What is this mod about?

Choice. Specifically alternate ways to beat the game. Traditional Fallout was a role playing game. The series has strayed from those origins:

- We can blow up Megaton in Fallout 3. Why can't we blow up Diamond City in Fallout 4? How about an optional quest presenting dilemmas that might lead us to feel destruction is a reasonable thing to do, with consequences for our actions, replayability, and options to escalate or de-escalate the situation?

- Suppose we tire of being "General" of the Minutemen, or never want to do work for that faction at all? How about an option to Kill Preston, become enemies with The Minutemen, and blow up The Castle, but still keep our settlements and claim new ones? The base game makes it impossible to do this. Even if we join the Raiders in Nuka World and start pillaging the Commonwealth, Preston won't become an enemy. That doesn't make sense.

- If we choose to destroy The Railroad, walking in and shooting them doesn't provide enough closure. After murdering them, how about we detonate some explosive charges on the support beams and collapse the roof over their corpses, forever burying them in rubble?

- The end sequences when destroying The Prydwen and The Institute are pretty cool, but a lot of us don't love the grind, mental gymnastics, and alliances we're forced to accept in order to do make that stuff happen. When we blow up those guys, if that's something we choose to do, let's do it on our terms, for our reasons, and not because some under-qualified faction leader orders us to do it, over our objections, for reasons which make little sense.

- When choosing any of the above options, the game and the characters in it should respond appropriately to our choices.

Didn't you make an alternate ending mod like this before?

This mod is the Ying to Project Valkyrie's Yang of alternate endings- and yes, you can do both: make peace with all factions during Project Valkyrie, then blow up any or all of them with this mod. You can also skip the peace process and jump straight into murdering people. Project Valkyrie is not required for this mod to work.


I don't want to side with anyone

In Fallout New Vegas, there was a character called Yes Man who allowed you to complete the main quest without siding with one of the other main factions (NCR, Legion, Mr. House). Same concept here.

How do I start the mod?

1) Head to Pickman Gallery. It's located here and the entrance looks like this.
2) Once inside, take the stairs to the top floor and make a right turn into the bedroom.
3) Turn right once inside the bedroom and unlock the safe against the wall.
4) Grab the "Diary of a Madman" holotape from the safe and read it.

All quests in this mod can be accessed via that holotape. Do whichever ones you want, in any order you want. All quests are fully voiced and you can back out of each one mid-way if you change your mind.

You can also obtain the "Diary of a Madman" holotape via console command:

A) Console command: Help "Diary of a Madman" 4
B) Find the 8 digit identification number the console provides under NOTE.
C) Console command: Player.AddItem xxxxxxxx 1, except replace the x's with the 8 digit number from Step B.

What quests are in the mod?

1) Retaking Independence

This quest allows you to gain access to The Castle, its armory, the Minutemen General outfit, and Minutemen artillery without ever needing to work with Preston or do the quest 'Old Guns' with Ronnie. At the end of this quest you have the option to blow up The Castle. If you later change your mind, you can hire a hazmat crew to make the area habitable again.

This quest is available at any point after killing the Mirelurk Queen at The Castle, which you can do with or without Preston.

2) Your Settlement Does Not Need My Help

If you nuke The Castle, Preston will approach you for an explanation. If you can’t convince Preston to calm down in the conversation that follows, or if you deliberately antagonize him, you will become enemies with The Minutemen. Preston will turn hostile, and you can kill him.

You can also use this as an opportunity to 'accidentally' incinerate or execute Marcy, Jun, Mama Murphy, and Sturges via nuke or Mirelurk Queen, as these Muppets lose their 'essential' flags during this mission and the preceding one.

If you kill Preston, you receive the “For a New Liberty” perk, which is a replacement for Preston’s “United We Stand” perk with identical stats (20 percent more damage and +20 Damage Resistance when facing three or more opponents). Once you receive the new perk, the old one is taken away.

Settlements that normally require doing Minutemen radiant quests (County Crossing, Greentop Nursery, Nordhagen Beach, Oberland Station, The Slog,
Somerville Place, and Tenpines Bluff) become automatically available to you.

This mission is a way to obtain all the benefits Preston offers without ever having to take him as a companion or do his grindy quests. In effect, it makes the Minutemen and the settlement system truly optional, like Todd Howard said things would be when promoting Fallout 4 in 2015.

