The Second Age of Darkness

The original Ultima II manual came packaged with the original releases of Ultima II. It is 18 pages long and written by Mary Taylor Rollo.

Description
The Ultima II manual includes backstory from Ultima I, and attempts to bridge the gaps between the early Ultima games where little backstory existed. Original printings of the Ultima II manual were in black and white, and contained a number of important gameplay and grammatical errors. A small card containing a list of important errors was included with the earliest releases. These were fixed in later printings of the manual. Also of note is, that the cover of the first edition was different from the second edition, being in monochrome and riddled with claw marks. The even later "black box" and "grey box" releases again had a different cover and significant changes to interior art and layout.

Book Content
The following topics are part of the book:


 * The story so far...
 * Instructions
 * Bestiary
 * Transportation & terrain
 * Magic
 * Time travel
 * Space Travel

Other Editions
Interestingly, there exists a version of the book that is fully translated into French and does include everything from the original edtion plus what was written on the reference cards. The cover design hower looks nothing like the original. This was released by the small company in Monaco named "MCC", that published the Atari ST-port of the game in 1985. The game itself got not translated.

In Japan, the book was translated twice for various ports, first by Starcraft and then by Ponycanyon. While the book from Starcraft is bare-bones, the Ponycanyon release has all the content of the original and additionally sports the cover image of The First Age of Darkness, just with an Ultima II logo.

The manual was later released as The Second Age of Darkness, and came packaged with the Ultima Trilogy I II III and later releases of Ultima II. It is 31 pages long. In-game, Lord British is the author of the book. The manual has been partially rewritten to remove slang, and it goes out of character less often.