Ultimate Adventures

Ultimate Adventures is the Savage Empire game manual. It is 46 pages long, and it is written by Aaron Allston. The magazine lists the creators of the game as the magazine staff. Intanya asks questions about the book for the copy protection.

Description
The manual is written like a pulp magazine, similar to those of the early 20th century. Several of the articles appear to be written by game characters, such as the Avatar, Dr. Rafkin and Jimmy Malone. It contains numerous articles based upon Eodon, and is written tongue-in-cheek. This is especially noticeable on the second-to-last page, where Aiela models the Wild Basin Expedition T-Shirt. The final section about the return of the Wild Basin Expedition actually shows photos of the Origin staff in safari outfits, including Richard Garriott.

Book Content
The following topics are part of the book:


 * The story of the game
 * The tribes of Eodon
 * Weapons
 * Creatures of Eodon
 * Totems
 * The return of the Wild Basin expedition

Other Editions
For the Japanes ports to various systems, the entire book was translated. Interestingly, the cover is totally different, sporting a newly drawn image. Content-wise however, it stays the same, with the exception of the removal of the T-Shirt ad. The book also was fully translated to Chinese (Taiwan) and Korean, but with again vastly different covers.

Surprisingly, the Japan-only SNES-Port of Savage Empire does contain Ultima Adventures in a book combined with the manual. While being somewhat traunced with some sections removed, most of the content is present. Most interesting, all the original illustrations were actually colored, thus giving them a totally different feel compered to the monochrome original ones.

Trivia

 * There is some inconsistency between the story of the Avatar’s coming to Eodon in the manual and the story told in the actual game itself. The manual clearly states that the black gate that transported the entire lab to Eodon was caused by Dr. Rafkin’s experiments on the ruined moonstone sent to him by one of Spector’s former students. The game contradicts this by stating it was Rafkin’s experiments on the Avatar’s Orb of the Moons that created the Black Gate. According to the manual, the Avatar only showed the Orb of the Moons to Rafkin, then pocketed it while Rafkin got to work on the ruined moonstone.
 * The shots for the return of the Wild Basin expedition, featuring the entire game team, were done in an interior yard of Origin headquarters, which already looked jungle-like. In the unprocessed photos, the walls of the building are clearly visible, releaving the true dimensions of the yard.