Getting it Right (Whale): A Reef-erence to a Whale of a Style Sheet
Back in June, when I was a guest on Nadia Geagea Pupa’s podcast, The Editor’s Half Hour, a woman in the comments (I’m afraid I don’t know her name, and I’ve been unable to find said comment) asked if I would share the 150-page style sheet that I created for Blue Planet: Recontact, a cli-fi tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG). Nadia encouraged me to write about this behemoth, so she is partially to blame for this article. But seriously, thank you, Nadia, for cheering me on. I also want to thank Jennifer Povey for editing this as well as the truncated style sheet. I know how hard it can be to edit your own writing, and I’m grateful to have had a skilled editor look it over and make it shine.
A Little Bit About Blue Planet: Recontact
Blue Planet: Recontact is a hard science fiction game set in a universe which Jeff spent many years creating. There are three major points about Blue Planet that you should know. First, in the game humanity has not just spread across our solar system but also through a wormhole to another system, where a settlement was set up on a planet called Poseidon. Given its name, you won’t be surprised to learn that Poseidon, where most of the game takes place, is mostly covered in water. Second, whales have been “uplifted,” meaning that they can communicate with humans and have humanlike intelligence. They are hired by human-run companies, and some also run their own. Third, is the existence of the Global Ecology Organization (GEO), which was created in 2093 by the members of the United Nations. It was established to deal with a virus that had destroyed most of the crops on Earth. The UN later restructured itself, giving GEO power over all UN organizations and resources. When Recontact takes place, GEO has a heavy presence on Poseidon.
I want to take a moment to extend a heartfelt thank you to Jeff Barber, the founder of Biohazard Games and creator of Blue Planet, for allowing me to share this style sheet. Working on Upwind and then Blue Planet helped me so much as not just a copyeditor, but as a copyeditor who specializes in TTRPGs. You can learn more about Blue Planet: Recontact on Biohazard Games’ website and you can purchase the quickstart guide (which I edited) through DriveThruRPG.
Blue Planet: Recontact is a 600-page game with sections written by different people. To make things worse, some portions were created back in the ’90s while others were written this decade. This meant keeping things consistent wasn’t easy. I managed this by keeping a very detailed—and very long—style sheet.
What a TTRPG Style Sheet Looks Like
Because I don’t think many folks would be interested in reading a hundred page-plus style sheet, I figured I’d instead give you a heavily truncated version followed by some brief explanations of why I included each section.
This is not meant to be a directive for what you should or shouldn’t have in your own style sheets. I’m a maximalist when it comes to style sheets; I include a lot of things other copyeditors would normally leave out. Several of the sections were in the examples I was shown when I was working on my copyediting certificate at the University of California, San Diego. Some are sections I’ve seen other copyeditors use for their own style sheets. And a few were created just for this project because I needed a way to wrangle and herd a lot of specific information. I’m hoping that you will find pieces to use in your own practice. This is not an exhaustive overview; I’m opting to exclude some sections that I feel are too specialized.
Here’s a section by section breakdown of what my style sheet looked like. You can view a truncated version of my style sheet here.
Section 1: References/Resources Used
Length: 4.5 pages
A lot of the incidents that happen in the game’s history are inspired by real-life events that I needed to fact check. Cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) feature heavily in the game, and there’s an entire chapter about whale biology that similarly needed to be verified for accuracy. (Did you know that orcas are one of the few animal species that experience menopause? The more you know!) Sometimes, I was checking how big the Chernobyl exclusion zone is, or trying to find the average height above sea level of the Maldives. All this meant needing to use a lot of reputable websites for research.
I had fifty-five cited websites. Included in that number was The Chicago Manual of Style, Merriam-Webster’s unabridged online dictionary, Word Hippo (my favorite online thesaurus), the Associated Press Stylebook (handy for covering current events and foreign politics), and BuzzFeed’s style guide, which I think is no longer being updated but is still available. I use Wikipedia a lot. In the age of generative AI, Wikipedia is more accurate—and less infuriating—than Google.
You’ll note that I don’t have these in alphabetical order. I did keep links from the same organizations together, but other than that I added links in the order in which I used them. Nowadays, with such a long list of references, I’d likely put them in alphabetical order.
Section 2: Spelling
Length: 31 pages
This is the largest chunk of the style sheet, taking up thirty-one pages. I used abbreviations to cut down on the length of each entry. These abbreviations are used throughout the rest of the style sheet.
