chapter 1 "Introduction" If you're reading this, you've probably been successful in installing Dead Souls, and are able to get around and manipulate stuff within it. There are lots of questions that new admins have at this point. This book is not intended to answer them. Specific questions about administration are handled in the Admin FAQ, which you can read at http://dead-souls.net/ds-admin-faq.html . A local copy is archived in the /www directory, but this may be out of date by now, and you'd be best served by looking at the online version. This guidebook isn't about "how to" or "where is," although such issues may be handled incidentally. The point of this guidebook is to describe to you various principles that are important to your success as a Dead Souls mud admin. The tone of these chapters is intended to be conversational. Because of this, it may sound like I'm being condescending (that means "talking down to you"), but that isn't intentional. I'm assuming that you fully understand I'm not the boss of you, that you can decide for yourself what is best for your mud, and that the contents of this guidebook are thoroughly biased. However rambling these pages might be, know that I claim no authority over What Should Be. I can only tell you, from my experience, how things look, and how I *think* things work best.