Concept: The Positive and Negative Planes

I had originally intended to accompany this post with a micro-setting I'm tentatively calling Shadow Mars and Crystal Mars, but I've been super busy with work lately and just haven't had the time or mental energy to give that a full writeup. I include at the bottom of this post a very brief blurb on Shadow Mars, not even including Crystal Mars, that I will hopefully expand upon in a future post. Some of the details may change in the process, there are a few things that don't quite feel right with the concept yet. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

The Positive and Negative Planes

As I've discussed before, I'm always fascinated by the idea of elements, the features of a universe at their most reduced (or nearly most- more on that later), see materials, phantasmos key concepts, weird & wonderful loot, tama-dama collectible egg battle game. There's nothing wrong with the traditional alchemical elements (Fire, Water, Earth, Air) or Taoist elements (Fire, Water, Metal, Wood, Ground), but these are rooted in our own world. Admittedly, it is hard to seriously conceive of a world with non-traditional elements since that would make it a fundamentally different, alien thing, but it is, to me, so much more provocative that way. A world of Impossible Light, Absolute Solid, Anti-Information, and Liquid Starfire; or Ectoplasm, Phlogiston, Yeast, and Lymph, has the kind of potential that only comes from that which is near-inconceivable.

For this reason, I've found the idea of the Positive and Negative planes in D&D / Planescape to be both intriguing and also disappointing. I should acknowledge that I have not read much of the source material directly and am going more off of descriptions I've seen elsewhere, so it's possible that it's much more interesting than I give it credit for. But at the end of the day, as best as I can tell, the D&D concept of Positive and Negative basically just maps to life and death, or all-ness vs. nothingness. As with the traditional elements, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, and I think it can be done in interesting ways (or subverted, such as with my Cancerverse), but it just seems too... obvious. Positive and Negative as absolutist elemental/planar concept should be like the sub-atoms of the universe, so life and death is fine, but what if it's something else?

But if Positive and Negative are not black and white; life and death, all and none, then what are they? I knew that I wanted to play with colors, to me that's an important part of elements. But being that Positive and Negative are like the sub-atoms of the elements themselves, they shouldn't necessarily map to colors per se, but to the origins of colors. While Positive could be mapped to white and color reflection, and Negative mapped to black and color absorption, it is more interesting to broaden it to Positive mapped to additive colors and Negative mapped to subtractive colors (color theory). 

However, then I started to think about a world of entropy (additive colors = starlight = thermodynamic entropy) and anti-entropy (I dunno, black holes, wormholes transferring energy across universes, something like that), which quickly devolved to something more or less akin to life and death or all and none anyway, albeit maybe a bit of a subversion like the Cancerverse, which isn't really what I wanted.

Then I tried thinking about physics. Non-fiction is always a good source of inspiration. I should say that I know very little about physics. But I was thinking about how, at least to my minimal understanding, Positive and Negative in physics don't really mean anything. Or rather, it's not so much that Positive and Negative reflect two different binary states like 0 and 1, but that they are opposites from the origin along a dimension, like -1 and 1, which are in an absolute sense the same thing ( abs(-1)==1 ).

So then I started thinking about how to combine the idea of additive and subtractive color with binary logic, and that led me to anaglyph 3D; those old-school red and cyan 3D glasses. In most cases, one lens is an additive color such as red or blue, and the other is a mixture of the two other additive colors to produce an opposing subtractive color, so cyan (subtractive or blue+green) against red (additive), or yellow (subtractive or red+green) against blue (additive). So these lenses act as opposing filters [1 0 0] in one eye, [0 1 1] in the other eye, the union of which is [1 1 1]. The vectors themselves aren't binary per se, they just map to Red Green Blue (or Magenta Yellow Cyan), but they are binary-valenced and the end visualization is a binary OR operation, or union. That's not actually totally correct for various reasons, but that's how it all came together in my head, in any case.

So we have Positive and Negative elements which are like the sub-atoms of the other elements, have an interesting pseudo-science schtick, and also a cool retro aesthetic, but they aren't inherently meaningful (by design). So what makes them interesting?

What makes them interesting is what can be revealed when one separates or combines their perception of the planes. You see, reality as we know it is merely the overlap between the Positive and Negative planes, but much is misaligned or left off the intersection entirely. Special "anaglyph" lenses may be used to correct the misalignments, or singularly positively or negatively filtered lenses may reveal that which is hidden from reality, overlapping in space but existing only in one plane or the other.

And what does it mean for the elements themselves to be separable by Positive or Negative where there is no intrinsic meaning such as life and death or all and none mapped to them? What does it mean for life and consciousness? For magic and science? The answers to these questions will depend on the elements themselves, but independent of anything else, isn't this just a fascinating question?

Shadow Mars and Crystal Mars

The dead planet Mars; the red marble. Or so it seems to those on Earth. In fact, Mars is just as vibrant with life (of a sort), merely out of phase with reality as we know it. It exists disproportionately in the cyan Negative Plane, and so what we see in reality is mostly its red Positive form, and not even all of it, at that. Although life exists on Mars on both planes, let us first discuss Shadow Mars.

Through a Positive-filtering lens, usually cyan-colored, one may see Mars as it exists on the Negative Plane: Shadow Mars. The red planet appears black, and its cyan occupants shimmer white against the cyan sky and black planet like an inversion of a starry night sky. Thin rivers of iridescent azure vein across the twinkling lights of cyan cities like connecting the dots of astrological formations, pulsing with schools of fish and nixies overwatched by the vampire lords.