Context Dependent Nightmares

[DoctorBoomstick]

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Summary

Content " adds context-dependent nightmares that change based on the player’s profession, reflecting traumatic nightmares gained from the events of the cataclysm. Also reformats existing nightmares by adding line breaks."

Purpose of change

While working on PR #71877, updating profession descriptions to reflect established lore, it often crossed my mind how little a player’s profession plays a role in the game as a whole. It determines your starting equipment and your opening skills, and that’s, essentially, it. In addition, it is often said that our player characters feel somewhat overly desensitised to the, let’s be honest, mind-shatteringly upsetting events that transpired during the Cataclysm, with a collection of shoehorned in guilt penalties for putting down undead children and non-hostile NPCs and little in the way of tangible psychological effects. While explicitly twisting a player's arm and telling them what their character’s feeling and has been through is likely not the best way to go about things, and the endless power of role play comes in to save the day as always, I felt like there was room for traits and features that Leen into this notion a tad more, while also making a player’s profession effect more things within the game. As such, like any good JSON munky, as soon as the idea crossed my brain, I stopped working on the aforementioned PR, and like a baboon being presented with a banana on a string over a pit, I charged after this.

Describe the solution

I must, firstly, stress that not only is this PR still a proof of concept, but that I have left it as such to gain best-practice advice from those who know better than myself. Fundamentally, this PR adds a new trait to character creation, troubled sleeper, that activates a number of EOCs that check the player's profession upon falling asleep and display different sets of snippets, depending on the player’s profession. As of this PR being opened on draft, current work includes:

• 4 snippets and associated EOC to run should the player be in a profession that wouldn’t have been in a position to experience unique, traumatic events. While a police officer, a soldier, and a doctor would have, by virtue of their jobs, seen different things during the cataclysm that effected them, a used car salesman and a fast food cook had a fair chance of experiencing similar events.
• 2 snippets and related EOC to run should the player, regardless of profession, sleep within the refugee centre.
• 3 snippets and associated EOC to run should the player start their game as an active-duty soldier.
• The capability for a player to prevent their nightmares through taking antidepressant medication, as well as an EOC that prints different text when the character falls asleep on medication or not: sign-posting to the player whether they’ll be effected by nightmares.
• An EOC that prints different messages to the log when the player character enters tiredness, relaying the information that, indeed, the character isn’t jazzed over the idea of falling asleep to a nightmare of their family being reduced to meat paste.
• Adds line breaks to existing nightmare snippets to pad them out from a giant block of text and make them more readable.

What’s left to be done?

