Walking nightmares

Walking nightmares is a property that appears in dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack.

The only source of the walking nightmares property is The War-helm of the Dreaming.

Description

While a hero has walking nightmares, monsters that can see them with whatever type of vision they possess can potentially receive the hero's madness. For each madness the hero has, a check is made versus the hero's sanity that ignores any reduction from clear thoughts, i.e. this check always succeeds if the hero is at 0 sanity, and always fails at 100 sanity - if the check succeeds, the monster becomes aware of this madness, and a second check occurs to determine if they are given that madness. If the monster's level is lower than or equal to a roll of 2dXL, where XL represents the hero's experience level, then they are afflicted with the madness, and otherwise become immune to that madness while the monster is alive. Peaceful monsters, mindless monsters, secret-whisperers, truth-seers, dream-eaters, and veil-renders are all immune to walking nightmares.

The forms of madness listed below have particular effects on monsters:

• Delusions, real delusions, and spiraling madness render the monster crazed, which lasts until the craze is cured.
• Rage is inflicted upon the monster as normal, but also renders them crazed and permanently berserk; both properties last until cured.
• Dreams is inflicted upon the monster as normal, and causes a monster without sleep resistance to immediately fall asleep for 1 turn.
• Frenzy sets the monster's HP to 1.
• The host, cold night, overlord, and thousand masks cannot be granted to monsters.
• All other forms of madness simply give the monster their effects.

If the hero has Yog Sothoth bound, they are credited for each madness that is successfully transferred to monster via walking nightmares, with the credit being equal to the monster's level.

A hero with walking nightmares who also possesses clear thoughts has the latter property partially blocked, and the effects of losing sanity are no longer entirely suppressed. Instead:

• The hero's sanity loss is treated as ¹⁄₅ of its current value, with every 5 points of sanity loss corresponding to one point while afflicted by nightmares, i.e. at 0 sanity (100 sanity lost), the player is treated as having 80 sanity (¹⁰⁰⁄₅ = 20 sanity lost).
• The effects of sanity loss scale with this lowered sanity loss, and last for only ¹⁄₅ of their normal duration.
• Effects that ignore clear thoughts entirely (such as walking nightmares itself, or The Sickle of Thunderblasts) still ignore the reduced-effectiveness clear thoughts, and still only consider the true sanity value (so 0 is 0, not 80).