Ultima II was the only game in the franchise published by Sierra On-Line (barring one obscure spinoff) as they were the only publisher willing to include the cloth map that Garriott insisted on. A dispute over the rights to the PC port of the game later led Richard Garriott to create his own company, Origin Systems, to publish future titles in the series.
When rolling up your character, you have 90 points to distribute. Each stat must have no less than 10 and no greater than 40 points in it to start. Ideally, you want at least 31 Strength to be able to equip the best Armor and as high of an Agility score as you can get (we'll eventually need 51 to equip the Quicksword). Intelligence and Charisma should be as LOW as possible; they make shop prices go up as they increase due to a bug.
The gender/race/stats bonuses are as follows.
| Male | +5 Strength |
| Female | +10 Charisma |
| Human | +5 Intelligence |
| Elf | +5 Agility |
| Dwarf | +5 Strength |
| Bobbit | +10 Wisdom |
| Fighter | +15 Strength |
| Cleric | +10 Wisdom |
| Wizard | +10 Intelligence |
| Thief | +10 Agility |
The game was heavily inspired by Terry Gilliam's 1981 film "Time Bandits"; in particular its characters hopping to various eras using "time holes" with the help of a map. Richard Garriott and his friends watched the movie multiple times in theaters, copying down whatever details of the map could be seen from its brief onscreen appearances, and he was quite insistent on having a cloth map of the "time gates" included with the game (which only one publisher, Sierra On-Line, would accommodate). Probably the most blatant lift from the movie is the concept of the Time of Legends - a period before all recorded history consisting of only a single small, round continent where the film (and game's) main villains reside.
Box/manual/map scans
The Exodus project, which provides a very nice bug fix/upgrade patch