• Add EOCs and related snippets to provide nightmares that change depending on if the player’s sleeping within particular locations: one’s dreams should be affected if they’re taking a nap within a Resident Evil-style government black site, some faction locations, or the literal guts of an alien monster.
• Expand the current list of EOCs to cover more professions: police officers, doctors, pilots, relief workers, etc. Some professions will be left out, as I intend to add snippets reflecting their particular profession descriptions in PR #71877, and, apart from this, because I want this PR to be out sometime before the cataclysm really happens, the great majority of the professions that I want to give snippets too will probably be missed on the first framework implementation.
• Cause the nightmare EOC to affect the player’s heart rate and breathing and to make them break out into a sweat upon waking up. Considering we have the tools to simulate these, if a nightmare tells you that you wake up in a sweat, you darn well should be sweating. Disclaimer: I’m still not 100% sure how to do this, so if a generous sort could point me in the right direction to hook this stuff in, I would take off my hat to them. I don’t have a hat. I would go get a hat and then take it off. This paragraph has become completely random, and I should probably delete it. For sake of history, I will not.
• Get advice on whether my EOC syntax and method are flaming trash or not. This is my first dance with the EOC script, and I feel like I’m stomping on its toes quite a lot with how things are currently set up. I suspect what I’m getting at could be set out a lot neater if I used if statements, but I couldn’t put together how they worked. As such, I opened this on draft while still very early to get feedback on, mainly, whether the EOC functionality could be done better. I do not wish to put in shoddy code that’ll only be a mess for somebody to fix in the future. That would be quite the Doosh Canoe move.
• Write a non-pathetic amount of snippets. My brain has ideas, my keyboard has keys, but the day has 24 hours.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I originally contemplated setting the trait to be PTSD, but, learning from our experience with the schizophrenia trait, I thought it best to avoid name-dropping anything in particular. In addition, considering I’ve never had PTSD and don’t know much reliably about it, I felt like I’d do a poor job at respectfully simulating such a medical condition, and mental health is just one of those places I’m not walking into unless I’m confident that I can do it right. I wouldn’t be opposed to adding some symptoms of PTSD if we had the means to implement them for the sake of making the trait more interesting, but I would need some pointers on what could and should be added. I considered implementing this not as a pickable trait at character generation but as a set EOC that would run for every character created. I might yet choose that latter course, but I’ve gone for the trait root, at least for now, to still leave the gate open for players who want to role play so that their characters don’t get nightmares. For the record, I think that every character, apart from hyper-particular circumstances, should suffer from trauma of some sort, but I honestly don’t want to poke the people that’d take to the comments and declare their characters to be: “SUPER BAD ASS MANLY EPIC CIGAR SMOKING MEN THAT FLEX ON THE CATACLYSM AND EAT ZOMBIES BECAUSE WE’LL KILL THE BLOB AND WHO DON’T GET NIGHTMARES BECAUSE WE’RE EITHER MANLY EPIC MEN OR SUPER NINJA JAPANESE BATTLE MAIDS OORAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

Testing

Still to be done for the most part, the PR’s in it’s baby stages.

Additional context

[GuardianDll]

Still pitching for it to not be dependant on the trait, but it's not me who decide

[Inglonias]

I like the idea behind this. That said, putting dreams about traumatic experiences into the message log seems like it should be something we can turn off if we want, based on a player's IRL tolerance to such things.

EDIT: I didn't see that this was locked behind a trait. Nevermind. I'm good with this.

[ashGlaw]

You're going to deserve that banana! I have long thought that dreams were an underutilized part of the game, and I'm thrilled to see you doing this. I bet there will be a bunch of people excited to add snippets.

[NancokPS2]

It is kind of a waste that this is behind a trait, but i assume it will be more widely accessible in the future (?)

Regardless, this would mean that the game assumes experiences that the character went trough, which most of the time will conflict with a player's idea of their character. The other existing nightmares like those from mutations are more abstract.

Maybe a better approach is to allow players to add "memories" that can be positive, negative or neutral. During character creation and gameplay alike. Similar to the journal (maybe they can be added alongside journal entries).

Then this nightmare system can just pull from any of them.

"You dream about how you 'escaped from a horde by jumping off the roof' "

---

To make them more accessible, it could perhaps be based on morale of the character (maybe take a snapshot of the current morale at random trough the day, then act based on how high/low that was). Low morale pulls from negative and neutral memories, high morale from positive and neutral.

The idea of it being random is both due to performance and to simulate a certain moment of the day getting stuck in the character's head (they could have been miserable all day but what really stood out to them was an unopened tub of ice-cream they found)

---

The trait can remain to increase the chance of having nightmares.

[Inglonias]

It's behind a trait because we want to be able to turn it off in case the IRL player doesn't want to have to read about nightmares caused by traumatic experiences. No point exposing people to things they don't want to be exposed to if we don't have to.

[DoctorBoomstick]

Also, while I like the idea of the player being able to note down a notable bit of their day to have show up in dreams, it’s far, far beyond either my capabilities or the scope of this PR. When it comes to insinuating things about the player’s past, I would like to keep them general enough to be plausible as something inspired by the events of the cataclysm, something they saw from somebody else, read about, watched on video, etc. Insinuating something to the effect of “you had a friend while you were a soldier” is alright, because that isn’t anything out of the norm. Also, while we don’t want to challenge the player’s backstory for their character, by virtue of the nature of the cataclysm, most characters will have seen certain things. Soldiers would have probably (9/10) been deployed to fight a giant portal monster. Civilians might have seen corpse pits. Most everyone is going to have seen evacuations take place, etc.

