The Realms of Magic#

Note

All seven realms are playable — Arcane, Life, Nature, Death, Sorcery, Chaos and Trump, two hundred and twenty-four workings in twenty-eight books, all of them Zangband’s. You choose your realms at birth and your character sheet records them, and that choice decides which books you can open at all.

Seventeen individual spells across the seven are inert and say so in their own description, each for want of a mechanism this game does not have. They are named in the realm sections below.

Spellcasters in ZangbandTK choose realms of magic at birth, and that choice defines the character as much as the class does. Angband asks you what you are; Zangband asks you what you study, and this game asks both.

The seven#

Realm	Stat	You…	What it is
Arcane	INT	cast spells	The wizard’s realm: bolts, bindings, detections and the deep power at the end of it.
Life	WIS	recite prayers	Healing, blessing, protection, and the banishing of foul things.
Nature	WIS	chant verses	Both defensive and offensive; the realm that talks to animals and to weather.
Death	INT	perform rituals	Necromancy. Draining, cursing, and commerce with what should stay buried.
Sorcery	INT	invoke workings	The meta-realm: detection, identification, protection, escape and advantage. No direct attacks at all.
Chaos	INT	unleash invocations	Destruction, and the realm that changes the caster as much as the target.
Trump	INT	read cards	A deck that reaches places and people. Teleportation, summoning, and the Amber realm in everything but name.

Four of these are Angband’s own, renamed to the names this game uses everywhere else: arcane keeps its name, divine becomes Life, shadow becomes Death, and nature keeps its name. Their casting stat, verb and nouns are Angband’s and are unchanged — Zangband kept the same information in scattered per-class constants, and Angband’s way of holding it is better.

Warning

Arcane is Zangband’s Arcane, and that is a change from Angband. The two games disagreed about this realm more than any other: Zangband’s Arcane was deliberately the weak generalist, every book buyable in town and no high-level power at all, while Angband’s arcane realm is the Mage’s realm, with two books of attacks and a Wizard’s Tome of Power found only in the dungeon. Having exactly seven realms means folding them together, and the fold went Zangband’s way (DEC-49, DEC-50).

So a Mage no longer learns its attacks from Arcane. In thirty-two Arcane spells there is one ball, one bolt and one beam. That is not a mistake: in Zangband a Mage takes two realms, and the second is where the damage comes from. Take Chaos alongside it, and the pair is the classic Zangband Mage.

Choosing them#

Realm choice is a birth step of its own, after race and class, because which realms you may study is a property of your class. That is what makes the combination mean something rather than merely being wide: a Paladin is offered Life or Death and nothing else, and a Mage is offered all seven, then the six it did not take.

A realm already taken is not offered again. A Mage of Arcane and Arcane would study thirty-two spells where it should study sixty-four, which is not a choice anybody would make on purpose and is therefore not one you are given.

You begin holding the first book of every realm you study. A Mage and a Priest start with two, one for each slot; a Monk or a Chaos-Warrior with one; a Warrior or a Mindcrafter with none, having no realm to hold a book for. The book follows the realm you actually chose, so a Rogue who takes Death starts with a Necromantic Tome and not somebody else’s arcane primer. The second, third and fourth books of a realm are bought or found — the village bookseller exists for exactly that.

Class	First realm	Second realm
Mage	any of the seven	any of the other six
Priest	Life or Death	any of the other five
Paladin	Life or Death	—
Rogue	Arcane, Death, Sorcery or Trump	—
Ranger	Nature	Arcane, Death, Sorcery, Chaos or Trump
Druid	Nature	—
Necromancer	Death	—
Blackguard	Death	—
Monk	Life, Nature or Death	—
Chaos-Warrior	Chaos	—
Warrior-Mage	Arcane	any of the other six
High-Mage	any of the seven	—

That is twelve of the game’s fourteen classes. The other two never reach this step: a Warrior studies nothing, and a Mindcrafter’s psionics are a power list rather than a realm — nothing to choose, nothing to find, and nothing that can be taken away.

Two of those rows are worth reading twice. A Priest’s second realm cannot be Life or Death — the first slot offers the two priestly realms and the second offers the other five, so a Priest always ends up with one holy realm and one that is not. And a Ranger’s first realm is Nature and there is no choice about it; you are not asked, because a list of one is not a question.

