Home

You finished writing. You did the layout. The PDF exports cleanly and it looks genuinely good. The temptation at that point is enormous — just post it. You've been staring at this thing for weeks.

Don't. Not yet.

I just finished a full editorial run on The Palimpsest Trilogy before it goes up on the Miskatonic Repository, and the process reminded me how many layers of wrong can live in a document that feels done. Here's what I actually caught and what I check for now on everything I publish.

The Duplicate That Hides in Plain Sight
The most embarrassing error in any document is duplicated content — a full scene, a stat block section, a paragraph that appears twice because of a copy-paste during layout. It looks fine in the TOC. It reads fine when you're skimming. It only becomes obvious when someone is running the scenario at the table and hits the same text twice in a row.

On this project, a full scene appeared twice in the body copy of the first scenario. The TOC had been corrected, so it only showed up once there. The body still had both copies sitting next to each other. A global read-through is the only way to catch this. Skimming won't do it.

Your Table of Contents Is a Separate Document
This sounds obvious, but your TOC and your actual content are two different things, and they can drift apart every time you move or rename a section. Check that every scene heading in the body exists in the TOC with the correct page number. Check the reverse too — every TOC entry should have a matching heading in the body. On this project, one scene existed in the body text across every version but never made it into the TOC. It took five editorial passes to finally catch and fix it.

The Stat Block Checklist
NPC stat blocks are where small errors cluster because there are so many fields and Keepers actually use every one of them. Before you publish, run every stat block against this quick check:

All eight characteristics present (STR, CON, SIZ, DEX, INT, POW, APP, EDU)
HP calculated correctly and listed
MOV listed
Damage Bonus and Build both listed — not just one of them
At least a short skill list
Consistent formatting across all NPCs
On this project, the same two fields — DB and Build — were missing from multiple NPC blocks across multiple versions. It's easy to add the first six fields and then just stop.

Design Notes Are Not Published Text
When you're writing, you leave yourself notes inside stat blocks and talent descriptions. Things like "I'd suggest MOV 8 for balance but the rules would allow 9" or "maybe 1D3 or one step, decide with your Keeper." Those are working notes. They need to come out before publication. Read every stat block and every mechanical description looking for parenthetical asides that are still talking to yourself rather than your reader. Commit to a number. Cut the rest.

The Article Error That Survives Everything
Do a global find for "a Investigator" and "a Encounter" and "a NPC." Words starting with vowels need "an," not "a." This error is invisible when you're reading for meaning and it somehow survives spell check because neither word is misspelled. It will be in your document. It is in almost every document. Search specifically for it.

Possessives at the End of a Name
If you have a character whose name ends in a vowel or a soft consonant, check every possessive. On this project, one character's name appeared with a dangling apostrophe and no S across a dozen connection entries — Casey' instead of Casey's — in almost every version, including ones where it had been specifically flagged. The reason it kept surviving is that the eye reads the name and moves on. A targeted find-and-replace on the exact string "Casey'" followed by a space is the only thing that actually catches all of them.

Read Your Front Matter Last
Copyright page, credits, blog URLs, legal boilerplate — these get written early and then never touched again. That's where the errors live. On this project the blog URL was missing both "to" and "a" in the same sentence for several versions running. Read your front matter out loud, slowly, as if you've never seen it before. You'll catch things you've been walking past for weeks.

One Last Pass After Every Fix
Every time you fix something, you introduce the possibility of a new error. Paste operations can duplicate text. Find-and-replace can hit the wrong instance. A corrected stat block can accidentally drop a field that was there before. After any significant correction pass, do a targeted check of the sections you touched. Not the whole document — just the pages you changed.

The goal isn't a perfect document. The goal is a document where nothing pulls a Keeper out of the scenario at the table. A typo mid-read-aloud is recoverable. A missing stat block field during a fight is a real problem. That's the standard to aim for — ready to run, not just ready to read.

The Palimpsest Trilogy hits the Miskatonic Repository soon. More on that when it's live.