[NancokPS2]

It's behind a trait because we want to be able to turn it off in case the IRL player doesn't want to have to read about nightmares caused by traumatic experiences. No point exposing people to things they don't want to be exposed to if we don't have to.

I understand that under your iteration.
But going back to my first point, don't you think it is a bit jarring to reference pre-defined scenarios for a PC's story?

The only cases where this works (as it is) is if: 1 - The player imagines that their character had traumatic events in all of their high risk professions (and only on those)
2 - The player has not formulated a back story for the character or theirs align with the nightmare's

[DoctorBoomstick]

It's behind a trait because we want to be able to turn it off in case the IRL player doesn't want to have to read about nightmares caused by traumatic experiences. No point exposing people to things they don't want to be exposed to if we don't have to.

I understand that under your iteration. But going back to my first point, don't you think it is a bit jarring to reference pre-defined scenarios for a PC's story?

The only cases where this works (as it is) is if: 1 - The player imagines that their character had traumatic events in all of their high risk professions (and only on those) 2 - The player has not formulated a back story for the character or theirs align with the nightmare's

What sort of line with the nightmare itself, for example, would make it suitable, in your opinion? Personally, if I were browsing through the traits screen and came across the trait explicitly telling me that picking this will give my character trauma nightmares, I would accept that I’m essentially giving the game licence to, at least, insinuate a little bit. I could always not pick it up if the notion of trauma didn’t chime with my character's backstory. That being said, I understand your standpoint and would like to find some form of middle ground.

[RedMisao]

I fully agree with DoctorBoomstick here. This is already a trait, so it can be picked or ignored by the player. By picking any trait you're agreeing to receive something pre-defined by the game, and doesn't necessarily has to match specifics.

This is most obvious with cases such as UNSTABLE and SPIRITUAL, where the player agrees for their character to suffer "random" bad mutations and receive bonus morale from having "random" religious-related experiences. Both of these flags allow the character to have two additional components (source and outcome) to their gameplay. In either case none of these components are truly random, as there are pre-determined lists for the outcome mutations and source experiences.

Similarly, when picking bad_dreams the player will agree for their character to have "random" nightmares based on the things stablished by current PR. The work here sets the framework, as the title says, to have more context dependant nightmares. It has to start somewhere to be expanded upon.

Also, is there a reason why bad_dreams is in lowercase instead of ALL_CAPS like the other mutations?

[DoctorBoomstick]

Also, is there a reason why bad_dreams is in lowercase instead of ALL_CAPS like the other mutations?

The reason's that my brain decided to have a smoke break and switch places with a potato while I wrote the id for that trait, and I forgot that the rest are capitalised. Good ketch, thank you.

[NancokPS2]

It's behind a trait because we want to be able to turn it off in case the IRL player doesn't want to have to read about nightmares caused by traumatic experiences. No point exposing people to things they don't want to be exposed to if we don't have to.

I understand that under your iteration. But going back to my first point, don't you think it is a bit jarring to reference pre-defined scenarios for a PC's story? The only cases where this works (as it is) is if: 1 - The player imagines that their character had traumatic events in all of their high risk professions (and only on those) 2 - The player has not formulated a back story for the character or theirs align with the nightmare's

What sort of line with the nightmare itself, for example, would make it suitable, in your opinion? Personally, if I were browsing through the traits screen and came across the trait explicitly telling me that picking this will give my character trauma nightmares, I would accept that I’m essentially giving the game licence to, at least, insinuate a little bit. I could always not pick it up if the notion of trauma didn’t chime with my character's backstory. That being said, I understand your standpoint and would like to find some form of middle ground.