Because this section is so large, I separated each letter into its own subsection, so in Microsoft Word, I can use the navigation panel to go directly to a specific letter. Here’s where I kept terms that were:
a. Unique to Blue Planet, like the Time of Awakening, which is a holiday celebrated by whales who are members of the Church of the Whalesong.
b. Could be spelled differently like “traveling” vs. “travelling.” Blue Planet used the spelling “flier” when talking about people or ships that were capable of flight and “flyers” for paper circulars.
c. Words commonly used in English that have accents. Examples: “café,” “fléchette,” and “naïveté.” (Note, I have an entire separate section of non-English words later on.)
d. Terms that I was previously unfamiliar with. The game’s authors used the names of deities and religious figures to name everything from ship types to goods for sale. For example, “Trienos,” a Greek sea goddess, was used as the name of a band of thieves. Within each entry, I tried to include where I got the definition from.
e. Terms that are familiar and spelled conventionally, but which are used in a different way. For example, “Gargoyle,” capitalized, is the nickname for a type of orbit-to-ground assault dropship. These ships are called Gargoyles because the outline of their fusion engines appears somewhat monstrous.
You may notice that there are a fair number of puns in Blue Planet: Recontact. That is intentional on the part of the game’s authors. One of my favorite parts of editing the game was coming across all the puns.
Section 3: One, Two, or Hyphenated Words
Length: 9 pages
Years ago, another copyeditor recommended creating a style sheet section just for terms that I would look up to see if they are hyphenated, closed, or two words. I spend so much time looking up certain words, and if I put them in the regular spelling section, it can be hard to find them.
Here’s an area where other editors may disagree with my maximalist tendencies. I can see the argument that you might as well look up the terms as you come to them and not include them in your style sheet. However, I believe it saves time to do a search for hyphenated words at the start of a copyedit (I use Paul Beverley’s HyphenAlyse macro for this).
As you’ll notice, there are lots of terms that are similar and located near one another in the dictionary, but one will be hyphenated, such as “life-form,” while “lifesaver” is closed. This is often the section I use the most in any of my style sheets. To take up less page space, I kept entries as short as possible and organized them into columns.
Section 4: Acronyms
Length: 3 pages
This section is pretty self-explanatory. Whenever a game or book features a lot of military jargon, medical technology, academic discussions, or other specialized knowledge, there are going to be a lot of acronyms and abbreviations. I prefer to add these to the style sheet as I come across them. Sites like Acronym Finder are very helpful if I don’t know what an acronym stands for.
Because there are only so many combinations of two, three, or four letters, inevitably you’re going to get in-game acronyms that are also used for something distasteful, problematic, or scandalous. As the copyeditor, I point these out to my clients. Notably, in Blue Planet, one of the Incorporate (per the game’s creator, “Incorporate” is both singular and plural) is named Hanover. Incorporate are massive companies that have enough wealth, resources, and personnel to act like a country. Think Apple or Google. Hanover was founded in Germany. The company’s internal security division was originally Hanover Security Service (HSS) and often simply referred to as “SS” in sections about Hanover. Having a German company that has an internal, heavily armed division, called “SS” seemed problematic to me, as the creator was not trying to evoke World War II Germany. After I mentioned this to Jeff, he changed the name to Hanover Security Division (HSD).
Section 5: Nonstandard Non-English Terms
Length: 2 pages
This is the section where I put non-English terms that weren’t in Merriam-Webster. Usually, I would have put these in the spelling section, but because there were dozens of them, I created a bespoke section for them. The writers for Blue Planet: Recontact were careful to incorporate words and names from many different cultures and languages. I used dictionaries like Langenscheidt and Collins Dictionary to check the spelling of non-English terms. The languages used included French, German, Japanese, Kenyan, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and Swahili.
Section 6: Italicized Words and Cited Works
Length: 2 pages
In the game, there were a lot of terms that were written in italics. Vessels, such as ships, boats, and spacecraft, had their names italicized. The titles of books, magazines, newspapers, movies—whether real properties or created for the game—were also styled in italics. So too were pieces of art like the fictitious sculpture Glass Ghouls. Genus names were also in italics, but because there were so many of them, I put those in their own section which I cover later on.
Section 7: Biotechnology, Hardware, Weapon, & Vehicle Names by Company
Length: 20 pages
There is a ton of gear that players can buy for their characters. Everything from handguns and body armor to surgical modifications and genetic enhancements to submarines and construction drones. Each Incorporate/company has their own naming conventions. I broke this section up by company/Incorporate, and then listed the products in alphabetical order.
Anasi Systems uses a lot of French terms for their products, and Hanover Arms (a division of Hanover) uses German. GenDiver prefers animal descriptors for their catalog. And Dundalk Shipbuilding uses longer descriptive names that aren’t very marketing friendly. By having all the product names listed together by company/Incorporate, I could see if there were any products that didn't fit in.
I also pointed out that there was a company named Response Weapons Systems and another named Responsive Weapons Systems. As it turned out, there was only one company and the correct name was Responsive. Had I not created a list of all the product names organized by company, I likely wouldn’t have spotted these inconsistencies.
