Some events have gone on without my posting immediate responses. I have two explanations for my laziness, one: My LAN-gaming friend (a marine) got some leave this month, and we've spent all our weekends LAN-gaming Quake 2, and Starcraft. (no putdown to UO, its just sometimes the opponent that is the most fun is "family") second: I attended each of the events that occured, and was PK'd at each one of them, including the latest one last night. The first one was somewhat smoothed over. the quest took us into the depths of Covetous. On Atlantic, covetous is dominated by a PK group called the Covetous Clan (CC). Yes, they slaughtered me for entering their dungeon. To their credit, BOB II (one of their leaders) resurrected me, apologized for killing me, and ordered his "men" to return my belongings (they returned everything but the reg's, which noone seemed to have taken). That was good, but it was just bad. It was good that Bob II at least respected the game enough to recognize the sanctity of Rp'ing and storyline, but a perfect example of how the anti-social behavior in UO will, more often than not, totally get in the way of the Roleplaying, and story creation. The second was last night, when, on buc's den, a dread lord saw me jumping ahead in the trail of clues, and began attacking me. He began chasing me around the NPC Tyr, at the Buc's Den Bathhouse. I was in no mood to fight, my priority was to interrogate Tyr. So, I finally, boldy approached the dread, asked why he was attacking me, and explained that I was questing. the only reply I got was Corp Por, and 'You Are Dead.' I was so pissed at the absurdity of being slaughtered for no reason other than someone out trying to specifically ruin my fun that I didn't even start attacking back until the second energy bolt from him, and didn't bother healing myself. The funny thing was that I nearly killed him, my mana vamp got him just as his last energy bolt went off. It wasn't a good day, and certainly had me wishing I could implement age/maturity restrictions on Atlantic.

This is certainly not to say the game's story elements have taken a break. No sirree. Finth Desryn has been the most active. Two weeks now he's asked questers to search for an amulet. Only last night did the quest take us on a hunt for the very evil Lord Jou'nar.The first night, the trail (I'm assuming it was for the same amulet, as I never heard of that one being recovered) In the battle last night Lord Blackthorn was KIDNAPPED.

I promise to get to all the e-mail I've received this weekend, or next week, as I've got a few days off of work.

I've updated the character name summary. It appears my info on Zog was grossly incorrect. Now, I've got two sections, one for Zog, and one for the Zog Cabal. I'm still not sure how or even if they're related in some way. Sage Humbolt is in there now (as it's apparent that he's a player in the overall (multi-shard) plotline.

Readers are telling me that this 'wisp' at Harthams wake was most likely just a clever roleplayer. I still find this difficult to believe, especially considering how few "Ultima Die Hard's" that I've yet come into contact with in UO. Whoever was that person playing this 'wisp' character, had knowledge of how wisps speak and act, and played a damn good job at it. Granted, that kind of info is available at any corner Electronics Boutique in the form of a hint book. It's just that serious Roleplayers were not that prominent in UO around the time of the Wake. My impression is that most players who loved to roleplay and knew tons about the Ultima series were very discouraged about UO around that time. Ok, that's enough meaningless rant on that. I'm going to leave the theory about it up for now, but until I get some sort of confession , or a msg from OSI about it, It stays a current theory of mine.

HELLBOY! I did write you back, but I think the return e-mail address on the message you sent to me was a generic address. I haven't ignored you, I did reply. E-mail me again with a better address for you.

I received a very nice e-mail from another gentleman who's also endeavored to piece together all that happens in the UO Storyline. His name is Wilde, and he's got a great site. Also, I'd been meaning to start up a links section, mostly to put MNS Dragon's UO Politics and Rumors there as well. Links are GOOD, never take my site as knowing all that goes on with the storyline. The three of us combined shouldn't miss anything. If I haven't updated my site in a couple days(hopefully that'll be happening less and less), definitely go check one of these for info, they're both great :)

The world did go silent. :) The town cryer update has been posted here as "uneasy quiet" beneath most else.

I've also posted part three of my own story. If all these stories sound like jibberish right now, its because I'm jumping all over the timeline with them. Part one was present day, part two was the "childhood" of my character, and part three is around young adulthood. with this update, I've probably introduced 50% of the characters of the story. Look for more, as well as some planned RP'ing events of my own, to further my own story.

Thanks for all your support and interest!