3) The Little Engine That Couldn't

This is a quick quest that involves placing explosive charges in Railroad HQ and collapsing the roof over their heads. The quest is available at any point after you've accessed The Institute, provided you haven't already killed the leaders of The Railroad.

4) Prydwenburg

This is similar to the Railroad quest "Rocket's Red Glare" to bring down the Prydwen airship, except now you can do it on your own without the Railroad. You will want to bring backup on this mission.

This quest can be started at any time after accessing the Institute and meeting all the Brotherhood division heads on the Prydwen. This quest will not be available if the Prydwen is already destroyed.

5) Fire on the Charles

This is similar to the quest "The Nuclear Option" (Minutemen variant) to blow up The Institute except you can do it on your own without the Minutemen or anyone else. This quest can be started at any time after first accessing The Institute, and will no longer be available if you've already destroyed The Institute.

Completing this quest will play the ending cinematic from the vanilla game.

6) Can't We All Just Get Along?

The vanilla game never gives us a resolution to the Ghouls being kicked out of Diamond City. Was everyone cool with that? End of story? Or should there be a way to address this presumably divisive issue?

Now there is. This quest requires you to deal with civil unrest in Diamond City. You can end things peacefully, side with either law enforcement or the protestors, implement reforms, or you can allow the situation to escalate, even going so far as to blow up Diamond City.

If you blow up Diamond City and then convince Piper it was necessary, Nat Wright and Sheng Kawolski become available as companions. Some of the other Diamond City residents evacuate and relocate to other areas of the game (e.g. Vault 81, Goodneighbor).

If you allow civil unrest to reach a point where citizens start leaving and the Raiders take over Diamond City, you will gain access to items like throwable riot bricks and weaponized protest signs.

This quest can be started any time after accessing the Institute. The following is a play-through of one version of the quest. It can start and end differently via "Diary of a Madman", and not all play-through options are presented in the video.


This last quest sounds like another one of those protest mods

Nope. Not trying to sell you anything + respect whatever you believe. This isn't a re-texture or a political statement, it's a full-on quest that took a long time to make.

Fallout 4 is ultimately a story about politics, and you've got beliefs. "Can't We All Just Get Along" provides a way for you to exercise your beliefs, whatever they may be, by addressing political/social issues that are already referenced in Fallout 4 but that Bethesda didn't let you resolve.

No real world people, locations, or events are mentioned, except there is a brief text reference to early 17th century London (also present in the Fallout timeline). Some subtle references to 1960's America may be recognizable to older players or history buffs. There are also multiple references to the early 1990's and the events of early 2020. History repeats, or at least rhymes, and some of the same conflicts we face in our world are fundamental to our species and are also present in the world we encounter in Fallout 4.

You may encounter characters in this quest who do not share your point of view - law enforcement, protestors, or children trying to make sense of a confusing world. You can listen to them or shoot them in the face - up to you (except the children are marked 'essential'), and you can replay the quest to obtain different outcomes. The NPC's in the quest are characters in a video game. Their views do not reflect the views of the mod authors. The player character has the ability to make insensitive dialogue choices. It is your decision whether to select respectful or offensive player dialogue.

Regardless of ideology, you should be able to complete this quest in a morally satisfying manner, and possibly have a great time doing it via one of the most intense fight sequences we've released so far.

This quest is 100% optional. It has multiple outcomes. The existence of an outcome does not mean you have to choose that outcome. You can make your own choices. If another player chooses an outcome you don't agree with, and they show that option in a YouTube video, hopefully you don't view their choice as infringing on your rights. A minority of users enjoy complaining about the mere existence of options they wouldn't choose personally or are too embarrassed to admit they chose. We believe in choice in video games. Most players do. You're free to believe otherwise.

Mod compatibility

Compatible with everything. However, if you blow up a location, you will generally no longer be able to access that place or the content in it. If you still want access to a location (Prydwen, Diamond City, etc.), don't blow it up until you've finished all the content you want to play there.

If you blow up Diamond City, you will still be able to access 'The Bleachers' interior via fast travel in the mod The Bleachers: A Diamond City Story, provided you've already discovered that location. However you will no longer be able to access the Diamond City Strongroom from Depravity or the Diamond City Security office optional quest content in Crime & Punishment.

