Video Game / Ultima Underworld

"If thou art truly the Avatar, then perhaps thou canst offer hope. None here can survive the Stygian Abyss and rescue Arial. My mind is set. Corwin shall take thee to the Abyss. Return here with my daughter, and thy innocence shall be proven. If thou dost not return, 'Avatar', then thy lies shall have brought thee low."

—Baron Almric setting in motion the plot of the first game.

"'Tis now almost a year since thy defeat of the Guardian. In that time we have repaired much of the damage done in the Guardian's assault. But though the task is great, the time has come to take pleasure in what we have acomplished. On the Anniversary of thy triumph, we shall hold the Festival of Rebuilding at my castle in Britain. There we shall honor thy victory, and relive past adventures. I shall be honored if thou dost attend."

—Lord British's letter to the Avatar at the start of the second game. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Two first-person Action RPG spinoffs of the Ultima series, developed by Looking Glass Studios and published by Origin Systems:

• Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, 1992
• Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds, 1993

The first game is almost completely disconnected from the continuity of the main series, involving the Avatar Dungeon Crawling through the eponymous Abyss with the goal of rescuing a baron's daughter. The sequel is more closely connected to the series, featuring NPCs from previous games and a storyline that takes place between the events of Ultima VII and Ultima VII Part II, and which fills in a lot of the Guardian's backstory.

The Underworld games are notable for being early examples of true 3D environments, predating quasi-3D First Person Shooters such as Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom. They are also regarded as the Ur Examples of the Immersive Sim genre.

The long-awaited continuation of the series was Kickstarted under the title Underworld Ascendant.

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Tropes present in the Ultima Underworld games include:

• Aborted Arc: In an obvious Sequel Hook, in the second game Fissif claims that former Fellowship members are gathering on Buccaneer's Den. What they are plotting there is never revealed, as they didn't make an Underworld 3, and the next main series game (Serpent Isle) goes with a different plot.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: In the sequel. It's apparently actually a dungeon - see All There in the Manual below.
• Acid-Trip Dimension: Talorus in the second game. After all the generic-fantasy worlds suddenly finding yourself in a place filled with psychedelic colours and inhabited by tentacled aliens is a bit of a shock.
• All There in the Manual: Despite no references in this game, the castle's sewers are actually a primordial dungeon, Hythloth, which was either there before the sewers accidentally opened it up or they were placed there to seal them off, depending on the story. Ultima VI actually had the sewers of the castle connect to natural caves which reached all the way to Buccaneer's Den.
• After the End: Two of the dimensions you visit in the second game, Ice Caves and Scintillus Academy, were conquered by the Guardian through utter devastation. You arrive at least several decades after the fact.
  • Also, the Stygian Abyss in the first game. It was intended to be a colony in which all races cooperated for the greater good. It did not survive the founder's death, but no one can leave.
• Anti-Magic: In Ultima Underworld II, blackrock encloses the castle therefore disrupting spells, and is also given an additional property of being indestructable. Despite being anti-magical, the guardian was still able to have it magically enclosing the castle.

• Black Swords Are Better: the hierarchy of bladed weapons goes like Dagger < Short Sword < Long Sword < Broad Sword < Jeweled Sword < Black Sword. The black sword is the absolute top tier.

• Calvinball: The game of White-Rock-Black-Rock becomes this when you play it in the Ethereal Void. Valid moves include taking the fish, squashing peas, and moving to Limbo.
• Clear My Name: The Avatar must find and rescue Baron Almric's daughter, Arial, in the first game to prove himself innocent of abetting her kidnapping.
• Colony Drop: Killorn Keep, a flying castle, can be made to suffer this fate. More annoying is that you may wind up doing this by accident if you weren't paying attention to the lore, since you need to go into the area where the monsters responsible make their home, and they're hostile.
• Continuity Nod: In Stygian Abyss, there is a troll who asks you your name. No matter what you tell him, he says your name is too hard to say and he'll just call you "Rodriguez". In the ethereal void in the second game you come across a troll, who immediately says "Rodriguez! What are you doing here?"
• Convection, Schmonvection: You can run across a huge pool of lava to grab a Plot Coupon from a central island without serious injury. Dragonskin boots allow you to walk/wade across lava — though they're magic, so perhaps A Wizard Did It.

