@ZacD this is what I thought originally, which makes me think the game I'm dealing with has a non-standard implementation. If we are talking about a spaceship for example, the diffuse should be able to look like the engines are turned off, that way the RGB glow map influence can be added to the base diffuse texture (say as…
Full color glow maps are necessary if you want the "off color" and the "glow color" to be different. Otherwise you could get away with using the diffuse/base color as the color of the glow, and the greyscale as the relative intensity.