Crafting Standards
Overview
Appearance Description
- Should not begin with a capital letter and can NOT end with a period.
- Also the appearance should be kept short (maximum of 50 characters).
- Don't make a sentence out of it.
- Don't write about any actions or reactions the item is having.
Dropped Description
- It must be a complete sentence, with a period on the end.
- Dropped description should be kept to about one line. (maximum of 80 characters)
- No exclamation points, no question marks, no multiple periods.
- The main noun in the sentence must be the same as the pattern name.
- Things like "A cloak is hanging from a peg here." are not acceptable. If it were dropped on the highway there is no peg to hang from.
Examined Description
- Must begin with a capital letter and must end with a period. Use full sentences. Multiple sentences are fine.
- Be descriptive.
- Examined description should be a few sentences long describing what the item looks like.
FirstEaten & ThirdEaten Descriptions
- Maximum of 240 characters.
- Do not force actions upon the eater unless they really make sense.
- Include some version of the 'appearance' description in the thirdeaten message.
Smell & Taste Descriptions
Design Guidelines
General
- Descriptions should not impose an opinion on the reader.
- Nothing that a craftsman could not reasonably create.
- Clockwork is inappropriate for the Achaean setting and may not be used.
- Use appropriate materials. You can't make a shirt out of living skin or pure gold.
- Metal that may not be used is mithril, orichalcum, and bloodsteel.
Cooking Specific
- The following anachronistic foods and terms are not allowed: pizza, tacos, hot dogs, pancakes, waffles, fondue, jellybeans, gummianything (bear, worm, etc).
- No ingredients may still be alive.
- Food may not have a face.
- No spilling or dripping, not everyone will eat messy.
Jewellery Specific
- Available base materials are, in order of value: Bone, Steel, Silver, Gold, Platinum.
- Nothing that is alive or was previously alive (excluding bone) maybe used in jewellery.
Tailoring Specific
- Achaea does not have "modern" materials and clothing features like velcro, denim, polyester (or any synthetic fabric), zippers, sweatshirts, and so on.
Language
Spelling
- Use UK, not US spellings. (Except when using measurements, in which case use Imperial.)
Punctuation
- Organisation names should be capitalised.
- Commas
- If you have multiple adjectives in front of your noun, they usually need to be separated with a comma. (a long, blue nightgown)
- A simple way to figure out if a comma is needed is to see if the word AND will fit between the adjectives. Not everything can be broken up with the word AND. In cases such as this, you do not use a comma. (a long hunting cloak)
- Emdashes
- These are used when you want to add something that expands upon what you have already written, and are especially important after the sentence should have been closed. (The flavour of the secret ingredient - garlic - lingers in your mouth.)
- Hyphens
- Some adjectives do not describe the noun. Instead, they describe other adjectives. When this happens, they should be hyphenated. (a red-hued cloak)
- When there is more than one word like this, you need to include all of them in the hyphenation. (a red-and-orange-hued cloak)
- When adjectives such as these come after the noun, the hyphen is not used. (a cloak with a red hue)
- This hyphen still applies if the adjectives come after the noun only to precede another related noun. (a cloak of red-hued silk)
- Semicolons
- Semicolons are used to join two complete sentences that are related to each other.
- The sentences must both be complete and must both touch on the same immediate subject.
- The second complete sentence is not capitalised. (The ring has different types of gems; sapphire chips surround small emeralds.)
Grammar
- The possessive form of common nouns ending in 's' should retain the possessive 's', example: dress's.