No class studies the same realm twice. Whatever the entitlement table lists, a realm taken in the first slot is struck off the menu the second slot offers, so two slots always mean two realms. That matters for the Mage and the Warrior-Mage, both of which are entitled to realms that overlap between slots; the second question simply has one fewer row than the first.

These entitlements are Zangband’s own, taken from the same table Zangband keeps them in, and the game checks itself against that table rather than against anybody’s idea of what a class ought to study.

Life#

The healing realm, and the one Zangband’s own spoiler calls “‘good’ magic”. It is built on cures, blessings and protection, and the handful of attacks in it are there for a single purpose: harming and banishing foul things. No other realm keeps a character alive as well, and no other realm is so uninterested in anything that is not evil.

Four books: the Book of Common Prayer and High Mass in town, the Book of the Unicorn and Blessings of the Grail below.

The cures run the whole length of the realm — Cure Light Wounds, Cure Medium Wounds, Cure Critical Wounds, then Healing at three hundred points and Healing True at two thousand — and Holy Word heals a thousand while it dispels, which makes it the one prayer that answers both halves of a bad situation at once. The blessings accumulate: Bless, then Prayer for four times as long, Heroism, Protection from Evil, and Restoration, which puts back every drained statistic and any lost experience together.

The offence is pointed at evil and almost nowhere else. Holy Orb is a ball of holy force that does double damage to evil creatures, and after it comes a run of dispels that need no target at all — Exorcism, Dispel Undead & Demons, Dispel Evil, Holy Word — along with Banish, which teleports every evil creature in sight away rather than killing it. At the end of the fourth book are Divine Intervention, the longest chain of effects in the realm, and Holy Invulnerability, which makes you very nearly untouchable for seven to fourteen turns.

Life is the Priest’s own realm, and the figures say so. A Priest reaches Holy Orb at level 10, where a Paladin waits until 18, a Monk 19 and a Mage 20; and Holy Invulnerability at 45, where everybody else needs 50. It is also the one realm a High-Mage is not first into — a Priest beats it to both of those, by nine levels and by four. These are Zangband’s own levels and mana costs, class by class, unchanged.

Holy Orb goes further and pays the two priestly classes more damage for the same prayer: a Priest or a High-Mage adds three halves of its level to the 3d6, and everybody else adds five quarters. Zangband tested the caster’s class in the spell itself, and two spells elsewhere do the same thing for the two mage classes — Chaos’s Mana Burst and Death’s Orb of Entropy.

Day of the Dove turns every monster in line of sight to your side. It was inert until pets arrived, for the same reason Nature’s Animal Taming was: the whole content of the spell is that the creatures become yours, and until recently there was no side for them to be on (Pets and Allies).

Note

Two of the thirty-two do nothing, and say so. Bless Weapon sits in Blessings of the Grail with its level and its cost, described as beyond what the game can express. 4.2 has a blessed-weapon property and no effect that confers it; chaos branding is the nearest thing the engine has and is a different spell wearing this one’s name. Holy Vision is the fourth spell in the game to want whole-object identification, and meets the same wall as Sorcery’s Identify True, Trump’s Trump Lore and Nature’s Stone Tell: 4.2 replaced it with runes learned one at a time, so there is no hidden description left for a prayer to reveal.

Three more do something measurably different. Nothing here dispels demons by name — 4.2 dispels undead, evil, or everything — so Exorcism and Dispel Undead & Demons hit undead by name and demons by being evil, which catches every other evil creature in sight along with them: wider than Zangband’s, not narrower. Warding True laid a ring of glyphs around the caster and now places the single glyph beneath you, the same as the lesser prayer does. And Divine Intervention does nine of the ten things Zangband’s did; the tenth is the angel it sent to fight for you, and this game has no angel among its summon types.

Sorcery#

The meta-realm, and the first of the three new ones to arrive. Detection, identification, protection, escape, and every convenience a dungeon delver wants — and not one direct attack spell in it. That is Sorcery’s whole character: it makes everything else you do easier and kills nothing itself.

Four books: the Beginner’s Handbook, the Master Sorcerer’s Handbook, Pattern Sorcery (a name this game has a better claim on than Zangband did), and the Grimoire of Power. The first two are sold in town; the last two are found below.

