Ultima

OK, I've got Hong's site bookmarked, but I'm trying to put together an Ultima game as one of two choices for the next D20 game I'm gonna run after I'm done with Star Wars. Does anybody know any good sites for information or anything on the Ultima series of games?

all the good sites i knew about went away.

I have a few documents that I copied from old webpages or made myself when I was planning on doing a similar campaign. Send me an email with ULTIMA in the title and I will send them to you.

ehoffm1@gl.umbc.edu

Here's 2 sites:

http://www.salikon.dk/callisto.html

http://blackgate.morningstar.info/

Both of these deal with a whole new RPG that someone's developing for Ultima (fan site, I believe). However, a lot of the stuff comes up as "Under Construction."

Also, what Age are you trying to go for w/ the Ultima game? The races & classes available change greatly, not to mention the world map .

For the Age of Darkness, it's humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings (you'll have to stat up the Fuzzies, if you want). Classes would include fighter, cleric, wizard, and rogue for the 1st 2 games, plus ranger, druid, barbarian, paladin, bard (called a lark in the old manuals), illusionist, & alchemist.

For the Age of Enlightenment & later, the classes available are bard, druid, fighter, paladin, ranger, and wizard. Adventurers/PCs of the tinker class could be handled as rogues. The shepherd seems to work as the Commoner NPC class--you may want to do something different, though, if Shepherd will be a viable PC class--maybe even a variety of the monk class! Only humans are available as a PC race.

As of Ultima 5 (and later, I think), there are really only 3 core classes: Fighter, Bard and Mage. Paladin, Ranger, & Shepherd are variants of Fighters (no spellcasting ability). Tinker is a variant of Bard (half spellcasting ability). Druid is a variety of Mage (full spellcasting ability). The variants of the core 3 classes could be Prestige Classes, if you wanted.

Also, by Ultima 4 & later, every spellcaster used the same base list (mages can heal!).

In all honesty, you may want to wait & see what Unearthed Arcana has to offer--a variant spell system, as well as a CoC-like base class which may work better at trying to capture the "classes/occupations" from Ultima.

However, in all honesty, I'm not sure what Ultima: Online is like at all. Then again, from what little I know, UO is essentially a bunch of alternate realities. It may be safe to say that, if your campaign is based after U9, all bets (and previous rules) are off--it can be standard D&D 3.5 from that point on, if you wanted.

Also, a question for hong: has your Ultima stuff been upgraded to 3.5?

Hope any of this helps.

AFGNCAAP said:

Also, a question for hong: has your Ultima stuff been upgraded to 3.5?

Click to expand...

Yes, not that a lot of stuff changed. The spell lists got a bit of tweaking, and that's about it.

Hi there.

Ah, Ultima. The pinnacle of old-school computer RPGs, beating out even the Wizardry and Bard's Tale series, at least in my eyes. The last real Ultima game I played was IV, Avatar, but in many ways it surpasses popular RPGs of today, whose fixed character selections and linear storylines are not made up for with graphical eye candy.

Here's a nice Ultima site: Underworld Dragon's Notable Ultima. It has a good assortment of information that could prove useful to someone setting an RPG campaign in an Ultima world.

Hope this helps!

I think I'm gonna go for the Age of Darkness...that is, if I ever get around to running it; there're a lot of games that are waiting to be run.