Ok, today was good. Before I even got in-game today I was bombarded by ICQ's from everyone I know about how the lag simply dissapeared. I got in-game to discover that I could indeed run/dance/sing/inscribe/etc... with little to no lag. I'm in Los Angeles, and I play on Atlantic, so I think that's really something to "shake dat bootie" up about. What was even more fun, was freaking everyone out with the newly-implemented Spirit Speak sound. I'm sure more than one of them started looking over their shoulder, expecting some kind of deamon. :)

Anyway, enough of that boring in-game stuff. Yesterday, I received an e-mail from OSI's event coordinator (that's the guy who schedules when storyline/seer events are to happen). I guess the main item of interest, was that this storyline is measured in months at this point. This means, we have a fairly complex story that's going to form, and we've got a lot longer to go before it gets "really" thick and hairy.

I also received a requested-info e-mail from Calsted (who I believe also plays on ATL). I guess he had some serious free time, so he typed out the summarized background story from Ultima's 1-6. That's major work, and my hat's off to him for sending that to me.

Newly posted is the story about Fildan the Pyrotechnic, and the death of G'Splat (poor G'Splat). Fildan has developed some kind of device or game called "DeathTrap". If anyone has more details on exactly what that is, I'd be much appreciated. G'Splat died while attempting to re-conquer the forests north of Vesper. He died leaving a book of simple instructions on him from his "master". Exactly who that master is, nobody seems to know.

Finally, you've probably noticed a small re-design here. I've put up two new pages, under a section called "quick reference." The story was getting too complex to simply place stories under their respective first appearances. So, I've created a timeline that lists events starting from the Gravestone poem and continuing onward. Eventually, I plan on putting every 'major' event in there, in the order they happened. The events are linked, so you can quickly scroll to the bottom and find what's happened lately, rather than trying to decipher what I may have placed on the menu to the left. The second page is a list of all the characters involved in the plot thus far. It's probably incomplete at this time, even though I spent about 3 hours trying to remember everyone that seemed important. If you've remembered someone that I've forgotten, let me know, I'll post them.

Well, after a couple weeks of what appeared to be many "plot-related" (assuming that I even know enough to tell the difference) events, I have only one to report to you since last Tuesday. After Crawworth resigned, Trinsic appointed Finth as the new captain of the guards. Since then, on one evening, the same evening that Finth's wife was on a caravan carrying many armaments, all the shrines were sieged, calling on city guards to extend themselves for their defense. This left the caravan vulnerable, and gave an unknown group of assailants the opportunity to attack th caravan, and steal its cargo.

Also, I've started my own role-play writing (just today :). So, I decided to put it up here and keep a "journal" of it.

Enjoy! and keep the reports coming in.

Oh! One last thing! If anyone knows of a good Ultima site(of the previous Ultimas, duh :P), one that has plot information for all of the previous Ultimas, It would be much appreciated. E-mail a URL to me, and I'll put a link up. Thanks in advance!

The Stories are piling up Fast!

So, I decided to update. Actually, I meant to update this weekend, but there was some behind the scenes construction on UOSS, and Den Dragon asked me to hold off until Monday. Well, then Monday came and there was a lot happening in-game, so I stayed in-game all day. :)

Part two of the background story of the lich twins has been posted. Its quite interesting, and leads into why they are now liches, they were experimenting ways of sustaining or rejuvenating flesh on corpses. That's not the best way to nail down exactly what they were doing, so please, go read, and be enlightened.

I got a very up-close account of the Lich Kyrnia's attack on the southern mainland last week(during the ball, which is why I couldn't make it :P). The story and a screenshot are posted on the Town Cryer, and UOVault also has a blurb on it I believe. I hope I've brought a little more into the story by posting the nitty gritty of what went on during that entire quest, which included a search for the missing Shrinestones, as well as some of my own speculations on what shrinestones are made out of.

I added to the SECRETS section. Essentially, I plan on putting all the miscellaneous tidbits that come in, that don't quite fit yet, in that section. I will post secrets that I know of, as I learn of them, fear not. Nothing particularly juicy has come by yet actually.

I put up the text news article on Crawworths Resignation, go check that out if you haven't read the Town Cryer lately. I also started a new "chain" on necromancers. Three appeared on Atlantic this Monday. It seems that similar quests appeared on other shards as well. I believe, since there is no mention of these attacks in the Town cryer, that this was more of a 'Standard Seer Story' or SSS, and not a definite link to the main fabric of the story. However, I have very little information on the roleplaying that these evil mages performed. If you have any logs of what happened, Please send them in. Thanks!

That's all I have for now! Keep up all the helpful submissions!

I received an e-mail from a gentleman who informed me he had solved the quest of putting together the Gravestone Poem singlehandedly. He indicated that he had found all four "magic signs" and that they were merely the runes (glowing runes I'm assuming) at the end of the prophecy. I'm tending to believe this is the case. I was not at all involved in solving that riddle when it came out, as none of my characters were strong enough to complete such a task at that time. Anyway, I'm considering the Gravestone Poem investigation closed for the most part, the only thing left to do, is to tie it in directly with what it is supposed to be prophesying. Mostly, I just changed my ramblings in the Gravestone Poem section to reflect what is known, rather than what I thought might have been.