No, i'd assume that the game would give me a generic "you have nightmares" message and maybe a mood debuff.
This feature is very different from precedents of all other ones.

All other traits that give you a penalty for doing X do it the same way.

When you pick wayfarer the game doesn't go "you remember that accident and back off the vehicle". When you pick hates books the game doesn't say "you hate the feel of paper".
You simply get a penalty and a snippet explaining what caused it, then it is up to the player to interpret it.

If the decision is made here that defining a character's backstory without the player's control is ok, then sure. But this will shape how the player's agency over the character's background is treated. Not that it addresses how different this trait is, tho.

---

If no extra systems are added, then i'd say this feature should at least be limited to "you have nightmares about your time as an X" where X is one of the professions

[Maleclypse]

It's behind a trait because we want to be able to turn it off in case the IRL player doesn't want to have to read about nightmares caused by traumatic experiences. No point exposing people to things they don't want to be exposed to if we don't have to.

I understand that under your iteration. But going back to my first point, don't you think it is a bit jarring to reference pre-defined scenarios for a PC's story? The only cases where this works (as it is) is if: 1 - The player imagines that their character had traumatic events in all of their high risk professions (and only on those) 2 - The player has not formulated a back story for the character or theirs align with the nightmare's

What sort of line with the nightmare itself, for example, would make it suitable, in your opinion? Personally, if I were browsing through the traits screen and came across the trait explicitly telling me that picking this will give my character trauma nightmares, I would accept that I’m essentially giving the game licence to, at least, insinuate a little bit. I could always not pick it up if the notion of trauma didn’t chime with my character's backstory. That being said, I understand your standpoint and would like to find some form of middle ground.

No, i'd assume that the game would give me a generic "you have nightmares" message and maybe a mood debuff. This feature is very different from precedents of all other ones.

All other traits that give you a penalty for doing X do it the same way.

When you pick wayfarer the game doesn't go "you remember that accident and back off the vehicle". When you pick hates books the game doesn't say "you hate the feel of paper". You simply get a penalty and a snippet explaining what caused it, then it is up to the player to interpret it.

If the decision is made here that defining a character's backstory without the player's control is ok, then sure. But this will shape how the player's agency over the character's background is treated. Not that it addresses how different this trait is, tho.

If no extra systems are added, then i'd say this feature should at least be limited to "you have nightmares about your time as an X" where X is one of the professions

You keep saying without the players control. The players control is picking the trait in order for additional defined content. This is firmly in the players control.

I think giving the player the ability to experience a little extra pre-written backstory is excellent Dr. Boomstick

[KittyTac]

Maybe it should be made a bit more clear that the nightmares are specific events from the past? idk how to phrase it without breaking the fourth wall or sounding clumsy.

[NancokPS2]

You keep saying without the players control. The players control is picking the trait in order for additional defined content. This is firmly in the players control.

I think giving the player the ability to experience a little extra pre-written backstory is excellent Dr. Boomstick

No, i never said without player control, i said that this is different from all other traits of this nature AND comes with pre-defined lore for the player.

As i said, i don't really have an issue with this being allowed, but i think it would be cool if we at least got a version that follows the standards set by the other traits of not interfering with a player's imagined background for their character.

[DoctorBoomstick]

To be honest, folks, the only middle ground I can see with this is creating a second trait available through the traits screen that gives a generic nightmare effect, with messages to the effect of:

You have a nightmare about your time as a soldier during the cataclysm.

And paraphrased versions of the general, location-based snippets.

Meanwhile, this trait, which prints full-length character backstories or trauma dreams, gets placed into a background, which would state something to the effect of:

You have been deeply effected by the events you witnessed during the cataclysm; particular recollections will haunt you in your sleep.

I don’t know where I stand on this; to be truthful, it sort of feels like extra clutter to apply an effect you could bypass right now by just hitting space, closing the pop-up, and not reading the dream snippet (to be fair, I suspect folks are going to do that regardless because they’re a tad long). However, if this is an acceptable and wanted solution, it would be relatively simple to bake.

