There’s a new news post up at the Titans of Ether website, in which Corv has announced a contest:

As we are working on this new version of Britannia we noticed something: We do not have enough books!

Yeah we have book models, but we’d like to be able to fill them with interesting little stories. This is where YOU come in! We would like you to write “books” for us!

I call this request a contest because it makes it sound more interesting and less like work 🙂 but seriously:

• everyone who writes a book for us will see this book in Redemption, with the name of your choosing as the author. It can be your real name or a nickname.
• If you write 3 or more books, you will have a NPC named after you!

As you might have guessed the name of the author and the content of the book have to go along with the lore of Ultima (we won’t add a Xserialkilla3000X, sorry). This does not mean that you have to write something about the lore itself (for example “The History of the Skara Brae”), it can just be a trivial or fun little story.

Corv doesn’t actually mention where to submit book text, so for the moment I’ll just suggest you make use of this news posts’s thread at the Redemption forums.

There’s also a new dev diary from Direhaggis on those same forums, in which he talks about his current role as the team’s story consultant, helping polish the plot he wrote some years ago.

Which, by the way, more or less goes like this:

The plot involves 5 main, somewhat overlapping aspects:

1) Eight shrine quests that reveal the history of the Guardian;
2) Up to 8 political quests to influence the Atarkan Senate to the Avatar’s advantage;
3) Up to 8 quests with the Order of the Ethereal Void to gain their favor, because they are a neutral body of mage-like monks who might counteract the Guardian’s own mages;
4) About 5 quests to win over various factions who dislike the Atarkans; and
5) Eight long quests to allow the Avatar to travel somewhere and figure out how the Guardian can be dealt with once and for all.

EDIT: Just for the sake of mentioning it, the whole main plot is done. It’s been done since 2009. And then I took a long, long hiatus.

Sounds like it’ll be a long, long adventure to play through, once it’s finished!