Its best workings are the ones no other realm has. Teleport Away fires a beam that removes monsters from your path rather than killing them. Telekinesis pulls an object to your feet from anywhere you can reach — the strongest of the three versions in the game, lifting a pound and a half a level and needing no sight of what it takes, where the Chaos mutation lifts a pound a level and must see what it takes. Recharging is four times the strength of Angband’s own spell of that name, which is a large part of why the realm is worth studying — Arcane’s Recharging is the same spell at the same strength, twenty-one levels later. Dimension Door lets you pick the square you arrive on rather than taking what the dungeon gives you. And Globe of Invulnerability makes you very nearly untouchable for eight to sixteen turns.

Charm Monster turns a single creature to your side and it stays turned. It is the single-target twin of Life’s Day of the Dove, and like that prayer it was a different and lesser spell until pets arrived — it took a monster over for a while and handed it back, because there was no side for it to change to (Pets and Allies).

A Rogue and a Ranger never learn Globe of Invulnerability. Their Grimoire of Power holds seven workings where everyone else’s holds eight; Zangband’s table marks the last one unreachable for both. See Books that come up short.

Note

Four of the thirty-two do nothing, and say so. Identify True, Detect Enchantment, Self Knowledge and Explosive Rune each need a mechanism Angband 4.2 removed or never had — whole-object identification, a separate is-this-magical bit, a self-knowledge readout the character sheet already carries, and a glyph that explodes rather than wards. They are in their books with their levels and costs, described as beyond what the game can express, rather than quietly missing: a book with a hole in it and a note saying so is honest, and a spell absent without explanation is not.

Trump#

The last realm to arrive, and the one that had to wait for pets. Fifteen of its thirty-two spells summon a creature, and in Zangband every one of them turns on the same question: cast it well and the creature is yours, cast it badly and an angry group of them appears. Until monsters could take sides, all fifteen would have come out as the bad half — Trump Cyberdemon would have been sixty mana spent to put a hostile Cyberdemon next to you, which is not a weaker spell but the opposite spell. Pets closed that, and the realm went in whole.

Four books: Conjurings & Tricks and the Deck of Many Things in town, Trumps of Doom and Five Aces below.

Note

A Trump summon that fails simply fails here. Zangband makes the hostile result the price of the realm — miss the roll and the thing you called arrives angry. In this game only Chaos and Death punish a miscast, so a failed summons costs you the mana and nothing else, and every creature you do call is yours. That is a real softening of the realm rather than a detail of the translation, and it is written down here because the spoiler opens on the risk it removes.

What it is for is reach: a deck that goes places and fetches people. Teleport, Teleport Away, Teleport Level, Word of Recall and Phase Door are all in it, which makes it the realm of getting out; and the summons run from Trump Animal up through the hounds, spiders, reptiles, dragons and undead to Trump Cyberdemon. Mass Trump calls several at once. Living Trump makes the caster part of the deck, and Trump Branding puts a brand on your weapon, though not one you choose.

It fetches more than people. Trump Reach pulls a distant object to you — the same spell as Sorcery’s Telekinesis, at the same pound and a half a level. Trump Divination detects everything nearby in one casting, and Banish teleports away every creature in sight rather than killing it.

And it does have two attacks, which is easy to miss in a realm this busy: Mind Blast early, a bolt of psychic force that sometimes runs as a beam, and Death Dealing in the third book, which strikes every living creature in sight at once.

A Ranger loses more here than in any other realm, and a Rogue is not far behind. Seven of Trump’s thirty-two are unreachable for a Ranger and four for a Rogue, all of them in the last two books — a Ranger’s Five Aces holds four cards of eight. See Books that come up short.

Note

Four of the thirty-two do nothing, and say so. Reset Recall would write the depth Word of Recall takes you to, and nothing here can. Shuffle is the deck itself — one roll read off twenty unequal outcomes, several of which need mechanisms this game lacks. Joker Card summons the groups 4.2’s summon table has no equivalent of. And Trump Lore is whole-object identification, the same wall as Sorcery’s Identify True and Nature’s Stone Tell.

Dimension Door was the fifth until recently, and should not have been. It lets you choose the square you arrive on, which this game can do and always could — Sorcery’s copy of the same spell had been doing it since that realm went in. Both now work.

The guard that used to keep Trump off the birth menu still covers every realm: if your class has no books in a realm, you are not offered it. That was not true before, and choosing Sorcery in the version before it shipped gave you a character who could never cast anything.