[NancokPS2]

Making it a background sounds pretty good.
Those are meant to more directly affect the character's backstory and even define it. At least i can't think of a better place to put it.

[I-am-Erk]

I like the concept here, but having reviewed nightmares overall, I think there are some writing suggestions that get pretty important. I will have to look more closely at the ones you're adding, but I want to ensure our nightmare content doesn't become prescriptivist for your character and their experiences. It's important that these stay vague enough that they could be experienced by anyone in that profession regardless of the RP backstory.

[DoctorBoomstick]

@I-am-Erk, appreciate your thoughts on the nightmares. With respect to the one you pointed out, I also grew to think that it’s likely too specific, so I’ll work on that. In general, I think I should lean into more of the paraphrasing style of writing rather than writing them out as an active story, as I do find myself falling into too much detail and making them 300 words, which I understand is quite long for something of this frequency. I have the same issue with general E-logs, but I think it’s more acceptable there as you’re directly recounting an event that the player has to seek out and read by choice rather than being presented with them every time they fall asleep. I’ll look at trying to paraphrase these nightmares and keep them under 200 words long. It might be a tad tricky for some of them, refugee snippet 2 coming to mind and general snippet 4, but they do need to be shorter.

[I-am-Erk]

There's an overall issue with nightmares that came to my attention through this but was there when you got here. A lot of these nightmares are way, way, way too long. For a snippet that can randomly occur and recur, they simply need to be more vague than this. When there's this much descriptive text it rapidly gets unbelievable to have the same nightmare occur more than once, even if it's perfectly written to not assume anything. Nightmares should be much shorter, along the lines of:

"You have a nightmare about churning in mud, digging into trenches like it's the first world war, as the dead come on in never ending waves."

for a soldier, for example. I will probably have to do an editorial pass and dramatically cut down on some of the massively overdescriptive prose in the nightmares that we already have.

[Inglonias]

Making the nightmares shorter and more vague would also absolutely mitigate the "railroading" effect for roleplay purposes

[I-am-Erk]

I did up #72503 to give you an idea what I mean. Some of those still probably need work but that's generally what I think our dream sequences should be more like.

[DoctorBoomstick]

I did up #72503 to give you an idea what I mean. Some of those still probably need work but that's generally what I think our dream sequences should be more like.

Thanks for pushing these audits out so quickly; they’re very illustrative. Case in point: after some rough tweaking (it probably needs more work) in place of soldier snippet 3:

Dream and memory merge into one once again as a nightmare oozes into your sleep#. You're cascading down an earthen embankment, dirt showering over you as you roll and tumble, your eyes pulsating in your sockets as melding arrays of blacks, purples, and ochre shades assault your vision. Down-drafts tug at the luce folds of your equipment, the scream of approaching helicopter rotors slicing directly overhead as you're flung to the soil, a sequence of whistling emanations pipe in the distance, and the earth quakes. rolling to your back, rifle clutched to your chest, and a nose bleed painting red webs across your face, your pupils contract as a filigree of white bursts across the horizon in intermittent sequences: a symphony of staccato gun pods and teeth-rattling detonations compressing upon your eardrums. Backpedalling on the slope above you, shrouded in darkness save for the ethereal light refracting off their helmet, another soldier descends towards you, their bodies shaking as a stream of casings bounces down the incline from their Minimi as they fire over the lip. You know it's worthless. You nestle yourself deeper into the soil as you brace yourself; over the machinegun's rattling, you hear a manically swift series of titanic thwacks thundering closer — as though a monstrous drum heralding something's arrival. You don't need to wait long. A massive appendage shoots over the embankment and crashes through the soldier's face, bursting through their back and hoisting them skywards. At least, you'd call it skywards were it not for the fact that the sky's freshly obscured by the undulating profile of the tentacle's owner. You couldn't call it a starfish. Starfish don't blot out the heavens, suspended on their five appendages. They aren't covered in bone reeds that pipe out a terrible whistling as it crawls over the environment. The soldier's dragged up. You hear a sound not unlike a nutcracker at work. Red, copper-scented rain spatters across you.

