Sosaria

Sosaria is the world. In Ultima lore, it is the planet on which Britannia, the Lost Lands, and most of the original Ultima saga unfolds — the place Mondain came from, the place Lord British forged a kingdom out of, the place the Avatar adventured across in Ultima I through V. In Ultima Online, the term has spread loosely outward to mean "the entire game world" — every facet, every map, all of it taken together. Both readings are in active use; the context of the sentence chooses.

The name itself was coined in Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress — a renaming of Akalabeth's homeland, the world of Mount Drash and Mondain, and chosen "in honor of the Sorcery used to destroy Mondain" (a folk-etymology gloss the games never fully justify). The transcribed canonical spelling is Sosaria, though the original Ultima II manual occasionally renders it Sosoria; modern usage is uniform on the former.

The two readings

Players use "Sosaria" in two distinct ways, and the difference matters when you're trying to interpret a piece of fiction or a quest dialogue:

Under the narrow reading, only Britannia and the Lost Lands are unambiguously on Sosaria. Tokuno might be (the geography is plausible and the setting is Sosaria-adjacent, but never confirmed). Ilshenar, Malas, Ter Mur, Eodon, and the Stygian Abyss are explicitly not — they are separate lands, separate dimensions, separate worlds reached through moongates, dungeons, or tears in reality.

The four continents that aren't there

Pre-Ultima IV lore — established in Ultima II and Ultima III: Exodus — describes Sosaria as a planet of four continents. Mondain's defeat, and specifically the destruction of the Gem of Immortality, caused a cataclysm. Three of the four continents disappeared. Some form of magic prevents anyone from reaching them. Occasionally, lost ships drift in from the missing lands, never to return. Britannia is what remains — the surviving continent, plus its adjacent island chains.

(Ultima Online layers its own explanation atop this: the destruction of the Gem caused Sosaria to be shattered into shards, each shard a parallel copy of the world — the in-fiction explanation for the dozens of UO servers. Shards drift in time and history, are individually mortal, and the Time Lord's revelation of their existence is itself a major lore moment. See Time_Lord and Mondain.)

The geography of Sosaria proper

Even under the narrow reading, "Sosaria" comprises more than just the original Ultima Online map:

• Britannia (the kingdom forged by Lord British, the original UO continent) — Britain, Trinsic, Yew, Moonglow, Magincia, Vesper, Skara Brae, Minoc, Cove, Jhelom, Buccaneer's Den, Nujel'm, Serpent's Hold.
• The Lost Lands — Papua, Delucia, the deep Terathan/Ophidian conflict zones, the Lost Pyre and surrounding wastes.
• The Underworld — the subterranean shore beneath Britannia where Captain Johne shipwrecked and the Shadowlords were born. In UO this corresponds to the dungeon network beneath the world (Despise, Destard, Hythloth, Shame, Wrong, Deceit, Covetous, the Lost Pyre).
• Akalabeth — Mondain's birthplace, the City-State ruled by his father King Wolfgang. Submerged in pre-history; not extant in modern UO.
• The Sea of Britannia — the ocean girdling the continent, navigated by ships and traversed by High-Seas pirates and the Corgul fleet.

Sosaria in the broader Ultima cosmology

Beyond Sosaria the planet, the Ultima cosmos contains other realms reached only via specific magical means:

See also

• Britannia — the kingdom on Sosaria
• Mondain — destroyed Sosaria's old order, his death shattered the world into shards
• Lord_British — forged Britannia from post-Mondain Sosaria
• Time_Lord — revealed the existence of Sosaria's shards
• Felucca · Trammel — Sosaria's two parallel facets
• Ilshenar · Malas · Ter_Mur · Tokuno_Islands · Eodon — neighboring lands and worlds
• Virtues — the moral cosmology of post-Mondain Sosaria