If you blow up The Prydwen, Sarah from Project Valkyrie will not be angry with you. She hated that thing anyway.

If you blow up The Institute, The Institute will no longer be accessible. The Reformed Institute from Project Valkyrie will be, but only if you've already reformed it.

If you blow up Railroad HQ, Deacon will not be there and he will not turn hostile, but he will refuse to interact with you thereafter. If you want to access his 4th affinity dialogue and personal quest from Settler & Companion Dialogue Overhaul, do that before blowing up the Railroad.

Required Files

You need all of the following:

1) Base Fallout 4 game - any version from 2019 or later. Haven't tested on versions before that.

2) All the regular DLC (Far Harbor, Nuka World, Automatron, Vault-Tec Workshop, Wasteland Workshop, Contraptions Workshop)

3) Depravity - Version 1.0 or higher. This mod relies on resources from the quest mod Depravity. You aren't required to play Depravity's quests in order to play this mod. This mod will not work with a version of Depravity below 1.0. You need version 1.0 or higher.

4) Outcasts & Remnants - Version 1.4 or higher. OAR has asset files that Depravity relies on. You don't need to play any of Outcasts & Remnants (or even have the OutcastsAndRemnants.esp active) in order to play this mod. You just need the asset files.

There will not be versions of "Diary of a Madman" requiring less than what is listed above. If you ask anyway, we'll assume you had trouble reading. When a mod author gives us permission (say 4 years ago) to use their assets in a mod, and that author subsequently leaves the mod scene, we can't obtain permission from them to include their assets in the files of the new mod, so we have to reference the asset files contained in the older mods for which explicit permission was granted.

The file size for "Diary of a Madman" is small because all the meshes, textures, scripts, voice files, etc. are contained in the other mods. DiaryOfAMadman.esp is tagged as an .esl file so it will not take up a load order slot. Place it directly below Depravity.esp in your load order.


Integration with Depravity

The quest mod Depravity released on Nexus in August, 2019. On July 1, 2020, the mod received an update nearly doubling the amount of playable content. Included in that update were some quests, given by Stella, to provide alternate endings to the game. Some of those quests were locked behind 10 to 15 hours of playable content.

Some people aren't interested in playing that many prerequisite quests, or interacting with a potentially psychotic child quest giver, they just want to skip straight to the alternate endings. Diary of a Madman lets you do that. It's fully compatible with Depravity. You play similar versions of the alternate ending quests, but with Diary of a Madman you have a much quicker way to access them that doesn't require playing any other Depravity quests.

If you choose a quest in Diary of a Madman, say to blow up the Prydwen, you won't also be able to blow up the Prydwen in Depravity or the vanilla game. If you do it via vanilla or Depravity or another mod, you won't also be able to do it via Diary of a Madman. It's one or the other, since there's only one Prydwen to blow up.

Other Mods in the Series

If you're interested, these are optional (except Depravity + Outcasts and Remnants). They do reference each other in places to form a fuller story if you're playing all of them. Combined they provide an additional 70+ hours of playable Fallout 4 content:

Depravity - August 2019 Mod of the Month
Project Valkyrie - August 2018 Mod of the Month
Outcasts And Remnants - April 2017 Mod of the Month Runner-Up
Fusion City Rising - September 2016 Mod of the Month
Settler & Companion Dialogue Overhaul - November 2019 Mod of the Month (has Deacon tie-in once you max his affinity)
Commonwealth Bounties - Coming in Fall 2020, test version is playable via Discord see commonwealth-bounties thread.

Load order, from top to bottom is: 1) AAFusionCityRising, 2) OutcastsAndRemnants.esp, 3) ProjectValkyrie.esp, 4) Depravity.esp, 5) DiaryOfAMadman.esp, 6) CommonwealthBounties.esp, 7) PiperCaitCurieDialogueOverhaul.esp

The first 5 can be placed consecutively near the top of your load order, the last 2 should go near the bottom.

Credits

McMacHack for the weaponized protest signs, throwable bricks, and other riot gear in the Diamond City riot.
Kerstyn Unger for Raina and Powell voices
Formado for Denny's voice
Please refer to the credits sections of Depravity and Outcasts & Remnants for everything else.