About the Ad Astra Website

In the beginning we developed Ad Astra in face-to-face meetings, with friends providing comments on sections distributed on paper or by e-mail. These methods became unwieldy as the size of the game's core documents grew. The first incarnation of the Ad Astra website was developed to provide easier access for our friends. Little thought was given to presentation; indeed much of the text was just preformated ASCII. As the core sections of the game setting began to stabilise, we decided that it would be worthwhile to dramatically improve the presentation and organisation of the site to enable people beyond our immediate circle to get some feeling for what Ad Astra is now, and what it will be. This is essentially the current status of the site - it is not intended to be a definitive presentation of the Ad Astra background.

Criticism and Frozen Mistakes

We hope that some readers will make use of the currently available Ad Astra background material in their own campaigns (and we would be delighted to hear from anybody who has done so). Readers should note, however, that we reserve the right to make any changes whatsoever to the background, so any particular version of the webpage may not be assumed to be consistent with earlier versions. The reason for this disclaimer is that each section of Ad Astra is being made publicly available at what is essentially only the second draft stage.

In any game setting there will be frozen mistakes: things that the designers wish they had done differently, but which are so deeply embedded within the setting that they cannot be changed. We had hoped that anything stated as a fact within the background sections of Ad Astra would remain forever true - only presentation and interpretations of facts would change as we further developed the setting. This is still our goal, but we will not adhere to it at the cost of freezing mistakes that we could easily avoid. The only way to eliminate frozen mistakes to think very carefully about everything, and to receive copious amounts of constructive criticism. Our view is that it is better to sacrifice the authority of the background in the website to improve the quality of the eventual finished product. To minimize such disruptions we would like constructive criticism of everything.

Accessibility

We want the Ad Astra website to be accessible to anybody with a frames-supporting web browser. However, the site has been designed using the Amiga browser IBrowse as a reference browser, and so may not be correctly displayed by any browser less capable than this. Thoughout the site the HTML 4.0 standard has been closely followed. If you encounter any problems then please contact Rich .

In the future it is our intention to update the site to make use of Cascading Style Sheets, XML (particularly MathML), scripting languages and other new technologies. In any case, every effort will be made to provide transparent fall-back to older methods for those without access to the latest browsers.

The future of Ad Astra