Unraveling The Mystery Of Tabula Rasa?

Thanks to an anonymous reader for suggesting abstruse information on Ultima creator Richard Garriott's mysterious new MMORPG, Tabula Rasa, as referenced in a recent Slashdot Games post dealing with Korean MMO behemoth NCSoft, who purchased the nascent game for "$33.4 million in stock and cash" back in 2001. An online chat transcript from early 2003 noted that "many people that worked on [cancelled MMO Ultima Online 2] are now with NCsoft working on Tabula Rasa", and more recently, a Richard Garriott lecture at the Austin Game Conference mentioned that the game "will most likely utilize a massively multiplayer metaworld for player matching and instantiated spaces for smaller groups of matched players", but almost nothing about the game has yet been revealed. The clearest indication yet comes from several recently-posted pieces of concept art, as noted earlier this week, showing an alien planet called Eera as the main setting, and mentioning such oddities as "Eeran Wastelanders [which] will beguile you with psychic hallucinations."