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[Iamblichos]

I found these in an old directory, figured I would post them for the community to throw stones at   

This was the first fort I had that went longer than the first enemy... I was still very new at figuring out "what went where", and of course started to wonder how my sad mismanagement would look to one of the dwarves.  These were the results.

[Iamblichos]

So... there I was, in the bar, table leg at the ready; the drinking had been getting boring, but the dispute that arose was just the thing!  I shouted "Come on you lot, if you feel so hard, come and get some.  I've fought trolls, I've fought harpies, I've fought cavern spiders, and I've fought bloody roaches that were more impressive than you lot of drunken layabout peasant hauling scum!"  I knew them, you see, I knew those cowardly little cave crawlers wouldn't dare come within reach of a REAL dwarf.  I hears a bit of a commotion, then, and I thought, well, maybe Garm found some balls under that beer gut of his and wants a hat made of table leg.  Happy to suit him, I was, and ready to administer a gentle love tap when he came around the table I'd turned over.

Well, you can imagine my surprise when, instead of that fat old opal poacher Garm Witheraxe, what I get coming around the corner of the upended table was the bloody Sherriff!  Little ponce swished over to me bold as brass, told me I was causing a Disturbance With Malice Aforethought, and to come with him!  I told him I'd not leave with him as I had plans later, but that I would be pleased to offer him a drink... though I don't mind saying it choked me to be respectful to the wretched little tit!  I had plans with a woman that didn't involve losing half my skull to the King's Hammer, if you know what I mean.

He lisped out that he would have none of my backtalk, and to drop my weapon (which was nowt but the leg of a table, weapon my hairy arse!)  Well, and I ask you fine dwarves, what was I to do?  I was shaming my ancestors to disarm in the face of this little silk-clad would-be elf, but I'd seen the Hammer of the King's Justice, and that's one dwarf I had no desire to see up close... bloody gave me the shivers, the way he looked at you!  Rumor was his mother was a troll, which is where he got his undwarfish size, along with his bloody temperament.  But anyway, not only was I forced to put down the little twig I was holding but also to walk the gauntlet of grins from that pack of bloated kobolds I'd been having my little discussion with. Wankers.

So, off we went to the Justiciar, hauled up in front of the King's Justice.  At first, it was all the usual blah blah blah, known troublemaker, blah blah, no crucial skills to my name, blah blah, sentenced to... WHAT?!?!  I just about jumped up on that bench and demonstrated to the Justiciar what I thought of him on the spot, Hammerer or no!  Bloody DEPORTED.  Or as the evil old troll called it, "Transported".  Thrown out, is what it was!  I was informed in no uncertain terms that the King needed settlements, and that settlements needed dwarves, and that dwarves needed to be led, and that I was clearly a dwarf who knew how to keep a firm hand, so they were relying on me blah blah blah.  About the time I started hearing things like "wagons" and "supplies", I tuned back in. 

"Hold up a moment, there, shortarse." I said, ignoring his stink-eye for the interruption of his pompous prattle.  "If I'm to go on this mad expedition, not saying I am, look you, I have things of my own that need to be gathered up, affairs to be put in order, a woman to visit tomorrow (come to think of it by this point, later today)... What makes you think I have any interest in galloping off like some bloody elf into the woods here at the end of winter at all, let alone all in a hurry like this?"  My answer was the resounding CRASH of the Hammerer's bloody Artifact "Destroyer of Skulls of the Wicked" putting a bloody crack in a bloody granite bloody table.  Armok's balls.  Strike the earth to you too, you stinking old elf-sucker, may your every limb rot away and leave you lying in a pool of vomit.

I don't mind telling you, my friends, I felt pretty low.  Damn low.  My first sweetheart went odd years ago, sat in her room and wouldn't eat or drink until we finally put her in the earth, and I never understood what would make a vibrant young dwarf act like that until that very moment.  Driven away from my kith and kin, not even able to go get my few possessions, but thrown out onto a stocked wagon without so much as a by-your-leave and shipped off with 6 other losers to some spot the Royal Surveyors claimed had worthwhile resources!  I'm not the sort of dwarf to tear up easily, as you can well imagine, but I vow before the golden statues of the gods, the situation near brought a tear to my eye!

