Rock, Paper, Shogtun!’s editors are, in general, unabashedly vocal about their love of the Ultima series, so it’s somehow fitting that — with they sat down with Larian Studios for a play session of Divinity: Original Sin 2’s DM mode — they took an opportunity to re-enact the opening scene from Ultima 7 Part 2: Serpent Isle:

Last week I spent a day playing with Divinity: Original Sin 2’s [official site] Games Master mode, and now I want to force everyone I know to play pen and paper RPGs with me. If this is what I’ve been missing in the years since I last went full goth with weekend Vampire: The Masquerade sessions, I’ve had a wasted adulthood.

The GM mode is separate to the main game, using the Divinity ruleset in campaigns either released by Larian or created by players, who can then share those campaigns online or with friends to recreate a tabletop experience digitally. At the press event, we built a chunk of Ultima VII and then started cannibalising the good guys.

…

Our GM was Larian’s CEO Swen Vincke and I half-jokingly challenged him to create the opening of Ultima VII, saying I’d be doing that very same thing as soon as the game was out in the wild. We went with The Serpent Isle, part two, rather than The Black Gate, possibly because Vincke wanted to show off a battle at sea, and the results were superb. We had our battle at sea, our ship boarded by pyromancers, we had landed on the Serpent Isle and we’d killed and cannibalised an important NPC ally.

They quickly deviate from the events of Serpent Isle, but it’s still amusing to read through their attempt at it. So why not go and do that?

(Hat tip: Windemere)