The Midwinter Ball went on with only one server crash of ATL. I wasn't able to do much talking to people while I was there, and wasn't even able to get the Hulkster's attention as the 'noise' level seemed to be restricting all conversations to only those people directly next to you. Even Faust's speech was seriously affected by this.

Two more texts from the Town Cryer are posted here. The Bio's on Lathiari and his sister Kyrnia have been posted here for people to read, they're also available on the official Town Cryer Newspaper on OWO. I've added in some of my own musings at the end, but the texts are verbatim. I've also included the reports on their original attacks. These events surely hold significance for some kind of power struggle in the near future. Exactly who this new ally of the Cabal's is, is still unclear.

I've also corrected a number of glaring errors to the pages, like text repeating itself, *cough*Blackthorn spelled with an e*cough* and others...

Lundi, Lundi... Today was proof positive to me that I will have to devote some serious time to this site over the next month or so to simply get it up to speed with all the factual information there is out there. I had forgotten everything that's gone on in this game so far (beta included). Most of the storyline elements over the past 8 months felt so spread apart that I had forgotten how much had actually happened. Designer Dragon was kind enough to not only point out the new Town Cryer as a useful source of info (which it is), but e-mail me the entire [storyline] text from the beta shard, as well as the link to the recent text from Sherry the Mouse on the meeting between Blackthorn and British on the Virtue Guard law that was established recently (Founding of the Virtue Guards)

For anyone who did not participate in the Beta test, I would recommend taking some time to read everything that went on (from a storyline perspective) during beta testing. Be warned, the section for the Scavenger Hunt is a good 40k of reading material, and the other two aren't exactly "readme" files either.

The information on the New Town Cryer alone is going to keep me busy this week, as the information there will undoubtedly alter a lot of what I have speculated on. I should make a start on including the in-game books here as well, at least to get "My Story" in here, as it has always been regarded as the most pertinent.

Ar, Things have started up at a nice pace. I got several submissions, notably the entire gravestone quest from Gasper over at UOVault, and two mentions from excited people who managed to attend or get info on the alleged recent invasions of Vesper Yew and Trinsic by agents of the Cabal. My next thrust will be to try and understand that poem in its entirety (daunting task) and to try and fit in some of the more recent events.

In passing thought over the weekend, I've come to feel that this site would be incomplete without either a link to or the stored text of all the official books in the game, as the Gutenburg project on the UOVault had for so long. If anyone has some site I could link to for readers of this page to read all the recorded books in UO, I'd appreciate it. If none exists, I'll start recording them myself over time. Thanks!

Also, just before I was able to get this update posted, I received an e-mail requesting that I not offer so much commentary on what I think about the facts. I'm kinda torn on the subject, but in response I'll just say that I'll try to emphasize the facts more than my own thoughts on the events. I feel like I already do that, and keep in mind, that my commitment is to replace anything I've written here when I'm proven wrong, or a more logical interpretation surfaces. With that, I'll say that if you HAVE a more logical interpretation, and I'm HOPING many of you do, send it to me without hesistation, we'll start a dialogue, and I'll correct anything in error. I know, a chatzone might be best for this, but there are so many chatzones, and I don't want to give the time to creating/maintaining one. I'd rather establish individual dialogue and post the best of what everyone comes up with here. Still, there's no reason not to cut down on the chatter some, so I'll emphasize the facts more.

One final note, The Midwinter Ball on ATL is looking to be quite a good player event coming up. Several people are already working on roleplay text for the event. The rumors for an assassination attempt to be performed at the ball have not yet died down, exactly who got this idea, or who's planning on killing whom is still a mystery... as is the method of this proposed murder under the watchful nose of the guards.We can only hope :)

Greetings, and Welcome,

Since final release, I, like many of you, have been longing for some kind of on-going plot to begin in our rich land. Indeed, were it not for some official announcements from OSI regarding the implementation of plotline events, I might've clicked on the dreaded 'uninstall' icon myself. Over the past month, I've been eager to get myself as involved as possible in recording this story and all its hidden agendas. I was about to put up some web pages of my own on my space on AOL when Den Dragon put out the word that he was looking for help with his site. So, I e-mailed him with my idea, he agreed, and here we are. This site, like countless others in the UO community, will need more than myself to succeed in its mission to chronicle the best stories of our fair land. It needs the watchful eye of those of you who, like me, play it with watchful, analytical eye. It is my hope that this will become the place that all will turn to for insight and understanding of what goes on in all of Britannia.

Welcome to Ultima Online's Stories and Secrets!