The next morning I was ushered to "my" team of wagons.  There were a group of other dwarves standing around, looking the same as me... low, miserable, and bedraggled.  I didn't know a single one of them, of course; when Armok decides in His holy wisdom its your turn to get it, He gives it to you hard as He can.  One of the Royal Surveyors, Inger Stonehand, was along for the trot, "to show us where to build".  Thanks a lot.  I didn't even look in the wagons, my friends, I figured we were all destined to a quick death at the teeth and claws of the local wildlife; who cares what they had in there? Given the way things work in the government, probably one of the King's cronies used this as an opportunity to offload some of the useless crap they made in their factories.  I was certain there wouldn't be anything worth a mandrill's fart in there, what normal dwarf (let alone one of those skinflint nobles) is going to send anything worth money off on a wagon into the woods?

Two months later, I still couldn't believe we actually had been out there in the air that long.  I didn't even know the overworld was so bloody big!  The Surveyor with us turned out to be a decent enough sort, didn't talk a lot but when he talked he had useful things to say, not dribbling on like so many dwarves love to do.  Over the months he gave me a decent overview of what was in the wagons, some tips on setting up a new home without ending up starving, drowning or turned into some goblin's new sex toy.  Turns out some flunky smarter than the usual run of government worker had thought about what we might need, because there was a decent amount of useful stuff there in the carts among the ash and trash.  We even got an iron anvil, and gods alone know how they managed to pry something that valuable out of the grasping hands of the mine owners... probably the King just took it with some gas about "the good of the Kingdom" instead of payment, come to think of it.  Bloody typical.

By the time we got there, I had almost forgotten that we had a destination (at least I wanted to forget).  You can imagine my shock when Inger finally says "Right, this is it, welcome to Steamybellows and good luck.  Strike the earth!" and off he rode.  Looking around at the unfamiliar trees, plants, sandy hills and each other, we all seven had the same thought.... "we are completely and utterly screwed".

[Iamblichos]

So where was I?  My kindest thanks for the ale, you dwarves know how to treat an old geezer well!  Oh yes, when we first arrived...

God that was a shithole.  You can't imagine.  Worthless patch of sand and green, little pools of water and swamps everywhere, an embarrassment to the race of dwarves as a whole and specifically to the Surveyor who decided that this particular stinking corner of nowhere was where a group of dwarves needed to settle (the original Surveyor, you understand, not my traveling companion Ingwe, long life to him!)

Well, there we stood, the seven of us, scratching our asses and blinking, and finally I shouted for the other dwarves to get moving.  My first companions were a shifty lot if I ever laid eyes on one, and believe you me in the back alleys and docks of the capital I knew my share of shifty!  We had a miner and a mason ... the two of them had been caught with a third companion trying to burgle the burrow of the Noble Angvar Kurbarremaruk, and good on them!  Sad thing is they were caught.  We had a farmer who never confessed what he did to get exiled... watched him closely, mark you, any dwarf who spent that much time in the open air was bound to be a little off, if you know what I mean.  No weapons for that one.  A woodcutter and a woodcarver, a married couple that didn't cut the wood some bloody idiot Noble wanted that week... I don't even understand some of the things that our King considers to be crimes!  Still, there they were with me and the sorrier for it.  A fish-cutter (who quickly got told to learn to fish as well, useless bastard) and my dockworker's experience as a fisherdwarf rounded out our merry crew of criminals.

The first order of business was to get our asses underground.  The miner and the mason (who ended up a junior miner for the duration, being as we had no bloody stone sitting in the middle of the bloody field waiting for us) made some measurements and took off tunneling like rabbits directly into the hillside.  The soil was pure shit, sandy and useless for anything. I worried that we would have a hell of a time keeping it from collapsing, but thank Armok the miner knew his craft well enough; we weren't the first dwarves to have to get to the other side of a sand dune in a hurry.  There was some jibber-jabber about sand being used to make glass, but I reminded everyone we were out in the far end of Outer Toesuck and who the hell would be making the cloth to make the bags to gather the sand to take to the furnace we didnt have to burn charcoal we didn't have to make the bloody glass we couldn't bloody cut because we bloody well didn't have a bloody jeweler shop?  That shut that up quick enough.  One thing about us dwarves, and I say the same of myself... we don't get a rock that we don't dream up the bloody mountain that made it!  First things first.

