Your periodic reminder that you can use a color or something else besides 'dark' or 'black' to denote your fantasy construct as evil.

You'll make your work a lot less boring if you do so.

While it has a lot of work to do in other ways, I do love the way Warhammer uses Red, Blue, Purple, and Green as color associations for their evil chaos gods.

'dark' -> 'evil' has a lot of problems!

On top of all those problems...'dark' as a word to express evil is overloaded, overused and bland.

When you want to make your fantasy thing a hyberbolic evil, the best thing for you to do is use words that depict what is out of control.

That makes it more vivid and evocative.

ultimately, people act like inclusion and good craft are separate things...but inclusion *is* good craft. Taking that extra step to be thoughtful and specific about your elements is how you make them shine.

yes, it definitely feels inconvenient and painful to work on, and yes you will likely mess up more than once...but failures and compromises are always the cost of craft. You need to wrestle with these things and tease them out to grow as a designer and a human.

Here is the thing: once you start colorizing your evil, what is to stop you from colorizing your good?

Once you colorize those, isn't your fantasy world suddenly more vivid, colorful and distinct?

Not here to label you bad or anything if you've used 'dark' as a stand-in for evil...I've done it! It's a widely used and typical convention.

Take this thread as encouragement for your next thing.

Maybe your current thing!

Once we know better, we do better.

One of my bucket list "one day" sort of books is getting together with designers and historians to talk about using color theory and cultural color associations for use in game design/fiction.

Very firmly in the "Dream" category, but I feel it would be super helpful.