User:Zaylin/The Discordian's Guide to Lost Souls

From LSWiki

Foreward

There's plenty of guides for this game on this wiki, but those lack integral components, such as, zazz, panache, moxie, and other outdated slang for "flavor". And thus, this shall be remedied with this particular guide, which tells you what every other guide tells you, but filtered through the arguably terrifying veneer of someone who spent 2 years sitting on their ass being weird.

It's probably best to take this guide with multiple grains of salt, as it is the opposite of serious, and probably has dumb misleading information. If you want an accurate mostly helpful guide, it's probably best to check Kex's Newbie Guide (Which I'm heavily cribbing the format from anyway.) or Vet's Newbie Help, which gets updated regularly by a guy who has experience from newbie helpings. Enjoy this brief bit of sanity whilst you can because the rest of the guide isn't gonna be anywhere near this lucid.

Snazzy Intro Thingy

So, you've made a character, or at the very least are traipsing around as a boring generic humantype. You may be scared and frightened by this, but don't let this cause you to start beating up poor Ashe, he has enough trouble at home. In fact, you probably shouldn't be beating up anyone right now, as they're all bigger and tougher than you.

You started with some items, chances are they're boring as hell, other chances are you might have gotten some fun stuff, like some lenses! Lenses are good, if you look at things through them, you learn things! But the force of all this learning is too much for their fragile forms to bear, so keep that in mind, you can get more later though, which is good if you didn't start with any. Be sure to memorize anything you learn, by the way, so it sticks with ya!

This would be a good time to wander around and get your bearings, watch out for thugs and pickpockets though, they hate you, and want your money, and probably your stuff. So while you're poking through guides (Like this one!), or checking the set and show commands and the helpfiles, you should poke your head into the cathedral a bit east of the Adventurer Guild, this'll give you some breathing room while you poke the MASSIVELY INTIMIDATING INTERFACE AND ITS MYRIAD DISPLAYS.

Anyway, if you want to scream at newbie helpers if you're sad, scared, and confused, just type 'newbie <whatever you feel like saying'. And for other stuff, there's an ooc chat, which is out of character, which means you can chat there even if your brain is leaking out of your skull. Hey, let's move on to some more specific interacty things.

What's All This Stuff Then?

Now, if you mud at all, you're probably intimately familiar with the "look" command, and that's good and all, but we're gonna talk about it anyway, because you might learn something, and I'm not making this guide for people who know everything anyway, smartass. Besides, you probably don't know about "show", and that's gonna get explained to, so pull up a chair, or a stool, or some other sitting apparatus.

Getting a Looksie

Everyone knows about "look", you'll be using it a lot, use it by itself, you get the room description, plus the stuff in it, which is pretty standard. You also get to see the name of the room, its viable exits, and other fun things like that. You can also look at stuff to get their descriptions and stuff too. There's the info command too, which isn't as detailed as look, but gives a bunch of fourth-wall breaking information, like when stuff was made, when it was last modified, and even some things specific to the object like certain commands that work with it, and such.

Help, You Know I Need Somebody

The help command works here just as well as it works anywhere else, use it to look up rules and various things you can do. Easy peasy.

Show, We Meet Again

One thing that makes Lost Souls special is the staggering amount of displays that can tell you various things about your dude. You can use "show" without any arguments to see what those are, and if there are any arguments, you're probably gonna cause a domestic disturbance and it'll look bad on your criminal record. These various things have helpfiles too! Hopefully they're intuitive enough.

The Talky Bits

Okay, so now you've got a vague (hopefully) idea of how things work, and now you want to blab at people in a capacity that's not just hoping someone knows how to help you. You got your channels for the long-range communication ('show channels' love you long time), the newbie and ooc channels are here, isn't it wonderful? And you got your short range communication, which you can dink around with using "say" and "emit". Emit's all sorts of fun, and will enhance the roleplaying you'll undoubtedly get involved in.

Short Range Talkiness

Like stated before, you can use say to talk. If you're still farting around on the default human you get, you should be talking in anglic, the most common language in the game, if not, you probably need to use "set primary language to anglic", we'll talk about set later, maybe, either way, you're talking in anglic now. Now, depending on circumstances, this might look really boring. If you get some vocalization or mimicry skill, you can go over and first "show quote styles/speech patterns" to see the hopefully vast range of different patternings and accents you can apply to your speech, and use "set quote style/speech pattern" to make your text all nice and awesome.