By the second day, it was raining and the campsite was a pot of pure curdled piss and misery.  New Fisherboy and I managed to rustle up some turtles in the ponds nearby... no sign of carp, thank Armok.  We had enough problems.  Woodcarver was useless until we got some wood and a place to carve, so off he went to gather the pretty plants.  He claimed to know enough to tell the ones that could be used to eat or brew from the ones that would stretch us out into a line of stocky little corpses.  He was right too, strange enough... if he had poisoned us I would have made sure he died at my hands long before my gut killed me, I tell you that! 

After a few more days of nonstop rain and cold raw turtle Miner Durzim and Junior came rolling back out of the hole, happy as rats in a refuse pile, and told me that they had finished a decent growing hall for underground farming and a storage area that should hold up unless we went to banging on the walls!  Well, that was the best news I had heard in months, so we all picked up the nearest thing and humped it inside.  The prospect of getting in out of the rain even got the real lazy-asses to put on some speed.  I thanked the miners kindly, and asked them to head down a level or two and see whether the Surveyor had screwed us royally or just played a cruel joke on us at the surface.  Within an hour or so, they came back with news that the first deep was clay and would stand up to some decent rooms.  I asked them to dig some bedrooms for us and a dining chamber, and when they got a chance to please go a little deeper.  Polite?  Hell yes I was polite, I was the one who needed what they brought!  I was used to fishing, didn't want to have to grab a pick and head down myself if I pissed them off, now did I?  I daresay you'd be polite too, there in the back!

Within a day or two, we were all snugly inside the hillside where we belonged, a stash of wood was building up for beds and such, the farm was being sort-of-worked (despite a lack of decent seeds), and Durzim came bouncing up the stairs with a giant chunk of opal and some of the prettiest slab rock salt I'd ever seen.  Apparently when the salt was laid down in the long-ago, whatever the body of water was had swept up a decent amount of semiprecious stones as well!  Things were actually looking up! 

[Iamblichos]

What, you're all back again?  Don't they do any work here?  Well, funny enough, that reminds me of Steamybellows as well... let me grab one of those delicious cat biscuits... thank'ee sir... and a mug of this fine rum here and I'll wend you the tale, if you want it.

So, there I was, sitting pretty on top of a mountain full to the brim with salt and opals... or so I thought.  Well, don't get me wrong, I was happy as a goblin with two stolen kids, and the good news kept coming up from below.  Durzim (the Miner), every few hours he would come popping back up with more good news... I was going to change his name to Goodnews Durz, almost undwarfish to be that cheerful.  First he finds aventurine, then he finds pineapple opal, then he finds white marble!  I couldn't even keep up with the news!  Meanwhile, the rest of us were setting up shop.  If any of you have ever started a camp, you know the drill; plant the fields, set up the carpenter shop, crank out some makeshift tables and chairs to eat on and beds to sleep on.  That's all a real dwarf needs; just the basics!  None of this foolishness about statue gardens and polished walls and "oh I want a gem window in my living quarters down on the tenth deep"!  A window to look at bloody WHAT?!

Urzon (the recently named Junior Miner) chose that moment to beg me on bended knees to let him set up a jewelry shop.  Jewelry!, says I.  You think we would dig and farm faster covered in polished gems?  Perhaps eat our raw turtle on rock crystal plates?  I was about to tell him to get his bloody pick and get back to work before I kicked him in the face, but he swore that his father had helped start a city back in the day and the only thing that kept it going for the first few years was trading polished gems out of the mountain.  Well... when I thought on it, seems to me that I had heard something similar from a few fellows in my old stomping grounds, so I told him he could build it but he better be working his ass off every time I went by... we weren't building him a secret nap spot.  So Urzon the Jeweler it was.  Ol' "Goodnews Durz" wasn't exactly thrilled when I told him he had lost his new assistant, but he agreed that the sooner we made something to trade for the stuff we needed the better.  Put the new workroom right in the middle of the hallway... easier to keep an eye on him that way.  Soon enough, though, he was off and running and crafting some fairly decent cut opal.  Not just cabochons, but actual faceted pieces, and opal is a bitch to work, since there's a lot of water in the matrix and no real planes of cleavage... well, no need to natter on, suffice it to say he was doing an amazingly dwarflike job of it.