For weapons, I first made a mockup of what features and traits each weapon should have listed. These included the dimensions of the product, its durability, and how easy it is to obtain. While I didn’t list all the options for each piece of hardware on the style sheet, the mockup helped me identify areas where a weapon was listed, but missing certain features.
Section 8: Game Mechanics
Length: 13 pages
In this section, I don’t just list how game terms like attributes and skill sets should be styled, but what they mean and how they work. A lot of the terms here appear in the Spelling section, so they were double posted here. If you are working on a TTRPG/board game, consider adding a section like this to your style sheet. Should game terms be capitalized? In bold font? Should spells or attributes be in italics or quotation marks? Here’s the place to write that information down. In this section, take care to make note of stats, as these are very important and you want to make sure that the stats for a particular type of creature or NPC don't change across chapters.
A lot of these definitions were taken straight from the introductory sections of the game. When working on later sections of the game, there would often be points where I would be unsure if it was Awareness or Cognition that a wild animal used (it’s Awareness; sapient PCs and NPCs meanwhile have Cognition and Psyche). By referring to this section, instead of trying to locate which chapter they were defined in, I saved myself a lot of time.
Section 9: The World of Blue Planet: Recontact
Length: 2 pages
This is another section that is somewhat unique to Blue Planet. I wanted a place to add facts about the world of the game that differ from how things are on Earth. For instance, the planet Poseidon has a thirty-hour day instead of a twenty-four-hour day. If you’re working on a story where the characters have thirty-hour days, that’s going to change a lot of things. A convenience store that’s open all day, for example, shouldn’t be referred to as being open 24/7. Plus, the planet has multiple moons, and most of the indigenous land animals have six legs instead of four.
Having all this information in one place allowed me to quickly fact check things about Poseidon. Once again, it helped me prevent inconsistencies. As you can see in the second bullet point, Jeff didn’t want creatures native to Poseidon to be described as having feathers or teeth, so I needed to keep an eye out for this.
Section 10: Field Guide List of Animals and Plants
Length: 1 page
Along with dozens of weapon and product names, there were a number of flora and fauna species established as living on Poseidon. Once I realized how many species names there were, I decided to create this section and keep the species names here rather than in the Spelling section. Each species had a common name and a Latin-like scientific name. Did I check the scientific names to make sure the right Latin words were used? Yup. Thankfully, I could use online dictionaries like Latinitium to look up Latin terms, though I’m sure I missed some things.
Section 11: Non-Player Characters
Length: 17 pages
Unsurprisingly, given the size of this game, there are a lot of non-player characters (NPCs). In this section I listed details about NPCs, like their age, physical appearance, location, and relationships with other characters if applicable. For some characters, this entry was only a few words long while others I devoted a few paragraphs to. You’ll note that I put characters’ locations in bold font. While I didn’t do this for every character—sometimes because the character moved about a lot and sometimes because a character’s home wasn’t listed—it assisted me in looking for a specific NPC whose name I had forgotten, but I remembered where they lived.
In one chapter, there was a character named Alex Nikolaev. This NPC was a holdover from an older version of the game. For Recontact, Jeff wanted to change some NPCs from men to women or nonbinary individuals, in order to be more inclusive. Alex Nikolaev was to be changed to Alexa Nikolaev. However, I remembered that Russian last names have different spelling/pronunciation based on the gender of the person. So, I looked up “Nikolaev” on Wikipedia and found that the feminine version of the name is “Nikolayeva.” I got the okay to change Alexa’s last name to Nikolayeva.
Section 12: Locations
Length: 17 pages
Since there were many towns and cities spread across an entire planet, it was all too easy for me to forget where settlements were in relation to one another. Locations for the game include not just the fictional planet of Poseidon and its moons, nestled within the Serpentis system, but also our solar system (Sol system)—which includes Earth and its moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
In addition to maps, I added key features of each location, its population if known, and any nearby geographic features. At one point, while editing the game, I came across a passage that listed one town as having a population of just a few thousand. I double-checked this against my style sheet and found that I had listed the population as almost ten thousand. Had both population numbers made it into the final game, it likely wouldn’t have affected players very much, but I do my best to keep data points consistent.
Section 13: Timeline
Length: 21 pages
During the editing process, I came across a lot of contradictory dates for historic events. Likely the biggest reason for these discrepancies is because different sections were written by different authors in different decades. Creating a timeline for Blue Planet: Recontact was an upfront investment, but it allowed me to keep track of when and where major and minor events happened.
