Good Neighbor
| & Good Neighbor (No tile) | |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 39 |
| Attacks |
Reach 4d8 armor shredding, Reach 4d8 armor shredding, Reach 4d8 armor shredding, Reach 4d8 armor shredding, Cast 0d0 mage spell |
| Base level | 66 |
| Base experience | 5376 |
| Speed | 16 |
| Base AC | -3 |
| Base MR | 66 |
| Alignment | 0 (neutral) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | Unique |
| Genocidable | No |
| Weight | 1740 |
| Nutritional value | 0 |
| Size | medium
|
|
The Good Neighbor:
| |
The Good Neighbor, &, is a monster that appears in dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack. She is a unique demon-like humanoid that is fey and a Great Old One, and is an overlord to her kind. She is strong and capable of flight, can see invisible, can be seen via infravision, has a tendency to wander, and will pick up weapons, armor and magical items that she comes across. The Good Neighbor has 13 points of effective AC: six each are in the natural and protection categories, with the remaining point in the dodge category. She cannot be made tame.
The Good Neighbor has four armor shredding reach attacks and the ability to cast one mage monster spell during each of her turns.
Killing the Good Neighbour will permanently afflict the hero with the "Masks of Nyarlathotep" madness, which has a chance of causing any non-summoned monster they kill to "reveal their true form" and turn into a random unknown abomination, with the chance increasing steadily at lower sanity.
Generation
The Good Neighbor is not a valid target for genocide or polymorph.
The Good Neighbor is generated randomly on the sixth level of the Lost Cities in the Neutral Quest at level creation.
The Good Neighbor never leaves a corpse upon death.
Strategy
The Good Neighbor has a solid 16 speed, and engaging with her in melee is dangerous due to her shredding attack, which can quickly disenchant and destroy your armor—this makes kiting infeasible without the use of a preservative engine. She can cast high-level spells including touch of death, curse items and life drain, and her acid rain spell may also destroy any scrolls, potions and books being carried in open inventory. A player can also find themselves repeatedly getting confused and unable to cast spells when hit by a doubt bolt.
The notable lack of resistances besides player-style magic resistance allows for the use of elemental attack spells as a viable way to kill her without entering her range or putting her to sleep with the help of the wand or spell, though any magical attack will still be subject to her MR score of 66. Using a boulder fort will trivialize her reach attack and block line of sight preventing constant spell spam cursing items and destroying scrolls and potions. This may also help diminish the barrage of open wounds cast by the abundance of witches and their familiars present on the level. She can only be warded off by heptagrams but may still hit the player before fleeing while approaching due to her reach.
Origin
The Good Neighbor is loosely based on Bensozia, a mythological figure traced back to the Gauls and associated with witchcraft. Jacques de Martin, the 18th century french benedictine monk, discusses Bensozia as being a major moon deity described as "malevolent, sometimes benevolent", and also mentions the names Herodias, Nocticula and Diana as being similarly associated with this figures' worship. The name's origin supposedly comes from the phonetic similarity to a phrase closely associated with her worship, loosely "bon(a) socia/sosed" or "good neighbor". This probably reflects the later Indo-European pronunciation rather than the original Gaulish.
Bensozia appears in Dungeons & Dragons, where she debuts in issue #76 of Dragon Magazine as the Queen of Hell: she is described as a devil with a human appearance who is coldly polite and haughty in nature. She is a consort to Asmodeus and mother to Glasya, Princess of Hell. The story goes that Levistus killed Bensozia and was in turn imprisoned in a block of ice as punishment.
dNetHack also draws inspiration for the Good Neighbor from the Cthulhu Mythos, loosely associating her with the outer god Nyarlathotep, god of a thousand forms. In the Cthulhu Mythos, Nyarlathotep is an eldritch deity that acts as a messenger and harbinger to the outer gods spreading their influence over the world. The Good Neighbor of dNetHack and its variants is implied to either be an avatar or one of its many forms taken on in order to propagate witch cults like the one that the hero encounters, which is further implied by her unique death message—she is also a distinct entity from Bensozia as described above.