I have:

You have a dream about sprinting through a night alive with the sounds of approaching helicopter rotors and staccato gunpods, the ground underfoot quaking as you trip and cascade down an embankment. Roling to your back, you scream—the agony-twisted face of a fellow soldier hovers at the incline’s apex, chest impaled by a purplish-red appendage emerging from the darkness, coated in piping bone reeds. You recall the feeling of sticky rain spattering across you moments before you startle awake. It takes a few heartbeats to assure yourself that all you’re drenched in is your own sweat.

Do you think that this follows your overall recommendations?

[I-am-Erk]

Getting closer for sure! I would still take out a lot of the specific descriptor terms..part of what I'm going for is the feeling that if you get the same.text two nights in a row it could believably be describing two similar but not identical dreams. I can do an edit on the above later if it helps but it'll be a while before I'm at a keyboard again

[I-am-Erk]

You have a dream about sprinting through a night alive with the sounds of approaching helicopter rotors and staccato gunpods, the ground underfoot quaking as you trip and cascade down an embankment. Roling to your back, you scream—the agony-twisted face of a fellow soldier hovers at the incline’s apex, chest impaled by a purplish-red appendage emerging from the darkness, coated in piping bone reeds. You recall the feeling of sticky rain spattering across you moments before you startle awake. It takes a few heartbeats to assure yourself that all you’re drenched in is your own sweat.

So for my editing so far, I'd probably boil this down into something like:

You have a dream about sprinting through a battlefield, the ground shaking as you dive for cover, only to find yourself face-to-face with a member of your unit. Before you can react, they are impaled by an enormous otherwordly monster, spattering you in gore. You startle awake, taking a few heartbeats to assure yourself that all you’re drenched in is your own sweat.

I'm intentionally removing a lot of the descriptive text and specific situations, because the more descriptive it gets, the more likely it is to be prescriptive, and the less believable it is as a dream you could have more than once. This necessarily makes it read less like a horror story and more like a summary, which might be better or worse depending on who you ask.

As a rule of thumb I've been trying to keep them to 2-3 sentences.

[KittyTac]

@DoctorBoomstick The abridging makes sense but the old versions of the snippets are legit chilling. You should become a horror writer.

Anyways, what was the intended idea behind the snippet with the dog-like monster? In several other snippets I saw some references to "monsters wearing people's faces" and the last line reminded me of that. Is it intended to be like, the initial portal storm on C-day mutating people? This one, for posterity.

As the teeth of a fresh nightmare snap shut upon your rest, you wimper in your sleep. Rancid mud cakes your uniform as you rock desultorily, your knees pulled to your chest as the tears flowing from your eyes match the thundering rain overhead, drop for drop. Shielded from the tempest by a steel aisleway, vibrating as water cascades across the undercarriage of the antiquated, overturned military truck tented about you, you shiver — your teeth on edge with each groaning creek the battered vehicle emits. As thunder booms, the noise's accompanied by a guttural, nasal grunting, as though the emanations of some gargantuan dog. Yet, somehow, the small voice that's faintly calling in the distance, lost among the rain, is still audible over the maelstrom. "<u_name>. <U_name>," the voice of a fellow soldier, and your former friend in the forces, <given_name> <famaly_name>, gently calls. "Look up, <u_name>," they softly urge. "Look up. It'll be easier that way." Complying, your cheeks awash with grief, you spy a lanky, scaled thing struggling to push through the narrow gap between the truck's rear gate and the ground. It's an ebony snout with flared, oozing nostrils and haphazardly grown fangs. "It's alright," the voice sadly whispers as the muzzle's lips stretch and a muscular, blackish-blue tongue flops forth, its underside lined with dual rows of barbs. "It'll be alright." The creature lets out a frustrated howl, its rotten breath rolling across you as its tongue reaches just shy of your boots. "<u_name>, when this is over, find me." As the melancholic voice of your friend merges with the beast's rising growls, the truck quakes as it succeeds in shoving its head into the compartment. "Find me... and kill me." You startle awake, your body drenched in sweat and with the image of your friend's features stretched across the monster's skull, branded into your retinas.

