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 |
Box/manual/map scans
The Exodus project, which provides a very nice bug fix/upgrade patch