• Damsel in Distress: The goal of the first game is to save Baron Almric's daughter Arial from the Abyss.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: In the first game, if you've planted the Silver Sapling then you return to it when you die. In the sequel, death is permanent in Britannia, but if you die in an alternate world (where you spend the majority of your time) you return to the blackrock gem.
  • Though you can reincarnate indefinitely provided the above mentioned conditions are met, you're slapped with a reduction to experience points per death.
• Developer's Foresight: In the first game, you can refresh burnt-out torches and lanterns if you find some oil, or combine a pole and some giant spider silk to make a fishing rod. You can also make popcorn by using corn on a torch (no, it has no purpose, but it's fun).
• Dialogue Tree: A particularly well-written one.
• Difficulty Levels: Curiously, there were only Standard and Easy, with no Hard.
• Door to Before: After reaching the blackrock gem, a convenient passage takes you back to the castle via a portcullis that's locked from the other side. A good thing, as otherwise you'd do a lot of wandering up and down through the sewer.
• The Dragon: Mors Gotha, the anti-Avatar who serves as the final boss in Underworld 2, is the Dragon to series Big Bad The Guardian.
• Early Game Hell:
  • In the first game, you start with literally nothing (a nearby bag, fortunately, has a dagger and some food), and you have to scrounge everything. Unless you're diligent in exploring each inch of the level, and finding every secret, you're going to be underpowered and underequipped when you go to the second level.
  • In the second game, while you can't die while you're in another world, you first have to get to the Blackrock Gem at the bottom of dungeon under the castle, where death is permanent. While you start with a lot more equipment than in the first game, the enemies are more dangerous as well.
• Face–Heel Turn: Rodrick the Chaos Knight in the first game is a formerly honourable member of the Knights of the Crux Ansata who went rogue.
• Fantastic Racism: The first game actually gives an in-depth examination of this concept, as the settlement in the Abyss was intended to see if humans, mountain-folk, goblins, trolls, and lizardmen could live together. It wasn't entirely successful; the settlement collapsed and most of the groups live in their own sections, though still trade occasionally. Interestingly, the green and grey goblins hate each other more than any other group. Also, it turns out that the lizardmen, far from being evil monsters, are actually a quite intelligent and civilised race who have historically been seen as monsters due to their physical inability to speak the Common Tongue. It may be unintentional, but lizardmen are one of only two races who never attack you without provocation (the other is the mountain-folk).
• Fantastic Slur: The short, bearded people get offended if you call them "dwarves"; they prefer "mountain-folk".

