Great Find Tabbs!
Judging from the first pages it's a real fine read and written by someone really dedicated.

Only worry I got:
I plan on playing the old Single-Player series to educate myself in Ultima lore, and because I like old games. Only played Ultima 1 so far, was a nice retro expierence, even if the starship episode was weird. But now, if I read that text, will it be a great spoiler for playing Ultima 5?

Possibly. It reveals a bit more about characters before the story does. It's meant to be a prologue to Ultima V. It gives a little background into why Britannia is the way it is in Ultima V. But having said that, it IS written AFTER the game was released. So it might assume you know characters. Personally, I'd play Ultima V before reading it. It adds fair bit of emotion to a particular character and might shift your opinion/interpretation after the fact.

Also the elves and spaceships are a bit weird if you've never played the original games first. You'll see how the lore evolves quickly to suit Ultima Online better as you play the later games. They change as Garriott's creative direction evolved alongside his technical expertise.

Thanks Merion and Darkblade,thanks for the great summary.I read as much UO Lore as I can get my beady eyes on.

I must be honest,I was having a moan that EA had wasted the depth of lore they could of used based around the Shadow Lords to make this an epic event storyline.

Looks after Cal's post recently though that ,thats just what they are doing ,so thats encouraging.

Couldn't agree more. A lot of people didn't like the Lord Blackthorn's revenge expansion pack, I loved it. It's probably the only "redundant" expansion. Why? Because when the expansion came out, so did a whole heap of fiction, lore, action figures and in-game events that lasted months. Characters in comics came alive on the screen infront of us. It was fantastic.

I left just after Age of Shadows and returned recently with Kingdom Reborn before leaving again (angry at the way the game changed with SE, ML and more importantly, AoS).

But after reading about the events again (Magincia was a good one too) I'm eager to return to some true BRITANNIAN Ultima adventure.

If my memory serves me right ,isnt that where the existance of elves and what I call the 'spaceship' in Brit Castle grounds came from ?

Nope.

Elves, Dwarfs, Hobbits/Half-lings and Fur(thingies?) were originally a part of Sosaria. However Garriott changed Sosaria into Britannia he removed the other races on the basis that besides appearance and attribute differences, there was no real reason to have them. The game treated you no different, your social interactions were no different and at the end of the day, he wanted YOU to be YOUR character.

Spaceships were in Ultima but not for any fictional reason, they were there because he was trying to cram as much into Ultima 1 and 2 until the discs were full of content. You'll see they mysteriously vanish in Ultima 3 onwards.

Blackthorn's Revenge had a little techno elements to it. Golems, mechanical creatures etc and 2 races. This was originally the setting for Ultima Online 2 which took place in a Britannia whos past (meer), present (human) and future (juka/techno elements) had combined as a result of some big catastrophy. When the project was cancelled and Garriott and most of the team left, they recycled this content into an expansion and placed it in Ilshenar. A lot of people rejected the lore but infact, this WAS all of Garriott's work. Britannia (on the UO2 shards) has a techno future.

People should have accepted it though. Because as Starr Long said, they based the fiction on the fact that as the intro says: each shard has it's own history and destiny. On this shard, the cataclysm never happened, it turns out the meer and Juka have been fighting their eternal war in Ilshenar. But in another shard, this might never happen (which also justifies the fiction in free shards).

Thanks for all that Davin .

Very interesting reading, as I myself had never delved into the actual fiction (is that an oxymoron?) of Ultima until now. Hopelessly addicted to the game as I am, I got there without knowing any of the storyline, but now it is even worse! hehehe

Thanks for the info, everyone

Links for the Shadowlords:

Shadowlords - UOGuide

Shadowlords - The Codex of Editable Wisdom, a Wikia wiki for Ultima and Ultima Online

-Galen's player