Meanwhile, out on the farm, the crops were starting to show up, the gathered plants turned out to be brewable into something approximating ale, and we were doing better than I had ever thought we might.  So... tell me, lads, what is the first rule of dwarven society, laid down by Armok back in the dawn of time?  DON'T FEEL HAPPY!

Right you are.  So... first indication we have of trouble is a band of raggedy-ass hobos wandering in claiming to be "skilled laborers".  I tell you, I could have dropped my teeth.  Leaving aside the indisputable fact that we were out in the cat's ass of nowhere, how did they FIND us?  Turns out, Inger the Surveyor had found them wandering in the swamp and sent them our way.  Well, a good word from Inger went a ways with me, so I started asking them what they were trained in... One of them was a mason, praise Armok, Gurt Armozanlin, and he was well and welcome - Gurt got a place at the head table quickly since our other mason was too busy cutting gemstones to be much use in building.  The others... well, Inger needs to check his people a little better.  A more lackluster crew of ragtag uselessness you'd be hard pressed to find.  Beekeeping!  Spinning!  CHEESEMAKING!  Bloody Toenail Trimming and Nosehair Plucking!  Now I ask you here, what kind of stinking "jobs" are these?  Right, you lot, says I, you are now reassigned... we don't need any bees kept or cheeses made,  and I can't say I've yet heard a complaint about our toenails and nosehairs, thank you very much, but you are all capable of hoeing a field and planting and that, my fine fellows, is what you will be doing if you want to stick around here! 

As you can imagine, this went over like a wall of damp rock, but they realized that if they wanted to eat they better get to work.  In short order they grumbled their way off towards the plump helmet farms.  Right, thought I, that's that sorted, and off to work I go, yeah?  WRONG.  First the fights break out between the new ones and the old ones, "who's been drinking my beer" sort of stuff, real schoolyard garbage.  Then, no sooner is that settled, than out of the woods comes another mob of these useless grifters.  Then another.  Dozens of them!  Now, I wouldn't have minded if there were some with real skills... we desperately needed more miners and masons, poor old Gurt was fair to run himself ragged trying to set up the trading post, walls, more walls, carve the stone coming up from below into tables and chairs and everything else we could think of.  With all the demands we heaped on him by the end of the day he didn't know if his stairs went up or down!  An ironworker or weaponsmith would come in handy too, if we ever found any gods-cursed metal at all... the Royal Assay and Survey Charter swore the bloody stuff was all over, but damned if we could find one tiny chunk of anything!  But the point is, my friends, the point is... not a single one of these wandering dwarfish chunks of detritus had a skill worth the name.  None.  Strong backs, two hands, and more mouths to eat and drink the grub they didn't have any way to earn.  Champion.

Which brings us to the other problem that these shiftless layabouts brought with them... the new dwarves were LAZY.  Now, we all know a dwarf (maybe a few) that never seems to do any real work, always rushing around carrying this or that, acting like his busy schedule of eating and drinking barely leaves time for an afternoon nap, am I right?  But this lot took the cake.  I couldn't reason out how they made it to our little corner of the earth in the first place, considering how little they did once they got there... surprised they didn't just sit down and fall asleep midjourney!  One of the third wave was a complete nutter, too, eyes pointing in different directions, wearing rags, constantly mumbling to himself about legendary dwarf-killing elephants and cheese... I sent him on his way with a bootprint in the raggedy arse of his trousers to remember old Steamybellows by.  No room in our outpost for that level of crazy, he needed a capital city to be that barking mad in... a total waste for all that talent for lunacy to be stuck out in the provinces.  Ha!

