Sanity Effects in DreamHack103
Mar. 21st, 2025 10:00 am(Originally told this to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
storyheight but the idea was so cool I decided to blog it)
For many years, we have played hack, AKA hack103, an ASCII adventure game from 1985 and the predecessor of nethack. It specializes in killing you in absurd, improbable ways. And a couple nights ago, we dreamed that it had introduced sanity effects!
You’d sometimes pick up items with totally nonsensical names (like "Jacob" and "witch-hunter") and you could only figure out what they truly were by trying all sorts of actions until either something worked (allowing you to identify at least its type) or the item disappeared, proving it never existed to begin with. (The dream didn’t go into this, but since hack has a limited number of item slots, having inventory bloated with possibly hallucinatory objects would eventually become a pain! Especially if they were cursed and why WOULDN’T they be?)
You would also sometimes get random unpleasant status messages: "Blood." "You hear screaming." "You are crying." Did they do anything? Dunno! But they could stack with other status effects, like blindness or confusion. (The dream did not do this, but erasing your stats from view or intentionally having them report wrong could also apply.)
Finally, you would be pursued by a large cloud of ASCII symbols that made no sense for the area--random doors and tunnels in the middle of a room, worm segments missing a worm, characters not used in the game at all like the degree symbol--which did not move quickly (you could stay ahead of it pretty easily) but was large and relentless and would increase bad sanity effects if it managed to touch you.
It was pretty creepy and effective, for an ASCII game!
storyheight but the idea was so cool I decided to blog it)For many years, we have played hack, AKA hack103, an ASCII adventure game from 1985 and the predecessor of nethack. It specializes in killing you in absurd, improbable ways. And a couple nights ago, we dreamed that it had introduced sanity effects!
You’d sometimes pick up items with totally nonsensical names (like "Jacob" and "witch-hunter") and you could only figure out what they truly were by trying all sorts of actions until either something worked (allowing you to identify at least its type) or the item disappeared, proving it never existed to begin with. (The dream didn’t go into this, but since hack has a limited number of item slots, having inventory bloated with possibly hallucinatory objects would eventually become a pain! Especially if they were cursed and why WOULDN’T they be?)
You would also sometimes get random unpleasant status messages: "Blood." "You hear screaming." "You are crying." Did they do anything? Dunno! But they could stack with other status effects, like blindness or confusion. (The dream did not do this, but erasing your stats from view or intentionally having them report wrong could also apply.)
Finally, you would be pursued by a large cloud of ASCII symbols that made no sense for the area--random doors and tunnels in the middle of a room, worm segments missing a worm, characters not used in the game at all like the degree symbol--which did not move quickly (you could stay ahead of it pretty easily) but was large and relentless and would increase bad sanity effects if it managed to touch you.
It was pretty creepy and effective, for an ASCII game!
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