# Tone

**Confident fantasy stylization with muted weight.** Substantial enough for adults, accessible enough for anyone, never juvenile or edgy. The hand-painted fantasy illustration tradition (Brom at his subdued moments, classical fantasy book art) translated to the late-90s pixel art era.

## Reference triangulation

The mood is the intersection of three primary references:

| Reference | Contribution |
|---|---|
| **WoW** | Stylized exaggeration for readability — chunky pauldrons, fat gems, weighty pommels, silhouettes that read at a glance. Confident proportions, not realism. |
| **Quake** | Muted earthen palette dominated by browns / sepias / rust-reds with restrained accent colors. Materials look weathered, real, lived-in. Adult seriousness without edginess. |
| **Machinarium** | Atmospheric environmental storytelling — every workshop tells you something about who works there. Warm interior glows against cooler exteriors. Wordless mood via lighting and texture, not subject matter. |

Modern reference points that hit this exact mood:
- **Bastion / Transistor / Hades (Supergiant)** — closest active match. Stylized illustration, muted-but-warm palette, atmospheric lighting, accessible-but-mature.
- **Stoneshard** — pixel-art-specific reference: Diablo-influenced gritty stylized fantasy that stops short of grimdark.
- **Tunic / Death's Door** — broadly accessible without being childish, confident art direction, small-scale fantasy with weight.

## What "muted weight" means per surface

### Palette weighting
The 256-color palette is locked, but the *application* leans muted. Materials use earthy ranges — leather browns, iron grays, oxidized greens, ember oranges. Effect ranges use muted magical colors:
- Poison: sickly olive, not lurid neon-green
- Fire: warm ember-amber, not arcade orange
- Holy: dusty gold, not pure white
- Curse: bruised wine, not vibrant purple
- Cold: foggy slate-blue, not pure cyan
- Arcane: faded lapis, not electric blue

The palette is rich enough to support both vivid and muted readings — we always pick the muted reading.

### Backdrops
Warm hearth-light interiors, smoky and lived-in. Workshops have texture — tools hanging, half-finished projects on benches, rust on the bellows, candle smoke staining the ceiling. Zones are atmospheric and weather-affected — the Mire is foggy gray-green, not poison-neon green; the Ironwood is overcast and rust-red, not bright autumn. Machinarium's "every room is a story."

### Items
WoW-style chunky silhouettes for readability — fat gems, weighty pommels, presence. But Quake-style material treatment — iron has rust spots, leather is creased, wood is grain-textured. Enchanted items glow as a soft warm ember, not a video-game halo.

### Characters
Stylized but with weight. Real faces with slightly idealized proportions. WoW silhouette discipline — class reads at thumbnail size (the soldier visibly has thick pauldrons; the alchemist visibly has a bottle-laden belt). Not chibi, not realistic, not grimdark.

### Writing voice
Middle register. Atmospheric, occasionally dry, never quippy.

> *Theodric stumbled into a lurkwight nest. Mira pulled him out, but Theora's tincture was lost in the muck.*

Not too juvenile ("OMG Theodric almost died!").
Not too edgy ("Theodric was DEVOURED in a hideous orgy of carnage.").
Not too purple ("Theodric, our brave warrior, encountered a foul beast...").
Just: stuff happened, here's what happened, here's what it cost. Confident, terse, atmospheric.

Patron dialog: courtly, dry, stakes feel real but not melodramatic.
Item flavor text: evocative, terse, no winking at the player.

### Audio
The Diablo II Tristram / Machinarium piano / Bastion plucked-string school, plus the Everquest Kelethin lineage of slow modal woodwind-led ambient. Wordless atmospheric melodic beds. Workshop ambience layered underneath (hammer rings, bubbling, page turns). Not orchestral-heroic, not chiptune-nostalgic, not ambient-droning. Melancholy-warm-confident. See [15-audio.md](15-audio.md) for production approach.

### UI chrome
Burnished brass with riveted iron — something a craftsman would actually make. Not gold-filigree (too high-fantasy cliché), not skull-and-bones (too grim), not flat-modern (wrong era). Substantial, weighty buttons. Serif text with weight (Bookman, Garamond, or a chosen fantasy serif). No calligraphy.

## What we're explicitly avoiding

- **Comical / mobile-game cute** (Hay Day, Clash Royale aesthetic)
- **Grimdark / edgy** (Darkest Dungeon's narrator pitched up to 11)
- **Juvenile humor** (winking at the player, video-game-isms in the text)
- **High-fantasy purple** (every NPC speaks like a Renaissance Faire performer)
- **Photorealistic** (loses the era reference and the AI-look-erasure trick)
- **Saturated cartoon palette** (loses the muted gravitas)

## The tone matrix one-liner

*Confident fantasy stylization with muted weight — substantial enough for adults, accessible enough for anyone, never juvenile or edgy.*