The Dragon Gallery - Part V
Paulon Dragon

Parcival, 2003-12-24

The Dragon Gallery is dedicated the Ultima Dragons who contribute(d) to the ultima community. You will get a look at ‘the person behind the dragon' and his or her love for Ultima. Houston Dragon passed on the quill to Paulon Dragon.

RPGDot: Please include a photograph or equivalent picture

Paulon: Sorry. I don't think that there's been any photos taken of me in the last
few years, other than the one from my driver's license. At least not photos that I'd want to see online.

Personalia

I'm Paul Ryan, a 30 year old citizen of Auckland, New Zealand. As a general description of slightly above average height and a little overweight, with short brown hair, brown eyes and glasses. I'd do more exercise to try to get the weight off, but a damaged hip kept me from walking for any length of time for over a year, and still limits my ability to run or twist somewhat. Personality wise, I tend to be quiet around other people, and reasonably even tempered, though I've been known to really lose my temper occasionally, especially if my hip is hurting. Currently I'm not in any relationship, and that doesn't seem likely to change soon.

My current job is something I generally don't discuss. There's no big secret, but an online friend has spent a lot of time trying to figure it out, and I wouldn't want to spoil the fun for him by saying it out loud. It's no secret though that my current working hours are from 4am to 2:30pm, leading to people asking if I get to borrow the Batmobile as a job perk. *grins*

With hours like that, timing in my life tends to revolve about work. I spend my free time either reading sci-fi and fantasy books, with the odd military or detective novel thrown in, or online, reading newsgroups or talking in IRC. It's safe to say that my major current hobby is novel collecting, always needing more space for books. I tend to be a packrat though, and hang onto almost anything I find interesting.

In the longer term I'm saving money to go and continue educating myself. I'm going to wait and see how the funding goes before making more explicit plans.

Ultima

My very first Ultima was U2, back on the C64 when I was about 10 or 12. I didn't really think much of it at the time, and didn't get too far into the game. In those days I was more interested in shooting games, or text adventures. What actually hooked me was Ultima 5, shown to me by a friend when I was somewhere around 15ish. He was lost at sea, and we spent a lot of time locating him. I got the game as soon as I could and played it most of the way through, until the entrance to Shame stimmied me. It was a few years later with the PC version that I actually finished the game. Not too long after that my father got a PC, and I got given U6 for my birthday... and I never looked back, collecting the games as they were released,and digging up the earlier ones where I could. I even wrote solutions to three of the games I had, even though nobody but me was ever likely to read them.

Your Favourite

My favourite is still Serpent Isle. It combines the bugfixed and improved U7 engine with one of the best plots in the series. My only regret is that I've since learned that in many ways the game was cut down to faciliate a quick release. If it was that good with the second half of the plot gutted, what would it have been like in the original planned version? At present I'm not actually replaying any of the Ultima series. From time to time I replay one, refreshing the memories. To be honest these days I'm quite likely to use a character editor, because I'm not really interested in the technical stuff such as levelling up in U5 which is a bit combat intensive, but would rather get on with the story. It's not the engine which makes any given Ultima great, but the plot and what the character does. I don't play the games too often because I like to let the memory blur. That way it's as close as I can get to replaying the game
again.

Ultima Character

My favourite character in the series... a tough one. So many were memorable. But in the end I'd probably pick the Blackthorn of U5, who also had a mention in SI. He wasn't an evil foozle with no good features, he had a history that I found through the game, and I could even sympathise with his errors in some ways. I was glad in the end that he got given a chance to look for a way to change back to what he had
been. Of course the less said about U9's Blackthorn the better. I suppose that leads on to the thing that struck me most in the series.

Memories

There's one event that I walked right into, talking to Wartow in Magincia in U5. Like many others when asked if I hated Blackthorn, I answered Yes. And had the errors in that attitude pointed out. A good lesson in humility.

Ultima Internet Community

I joined the UDIC in early 1998, because I was interested in finding out about other fans. I'd known about the group for a couple years longer from a friend (Dracos Dragon) but I didn't have any internet connection up until the time I joined. I spent most of my time in the rgcud and rgcus newsgroups, talking, answering Ultima related questions, and simply having fun.

Website

Eventually I got around to building a website on my ISP provided space. It started with some common questions from the various games, but I kept on adding to it over time, doing my best to add stuff that wasn't already on other sites. I finally found a use for the solutions I'd written a few years before, correcting errors I hadn't noticed at the time and updating them with new tidbits I'd learned.

Over time I added stuff that had vanished, my packrat instincts letting me locate files who's sites had gone offline, spreading into free hosting when the amount of stuff got too large for my ISP. I didn't do anything major until Destrius from rgcud suggested a gameplay faq for the Ultima series. Somehow I got around to working on it to fill in some spare time. The now unfortunately out of date latest version is nearly 3000 lines
long, but it covers every issue that I knew about on the PC as of the last update, whether technical or gameplay. Eventually I got around to paying for significant storage space and a domain name, and my site now is found at www.ultimainfo.net.

Ultima Projects

The majority of the longrunning Ultima remakes came into being about the same time as I was still fairly busy with the faq and I didn't get involved with them. I was asked if I was interested by Tiberius of the Lazarus project once in passing, but I didn't think I had the time to do them justice. Nowadays I have less time, and most projects seem to need modellers, graphics artists, or programmers, none of which I am. I tinkered around with the idea of remaking U2 in the Dragon Engine project, a U5 style rpg maker,  worked on by Litmus Dragon, but gave up after he dropped the project. I ended up running the Legacy website after Darkheart lost his webspace, which counts as a project I suppose.

Beyond Ultima

I enjoy rpg games, though I don't have as much time as I'd like. Given that, I'm still working my way through Morrowind and the official addons, despite the time since their release. I play on Legacy a fair bit of course. I also enjoy RTS games, which I'm totally useless at, tending to get beaten by the computer regularly on the easy levels and settings, and Civilization style games. Currently I'm playing either Civ 3 or Alpha
Centauri on the weekends. I don't dare play either on working days, as I'd lose track of time and get no sleep. I'm not really looking forward to any games in particular. The release delay in New Zealand is such that by the time a game reaches here I've seen enough feedback to be able to guess if it's worth buying.

Pass it on

I'd like to see you contact Samurai Dragon. He's the current maintainer of the rgcu* newsgroups FAQ. He's always been a sensible and witty person, and well worth talking to.