Part 5: Chapter 2, Part 2

The looting of Britain:

I hope you like looting, because that's what we're doing. The objective is to get over 2800 gold before leaving the Britain area. Doing so will make Hythloth much easier, which is important because Hythloth sucks.




The teleporter that the Wyrmguard was standing beside takes us to the inside of Lord British's castle. This is a safe device to leave sitting in the middle of nowhere.






So far so good....




















I then stormed off to find the nearest Moongate home, but that son of a bitch locked us in.






: I begrudgingly accept the task that has been forced upon me about 12 other times.

: Excellent. I don't know what's wrong or where you should start looking, but here is a bag and a map. Go busy yourself.

: I hate you.


Before we move on to stealing everything that's in the castle, we talk to a winged gargoyle named Vasagralem.




Vasagralem has a thing for the infinitive forms of verbs. That's alright, at least he doesn't talk like Yoda.

Vasagralem tells us how the Gargoyles are now overcome with pride, and how they've had their Codex Lens stolen. Without the two Codex Lenses it is not possible to read the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom.




...you might be asking, if you missed a couple of the Ultima games.







Tell me how to kill the Guardian ( 1 2 3 )





HAHA! Not while I'm on the job!




This is our room in the castle. In addition to a bag, some potions and some gold, it has copious amounts of floorspace which will soon be carpeted with billions of gold worth of treasure.




Now we strip Lord British's room bare.




Lord British has a mirror like the Guardian. It lets you see through time and space.






The mirror shows us what would have happened if the USS Nimitz had stopped the attack on Pearl Harbor instead of going back to the future.




There's a Wii joke here but I can't articulate it.


Our last stop inside the castle is to take the teleporter pad beside Lord British's bed. It brings us up to the suspiciously well-stocked alchemy lab in the castle attic.




Ultima 9 magic is fairly straightforward. There are 8 different reagents which are used to bind scrolls to the spellbook. Mandrake Root is the rarest reagent, and it's also used in every single spell. There actually aren't enough free Mandrake Roots in the game to learn all of the spells, and the one vendor who will sell Mandrake Root charges a ridiculous amount. Mandrake Root is also the primary ingredient of the delicious Invincibility Potion. We'll be hoarding the stuff.

There are also some side passages with a bit more gold, and the first sword trainer which we won't worry about for now. We're done in the castle, so let's go outside.







Lord British keeps a rather nice beginner's weapon at the center of the castle hedge maze. Now we could spend whole minutes going through the maze....
















BRITAIN - The City of Compassion





Britain is a happy place. Especially now that they've sent all of the poor and the sick people to die in a swamp.




Dropping a coin into the town well gives us our first Glass Sword. The Glass Sword is a one-time-use weapon that deals the maximum possible damage.


The secret to success in any RPG is to steal everything that isn't bolted down.

"But," you might begin, "isn't that disturbingly un-avatar-like?"
Yes! Before we continue, I'll explain how the karma system works in Ultima 9.

Each time you do something good you gain 1 Magic Point.
Each time you hurt or kill an innocent, you lose 1 Magic Point.

Everything else is fair game.




For instance, the town's jeweler left a very attractive-looking cut emerald sitting in the middle of a table in plain sight. We took the emerald and sold it back to him.




The Cathedral of Love has a few assorted gems and some bottles of precious Serpentwyne, a magical cure-all potion. We'll give this bottle of Serpentwyne to the woman outside the cathedral and earn a karma bonus. Stealing from church is a good deed.




But what about all of the wonderful trinkets that are bolted down? The Ultima 9 engine has the answer to every RPG gamer's bane.

















Finally, with Britain empty, we visit the archery trainer to get the TRIPLE SHOT.


Heading west, we come across a burning house.



Gently set a full bucket of water within the doorway and the fire will magically go out.




This earns us 1 more point of magical power.




To save this boy's mother we're supposed to search for the secret passage to the brigand's clifftop hideout.




Instead we jump up the side of this mountain.




Most of the brigands fall to our mighty stolen bow.


In order to get our precious point of karma, we need to run into close range of the last brigand to trigger a cutscene. Unfortunately the brigand uses a staff: if he can't kill us in a single hit, he can stun us for up to 5 seconds. Obviously we won't be able to stand toe-to-toe against him (or most enemies) any time soon.




We set up some potions on the side of this unclimbable cliff. This is the bottle trick. With two potion bottles we can climb any non-perfectly-vertical surface.




Trigger the cutscene.




Quickly jump to the second bottle and butcher the last brigand. Our Avatar is pretty weak right now, so this is how most of the bigger enemies will be killed. From now on this will either be called "Plan 9 from Outer Space" or "Operation Dumbo Drop", depending on how I feel.

Killing the last brigand nets us another point of karma.




Going further up into the mountains leads us to a series of treasure-filled caves. We take our fill and head back down.


We follow the main road until we reach a bridge.



The bastard! We only have two orders of magnitude more gold than that. I'm not going to stand for this outrage!




















Murdering the bridge troll nets us some various jewelry and a valve. We're just going to hang onto the valve for now.




Nearby there is also a wizard's tower.




Inside is a wizard. He screwed up a spell and now he thinks he's a bluebird.
Sometimes he flies around, but I wasn't able to get him to do that this time. On his desk is a scroll of Levitation, our first unique scroll.


SEQUENCE BREAKING ALERT





Doing the bottle trick on a cliff wall to the west of the wizard's tower will put us right outside of a haunted mausoleum.




Inside is a Two-Handed Sword, a golden shield and a platemail helm. To get past the ghosts I quaffed a purple potion (invulnerability). Purple potions are pretty hard to come by later on, so I probably won't be doing anything like this again.




The sword makes the game retardedly easy, so I'm leaving it in our room at the castle along with the scrolls we've collected so far. I'm going to keep the helmet.




We head back to Britain to cash in our loot. Now that we have over 2800 gold we can continue with the quest.