Required Reading:

When you do submit material, at the very least you will be expected to be familiar with the following resources:

• The Terms and Conditions Page


• Forum Rules


• The Illustrated Primer


• The FAQs Pages


• The OA Canon

While not required, the following will help you in becoming acquainted with what has been done before, as well as the look and feel of the project. It is our experience that reviewing these can save you a lot of time, trouble and frustration.

• The Encyclopaedia Galactica


• Stories by Author's name


• Member Galleries

Join the Forum

The OA community creates content through discussion on the forum. There are sub-forums for worldbuilding, artwork, stories, games, and off-topic discussions. We also have a Discord server for more casual conversation

Don't be afraid to ask questions. Being new to the project, questions are perfectly normal. We do suggest taking a couple of easy steps before posting to the group.

Use the Search function to try and find it on the site: You may find nothing, or you may find we already have something identical, or at least very similar, and it will save you the trouble of writing a long essay. The Search function on these introductory materials and the main page uses google search and will give you ranked results by relevance. The search function in the Encyclopedia Galactica (EG) pages will list all results which precisely contain the search term with no room for spelling ambiguity. The EG can also list all articles listed under a given letter of the english alphabet, using the dropdown menu next to the search bar in the top righthand corner of the website.

Search the web: Do a little homework to make sure the science is on at least stable ground - it doesn't break the laws of physics, for example.

NO PLAGIARISM: Please refer to the Terms, Copyright, and Submissions agreement for our stance on this. Inspiration is one thing, direct copyright infringement is quite another. Breaking this rule can get you banned.

Content can be created for any point in the OA timeline, but to reduce the chances of material becoming dated, we try to avoid real world and near future (up to the year 2100AD) events and references.

OA contains thousands of articles, contributed by people like you over more than 20 years. Canon, and scientific understanding, has evolved during this time. You can find the creation date of an article at the bottom of the page, in the Development Notes Section. Some articles, especially the oldest ones, may still need slight updating to better fit how canon has evolved. This is another possible way to contribute to the setting.

Back to How to Contribute