You can paint certain Bifröst attributes using color sets on emitter and accelerator objects. This lets you vary attributes like density or influence across the mesh surface.
The vertex color map's values range from 0.0 (black) to 1.0 (white) and act as a multiplier for the corresponding value set in the Attribute Editor. If you have not painted any map, the default map value is 1.0 so the full value set in the Attribute Editor is used.
The default map color is white, so apply darker colors to decrease the attribute value.