Athas.org has a new home
What now lies before you is the end result of a lot of writing and re-writing on my part. I had to learn a new language before this move could follow through, and with me, that sort of thing tends to involve a lot of prototyping (aka, work that I throw away). Athas.org now lives on a new server, graciously provided by 3ip.net. There are a few changes that were brought about because of this move:
- Because I had to rewrite the site, and it's no longer in cold fusion, all of the links to .cfm pages are now broken.
- You may notice that most of the database driven sections of the site are absent. There's actually a good reason for this, and it's not lazyness on my part. More on that below.
- I'm trying to get more of the art that's been contributed to us in use over the site. Actually, what had made that hard in the past was the purely database generated pages ... without those, it's pretty easy to incorporate.
Of major note: To go along with the site revision, we’ve got two releases for you:
- Tyrian Conspiracy a 3e Dark Sun adventure by Jon Sederqvist
- Wisdom of the Drylanders a setting elaboration by Brax.
As mentioned above, my mutterings on why removing the database driven parts of the site. Specifically, the feats, spells, races, classes (was never really a db, but I tried fakeing it), monsters, powers … Once we began editing the items that were going to appear as a part of DS3, it turned out that we were totally neglecting the copies of those items that resided in the database, in favor of the ones in our working documents. Perfectly understandable, that. It’s a natural result of having repeated information in more than one authoritative source. (I’m a software developer by trade, so that’s acutally something I think about more often than I should…) But, the version skew was damaging and misleading. We’re better off without it.
The second aspect is that, while weeding through some of the databases, we encountered a lot of material that was ... shall we say, below par. Quite a few of the spells and powers broke rules left and right, and more than a few of the feats were terribly broken. I belive that to be a result of inadequate maintenance; something the active staff either didn't have the time, inclination, or realization to do. The mantained database, for monsters, was of a noticably higher quality than any of the other databases.
So, there you have it. The database sections were dropped for quality reasons. Until I think I can reasonably expcet that to get better, I don't think that I'm going to be re-implementing them anytime soon.