dirtyharry50: I found a keyboard reference of commands and a walkthrough on the Web which are helpful to have. I enjoyed reading the manual the game came with but was surprised it did not include anything about keyboard commands. Anyway, problem was solved.

So, I begin playing and wander into Lord British's castle. I read in the walkthrough I ought to speak to some guy at a bar. I didn't see any bar there but I did find the king and got his quest I think using the Transact command to talk to him.

Then I go outside and there is another place to enter so I do to find out this town has the bar and there are two guys in it. One guy moves around and the other remains stationary by the bar. I am guessing this guy who does not move is the barkeep. I try transact and wind up buying myself an ale. That was fine. Who doesn't like an ale whilst out adventuring?

Then I try transact with the guy moving around but it just brings up the buy/sell window again. So apparently I am unable to talk to the bar guy. It's not a big deal as I think he just tells you about the King's quest. So that's fine where I already have the quest and I am thinking maybe the guy doesn't talk to me because I already have the quest now. But it kept bugging me that maybe I was doing something wrong or missing something somehow that I couldn't get the guy in the bar to talk to me. Was I doing something wrong or missing something there or was it because I happened to visit the caste and get the quest first? I'm just curious if anyone would know that.

So next I head outside and am wandering through some woods where I am waylaid by a nasty necromancer and a ranger who gang up on me. I try to fight back but it does not go very well for me and I died. I did ready my armor and weapons and this brings up another question. Once I ready these things, are they permanently ready until I replace them with upgrades? I hope so!

During the combat I became confused (it does not take much!) and I wasn't sure if positioning relative to my enemies, other than being next to them mattered. In other words, do I need to be beside them or just on any adjacent square next to them? Does that matter? It went kind of quickly that I got killed with two of them attacking me so I wasn't sure.

After dying I was resurrected (yay!) but I came back with less hit points. I had 99 and they displayed in red color text. I guess maybe because I was injured? This then made me wonder, how the heck do I heal myself and recover when I am hurt? I headed off again and entered a dungeon nearby and actually killed one or two monsters successfully but then I was again defeated and died. I resurrected again (yay!) but had 99 hit points again I think. Once again I was wondering oh boy, how the heck do I heal up?

That was my first foray into the game and I saved my progress and quit out of it. As you can tell, I am a wee bit lost about some things. So any answers to these questions or other tips/info would be greatly appreciated.

My first RPG and really the game that hooked me into PC gaming was Ultima VII: The Black Gate. God, how I loved that game! I had so much fun with it. So I have always wanted to go back and play the whole series for its entire story, etc. Thanks to GoG I can now at least up to Serpent Isle. I really hope they release Ultima VIII and IX too. Back in the day I never did play Serpent Isle and I forget why now. I did play Ultima VIII however and enjoyed it. I also attempted to play Ultima IX which I owned back then but like so many others, it would not run well for me and I never finished it.

If you got this far, thanks for reading this wall of text! I look forward to any replies! :-)