A ttrpg style guide is a short document setting out the writing conventions to follow in a product or line of products.
Some writing issues are clearly right or wrong, like typos or weird punctuation. But some are style choices: you can decide which way you’ll jump. For instance, how will you use dashes in sentences? Will you write out numbers? Will you capitalise some terms?
I have a little template document that I give to clients if they don’t have a style guide yet. They fill it in and we go back and forth if needed to finalise it. For most small-press projects it fits easily into two pages.
(Sometimes projects have a style guide for visual design. That’s a different thing. We’re only talking about text here.)
Why you need one
The key reason is consistency. Especially for projects that may contain a lot of specialised system and setting terms, or that have been worked on by a team of people with different awareness and focus. A lot of variation can find its way in.
That variation will be jarring to the reader, interrupting the flow and looking unprofessional. Readers will spot that you don’t seem to know what you’re doing, and that can damage the reputation of the product and publisher. There are enough hurdles in marketing products without adding more!
So you need a common reference point.
As an editor, and especially at the proofreading stage for final quality control, I need to know the definitive way the text should be done so I can correct to that standard.
Style choice examples
The first thing you set down, for products in English, is whether you’re using US or UK (or possibly others, though I’ve not seen it done). That sets a lot of underlying stuff about word use and punctuation.
I always push the basic level of inclusive language: persons of undefined gender are ‘they’, not ‘he’. There are lots of undefined persons in rpgs: ‘the player’ and ‘the GM’, for a start. (And getting caught up in ‘he or she’ can be consigned to decades past.)
How will you use bold and italic for emphasis? You don’t want to overdo these, but they’re handy layout tools for drawing the eye. For instance it’s common to use bold for the first introduction of a term.
Game terms that are handled a particular way should have notes for their spelling and capitalisation. Some may be unfamiliar words, for example fantasy place names. It’s common to capitalise key system terms, especially when they are ordinary words and you want to make it clear when you’re talking about system elements, like Hope vs hope. (When I worked on Warhammer FRP, that line had a substantial style guide with a lot of system and setting terms that had to be used correctly.)
Notes on using them
A style guide is a simple text document that can be shared to everyone who needs it. In a multi-person project you’ll want one person to have ownership of this document and manage any updates.
Remember that a ttrpg style guide should be concise. I’ve seen one from a major rpg publisher (not the one mentioned above) that read like the work of a frustrated novel writer. The point is to be quick and easy to find style rules and understand what they’re saying.
It can be a living document, updated over time. But if you want to do that you need good communication with your stakeholders, because it’s intended as a dependable foundation, and if it keeps changing you’ll get a mob with pitchforks. If your project is just one creator and one editor, you can find things that need to be added as you go through the chapters and agree them with each other — that works OK.
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