context to whatever they are used to – so it remains a valid descriptive shorthand, albeit one built on assumptions of shaky validity.<\/p>\n It’s easy for Blue to be used to symbolize some other emotional state, like calmness and placidity, by a culture. When a member of such a culture describes someone as ‘feeling blue’, they mean that the person they are describing is cool and collected, but most people will misinterpret the code and react inappropriately to the signal. This can actually provide a window into the other culture when it is recognized, but that’s a trap for the GM – the cultural interpretation can’t just be tacked on to the culture, it has to make sense within that context, and that’s complicated and difficult to achieve.<\/p>\n So “Blue” either has to be used exclusively in terms of the cultural context of the audience – the players – or has to be extremely nuanced and reflective of very deep cultural world-building that even experts should be wary of.<\/p>\n Ancient Greek philosophers like Hippocrates believed human emotions were regulated by four humors (fluids). Envy was associated with an excess of bile, which was thought to produce a greenish tint in the skin, linking the feeling to a physical, sickly color.<\/p>\n Historically, green was used to represent illness, nausea, and decay – and that in turn was associated with the ‘toxic nature’ of envy and jealousy.<\/p>\n Enter Shakespeare. In Othello, he described jealousy as a “Green-eyed monster”, popularizing both that phrase and the general association of envy with the color.<\/p>\n Like Blue, then, there is a strong cultural context to the association, but one that has been gathering momentum from ancient times. But it will only accurately apply to a culture that derives from analogous origins. In China and Ireland, Green is considered a “lucky” color, and having a ‘green thumb’ has a completely different connotation.<\/p>\n Green is another color that has to be used with caution.<\/p>\n When you dig into it, you’ll find a lot of half-baked theories relating to the origins of this assciation and very little that’s definitive. Prior to 1856, there was no such connection – back then, it was associated with envy and jealousy (see “Green” above).<\/p>\n The War Of The Roses, loss of bladder control through fear, Christianity and the betrayal by Judas, and the Yolk in an Egg have all been put forward as origins, but the bottom line is that it seemed to come out of nowhere into general use in England all at once, and then spread throughout Western culture like wildfire.<\/p>\n The term “Yellow-bellied” is even more recent – 1924 to be exact. Before then, it was a sailor’s name for a half-caste (1867) and a Texas term for Mexican soldiers (1842, based on the color of their uniforms).<\/p>\n It’s also worth reflecting on the fact that yellow is often described as the color of gold, of sunlight, and of wheat and hence of bread – none of which are associated with cowardice in any way.<\/p>\n I searched Google and discovered a host of other color associations – but these are more in the context of symbolic representations through environments and the inducement of emotional states than descriptive of those states.<\/p>\n For completeness of coverage of the subject, though, here are the results:<\/p>\n Furthermore, Purple and Green are often associated with mystery and danger. Give an object a Purple or Green glow, and it automatically becomes more mysterious than the same object with a Reddish glow. That’s because fires give a reddish glow to the surroundings, and so we are more used to that association – but very little in nature gives a Purple or Green glow, so it automatically becomes symbolic of something stranger.<\/p>\n Blue-white – the color of lightning – automatically implies a greater magnitude of power than a monotone color.<\/p>\n In emotional terms, a Black glow (especially one that writhes or moves in some other strange fashion) is even more chilling and threatening. Darkness has long represented danger to humans, because an unknown number of threats can lurk in the dark, unnoticed until it is too late. Fear of the dark is literally programmed into our DNA from when we were tiny little mammals. A “Black Glow” connects directly with that primal fear of the unknown.<\/p>\n Some of the above is biological, and responses will be similar across all species, though shifted to whatever their blood color is. Lots of it is psychological or cultural, and that’s a lot more slippery a slope – but potentially even more useful.<\/p>\n If you start by mapping an association, for example “Green = Bond With Nature”, and then link that to a particular race, all sorts of cultural cues naturally fall into place (This is quite common with Elves in fantasy, but usually isn’t taken far enough).