[DoctorBoomstick]

@DoctorBoomstick The abridging makes sense but the old versions of the snippets are legit chilling. You should become a horror writer.

Anyways, what was the intended idea behind the snippet with the dog-like monster? In several other snippets I saw some references to "monsters wearing people's faces" and the last line reminded me of that. Is it intended to be like, the initial portal storm on C-day mutating people? This one, for posterity.

As the teeth of a fresh nightmare snap shut upon your rest, you wimper in your sleep. Rancid mud cakes your uniform as you rock desultorily, your knees pulled to your chest as the tears flowing from your eyes match the thundering rain overhead, drop for drop. Shielded from the tempest by a steel aisleway, vibrating as water cascades across the undercarriage of the antiquated, overturned military truck tented about you, you shiver — your teeth on edge with each groaning creek the battered vehicle emits. As thunder booms, the noise's accompanied by a guttural, nasal grunting, as though the emanations of some gargantuan dog. Yet, somehow, the small voice that's faintly calling in the distance, lost among the rain, is still audible over the maelstrom. "<u_name>. <U_name>," the voice of a fellow soldier, and your former friend in the forces, <given_name> <famaly_name>, gently calls. "Look up, <u_name>," they softly urge. "Look up. It'll be easier that way." Complying, your cheeks awash with grief, you spy a lanky, scaled thing struggling to push through the narrow gap between the truck's rear gate and the ground. It's an ebony snout with flared, oozing nostrils and haphazardly grown fangs. "It's alright," the voice sadly whispers as the muzzle's lips stretch and a muscular, blackish-blue tongue flops forth, its underside lined with dual rows of barbs. "It'll be alright." The creature lets out a frustrated howl, its rotten breath rolling across you as its tongue reaches just shy of your boots. "<u_name>, when this is over, find me." As the melancholic voice of your friend merges with the beast's rising growls, the truck quakes as it succeeds in shoving its head into the compartment. "Find me... and kill me." You startle awake, your body drenched in sweat and with the image of your friend's features stretched across the monster's skull, branded into your retinas.

Thanks for the kind comment; I appreciate it. I’ll just save the long form texts for the e-logs; they fit better there anyway. Regarding the dog creature, in my mind, it was a comment over the player character seeing mutated zombies and amalgams, probably also seeing that soldiers had a tendency to evolve into more horrific things based on their equipment, and being afraid of what the bodies of their friends might be transforming into.

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[GuardianDll]

What's the status of this PR?

[I-am-Erk]

It's worth noting that if you want to save your great prose, you could probably put it somewhere else in game without much editing. Someone might tell you about the recurring nightmares they've had, or you might find a survivor's dream diary....

[DoctorBoomstick]

@GuardianDll, it’s absolutely silly how long I’ve left this PR on the burner, but life’s been rather busy as of late, and I’ve lost track working on other things. I plan to rework the current snippets, add some more to bring all categories up to a decent number, and perhaps add a couple more categories to more important areas or professions (disclaimer: I have yet to figure out what’s the most important area or profession). @I-am-Erk, that’s a great suggestion, and it would be nice to be able to save the current snippets if people think they're good. I hesitate to shoehorn them into NPC dialogue because I’ve yet to touch NPCs, which is something I’d like to get around to eventually, but ideas are a dime a dozen. The way I see it, I suspect I could wiggle them in as dream diary logs within e_logs; I think they fit better in there than the very short survivor notes. Otherwise, if I recall rightly, there’s a branch of lab snippets that deal with psychological evaluations and related dreams, so it might be more fun dropping them in there.