Linguistic Dragon found time in his busy schedule to play through a big more of Ultima 6 and then write about it. In his latest outing, he actually managed to recover all of the pieces of the pirate map:

As nice as it would have been to kick back for some much-needed – and arguably well-deserved – R&R on the lovely banks of scenic Dagger Isle, I only had a scant half of the map in my pockets, and four other pieces yet to seek out. Two lay in Britannia’s dungeons, one in Shame, another in Wrong, and after my harrowing experience in Destard, I wasn’t yet sure of the wisdom of chasing after those two yet.

…

Once we pieced the map back together, it wasn’t hard to find the island in question, and following Homer’s directions and fighting off another hydra, we dug just to the south of a dead tree and found an entrance to another cavern.

It turned out that this was the cavern I should have been worried about, over Shame or Wrong. Hawkins’ grave was the first thing we found, along with a few supplies, including a sextant, which would certainly come in handy. The pirate captain clearly was not well liked at all – even his epitaph read “He died a hard death and he deserved it.” It wasn’t hard to see why, if he went to the lengths to hide his treasure in such a dangerous place. Lava everywhere, demons and drakes hiding out on it, poison fields, traps everywhere, signs that outright lied to us, numerous slimes – this place threw everything it had at us, and we did not back down. Once again, I was glad I’d stocked up on reagents, as several spells came in handy during the trip. Vanish spells dealt with the traps we came across, fields were dispelled, and the Chain Lightning spell Aric had just gained access to just tore through the hordes of enemies hanging out in the lava. It was also an Explosion spell that blew down the door that led to the stash itself, and once we cleaned up the slimes crawling all over it, we claimed our prizes. Gold coins, gold nuggets, gems, invisibility rings, a magic fan which I suspected to be similar to the one (if not the same) that Utomo had mentioned back in Yew – to say nothing of the storm cloak Homer wanted so badly, and the object of this whole excursion in the first place, the silver tablet.

And having found the treasure of the hated pirate Hawkins, he was able to better understand — with Mariah’s help — just why the Gargoyles hated him so:

Suddenly everything came into focus. I was that False Prophet. I had taken their sacred texts, desecrated their holiest place, shattered their world, and for that they had determined that I must die. And so they called up a moongate of their own, snatching up to sacrifice me in the name of saving their way of life.

This was not going to be something easily fixed.

And after offering some praise for the pacing of the game’s story, he also had this to say about how its plot refers back to what has come before:

This bit of the game also brought up something that I really appreciated about Ultima VI, the fact that it ties in not just to its immediate predecessor, but everything that’s come before it. Granted, it does so by way of a few retcons and such, but I don’t find them particular obtrusive, and moreover, it’s not necessarily done in a way that makes it impenetrable for newcomers to the series. The Book of Prophecy basically interprets all of the Avatar’s deeds during the Age of Enlightenment from another angle, and the Age of Darkness gets its time in the spotlight later in the game too. But at the same time, the game doesn’t expect you to know everything that it’s talking about, either – Mariah spells out that she thinks it’s fairly clear the book is referring to your deeds, saving new players from both an infodump and confusion as to how in the world any of that relates to you. It’s a nod to the series as a whole without being so hamhanded as to alienate anybody unfamiliar with canon in its entirety, and it’s the way I think a series is best handled.

This being Linguistic Dragon, there is of course much, much more that he has written, which you should go and read. So…go, and read.