• Fictionary: In the first game, it's possible to learn and speak the Lizardmen's language.
• Frictionless Ice: The Ice Caverns contain plenty of this. The hint booklet even describes it as "Frictionless Ice".
• Game-Breaking Bug: If you fail to adequately handle the "strike" situation with Lord British's kitchen staff in the second game, the game will become Unintentionally Unwinnable. There's also no indication at the time that you've chosen the wrong option on the Dialogue Tree, it isn't until a bit later that you realise you can't progress any further... yet you still aren't sure why unless you consult a walkthrough.
  • Another bug, which along with the above was fixed in a patch, resulted in Relk attacking you when you first spoke to him, and the whole of Killorn Keep turning hostile towards you. (He's supposed to attack you alone in his quarters later on.)
  • With sufficiently high skills, it's also possible to destroy Killorn Keep before you're meant to know it's even an option. While the game doesn't technically break, the story definitely does, relying on details and conversations that could no longer happen.
• Giant Spider: A variety of unnaturally large spiders make an appearance in both games. Many of them are hostile and will attack the player on sight, but a few of them are non-malicious.
• Gratuitous Iambic Pentameter: The friendly imp in the first game speaks in rhyme.
• Gold Fever: The Dwarven king loves gold, and will grant you favors if you give him gold coins. If you want to access the vault with his permission, you have to turn over a huge chunk of you make on a lower floor with the help of an alchemist.
• Go Wait Outside: There's a blacksmith character who will repair your items. It requires X real-time minutes to accomplish the repairs, although you can skip this time by sleeping.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: The troll game of "White Rock Black Rock", in which you are challenged to pick the correct rock... from a pair of rocks clearly visible to both players. You can make it even more difficult by giving the troll a gray rock. It's more of a puzzle than it appears to be though, because the reward comes from figuring out how to let the troll beat you.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Sword of Justice, one of the plot coupons, is as good as the second best tier of bladed weapons in the game. While there are stronger weapons, and more situationally appropriate weapons, the Sword of Justice can easily carry you through a third of the game, or even more if you know how to get it early, by virtue of the it being completely unbreakable, in a game where equipment repair is your primary Money Sink.
• Interquel: Labyrinth of Worlds is set between Ultima VII and Ultima VII Part II, though it ignores the inventory of the preceding game which plays a part in the following game.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: You have eight slots for items in your inventory that you're not currently using. One of the most important things to find is bags, backpacks and scroll cases: they all multiply your inventory space, as bags and backpacks are functionally infinite in terms of storage space, and scroll cases can hold any number of pieces of paper. It's even possible to put bags in bags! That being said, as the game plays out in real-time exception in dialogue, having too many items or bags can make finding your potion of healing difficult in the heat of battle.
  • The real limit to inventory is weight: you can only carry so much based on your strength score, regardless of how many bags you have.
• Lethal Joke Weapon: Sort of—they're not jokes per se, just sneaky. Some of the most powerful weapons and armor in Underworld 2 look just like the weakest. There's a hatchet of smiting that's probably the most powerful weapon in the game, a cudgel that opens all locked doors and chests, and a leather vest that makes you immune to fire, to name a few of the most notable. The only way to know that they're enchanted is to cast the identify spell on them, or have a sufficiently high Lore skill (or notice the effects that they're giving you).

• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Low-level spells are extremely weak, whereas the top-level spell Smite Foe kills an enemy in one hit.
• Lizard Folk: The Thepa Lizard Men are a tribe of reptilians.
• Lord British Postulate: Of course. The game doesn't allow you to kill Lord British, but you can kill anyone outside of Castle Brittania by attacking them, and, more to the point, you can do it by pushing them into water and completely avoid retribution. Additionally, the Armageddon spell allows you to kill everyone.
• Made of Explodium: The bats, which inexplicably burst into flames when you kill them. It's just a visual, and doesn't hurt you.
• The Maze: Most areas of both games have a maze-like quality to them, although the map prevents this from being a problem.
• Mirror Universe: Killorn Keep, a mirror universe of Britannia in which the people have embraced the Guardian's leadership.
  • Evil Counterpart: Thibris to British, Mors Gotha to the Avatar. Lobar isn't evil, but looks an awful lot like Dupre.
• Missing Secret: The big double door on the ground floor of the Prison Tower, which really looks like it should be openable.
  • Also, you're told that there are eight pieces of the map of Praecor Loth's tomb. Only seven exist; it's implied that the eighth was destroyed.
• Modest Royalty: Lord Goldthirst actually gets offended if you are too obsequious to him.
• Money for Nothing: A borderline case in the second game. Merzan provides some pretty useful things, but aside from him there's virtually nothing for you to spend your money on that can't be found abundantly on the floor. The first game is fairly similar, in that the only things you really need to buy are things you could just as easily murder the holder for.
  • With sufficient barter skill in the first game, you can convince anyone of clearly ridiculous trades, such as one gold piece being more valuable than five. Since you don't save anyone from the Abyss when you leave it, you can crash the economy and buy out all reliable food, weapons, and gold before leaving. Notably, almost none of the intelligent races are ever mentioned again in subsequent games.
• Money Sink: In the first game, repairing your gear. A mountain-folk blacksmith on the second level can repair anything to perfect quality in a day, which is what most of your money will go towards, as otherwise you're constantly swapping out damaged gear for better quality gear.
• Mushroom Samba: The dream plant which sends you to the Ethereal Void when you next go to sleep. Also the mushrooms, which distort your vision.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The Trilkhai, who share a similar back story with the Kilrathi of the Wing Commander games. In fact, if you rearrange the letters...
  • Paintings hanging on walls in the second game are very low-resolution versions of cover art from previous Ultima games.
• Near Victory Fanfare: II has three battle themes: one when you're close to victory, the standard one, and one when you're close to defeat.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The sorcerer villain of the first game planned to sacrifice the Baron's daughter — but only as a means to complete the ritual necessary to prevent an immortal, invulnerable demon from entering the world. When you kill the wizard and save the comely maiden, you unintentionally task yourself with discovering a new means to hold back a demonic, world-destroying murder-machine.
  • More to the point, if you read his notes, you'll learn that he was capable of bringing back the dead, so it wouldn't even have been a meaningful sacrifice anyway...
• Nominal Importance
• Non-Malicious Monster: Although many of the gigantic monstrous-looking spiders, lurkers, worms, slugs, rats etc. encountered in both games are hostile, some of them are not, and will leave you alone as long as you don't provoke them. This is why it's a good idea to check a creature's state before attacking it, although the presence or absence of "combat music" will also be a telltale sign.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: As noted in the manual, Mountain-Folk dislike being called 'dwarves'.
  • Which is a case of Fridge Brilliance, as 'dwarf' actually also means 'an unusually short person'. There is nothing unusual in the size of the Mountain-Folk, regardless what some strangely overgrown humanoids might think. For them, the term 'dwarf' is like 'black' to an African or 'squint' to an Asian.
• Nostalgia Level: The maze in the Ethereal Void drawn in crude white lines and populated by stickmen was intended to mimic Akalabeth, the precursor to the Ultima series.
• Ominous Floating Castle: Killorn Keep, though you only get to see it from the inside. If you do enough searching, you can find what's keeping it aloft and destroy it. This will understandably turn everyone inside hostile, and once you leave using the Blackrock Gem, it will have crashed upon your return, revealing a few things you couldn't reach before while also eliminating everyone important to the plot that lived there.
• 100% Completion: The Tym rune seems to serve this purpose in the second game: only one exists, and it's hidden in an unmappable area full of Guide Dang It! moments.
• Our Ghouls Are Creepier: The Exiles in the first game. They are not actually undead, but have been mutated by the dark powers of the Abyss, and have no qualms about eating fellow sapients.
• Our Liches Are Different: For once, liches aren't necessarily wizards. Underworld 2 features a trio of liches—a warrior, a wizard, and an assassin. The warrior is the leader, and the most dangerous.
• Plot Coupon:
  • There are eight artifacts in the first game, corresponding to the Eight Virtues, and which are necessary to defeat the demon. Some of them are quite useful, such as the Sword of Justice (mentioned above, it's an unbreakable, relatively strong sword in a game where repairing equipment is the primary money sink), the Shield of Valor (another unbreakable item, it's as good as a high-level shield), and the Taper of Sacrifice (a light source that will never burn out, though it provides the least amount of illumination other than darkness). The rest are just nice to have, but don't do anything.
  • The second game has eight blackrock stones, used to unlock new worlds, as well as a number of items needed to employ the scheme that ultimately frees the castle.
• Power Nullifier: The Guardian's spell has this effect on Britannia to an extent: any spell above the fourth circle (there are eight) cannot be cast, although wands, scrolls and potions still work fine. It even prevents Lord British's usual free healing services.
• Press X to Die: The Armageddon spell, taught to the player in the first game as proof that knowledge is not inherently a good thing. When cast, it obliterates all trace of anything that the player could have interacted with, even doors, making the game Unwinnable. And once you've been told about it, you won't be able to resist trying it.
  If you've learned that not all information is valuable, you have learned some valuable information!
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: As is normal for the Ultima series.