<\/p>\n The deeper the green of one’s clothing, the stronger the bond with nature that you are symbolizing. That, in turn, can have all sorts of emotional representations – “Survival Of The Fittest”, “Kill Or Be Killed,” and so on, which are often not considered in that light. Instead, most GMs focus on calmness and tranquility and a penchant for growing things – all valid interpretations, but somewhat done to death.<\/p>\n Green Jewelry can represent a “love of” nature, rather than a “bond with”” nature – a subtle but powerful distinction.<\/p>\n Shades of Blue can be associated with the Sky and the Oceans (some of which can be Green, adding another nuance to the preceding commentary). These can be symbolic of power, strength, implacability, order, and change, through the power of the oceans to erode even rock over time, and through the oceans and skies as the drivers of the weather. Lighter shades would be more indicative of order and responsiveness (weather) while darker blues are more about power, authority, and leadership.- if this association were to be mapped onto an Elvish culture.<\/p>\n Black could be the color of danger and mystery, Red symbolic of fighting against such dangers, and of the potential for destruction – so black for mages and red for soldiers. Silver could symbolize the stars, so silver on black could be appropriate for Elvish clergy.<\/p>\n If a race has Green blood, like Vulcans in Star Trek, you get a completely different ‘map’ of emotional and biological associations.<\/p>\n When describing these races, for example in campaign briefing documents, or when they are encountered by the PCs for the first time, there is a natural tendency for the GM who has thought about all this to explain it all to the players, in particular to spell out the associations. Resist this urge.<\/em><\/p>\n GMs should point out that their different nature and culture means that they have different emotional symbolism that is reflected in clothing and decoration and language – and then point out the one example that’s right in front of them – and leave it at that.<\/em><\/p>\n This tells the players that the GM has done the hard work of mapping out these symbolic associations, but leaves it to them to deduce the associations themselves based on their own observations.<\/em> This means that a player who pays attention and deduces the symbology correctly gains an advantage in responding to and reacting to the individuals that they encounter from the culture in question, deepening their bond with the game world – while those who do not can miss important clues and subtexts, deepening their characterization as having ‘blind spots’ no matter what it might say on their character sheet.<\/p>\n Either way, it’s a win for the campaign.<\/p>\n So take the time to think about the cultural association color-map every time you bring a new culture or sentient species into the game. It can enrich the experience far beyond the immediate impact of using different terminology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Colors are often associated with emotional states. Remapping them can create uniqueness for non-human races and cultures. This is something of a filler article. The one that I’ve been working on all week on Futuristic and Alien tech is around the 10K words already but isn’t quite going to be ready in time. I thought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54954,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[370,67,70,74,89,94,95],"tags":[377,155,109,127,172,218,146,165],"series":[],"class_list":["post-54955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-genres","category-dnd","category-gm-ing","category-mike","category-npcs-etc","category-ideas-and-inspiration","category-tools","tag-all-genres","tag-dd","tag-dm-advice","tag-inspiration","tag-npcs","tag-pathfinder","tag-running-encounters","tag-tools-techniques"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/dadaworks-losing-4040744.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1toiD-ein","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54955"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54955"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54957,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54955\/revisions\/54957"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54955"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=54955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}White With Fear<\/h3>\n
\n
\nNervousness = Slightly Pale
\nExtreme Nervousness = Pale
\nAfraid = Pale
\nPanic = Whitish
\nTerrified = White\n<\/ol>\nRed With Anger<\/h3>\n
\n
\n
\n
\nBase -5\u00b0C: STR 18 becomes 2\/3 x 18 = 12.
\nBase -10\u00b0C: STR 18 becomes 2\/3 x 12 = 8.
\nBase -15\u00b0C: STR 18 becomes 2\/3 x 8 = 5.33333, round to 5.
\nBase -20\u00b0C: STR 18 becomes 2\/3 x 5 = 3.33333, round to 3.
\nBase -25\u00b0C: STR 18 becomes 2\/3 x 3 = 2.
\nBase -30\u00b0C: STR 18 becomes 2\/3 x 2 = 1.33333, round to 1.
\n… and so on.\n<\/ul>\nBlue With Sadness<\/h3>\n
Green With Envy<\/h3>\n
Yellow and Cowardice<\/h3>\n
Other colors<\/h3>\n
\n
Let’s talk about non-humans<\/h3>\n
Beware the Infodump<\/h3>\n