Virtues#

Your character is measured against eight virtues, drawn at birth from a pool of eighteen, and where they stand in each moves with how you play.

Nobody chooses them. They are chosen for you — by your class, your race, and the magic you study — so a Warrior and a Necromancer are not asked the same questions, and two Warriors of different blood are not asked quite the same questions either. You are not told at birth which eight you drew; you find out by watching what the world makes of you.

The eighteen#

Compassion, Honour, Justice, Sacrifice, Knowledge, Faith, Enlightenment, Mysticism, Chance, Nature, Harmony, Vitality, Unlife, Patience, Temperance, Diligence, Valour, Individualism.

Nine of them — Sacrifice, Compassion, Valour, Honour, Justice, Temperance, Harmony, Patience and Diligence — are general enough that any character might be asked about them, and the last slots are filled from those. The other nine arrive only through what you are. A Necromancer is measured against Unlife because of what a Necromancer is; a Warrior never will be.

How they move#

Not by declaration. There is no vow to take and no altar to swear at. A virtue moves when you do something that bears on it, and most of the time you will not be told:

  • Killing is the busiest of them. Something far above your depth is brave; a unique is a thing removed from the world for good; an angel and a demon are not the same death. Killing the harmless — the beggars and drunks of the towns — is noted, and not kindly.

  • Striking something asleep costs you Compassion, and Honour as well unless you are a Rogue, for whom it is simply the job.

  • Hasting yourself is impatient and industrious at once. Making yourself invulnerable is the largest single mark against you anywhere in the game, and most of it lands on Valour.

  • Digging is diligent. Clearing a stand of trees is diligent and something else besides.

  • Mapping a level you have not walked is knowledge got cheaply. Enchanting a weapon is faith placed in the work rather than the world.

  • Collecting a bounty is the one plainly just thing most characters ever do.

A standing runs from 125 for to 125 against, and reads on a ladder: neutral, then somewhat virtuous, virtuous, very virtuous, a champion, a great champion, and at the top the living embodiment of the thing. Downward it runs from straying, through sinning, to enemy, bitter enemy, arch-enemy and finally the polar opposite.

What reads them#

Two things, and this is the part Zangband never had.

The Lords of the Courts of Chaos. A Chaos-Warrior’s patron — or whoever has taken an interest in a character carrying the right item — hands down a reward on every level gained, from the genuinely generous to the actively hostile. What it reaches for depends on how you have lived. A Lord of Chaos is not impressed by a well-run life: it recognises Chance and Individualism, and it wearies of Harmony and Temperance. Live chaotically and the worst of the ladder comes up less often.

The dream at the inn. A night’s sleep can show you a true thing — a place on the map you had not found — or a dark one. Where you sleep matters most: a lawful town gives clearer nights than a frontier one. But a sleeper who has spent their life looking sees further. Enlightenment and Knowledge make a true dream likelier; Unlife and Chance make a dark one likelier.

Neither is a large effect and neither is meant to be. A virtue at full stretch moves the patron’s roll two steps and the dream’s odds by a few points in a hundred. What it is not is nothing, which is what it was.

Where to see them#

Press C for your character sheet and then space until you reach the Virtues page — it is the fourth, after your statistics, your equipment flags and your mutations. Eight lines, one per virtue, each saying where you stand on a thirteen-rung ladder that runs from the polar opposite of through neutral to up to the living embodiment of.

There are no numbers. Zangband did not show them either, and the rung is the part that means something: knowing you are very virtuous in Valour tells you what a Lord of Chaos will make of you, and knowing you are at 47 does not.

The same eight lines appear in the character dump f writes, in a [Virtues] section, so a dump and the sheet can be read against each other.

Zangband showed them in neither place. Its knowledge-screen entry was commented out, and for a long time this game only wrote them to the dump — which is a file you have to ask for and open in something else, and is not the same as being told.

Where this came from#

Topi Ylinen wrote the virtue system for Zangband in 1998, as an Ultima IV-style measure of how a character behaves. It was never finished. By the time development stopped in 2005 there were 168 places in the source that wrote a virtue and not one that read a virtue back, and the knowledge-screen entry that would have shown them to the player was commented out with the note “Display virtues option is always left out”. Every character in Zangband carried eight counters that moved with everything they did, and nothing — not one line, in seven years — ever looked at them.

The selection is Zangband’s, near enough unchanged, because it is the part that did real work. The two things that read a virtue are new, and so is the rule that every virtue a character can be given must be one their play can move: the original had no such rule and would not have needed one, since nothing was reading.