Zen

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Zen is a particularly challenging unofficial conduct. It means wearing a blindfold or towel, or being polymorphed into a blind monster throughout the whole game.

Breaking the conduct

Players have to set their own rules.

A zen game is flawed if a nymph or monkey steals your blinding item and you immediately put on another one, without looking at your inventory.

Reading the Book of the Dead on the vibrating square is allowed, as you cannot win the game without doing so.

Some facts

Roles

Only samurai, rogues, wizards, and tourists can start with a blindfold or towel, and therefore attempt zen conduct. Start scumming for one is not cheating. Generally, a samurai is considered the easiest role for zen conduct due to their good starting armor and strong melee combat skills, which are important in the early parts of the game. A wizard can start with several helpful items for the early game as well, such as a wand of fire or lightning for reliable engraving of elbereth or a ring of warning. A rogue or tourist is going to have a difficult time due to weaker melee skills and a lack of strong starting gear.

Object appearances

Until you have seen them, objects show up only as "a potion", "a ring", "a long sword" etc. A gray stones or rock is a "stone", glass or gem is a "gem". Only amulets and food are treated as seen.

An elven or orcish shield is just a "shield", and a shield of reflection is a "smooth shield". Even an artifact is "a long sword".

You cannot class-name such objects, and any individual name will not be displayed (but will affect stacking). You can dip items in holy/unholy water when blind, thus "a cursed scroll". Poisoning is shown. Erodeproofing and dilution are not displayed until you know the appearance. When erodeproofing is applied to a weapon or armor via scroll of enchant armor/enchant weapon or a cursed, confused scroll of destroy armor, the erodeproofing will not display as the player will not see the purple glow. Any erosion that has been fixed (or added) will be "seen."

A full list of ways to make an object "seen" without breaking the conduct. (Spells are only possible as a wizard's starting spells.)

• Formal identification from a scroll, throne, or spell. Also, your quest leader will identify your own quest artifact and the real Amulet of Yendor.

• A blessed potion of object detection makes the appearance of all objects on the current dungeon level known. This includes your and monsters' inventories, buried objects, and recursively the contents of containers.

• Buying or selling something at a shop. Contents of containers, stolen merchandise, and items covered by your credit when you teleport out are not made known.

• A wand of probing non-recursively makes any objects it is zapped at, containers' contents, and monsters' possessions seen. You can zap yourself.

• The appearance of your and your pet's starting inventories

• Eating one of a stack will make the remaining tins "seen".

• Eggs laid by you

• The special attacks of the Tsurugi of Muramasa and Vorpal Blade always tells you the artifacts's appearance. The gift you would recieve on crowning as neutral or chaotic are made "seen" if you are already holding it.

You hear the appearance of a scroll a monster is reading, so you can name another one later. Since you cannot generally "see" the result of the scroll directly, scrolls will not usually auto-identify. The same is true for potions, you will hear the potion being quaffed, but will not see the result.

In case a nymph steals your blindfold: the inventory i and #name commands also reveal object appearances.

If the farlook command ; does not tell you the appearance even though it is known, the object is buried or carried by a monster.

Polymorphing any object, alchemy, and #dip-cancelling a potion will render it unseen.

Shopkeepers

The pay command only works if you can see the shopkeeper, either by telepathy or monster detection, or if he is angry. Alternatively, you may drop enough gold to cover your purchase and then teleport or phase out, even without teleport control. The practical result of this is that a player will typically have no way to get an item out of a shop until telepathy is acquired.

Selling works as normal.

Strategy

ToDo

• Early game

• Shopping

• Identification, BUC, and stacking

• Genocides

• Equipment

• Nymphs

The difficulty in zen comes in that it is like a mixture of other conducts with additional twists to make it even harder. While blind, you may not read, though you may still use scrolls after you get the shopkeepers to name them to you (you only need to know those magic words). You cannot use altars to find the BUC status of an object because you do not see if the objects glow and in what color. You also do not see what your objects look like by their material or color, so all potions are only shown as "a potion", wands as "a wand" and so on.

Notable Ascensions

Only a handful of people are known to have ascended zen games and most of them have been zen samurai; this post to RGRN announces the first known ascended zen tourist. João Santos is the only person known to have completed zen ascensions in all four of these roles.