Help:Style guide
The NOPOTIONS Wiki is a community reference for the game's systems, and these guidelines keep it useful and spoiler free.
What to document
Document the rules of the universe, the substrate every player shares:
- Systems and mechanics such as combat, dice, crafting, tempering, trade, and progression.
- Public catalog data covering classes, skills, feats, items, and affixes.
- Cultures, factions, and world concepts that enrich everyone's game.
What never to document
NOPOTIONS generates a world for each player, and discovery is the product. Never document:
- The events of a specific playthrough, such as who betrayed you or what was in a particular ruin.
- Spoilers, secret lore, or anything that would rob another player of a first encounter.
A simple test is to ask whether the page helps everyone or spoils someone's story.
Writing style
Write in second person and present tense, with plain words and exact in-game names, the way the game talks to the player. Mechanics pages are singular, like Equipment and Tempering, while category pages are plural, like Items. The AI game master is always called the Narrator.
Prose is factual and plain. Every sentence states a game fact, with no dramatic openers, no flourish, and no metaphor standing in for the mechanic. Sentences are medium in length and joined with commas and plain connectors, never extremely short and never running on. Em dashes, en dashes, double hyphens, semicolons, colons, and parentheses stay out of prose, and the one allowed colon ends a line that introduces a bullet list. A cross reference folds into its sentence, as described on Combat, or stands as a full sentence beginning with See.
Lore pages for cultures and gods may keep concrete sensory detail from the canon under the same sentence rules. Quoted in-game copy, such as the tenet tables, stays exactly as the game shows it. Every fact must come from the game or from copy the players can already see, and when a fact cannot be sourced, the gap is left rather than filled with invented lore. Strategy and community knowledge are welcome as long as opinions are marked as opinions.
Generated pages
Class, skill, feat, item, and affix pages are written from the game's own data and carry a note at the foot saying so. Do not edit them by hand, because a regeneration overwrites the page and the work is lost. If one of them is wrong or out of date, say so on Discord or on the page's talk page and it gets fixed at the source.
Everything else on the wiki is handwritten and yours to improve.
Infoboxes
Put the facts in an infobox and the prose around it. Items use {{Infobox item|...}} and classes {{Infobox class|...}}, and each template's page has the field list.