Character Creation in the Underworld Games

The Character Creation in Ultima Underworld and Ultima Underworld II iscompared to the other games a no-frills affair that is done by selecting options directly. However, the whole process is quite complex and can easily cause lots of grief later in the game when wrong choices come back to haunt the player.

Therefore the whole process is analyzed here in all details. Since there are, despite the fundamentally same mechanism, considerable difference between the two parts during the creation, both games are handles separately.

Ultima Underworld
The name and gender of the Avatar are purely a personal choice and have no consequence whatsoever on the further process.

It gets interesting after that. One of the eight professions has to be chosen. This is the most crucial choice, since each profession comes with a certain range of the three stats and certain abilities they start or can start with. A detailled analysis follows.

The Stats of the Professions
Each profession has a minimum proficency in each of the three stats of strength, dexterity and intelligence, which sadly in Ultima Underworld is not exactly known, being only described as "low", "medium" and "high". It's only known that the abslute minimum for any stat (which most likely is 'low") is 12.

On that starting proficency, a number of bonus points are applied in a random fashion. That means of one doesn't like the numbers, they can re-try to get a different result, which however always can only be within the range set by the minimum numbers.

Here an overview of said minimum proficencies

Of note is that in order to offset the low minimum proficencies, the Shepherd dies have a much higher number of bonus points that are distributed, thus one can get much different results in each attempt.

The Skills
Additionally to that, each class has a unique skillset. Some skills are chosen automatically for the chosen profession, while others can be picked from a list of choices during the creation process. Which skills each class automatically gets and which they can chose follows in the table below. In it, each skill pick means, that one choice has to be made from that list.Of note is that these skills undergo a roll as well, so the actual points the skill gets can very significantly between creation tries.

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Ultima Underworld II
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