Alignment can be an important factor on BatMUD. The guilds joinable by the backgrounds "good religious" and "evil religious" pretty much require you to maintain a proper alignment, or suffer some sort of penalty. Also there are a number of pieces of equipment that require you to maintain a certain alignment as well. Below is the list of alignment messages.
Descriptions for alignment are (from evil to good):
(-7) Draen-Dalar's love child
(-6) nefariously evil to the core
(-5) morally bankrupt
(-4) a malignant growth on the face of society
(-3) a malevolent fiend
(-2) a spiteful bastard
(-1) an unwholesome rogue
(0) neutral
(+1) good and the gods smile on you
(+2) a beneficent being
(+3) irreproachably kind
(+4) pure at heart
(+5) a blessing to the world
(+6) Aveallis's gift to mankind
(+7) an angel in disguise
The numbers on the left don't really mean anything, they are just there for
the purposes of the example to follow. To maintain your alignment is simple
in theory, and here it is. Kill monsters of the opposite alignment of what
you need to maintain, to keep that alignment. In other words, to keep good,
kill evil things; to keep evil, kill good things; to keep neutral, kill neutral
things, or kill a mixture of good and evil things. Now, this being said, there
is a catch (isn't there always?). Here is an example of how alignment works
Say you are playing an evil priest, and you want to stay at max evil (-7 on the
chart above). You decide to go find some pansy elves to kill, because everybody
knows that elves need to stay good. You find some elves to slay, and go about
your merry evil-priesty ways, and kill the whole village of them. You type 'score'
to find out your alignment, and you are shocked to see that you have dropped (risen?)
from Draen-Dalar's love child all the way to a spiteful bastard. "But," you say, "I
have only been killing good aligned creatures! What gives?" Well, here is what gives.
Your alignment moves towards the exact opposite alignment of what you are killing.
So those goody-two-shoes elves you were killing, really weren't all that good, only
"good and the gods smile on you" good. So each time you killed an elf, your alignment
moved toward it's opposite on the scale, or "an unwholesome rogue". Since you ran out
of elves to kill, your alignment did not drop all the way to that level, but stopped at
spiteful bastard.
All is not lost! At character creation you picked an alignment for your character. Hopefully you picked "evil" for your evil priest character. What this does is make it easier for you to get evil and stay evil, so if you go out and find something to kill that is more good than those elves, your alignment will fairly quickly fix itself. If you don't want to wait to kill stuff to fix your alignment, you can always ask for a tempt on the wanted channel, and maybe someone can help you out. If by some bad luck, you kill a bunch of the wrong alignment stuff, or get a flip spell cast on you, and your alignment is totally inverted, you can ask for a baptize and tempt, or for a flip, on wanted as well. Just remember this. You can only be baptized once per boot (every 24 hours, resets at noon, EET), but you can be flipped/tempted any number of times.
Also, there are certain spells, and maybe skills, that are considered "good acts" or "evil acts". Casting or using these spells and skills will also cause your alignment to head towards more good or more evil.
Anyway, thats my quick-and-dirty guide to alignment on BatMUD.