The Book of Lore

The Book of Lore comes with Ultima V. It is 54 pages long. In-game, many sources are provided as authors, and the book is mentioned throughout the hero's adventures in Britannia. In real-life, Richard Garriott, Mark Hamner, Paul Isaac, Stuart Marks, Steve Meuse, John Miles, Toshi Morita, Chris Roberts and Dallas Snell are credited for the book.

Description
The Book of Lore is presented as an in-character guide to the land of Britannia, giving a very detailed account of things the traveler has to know about the land. It touches upon many topics that were not discussed in previous or subsequent game manuals, such as for example the exact workings of the Great Council or celestial mechanics. The last page holds the Ethics of Blackthorn, which were enacted in-universe during Blackthorn's reign just days before the book would go into printing, and thus are a late addition - and a warning how things have changed in Britannia.

Translated, the runic script framing the cover reads as follows: "Being a complete compendium of Britannia from ancient times to date, recorded for the referance and enlightenment of people throughout the land."

Book Content
The following topics are part of the book:


 * History of Britannia
 * Terrain
 * Government
 * Shops
 * Travelling guide
 * The classes
 * Transportation
 * Cosmology
 * Runescript
 * Music
 * Combat
 * Weapons and armour
 * Bestiary
 * The Eight Virtues
 * Magic and all its topics
 * Ethics of Blackthorn

Other Editions
For the port to the PC-9801 in Japan, the entire book was translated - including the title itself. Content-wise however, it stays the same.

The book was later re-printed in The Age of Virtue manual. While the text is the same, the book otherwise was altered significantly. The section headers - in the original drawn words - were replaced by simple text, a big number of illustrations were removed, others shoved together (especially the shop signs).

Fan Versions
For Ultima V: Lazarus, a fan Book-of Lore was created in PDF-format, containing all the same information one would expect from such a book coming with an Ultima game. This fan-created version however does not try to emulate the looks of the original Book of Lore and in general looks somewhat poor concerning the quality of the illustrations.