Chaos#

Sorcery’s opposite in every respect. Sorcery has no attack spell in it; Chaos is almost nothing else. The spoiler calls it “the very element of unmaking”, and what it offers instead of protection is an arsenal that runs from Magic Missile in the first book to Mana Storm and Call the Void in the last. Chaos has no protective spells at all — that is the realm’s own description of itself, and it is the thing to weigh before taking it as your only one.

Four books: the Sign of Chaos and Chaos Mastery in town, Chaos Channels and the Armageddon Tome below.

The damage is the point, and it is everywhere. Bolts of fire, chaos, mana and gravity; Fist of Force, which stuns; Sonic Boom and Invoke Logrus centred on you; Chain Lightning, which fires beams in every direction at once; and at the bottom of the fourth book Magic Rocket, Mana Storm at three hundred plus twice your level, Breathe Logrus — which does damage equal to your current hit points, so cast it healthy — and Call the Void, three volleys of destruction outward in every direction.

It is not purely artillery. Wonder is a hundred-band random table that may clone a monster, heal it, or drop a fireball on it. Polymorph Other reshapes a creature into something else. Alter Reality rebuilds the level around you, Teleport Other clears a whole line of monsters from your path, and Arcane Binding recharges a wand at four times the strength of Angband’s own spell.

Nothing was deferred — all thirty-two work — but several do something measurably different from Zangband’s, because 4.2 has no disintegration, no rocket and no radiation, and because a blast radius is a fixed number here rather than one that grows as you do. The trades are in the project’s decision record as DEC-53. Three are worth knowing at the table: Call the Void no longer punishes you for casting it beside a wall, which was the spell’s defining risk; Fist of Force keeps its damage and loses its ability to dig, since the element that did both no longer exists; and Chaos Branding gives fire or frost rather than a chaos brand, because 4.2 has no chaos brand to give.

And Chaos spells backfire. Fail one and you may not simply lose the mana: the realm produces a chaotic effect instead, and how bad it is depends on how deep the spell was. Magic Missile never backfires. Call the Void almost always does, and what you get ranges from a short teleport, through a room full of doors and traps, a mutation, a forgotten map and an earthquake, down to eight monsters landing on you and, at the very bottom, the Ancient and Foul Curse. This is Zangband’s own table and its own scaling — the spoiler warns that “Chaos spells are known to backfire easily” — and it is the price of the realm having no protective spells at all.

Summon Demon calls a demon of up to half again your level, and one time in three it serves you — the other two it does not, and says so. That is Zangband’s own roll, restored when pets arrived; it shipped always-hostile for one milestone before there was any side for a demon to be on (Pets and Allies).

The Chaos-Warrior is the realm’s own class: one realm, no choice, every spell, from level 2. Mages, Priests and Rangers may take Chaos as one of two realms; a Chaos-Warrior is one.

A Ranger never reaches the realm’s last four spells — Summon Demon, Mana Storm, Breathe Logrus and Call the Void are all unreachable for it, which leaves its Armageddon Tome holding five of eight. See Books that come up short.

Polymorph Self is here too — the same effect the Chaos mutation uses, reached from a second place. Chaos is the realm that twists its own caster, and that is the spell that does it.

Arcane#

The weak generalist, and the one realm where this game and Angband disagree outright. Detection, escape, the four temporary resistances, cures for poison and for light and medium wounds, Stone to Mud, Satisfy Hunger, Recharging — everything a delver wants and almost nothing that kills. Its whole offence is Zap, a weak lightning bolt; Ray of Light; and Elemental Ball, which throws fire, lightning, frost or acid and does not let you choose which.

Four books: Cantrips for Beginners, Minor Arcana, Major Arcana and the Manual of Mastery — and all four are sold in town, for 100, 250, 1000 and 2500 gold. That is the realm’s bargain, and it is the reason to take it: no other realm can be bought outright. Every other realm keeps its two best books in the dungeon.

Take it second, not first. Arcane collects the useful spells of every other realm, and every other realm sells them cheaper. Nineteen of its thirty-two appear in some realm a Mage might also be studying, and in seventeen of those the other realm asks a lower level and less mana — usually much less. A Mage reads Identify here at level 38 for 30 mana and in Sorcery at level 10 for 7; Recharging at 28 against Sorcery’s 7; Clairvoyance at 49 for a hundred mana against Sorcery’s 30 for forty; Stone to Mud at 20 against Nature’s 5. Only Cure Poison is genuinely better here. So Arcane is the realm that fills the gaps in another one, and a poor choice as the only realm you have — which is Zangband’s own advice, and it survives the port intact.

