What’s your flavour? - British or US English in TTRPG writing

As we gear up towards a core release of Beyond the Veil here at Wrenegade Studios we’ve noticed a trend in the various proofreading and review cycles our content goes through. Whether internally or from our friends across the pond playtesting and reading through advanced copies of our products, a common question arises time and time again:

British or US spellings and terminology?

At first, it seemed like an easy problem to solve, just pick a lane and put your foot down… but the more we thought about it, really thought about it, the more we realised that the subject warranted more serious discussion.

As game developers and aspiring publishers we want to cater to as much of our target market as possible yet without compromising the quality of our writing through unfamiliarity. The common saying ‘write what you know’ even came into play and ultimately we had to admit that sticking with our native language was the only realistic way forward. It allows us to produce good quality content with contextual accuracy, and yes, it may require some localisation for the reader. Still, hopefully, the majority of the terminology isn’t too onerous to unravel.

Unashamedly British

So, yes, we settled on writing in our mother tongue with all its flaws and peculiarities. Does it massively inflate our character count with barely necessary ‘U’s, yes it does. Are we having to be careful how many Britishisms we use when describing parts of vehicles, yes we are. But are we wasting hours researching our sidewalks from our footpaths, lifts from elevators, or figuring out what floor of a building we mean when describing the first floor, no we certainly are not.

Rather than account for this fact in every product we produce we thought it important to show our true colours in this blog, set out our stall (market, not bathroom!), and address the elephant in the room… Hello Mrs Elephant!

We believe that a clear and consistent voice is far more important than trying to please everyone by second-guessing vocabulary. And really, wouldn’t it be far more disorientating if our sentence structure suddenly flipped mid-way through a paragraph because we couldn’t decide whether we were in York (UK) or New York (US)?

Tea, Toast, and a Touch of Translation

So if you know your boot from your trunk, your football from your soccer, or your rubbish from your garbage then you’ll be in good hands with us. And if you don’t, well we promise to try and keep our tiny island’s idiosyncrasies down to a minimum and we’ll always be on hand to perform translations over in our discord.

Because while language may differ, the love of a good story (or a chilling investigation into the paranormal) is universal. We’re here to tell tales, hunt the uncanny, and occasionally argue about whether it’s pronounced “scone” to rhyme with gone or cone. (We refuse to disclose where the studio stands on that.)

Toodle-pip!