Every time a date was given, I added it into the timeline. I labeled each item with the year (and the month and day if given), and the location. Again, locations included both solar systems. Because there were so many locations, I ran out of highlight colors, so I also used colored fonts. The editor for this article, Jennifer Povey, recommended that I use different typefaces for each location to make it easier for people who are colorblind to differentiate between places, which is a genius idea that I wish I’d come up with! I separated both Earth and Poseidon into regions—six of the seven continents for Earth and nine island chains and archipelagos for Poseidon. If an event occurred on Earth or Poseidon and a specific location wasn’t given, or if the event affected the entire planet, then I marked that event as occurring on Earth or Poseidon respectively. I also had a tag for marking the doings of the Incorporate, as these massive organizations have multiple branches throughout both solar systems.
In one section of the game, it was stated that Mars had first been explored in 2015. As a NASA fan, I knew rovers had been sent years before that. In fact, NASA’s rovers Spirit and Opportunity had both been on Mars for over a decade before 2015. When I pointed this out to Jeff, he wrote, “Yikes—this was written in 1996. Good catch.” Because there are so many real-world historical dates in the game, having this timeline saved me from having to go to Google or Wikipedia each time.
I wasn’t merely concerned with comparing dates in the game to real-world events. In a chapter that included a timeline for the game, a cyclonic storm in 2092 on Poseidon is said to have killed over 200 colonists in a single colony. On my personal timeline, I had the same storm listed. However, I had the storm hitting two settlements. It would be like saying that Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina, but excluding Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland.
I pointed out the discrepancy—that the storm didn’t just hit one settlement but at least two, and Jeff asked me to change the wording to “several settlements on Poseidon were destroyed.” Again, this isn’t likely to be a continuity error that the average reader would pick up on, but this game has a very passionate fan base, and some of those fans likely would notice the difference between the two chapters.
Section 14: Grammar and Punctuation
Length: 4 pages
Blue Planet mainly followed Chicago style, but there were a lot of deviations. To make it easier on myself, I created this section to bring together spelling, punctuation, grammar, and styling guidelines. Some of these are things that Jeff wanted me to follow, like using the percentage symbol, using “cs” when referring to currency, or never using plus symbols when referring to ratings. I also included recommendations from The Chicago Manual of Style: Seventeenth Edition so that I wouldn’t have to keep looking up how to treat Italian last names or if I should use an “a” or an “an” in front of an acronym. For CMOS suggestions, I added the section number in parenthesis.
Section 15: Layout
Length: 3 pages
Here’s a very niche section of the style sheet—okay, to be fair, you could probably say that about just about any section I’ve already discussed. Because there were so many chapters and sections, and because these were written by different people at different times, there were variations in how information (like an NPC’s stats) was presented. This is one situation where variation could likely cause confusion among players. When editing a TTRPG, you need to be sure that all of the stats for NPCs, monsters, creatures, etc. are presented consistently, and that the stats make sense. I was also concerned with ensuring that locations and flora and fauna were laid out similarly. Why does this matter? Ensuring these subsections were laid out the same way allowed moderators (also called game masters) who were looking for an animal that would be a threat to their players to know exactly where to look on the page. Remember, this game is 600 pages long. It was my job as the editor to make it as easy as possible for readers to locate the information they wanted.
Section 16: Change Log
Length: 1 page
I borrowed the concept for the change log from another TTRPG that I worked on earlier. In that game, a sci-fi space battle, the creators had a change log listed at the end of each chapter that they updated every time they made changes to that chapter. For Blue Planet, this log allowed me to better keep track of all the changes that either I or Jeff made. If I was working on a section that I hadn’t previously handled, I would look at the change log to see if any of the items needed to be addressed. Multiple NPCs changed names or gender, and that is something that could easily confuse a reader.
Editing TTRPGs
I’m truly grateful to those of you who have read through this entire article. I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in hearing about this massive style sheet I created years ago for an indie TTRPG. When I’ve tried to explain this article to people who are not publishing professionals, none of them really got it. However, when I’ve talked about it to other copyeditors, they’ve invariably been interested in reading it, if not going over the original 150-page style sheet.
After doing freelance copyediting for over eight years, Blue Planet: Recontact remains the biggest project I’ve ever worked on both in terms of hours worked and in number of words. It holds a special place in my heart, and not just because I now know so many more random whale and science facts. This was the project that truly allowed me to stretch my editorial wings and to believe in myself. Yes, I’ve been lucky to get to work on super cool projects over the years, and I’ve also received so much assistance from other editors. But at the end of the day, I can look back at this style sheet and be truly proud of what I accomplished. When imposter syndrome strikes, this is the game that I mentally hold up to show myself that I do know what I’m doing. I want this article to be helpful to newer editors (or editors in other genres) who are interested in getting involved with copyediting TTRPGs. It is my hope that elements of this style sheet will be useful for your own projects, and that I’ve encouraged you to create sections that fit your projects instead of trying to force your manuscripts to fit into one, overly rigid, style sheet.
If you’d like me to work on your TTRPG, please contact me and let me know about your game.