Shortly after dinner, the king of the mountainhome, the great liege of the Ambiguous Monster, heard an urgent tapping in his bedchamber. He pulled a lever, which lowered a bridge that had moments before looked like a smooth marble wall, and his chief finder of knowledge hobbled in. "Sire, I bring dire news! The elves, they have located what they call a nexus point, a place where good, evil, and neither conjoin in a state as yet uninfluenced by people. They believe that such places are sources of great power, if properly harnessed. They have sent an expedition to form a settlement there!"
To which the king replied, "So what? Eleves are a silly frivolous folk. Who cares what they do? For all we know, their theories are rubbish."
"But sire, they seek to build their home in the mountains just across the pass from the mountainhome!"
"Ho! You say? We cannot have this. Mountains are for dwarfs, not treecarvers. Especially not those mountains which were claimed by my own self upon my coronation, after the founder of our land fell to a monster ever so slightly less ambiguous than the one he fought those few years before. Yes, we shall stymy those treecarvers! I will divert the royal expedition set to depart next week!"
"My liege, next week will be too late. Besides ... many of the beasts in the area are rather ferocious and we do not have the animal charm magics that those nasty elves seem to be born with. When the elves arrive and find that we have struck the earth first, their pristine location will be seen to be despoiled, even if the fort has become unoccupied in such a short time. Better to send the Royal Expedition to the land of plenty as planned - send some peasants with a little food, a few barrels of drink, a couple breeding pairs of something, some copper picks and an axe, enough to make them think they are doing something of import, but do not waste the steel tools of the Royal Expeditions on them."
"Yes, this sounds excellent! Why waste resources or important dwarfs when we're just poking the elves in the eye? Go explain this to the High Priest of Armok. He will know how to convince those ignorant, useless peasants of the honor of this most noble conquest."
And so it came that seven peasants, without a skill to their name, were sent to embark to make the fort Earthslip. Will they grow to become a functional dwarven community or will their unmarked graves simply denote a small minded pox on the elves? Only time will tell.
[OK, I have failed at attaching the embark image. I'll make a couple notes to it, put it and gameplay images on Flickr and copy paste links into here after playing a bit.]
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Topic: Earthslip (my first MW play (4g)) (Read 759 times)