Mistipedia:Guidelines

Overall Guidelines

• Please respect the copyrights of the publishers - The Ravenloft setting is not currently supported by Wizards of the Coast, and all of the source material is out of print, but that does not give us the right to republish the material. Please summarize in your own words, and limit direct quotes. Do not upload copyrighted pictures, but limit pictures to those which are copyright-free, or that you have created yourself, or that you find on fraternityofshadows.com, or that you have express permission from the artist to republish. EXCEPTION: it is our understanding that cover art may be used under the fair use clause when discussing the contents of a book for review purposes.
• Please do not edit anything that says DO NOT EDIT - The contents of The Ravenloft Catalogue were used to build the initial wiki. The text labelled as "CATALOGUE IMPORT" needs to remain in order for future imports from the catalogue to work properly. (The catalogue will remain live and will hopefully slowly be completed). However, the "See Also" information from the Catalogue has been imported and labelled as WIKISEEDs. Feel free to edit these WIKISEEDs into full-fledged articles and remove the WIKISEED label. EXCEPTION: Category links may be edited wherever they appear, even in areas that say DO NOT EDIT.
• Please keep things on topic - All aspects of Ravenloft are fair game, including Masque of the Red Death. But there are other places to discuss horror in general, or D&D in general, so if it's not Ravenloft-related, don't post it here. Please don't post advertising. Please don't post a rambling account of your day, unless you spent it in Ravenloft.
• Please clearly label non-canon material - Do not post the events of your home campaign as though they were canon fact. By all means, please do post them, but keep non-canon material clearly indicated as such. In general, in each article, canon facts should be detailed first, then non-canon info from netbooks, then all other non-canon info. See Levels of Canon for a more in-depth treatment of Canon.
• Please keep text out-of-character - We know how fun it is to immerse yourself in the world and use an in-character mouthpiece, but for the purposes of this wiki, it will be less confusing if everything is kept in a single out-of-character voice.
• Please be nice - We all have our favorite parts of the setting and our... less favorite parts. Please don't put any judgments on the quality of any source, author, or element of the setting here in the wiki.

Editing Guidelines

Pages

• Whenever possible, pages should start with a link to their own name. (For example: Skippy von Zarovich's page should start with "[[Skippy von Zarovich]] is a nonexistent vampire used as an example...") This link will be converted by the wiki software into bold text, but serves as a useful spellcheck.

Categories

For further information, see Mistipedia:Categorization_Guidelines

• Category versus Page - Certain entries should be Categories instead of individual pages. Anything that represents a group of things rather than a single thing should be a Category. Namely, Societies and Monster Species are groups of individual NPCs, even if there are no known individuals in that group, or only one unique NPC. To make linking easier, all Society and Monster categories should have a matching page that redirects to the category.

Example: Category:Goblyn is a category, even though they may all seem interchangeable. They aren't. See Herrd ApKie, a Goblyn NPC. (And Goblyn is a page that redirects to the category.) Are we really likely to have an individual Scavyt or Carrion Stalker as an NPC? No, but to be consistent, every species is a category. Also keep in mind, that we are allowing non-canon additions to the wiki, and you never know what some crazy DM has done.

• Category names are singular - usually - For the most part, categories should be named as a singular noun. The exception is for society categories, (including families and other subcategories of Category:Society. They should be named with the name of the group, which may be plural.

Example: Category:Book, not Category:Books. But Category:Seekers of the Spark, not Category:Seeker of the Spark.

• Places and NPCs are not Categories - To avoid circular categories and other confusion, NPCs and Locations should be individual pages.
  • If you want to categorize by place, use the Category:Nationality categories instead.

Example: Theokos is in Category:Nidalan, not Category:Nidala. Category:Nidala does not exist.

• • As a second possibility, when Nationaltiy isn't appropriate, Category:Ethnicity may work as in Category:Gundarakite, Category:Mulan or Category:Akiri.
• Monster Categorization
  • Category:Monster is broken up into subcategories for each of the 3.5 edition creature types. In addition, there is Category:Unsorted Monster for monsters that still need to be sorted into one of those categories, and Category:Other Monster Groupings for anything that can't cleanly be sorted into one of those types. There should be nothing else in Category:Monster.
  • Any subcategories that cleanly fit within a higher level category should do so.

  Example: All Golems are Constructs, so Category:Golem is in Category:Construct.

  • Any subcategories that don't cleanly fit within a higher level category should not do so.

  Example: Some cats are animals (like Plains Cat). Some cats are magical beasts (like Midnight Cat). Thus, as tempting as it may be Category:Cat can't go in either Category:Animal or in Category:Magical Beast. It must go in Category:Other Monster Groupings instead.

  • There are 12 "Van Richten Categories", based on the Van Richten's Guides. "The Created" is synonymous with Construct. Category:Fiend, Category:Witch, and Category:Mist Creature are in Category:Other Monster Groupings. Category:Lycanthrope is under Category:Shapechanger in Category:Other Monster Groupings. "Shadow Fey" are Category:The Arak, in Category:Fey. Category:Vistani is under Category:Human. All the rest are Category:Undead. All creature species who have a Van Richten Category should be in it, in addition to the appropriate creature type category, and any other appropriate categories.

  Example: Category:Arcanaloth is in all the following categories: Category:Greater Yugoloth,Category:yugoloth,Category:Fiend(Van Richten Category), & Category:outsider(Creature type).

  • If a monster doesn't fall into a "Van Richten Category", it simply gets all other applicable categories.

  Example: Category:Morph is in Category:Dreamspawn, Category:Lesser Dreamspawn, Category:elemental (Dream), and Category:elemental (Creature Type).

  • Humans and demihumans naturally fall into Category:Humanoid.
  • Any template that can only apply to a specific base creature type should be in that base creature's categories, even if the template changes the creature type.

  Example: All Elven Vampires start out as Elves. Though by the rules they are technically no longer Elves or Humanoid, it's useful to categorize them as such. So Category:Elven Vampire is in category:elf and category:Humanoid (as well as Category:vampire and category:undead).

  • Undead are a special case, since all undead were once something else, whether the undead species is a template or not. Non-template undead should get all categories of whatever they were in life, if it can be identified conclusively.

  Example: Carcass Hounds were once Animals, so they get Category:Undead and Category:Animal

• NPC Categorization
  • Individual NPCs get labelled with their species, and every category above that UP TO THEIR "Creature Type" category or categories. They do not get Category:Monster

  Example:Loht gets Category:Sith (Species), Category:The Arak, (Van Richten) and Category:Fey (Creature Type). Blackroot gets Category:Dread Treant (Species) Category:Dread Plant (Intermediate), Category:Plant (Creature Type).

  • Individual NPCs that are former humanoids with a template get their humanoid category too, even if the template changed their type.

  Example:Axrock gets Category:Dwarven Vampire (Species), Category:Vampire (Van Richten), Category:Undead (Creature Type), Category:Dwarf (Former Species), & Category:Humanoid (Former Creature Type).

  • Individual NPCs that are former humanoids transformed into a non-template creature get Category:Former _____, instead of their former type.

  Example:The Hive Queen is in Category:Queen Marikith (Species), category:Marikith (Intermediate), Category:Aberration (Creature Type) and Category:Former Human.

More to come..