Goldenflame Dragon recently found himself reading the TVTropes page for Ultima 5, and noticed a curious statement thereupon:

Pun: “Gazers”, aka Expy of Dungeons & Dragons “Beholders”, release a cloud of insects when you kill them. In other words….they’re Bee Holders.

…this had never occurred to me before. Oh god please tell me this is not the reason for the insects.

Rustic Dragon was, being an employee of Portalarium, able to obtain an official response from Richard Garriott on the matter. Fortunately, we have not all been the victims of a massive, ongoing pun since the 1980s:

“No! That’s funny, but no.”

He said that there was never any pun intended and “bee holder” was never something he’d heard until today. He made the gazer to have insects inside for two reasons: One, to help rationalize that it could fly (in a silly way) and two, because he was trying to make monster encounters more interesting. Hence, a monster that would swarm you on death.

The Gazer entry on the Ultima wiki has since been updated with this information, as well as a reference to the (erroneous, but still hilarious) pun. The discussion about it — on the Ultima Dragons Facebook group, of course — carried on for a while longer, however. And soon, a long-standing question about the homeworlds of some of the Companions of the Avatar was put to rest:

[Richard] said that all characters in Ultima with real-world equivalents are assumed to be just like Lord British in origin, meaning, from Earth. Including side characters like Tseramed, since they’re based on real people.

He said that he’s never made an official call on it before, but this is how he sees it in his head. If he were to write fan fiction, he would start from this premise. Also, he said that since Ultima was started when everyone was much younger, later lore generally trumps earlier, with the exception of lore not written by Richard. However, even that rule has an exception. He said that Richard lore trumps all excepting where someone else wrote it with his approval.

Clear as mud right?

But Richard’s official answer was, “Yes, Gwenno is from Earth.”

And when it was inevitably asked which story elements were written absent his approval, here too Rustic Dragon was able to obtain a reply from Lord British:

Richard said he did *not* approve the illegitimate child Easter egg in U7 and therefore is not LB canon.

…

He said that he did have know of an approve of all Easter eggs but this one was kept from him. So that sort of makes them canon?

TVTropes has a reputation for being a…productivity sinkhole, let’s just say. And clearly that must be true, because even what was just a discussion about the website and an assertion made thereupon managed to turn into a massive — and vastly informative — time-sink.