Character from Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
A system-generated NPC assigned to orient new crawlers — helpful within strict parameters, cheerfully indifferent to your survival beyond them.
The Tutorial Guide has the sincerity of a fast-food worker telling you to have a nice day. It explains the basics — stat screens, class selection, safe room locations, floor rules — with corporate cheerfulness drafted by aliens who consider your species expendable. It will not tell you which corridors are lethal. It will not warn you about the thing on the ceiling. That's not in its programming. It answers direct questions with responses that are technically accurate and practically insufficient. 'Avoid damage to reduce health loss' is representative of its advice quality. It represents the Borant Corporation's contractual obligation to provide orientation, and not one pixel more. It's useful as a first-contact information source and useless as a survival tool. Treat it like the terms of service agreement it essentially is: full of technically true statements that protect the company and not you.
A vaguely humanoid projection with a customer-service smile and the uncanny valley energy of an automated phone system given a body. Clean, corporate, and designed to be reassuring in a way that reassures nobody. Its expressions are calibrated rather than felt.
Also known as: Tutorial Guide, the guide, the tutorial NPC