Beyond the Serpent Pillars

Beyond the Serpent Pillars is included with Ultima VII Part Two and acts as the game's manual. It is 35 pages long and drawn upon as part of the copy protection, by having Thoxa and Fedabiblio ask questions about the book. In-game, Erstam is the author of the book, while in reality the scribe is Andrew Morris.

Description
The book is written from Erstam's point of view, and many of his personal beliefs, biases and opinions flow into the text. The history section at the very beginning of the book is a one-sided demonisation of Lord British for example, and his personal opinion and belief in magical superiority colors things like shops and weapons. The book should therefore not be taken as an authoritative narrative, especially in regards to the history of Sosaria; the reader has to be careful of what to believe and make their own conclusions by reading between the lines.

Book Content
The following topics are part of the book:


 * Foreword
 * Lessons of the Past
 * Runescript and Ophidian Alphabet
 * A Guide for Travelers
 * Shops, commerce and the classes
 * Weapons and armour
 * Bestiary
 * Magic and its assorted topics

Other Editions
In the European editions, the book has a somewhat smaller format and was printed on more glossy paper while losing all the shades of red, being printed purely in monochrome. The cover image is different, too. The book also was translated to German, French and Spanish. The cover of the Spanish book is entirely black with white text (like the Book of Fellowship). The German book, unlike The Book of Fellowship, suffers from a translator that obviously was not familiar with Ultima-lore, additionally to not having German as a first language. The inconsistencies (even towards The Book of Fellowship), mistranslations and wonky sentence structure leave no room for other explanations.

The book also got translated into Chinese for Taiwan and into Korean.

Later budget editions only got the book as a PDF, being notorious for the, even for 1995, poor quality of the scanned illustrations.