• Runic Magic: To cast spells, you need a rune bag and the runes that make up the spell you want. You can have one spell prepared, with its runes ready to cast, at a time.
• Run or Die: The Slasher of Veils in the final level of the first game is extremely strong and impossible to kill. Fortunately, as strong as he is, he isn't faster than you.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • The first game has a dead end with a switch and a warning not to flip it. Doing so summons a rat for each flip. The rats do run out eventually, but you can summon a lot of them.
  • In the second game, when you're collecting the pieces of the map of Praecor Loth's tomb, there's a room with a scroll case clearly visible inside it (which is normally what contains the pieces of the map, and are usually much harder to find.) Picking it up causes the room to seal you inside; the scroll case contains only a mocking note from Praecor Loth's vizier.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Try to pass out from exhaustion (the Avatar, that is... it doesn't count if you fall asleep at your computer, which will probably happen first). Even getting your wakefulness down to "drowsy" takes half the game.
  • Collecting all useful items (such as weapons, food, and gold) is quite possible in the first game, especially with a maximized Barter skill. There's no point to this, other to essentially ensure that civilization in the Abyss collapses without you.
• Sequence Breaking: The Plot Coupon in Talorus is intended to be obtained by completing a Chain of Deals, after which you get plonked on an island. However, you're more likely to stumble upon this island serendipitously.
  • For the most part, you can get any of the eight Plot Coupons in the first game without being told how to get them: the method of retrieval is always the same. This can prevent a lot of backtracking (for example, the Sword of Justice is on the third floor, but you generally don't know that it is until you get to the sixth floor).
• Shout-Out:
  • Calvin and Hobbes, H. P. Lovecraft , Monty Python and Q*bert are just a few that come readily to mind.
  • The Stygian Abyss has one to Pac-Man. Who needs power pellets when you have a sword?
• Significant Anagram:
  • The Trilkhai share the letters of their name and a similar back story with the Kilrathi from Wing Commander.
  • Lord Thibris, the dark world counterpart of Lord British.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Ice Caverns.
• Spiritual Successor: Arx Fatalis, it even has a hidden rune that textures everything to look like UU.
  • But wait, there is more! There was another spiritual successor, The Elder Scrolls I: Arena. Yes, that The Elder Scrolls.
• Stupid Evil: During your battle with Tyball in the first game, Tyball never thinks to tell the Avatar that he intends to sacrifice Arial only to stop the Slasher of Veils, instead preferring to gloat about his imminent victory. Really, the responsibility for his failure is all on him.
• Talk to Everyone: At least, everyone that isn't trying to kill you.
• Tastes Better Than It Looks: Rotworm stew in the first game is made from minced rotworm, a hallucinogenic mushroom, and a bottle of port. Surprisingly, it's apparently quite delicious.
• Thermal Dissonance: One of the keys is described as feeling "unnaturally cold to the touch".
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: The Armageddon spell obliterates everything except the player, but it's pretty obvious that you should save before trying it.
• Unwinnable by Design: The game allows you to attack any NPC, or bring about their death in other ways, regardless of their importance to the plot. The designers just trust you not to.
• Useless Useful Skill: Half the skills are either useless or thoroughly redundant. To illustrate: you can put points in Repair, enabling you to keep your weapons and armour in tip-top condition. And you can train in lockpicking, so you can get past those pesky locked doors/chests. Awesome! Except if you'd put those points into mana and casting, you'd have got spells to do both of those and a whole load of other things. One of the cool things about these games is that there are multiple legitimate ways to do everything. Want to open a door? You can bash it, pick it, cast a spell, find the key, or, if you invested in Lore, find a Cudgel of Opening. All of these represent different potential characters taking different paths through the game—though like all Ultima games, Underworld is rather unfriendly to thieves. The game is designed to encourage experimentation with character builds: mages have it easier, but just about any build is viable.
• Walk on Water: Available as a spell. It makes killing those obnoxious water monsters a lot easier.
• Wallet of Holding: Averted. Gold is about as heavy as you'd expect it to be in real life.
• Warp Whistle: A spell in the first game allows you to teleport to a special stone. Pretty handy as a quick escape method or to get out of areas that otherwise have no exit (the vault in the Dwarven area is just a massive pit with no exit, and you find the stone on the same floor).
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: In the first game, Tyball only wants to sacrifice Arial in order to stop the Slasher of Veils from destroying Britannia. You don't find this out until you've already killed him.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Zak in the first game has a phobia of the dark.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: You have to eat from time to time, but it's pretty much impossible to starve to death without actively trying to do so. The main negative effect of hunger is that it reduces or eliminates the rate of health regeneration when the protagonist sleeps.

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