Two of the thirty-two do nothing and say so. Phlogiston refuels a light source, which is a command in this game rather than a spell; and Detect Enchantment wants a single is-this-magical bit, which no longer exists now that an object’s properties are runes you learn one at a time.

One more does something else entirely. Zangband’s Wizard Lock jammed a door shut and this one makes a door, because 4.2 has no jamming at all — a door is open, closed, locked or broken, and no spell reaches the lock. Making one along the line you aim serves the same purpose, and works in an empty corridor where the original needed a door to already be there.

A Ranger never learns Clairvoyance. Its Manual of Mastery holds seven spells where everyone else’s holds eight. That is Zangband’s own table, which marks the spell unreachable for that class rather than merely expensive, and it is not the only place it does so — see below.

Nature#

The weather at the top and the ground at the bottom, with healing, protection and a pair of bolts in between. It holds the only powerful healing spell outside Life: Herbal Healing mends a thousand points and cures stunning, bleeding and poison with it, and no realm but Life has anything of the size. That one spell is a large part of why a character who cannot study Life studies this instead.

Four books: Call of the Wild, Nature Mastery, Nature’s Gifts and Nature’s Wrath — the last of which shares its name with the spell inside it.

The protections come in two grades. Resist Environment covers fire, cold and lightning; Resistance True covers those three plus acid and poison, which is the half worth paying for — each of the four elements has a cheap spell of its own somewhere in the game and poison does not. Stone Skin hardens you for thirty to fifty turns, and Stone Skin, Wall of Stone, Stair Building and Door Building between them let you reshape the dungeon rather than fight it.

The offence is weather. Lightning Bolt and Frost Bolt early, Ray of Sunlight for what cannot bear light, and then the fourth book: Earthquake, Whirlwind Attack — one blow into every square around you — and the three balls, a Blizzard at seventy plus your level, a Lightning Storm at ninety and a Whirlpool at a hundred, water being the one that batters and confuses as well. Call Sunlight floods the whole level with light and burns everything nearby that hates it. Elemental Branding puts fire or frost on your weapon, and does not let you pick which.

At the end, Nature’s Wrath does three things in one casting: dispels every creature in sight, shakes the level apart with an earthquake, and detonates around you. Zangband’s third part was a disintegration ball, which this game has no projection for; it arrives as the walls coming down and the damage landing separately, which is the same event described twice rather than one effect.

Two of the thirty-two do nothing. Stone Tell would tell you everything about an object in a game that replaced that with runes learned one at a time, and Protect from Corrosion is an object property here rather than anything a spell can reach.

Three more used to be inert and no longer are. Animal Taming, Summon Animal and Animal Friendship all needed a creature to be able to take your side; pets gave them that, and Nature is now the realm that walks into a fight with company (Pets and Allies).

The Druid is the first class in the game to cast on borrowed figures. Zangband never had a Druid, so there is no row of levels and mana costs for it to import; it takes Zangband’s Priest’s, which is the only class carrying Nature that shares the Druid’s three magic constants. The Ranger, which used to borrow two of the Druid’s books, now gets the whole realm on its own figures.

Death#

The foulest of them, and the one that charges you in blood. Chaos punishes a miscast too, but Death is the realm where the spells that work cost you something: Hellfire takes fifty to a hundred hit points to cast, Genocide takes 1d4 for every creature it removes and Mass Genocide 1d3, and a failed cast anywhere in the realm draws blood on its own account. Zangband says it plainly — the most powerful spells “need their own blood as the focus”.

Four books: Black Prayers, Black Mass, Black Channels and the Necronomicon.

What it does is take life and give it to you. Vampiric Drain and Vampirism True pull hit points out of a creature and into you; Death Ray draws the life out of anything living and does nothing at all to what is already dead; Word of Death does it to every living thing in sight at once. Around that sit nether and darkness bolts, Stinking Cloud, Terror, Horrify, Black Sleep, and two brands for your weapon. Berserk and Battle Frenzy make you a fighter rather than a caster — the second hastes you as well — and Restore Life puts back drained experience. Invoke Spirits is the realm’s dice-roll: the same hundred-band table Chaos’s Wonder reads from, which may as easily summon undead onto you as help.

