Iceblade has posted another update to the Forgotten World website, the second in as many weeks, which announces a most excellent outcome to his previous plea for assistance:

I have some good news to present as well as some changes to note. Firstly, I would like to welcome Fearyourself to the team. He will be helping us with DLL hacking the game’s executable, so that we can do a lot more with the game than is currently possible with just external files. First up is developing a better error logging system so that we can better diagnose some of the more persistent crashes. Then we will move into hacking in a conversation DLL that will allow us to easily write new dialogue. We are not taking in dialogue writers at this time, but I’ll let you know when we are. In addition, our previous DLL hacker HCl has returned and will be able to continue assisting us in some ways just perhaps in a more limited fashion due to his own time constraints.

Even more exciting than this, however, is what follows:

I also have some big(ish) news to report on. Due to the world map being one large file, most every fix I make to the game would have to be duplicated for Beautiful Britannia. So I’m going to merge the patches project into Beautiful Britannia to save on time (and repetitiveness on my part). So don’t expect the next patch until Firstknight is ready for his next release, but this should mean that the game world will be significantly improved from a bug perspective. No promises on NPC scheduling for Beautiful Britannia, though. Of course Forgotten World will have NPC schedules on top of new dialogue.

This is an interesting turn of events, and beneficial as well; Beautiful Britannia is doing wonderful and amazing things to the map of Britannia in Ultima 9, but to date hasn’t been able to fully benefit from the enhanced stability and bug fixes brought about by Forgotten World.

The results of the last Forgotten World poll are also in:

…it looks like people generally want more magic in the game, so expect to see it be a useful (but largely optional tool throughout the game), especially within our much improved and larger dungeons – definitely going to be lots of places to explore in these bits.

Now for our next poll, we want to know what sort of additional features you would most like to see in the game. Note that each of these options will require DLL hacking in some fashion. Just a note about the new weapons option on the poll, this is referring to weapons like more kinds of hammers or poison blades. Crossbows will not be added into the game.

Other options on the list include food preparation, blacksmithing, missing ores, and…well, just click on through to the Forgotten World website to cast your vote.

Finally, over on the Ultima Dragons Facebook page, Iceblade also released a teaser excerpt from “a book that will be added for Forgotten World”:

In the meantime, strange magically-birthed storms wracked the land – transposing all manner of objects with their bright prismatic lighting. Many people went missing during such occurrences: spirited away to places far from their homelands or simply disappearing as though into the ether itself. In the midst of one such storm, the Royal Mint of Britain was wrested in its entirety from the earth, and was replaced with a strange lighthouse of foreign design. Following this incident, much of the gold bullion in the kingdom’s reserves was lost, leading to widespread economic troubles as virtually all notes of royal credit became worthless overnight.

He’s talking here about the Imbalance, of course; the ethereal storms that plagued the land during the events of Serpent Isle. But I for one suspect that the entirety of the text may concern something very different than just that reasonably well-known period in history.