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. In-game, Erstam is the author of the book, while in reality the scribe is Andrew Morris.

The book is written from Erstam's point of view, and many of his personal beliefs and opinion 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 colors things like shops and weapons. It 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.

In the European editions, the book had a somewhat smaller format and was printed on more glossy paper while losing all the shades of red, being printed purely in monochrome. It 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 book also got translated into Chinese for Taiwan and into Korean.

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.

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

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