At the bottom of the Necronomicon: Evocation, which blasts, terrifies and banishes everything in sight in one casting, and Hellfire — six hundred and sixty-six points that nothing resists and evil creatures take twice.

Warning

A miscast Death spell hurts. Fail one and, on a roll against the spell’s depth in the realm, you take (book + 1)d6 — so the deeper the book the worse it is. From the second half of the realm you may lose experience with it, one time in six, unless you have Hold Life.

The Necronomicon is worse. Half of its miscasts shake the reader instead: fail a saving throw and you are confused, and one time in three hallucinating badly; make that one and fail the next and you lose a point of intelligence and a point of wisdom. It is the only spell failure in the game that can permanently cost a character a statistic, and it is why the fourth book is frightening rather than merely expensive.

Three of the thirty-two do nothing. Raise the Dead animates the corpses and skeletons actually lying on the floor near you, and 4.2 has no such object — there is nothing lying there to raise. Translating it as “summon undead as pets” would be a different spell wearing this one’s name: this one is paid for by what you have already killed, and that is the whole character of it. Wraithform needs an incorporeal player, which this game has no notion of. And Omnicide kills every creature on the level, one at a time, taking mana until you run out — a sweep with a running cost that the realm’s own Mass Genocide would otherwise duplicate.

Enslave Undead was on that list until pets arrived. It now does what it says, and binds one undead creature to you (Pets and Allies).

Three more do something wider than Zangband asked, and for one reason: 4.2’s projections were written for a game whose player is on the other side. There is no dispel-the-good, so Dispel Good blasts everything in sight rather than everything that is not evil; there is no detect-the-unliving, so Detect Unlife finds every creature nearby rather than only the ones without life; and Death Ray, which in Zangband kills outright or fails, is a heavy drain here, still useless against the nonliving.

A Rogue and a Ranger each lose seven of the thirty-two here — the Rogue’s worst realm, and level with Trump for the Ranger. A Rogue’s Necronomicon is the worst book in the game: four rituals of eight, no Hellfire among them, and two of the four inert. See Books that come up short.

Both of Death’s classes cast on borrowed figures: Zangband had neither a Necromancer nor a Blackguard. The Necromancer takes Zangband’s Mage and the Blackguard its Paladin.

Casting#

Two rules apply to every realm and neither is visible from the spell list.

Armour costs you mana. Every spellcasting class has a weight it can carry in armour before its casting suffers, and past that you lose one point of maximum mana for every ten tenths of a pound over. A Mage’s allowance is thirty pounds and a Paladin’s forty — the more a class leans on its spells, the less it may wear. The penalty bites hardest early, when the pool is small and a suit of chain is most of it, and matters little to a character with a hundred points to spend. Weapons, bows, rings, amulets and your light are not counted; everything else you are wearing is.

You may cast on an empty pool, and it will cost you. Try a spell you cannot pay for and the game says so and asks whether you want to attempt it anyway. If you do:

the failure chance rises by five percentage points for every point of mana you are short;
you will very likely faint, for longer the further short you were, and free action does not prevent it;
and about half the time you damage your constitution, which on this path can be permanent.

All of that happens whether or not the spell actually goes off. It is a last-resort mechanism and it is meant to hurt; the one time it is worth it is the one time you would otherwise die.

Note

Gloves do not hinder a caster here. Zangband, following older Angband, took mana away from an intelligence-based caster wearing anything on their hands unless it granted free action or a dexterity bonus. Angband 4.2 retired that rule and this game has not reinstated it, so a Mage may wear gauntlets with no penalty at all. It is the one casting restriction from the old manual that is simply gone.

Who can choose what#

Every class can study every realm Zangband lets it. That sounds obvious and was not true until recently: the entitlements were right from the start, but the books for a realm were only ever given to classes that already carried that kind of book, so a Mage was allowed six realms and had three. Completing it added forty books and three hundred and five spells (DEC-57).

What it means at the table: a Mage can study Death or Life, and a Priest can study Arcane. That is Zangband’s Mage — a far broader class than Angband’s, with healing at one end and Hellfire at the other — and if you know Angband 4.2, it is the biggest single change in this chapter.

One oddity worth knowing, because it looks like a bug and is not. Whether you choose which spell to learn or get a random one is a property of your class, never of the book. So a Mage that studies Life picks its prayers, and a Priest reading the same book takes what it is given. Zangband does exactly this.

