So, Because GOG's Ultima 7 Complete Doesn't Include the Map and Cluebook for Serpent Isle…
…here is where you can find online copies of both in the interim.
Balancing the Scales – the Serpent Isle Cluebook
It does not actually bite.
The absolute best place to get this from is at Pix’s Origin Adventures, where he has a very high-resolution scan available.
The Serpent Isle Map
The best place to get most Ultima maps from — excepting the map from Ultima 9 and, for some reason, Ultima 6 — is HRUMP, the High-Resolution Ultima Maps Project. Now, fair warning: the HRUMP website was part of the ancient Ring of Dragons webring, and occasionally you’ll get hijacked to the webring frontpage when you visit the site. As such, I’ve provided a selection of direct links below to scans of the Serpent Isle map at varying resolutions:
For the time being, folks, grab the missing items here. I’m going to see if I can work through BanditLOAF of the Wing Commander CIC to get these things uploaded to GOG and attached to their Ultima 7 download as extras.
Speaking of the missing Ultima VI maps… I have them. I emailed Xe Dragon about it almost a year and a half ago. He sent me the two halves of the map and then I forced them together in PSP. After that I modified his HRUMP logo from U7 and tacked it to the tops of the re-sized maps. I’ve emailed him again a few minutes ago to get permission to submit them here. Hopefully he’ll get back to me with a “yes” soon. 🙂
Thanks for taking care of this so fast!
Hey — I’m told these should be added to the GOG package next week (along with the Crusader: No Regret guide.)
That’s great news, LOAF. Thanks!
Hm. Well. He (Xe Dragon) did NOT respond with a yes to me submitting the Ultima 6 maps here. He responded with an update to the HRUMP site for the first time in over ten years… 😀
That works too!
Thanks for pinging him about it and helping set the update in motion.
Not a problem. 🙂
I’m happy to get them up for people finally (I should’ve showed them to him about 18 months ago.)
Would it be worth trying to get some of the other guide books onto GOG at the same time? The current process seems to be that they only include anything they find on replacementdocs. This would be fine if most submissions didn’t spend years languishing in the uploads queue. My No Regret scan got approved recently which is presumably the one being added in next week.
If they would cut out the middle man, I’ve got a stack of guide scans they could potentially use. It seems crazy to be adding No Regret but skipping No Remorse.
Hey! I have linked them to your site before, but… they seem to miss a lot sometimes. What guides are they missing, Ultima-wise?
We actually sent them a nice rendered from the source files version of the No Remorse guide which they don’t seem to remember they have. (Their version of the No Regret guide is kind of a monster; Origin’s files were corrupted, so we did the pages we could and then used your scans to fill it out.)
(There’ll be a born digital WC4 guide, too… I guess I can go ahead and point them at your U8/9 guides…)
I’ve had a sneak preview of the No Remorse guide and it’s looking great. The middle of the maps disappear into the spine on the real thing so it wasn’t the best to be scanning in.
I was thinking about guides for GOG games in general rather than Ultima specifically but there are the two Avatar adventures books which would made very nice extras. There are some fairly serious omissions with the Ultima manuals such as the reference cards for Ultima 1-3, the journal from Ultima 5 and the second Ultima 3 spellbook, all of which are pretty much essential to the gameplay. They don’t have the Ultima 1 maps either and I gather one of the spellbooks is missing a page but I couldn’t tell you which without going through them.
As far as Origin guides go there is Privateer and Wing Commander 1+2 missing (as I’m sure you know). For their other games I’ve done scans of guides for Magic Carpet 1 & 2, Dungeon Keeper, Myst, Last Express, Gabriel Knight 3, Gabriel Knight 1, Under A Killing Moon, Pandora Directive, Tex Murphy:Overseer, Alone In The Dark 1 + 2, Lands Of Lore 2 and finally the Under A Killing Moon + Pandora Directive novels. They would be welcome to use any of them.