Gotta bring up Ultima. This has turned out to be rather long so I’m splitting it.
You probably know the basics: the creator of the series, Richard Garriott, unnerved by the implication that the most optimal way to play his very popular kill-the-foozle RPGs was to be a plague upon the world, stealing and murdering everything and everyone, devised the eight Virtues, perhaps the earliest example of a morality system in a game, and a pretty complex one. But unlike many more recent morality systems that seek to offer similar rewards for good and evil behaviors, the virtues reward only the good, as in an RPG context evil has always brought its natural rewards in the form of riches and strength.
Garriott argued the virtues were a philosophy, not a religion, but that’s rather silly given it’s a belief system with worship, shrines, clerics, paladins, sacred relics, a holy book and a prophet/messiah. Likely it was just a way to avoid controversy. Even more interesting, from that point on Ultima introduced a number of other belief systems in its world with almost each game. So here we go:
It all starts in Ultima 4. After three victories over evil, the newly established kingdom of Britannia is growing rich and indolent so its king, Lord British, establishes the virtues to guide his people to an age of enlightenment, and proclaims the Quest of the Avatar, through which an ordinary person should strive to embody all virtues and become a spiritual leader to Britannia. Naturally that person’s gonna be the player (who’s not so ordinary as he originates from Earth, not Britannia). So, while there are still dungeons involved the idea is to go on a pilgrimage and explore the world, learn what each virtue involves, live by it, visit its associated shrine (which necessitates finding both the shrine and the runic key to access it) and pray at it by reciting its mantra, which you also have to find. Lots of exploring to do to find all those things.
The virtues are based on three principles (truth, love and courage) which combined in different ways result in Honesty (don’t steal from chests or shops), Compassion (give money to the poor, don’t kill non-evil creatures), Valor (fight evil, don’t flee unless you’re heavily injured), Justice (basically be honest, compassionate and valorous), Sacrifice (give blood, get killed before your party members), Honor (solve quests, act in a just way), Spirituality (meditate at shrines) and Humility (don’t brag to NPCs). Each virtue has a hidden score that goes up and down based on your actions and once it’s high enough you reach partial avatarhood for that virtue by praying at a shrine. After mastering all 8 virtues you still need to gather eight virtuous companions if you haven’t already, take a trip down the final dungeon, which will test your knowledge of the virtues, grab its sacred book, the Codex of Infinite Wisdom, from the claw of demons and demonstrate your knowledge of the product of all virtues, Infinity. As a result of this ritual you become the Avatar, the spiritual leader of Britannia.
Note that while Lord British devised the virtues and built most of the shrines, they seem to exist within a broader natural order built around the numbers 8 (for the virtues) and 3 (for the principles). There are 8 cities, 8 dungeons, 8 other planets in the solar system, 8 moongates (basically teleporters) that predate the britannian virtues, as does the Codex and the shrine it was taken from. While when that game was designed that wasn’t really a consideration, you could take it to indicate he has at least partially based his religion on something that was already there, christianity-style. That’ll come up again later. Anyway, the virtues are the foundation for the games that follow.
In Ultima 5 the virtues, which should have been an ideal to strive for, have been turned into draconian law by an integrist religious dictatorship, so you’ve gotta fix all that. Mechanically, virtue practice has been simplified and is tracked by a single aggregate score, karma, so you can for example compensate for fleeing from weak enemies by praying regularly. High Karma gets you better prices in shops, less stat loss on resurrection and, more crucial to the game, there are things you can only do with high enough Karma, notably getting stat boosts by accomplishing each optional shrine quest in which you seek out a deeper truth behind each virtue by consulting the codex. It’s interesting to see how each virtue is twisted into law and then further explained. For example the law for Honor is “If you lose your own honor, you shall take your own life” while the codex’s pronouncement is “It is the guilt, not the guillotine, that constitutes the shame”. This has no mechanical bearing on your behavior though.
In Ultima 6 Britannia is seemingly overrun by demons, but it turns out they’re an organized civilization who were peacefully living far below the surface until some self-proclaimed holy warrior invaded their most sacred shrine of Singularity and claimed their holy book, the Codex of Infinite Wisdom. Oh heeeeeey so that’s why that book was already around. So yeah, the gargoyles as they’re really called have their own three principles and eight virtues culminating in Singularity. Really, while the names are different, all the numbers and symbols and the book are the same (in fact the codex predates the gargoyles too). Mechanics-wise we’re sticking with karma but the shrines are now used to level up (still by having the rune and mantra) so you sort of need to behave (still according to human virtues, not the gargoyles’).
For the following games the virtues and karma won’t be included in gameplay so consequences of stealing or killing are merely reduced to whether people (be it civilians, local law enforcement or your own party) saw you do it. You no longer have to strive to be the Avatar. Religion will take a different mechanical significance. That is to say, none at all in Ultima 7. For all its other merits this is an aspect where Ultima 7 drops the ball. This is a game where you can bake bread but can no longer pray. One could argue it’s consistent with its worldview but that’s mostly a coincidence. We’ll see all that next time.