The two classes carried over from the previous milestone are the ones the realm system exists for:

A Warrior-Mage studies Arcane in its first slot, always, and anything else it likes in the second. Zangband lists Arcane in both slots, but a realm already taken is struck off the menu the next slot offers, so the second question is asked about the other six and a Warrior-Mage always ends up studying two realms rather than one twice.
A High-Mage chooses one realm out of seven and gets no second slot, and is paid for it in figures: it reaches a realm’s last spells earlier and more cheaply than any other class, in six realms out of seven. Life is the exception, because Life is the Priest’s own realm and Zangband’s table says so.

Both are entitled to Trump and both are now offered it; it was the one entitlement in the table that had nothing behind it, and no longer is.

Books that come up short#

A Rogue and a Ranger do not get all of a borrowed realm. Every realm is four books of eight, and for most classes that is thirty-two spells — but Zangband’s table marks some spells unreachable for those two rather than merely expensive, and a book then holds fewer than eight. Sixteen books in the game are short, and all sixteen belong to one of those two classes:

Class	Book	Spells	Realm
Rogue	Necronomicon	4 of 8	Death
Ranger	Five Aces	4 of 8	Trump
Ranger	Armageddon Tome	5 of 8	Chaos
Ranger	Necronomicon	5 of 8	Death
Rogue	Five Aces	5 of 8	Trump
Rogue, Ranger	Black Mass	6 of 8	Death
Ranger	Black Channels	6 of 8	Death
Ranger	Trumps of Doom	6 of 8	Trump
Rogue, Ranger	Grimoire of Power	7 of 8	Sorcery
Rogue	Black Channels	7 of 8	Death
Rogue	Trumps of Doom	7 of 8	Trump
Ranger	Manual of Mastery	7 of 8	Arcane
Ranger	Deck of Many Things	7 of 8	Trump
Ranger	Chaos Channels	7 of 8	Chaos

A Rogue’s Necronomicon is the extreme, and worth spelling out. It holds four rituals of the eight — Death Ray, Raise the Dead, Esoteria and Wraithform — so Hellfire, Omnicide, Word of Death and Evocation are simply not available to a Rogue at any level. Two of the four it does get are among the realm’s inert spells, which leaves two working rituals in a fifty thousand gold book. The Ranger’s Five Aces is close behind at four cards, one of them inert.

The fourth book of a realm is where its power lives, so this is the price those two classes pay for being entitled to realms they were not built for. It is worth knowing before you buy the book rather than after.

What has changed, and what has not#

All four of the realms Angband already had now hold Zangband’s spells: Life, Arcane, Nature and Death. Every realm in the game is four books of eight, which is Zangband’s shape throughout. This is DEC-50, taken deliberately, and it has consequences worth stating:

A Priest’s prayers and a Mage’s spells are different spells now, at different levels, in differently-named books. A Paladin gains most — Angband gave it three of the Priest’s books and sixteen prayers, and Zangband’s table gives it all thirty-two. A Ranger gains nearly as much.
Savefiles from before the change do not load. A book’s identity is its name, and every old save carries the town temple’s stock, so deleting [Novice’s Handbook] made every one of them unreadable. The game is pre-release and this was chosen with the numbers in hand.

Sorcery, Chaos and Trump took nothing away, because no class carried them before. Their books go on the end of the lists that gain them — a Mage’s four Arcane books are books one to four, with Sorcery’s as five to eight and Chaos’s as nine to twelve.

That ordering is not tidiness. Your known spells are recorded by their position in a flat list across all of your class’s books, so appending leaves every position meaning what it meant, while inserting anywhere else would shift them: the game would load, the sheet would look reasonable, and a Priest who had learned Remove Fear would find they knew something else.

One duplicate is visible and intended: a Mage who takes Arcane and Sorcery has Phase Door in two books, because Zangband put it in both realms and both are that character’s. You will only ever see the books of the realms you chose, so the duplicate is exactly the one Zangband showed.

That is not a courtesy, it is a hazard avoided. A character’s known spells are stored by their position in a flat list across all of their class’s books, so inserting a book anywhere but the end would silently shift every spell a saved character knows one place along — the game would load, the sheet would look reasonable, and a Priest who had learned Remove Fear would find they knew something else instead.