Linguistic Dragon hasn’t made all that much progress in his playthrough of Ultima 4, though he did devote an entire article to his process for creating a character. Which, it must be said, is a rather interesting one:

So therein lay my difficulty in getting the game going – I wanted to choose my class according to my character’s past actions in the last three games, which meant I had to consider the virtue questions I was given carefully in some instances – and that was harder than I expected it to be! Valor actually survived the first round of the casting (against Spirituality), which it almost never does for myself, simply because of how willing Aric has been to go hammer-and-tongs with whoever he meets. Compassion was ditched first round in favor of Honor, again something that hardly ever happens for me, due to how many prisoners in Minax and Exodus’ castles that Aric simply walked by – apparently he’s got little compassion for their plight? Sacrifice beat out Humility mostly based on how much money got spent in the past several games, Justice won out over Honesty partly because Aric couldn’t leave a chest unopened, and the eight potential classes were narrowed to four.

The final choice came down to Honor versus Justice, which decision Linguistic agonized over some. But he did make a decision:

with the Ultima series set in a land reminiscent of a period of history where a broken oath could lead to a serious shift in status, I think these questions, approached from the right angle, might not be quite so easy to answer as a modern perspective would make them out to be.

It certainly wasn’t in Aric’s case. He’d done some pretty heinous deeds in order to achieve his goals – goals that were, ostensibly, laid on him, if only to an extent, by kings themselves. (I can’t help but think back to Ultima I, no less than eight kings exhorting him to find a way to defeat Mondain, and killing a jester being necessary to see that done.) In the end, though, the allure of the… poetic nature of going for the Justice response, a feeling of remorse for the heinous deeds done, the ends-justifying-the-means attitude, was too tempting. And so Aric began his Quest of the Avatar as a druid, outside the walls of the city he… ran murderous rampages through… erm…

Maybe it’s best he make his way to Castle Britannia.

I’ve the sneaking suspicion that poor Aric may not have the easiest go of maintaining his karma — or Virtue scores — through this attempt at the game.