Playbook

The Playbook comes with the original release of Ultima I (then simply titled "Ultima") from California Pacific. It is 10 pages long. In-game, an unknown Sosarian is the author of the book. In real-life, Richard Garriott has written the book.

Description
In the remake, this book was replaced with the book "The First Age of Darkness". The book is basically little more than an instruction manual with no narrative. However, unusual for 1980, it sports lots of nice illustrations created by Denis Loubet, which mostly show pictures of the various monsters encountered in the game. Also, unusually, everything was printed with brown ink.

Book Content
The following topics are part of the book:


 * Loading Instructions
 * Movement
 * Space Travel

Other Editions
The book got two further releases. The second release by California Pacific changed the cover of the book, while the inside was now printed with black ink instead of brown one. Meanwhile, the Sierra re-release as "Ultima I - The Original" contained a very different playbook. The cover is a pencil sketch of the castle of the backcover of the Ultima II box and all illustrations were removed.