[Iamblichos]

Now I told you all about how I got stuck in that mess, trying to turn the settlement of Steamybellows into something worth knowing about... I'm an old dwarf now, and my brawling days are long over, but I tell you all, there are a few memories of all that went on that still make me want to go kick some righteous arse.  One of the subjects I don't talk about much is trading, and excuse me if I get a little heated.

So... that first winter, right about the time we were getting that third wave of useless mouths to feed out of the woods, up rolls a full-on caravan, fine strapping dwarf at the lead, announcing that he was there to discuss a trade agreement with the Capital.  With me!  Now, as you all know, I'm a common dwarf, from common stock, father was a dockworker, mother was a fisherdwarf; what did I know about counting coins and laying in provisions?  I can barely write my name, and I say that with pride!  I don't know anything about swanning about with pen and paper, I catch fish!

"Right", says he, "you're the leader, yeah?  Let's talk about your trade agreements, what do you want us to bring you here in... what the hell is this one called?"

"Steamybellows, and you can thank the twits at the Royal Assay and Survey for that!" I told him.

"Steamybellows, Armok's bloody fist, the names I see given to you poor bastards... Right, so, what do you lot want?"

"Booze!  Meat!  Seeds!  Some cloth and thread wouldn't go amiss, I reckon, and as much iron and steel stuff as you can bring, if you can't bring ingots!  We have an anvil and no metal... useless as a sock with no feet!  Think you can handle that?"

"No problems, sir, no problems at all, I'll just write this up... here you go, sign here and we'll be on our way."  I tell him to hold on a moment, I want to get someone to look this over, but nothing would do but that I make my mark that very instant because he had another ten camps to hit before Spring!  Well, I did it, but it didn't sit right.  He had a shifty look, and as I told you before, I knows shifty like my own brother.

I might have been born at night but it weren't last night and I trust my gut, so I took those documents to one of the women who claimed she could read and write.  She tells me they say we want all sorts of useless garbage!  Dresses made of cave spider silk and exotic leather waterbags and musical instruments and other gimcrack and gewgaws, not a damn thing I said!  My ruddy bum, we want that stuff, it has nowt to do with what I ordered from that crooked little kobold!  Too little too late though, as my dad used to say... Clearly this lad was in the pay of one of the noble houses to pawn off their worthless trash on the poor unsuspecting settlers, and just like the old outhouse-filler, the crap only flowed one direction.  We were very clearly on our own.

But we weren't done yet, oh no... less than a season later, who should come drifting in on the breeze but some posh elven ponce, deigning to visit the lowly dirt-grubbers.  Be off, you sod, says I, we've nowt for you here.  Oh no, says he, we've come to trade, being as you lot are so kind and gentle and dear to the trees.  Fine then, says I, set up in the shiny white building over there and show us what you've brought.  I figured after being ripped off by me fellow dwarves how much worse can it be?  Well no sooner have we got down to the dickering, being as he had some cloth and thread we could use, but he gets all snooty and says we don't appreciate his efforts and flounces off in a huff!  So we're zero for two in the caravan department!  Meanwhile the gems are piling up in the storeroom bins, being as Urzon was getting damn good at cutting them and hadn't bothered to set any yet.

Well, by year's end, we're almost a hundred strong... not bad for a sandy hole in the ground in the middle of a farkin swamp, yeah?  The lower deeps are dripping with gems... literally brimming over, we're finding stuff that I've only heard of in stories.  What don't we find?  Iron.  Copper.  Tin.  Not a speck, not a fleck, not a scrap of rusty old bootscraper or tin pot, NOTHING.  We've got a furnace going full bore, cranking out charcoal by the ton! We've got flux stacked ten deep against the walls!  We've got a team of crack blacksmiths, metalsmiths, armorers, weaponsmiths, and everyone else who's ever thought of looking at a piece of metal standing by, eating our food and swilling our booze and tying up our beds, just waiting for one of the mining crew to come back up the stairs with some ore... and nothing.  Late summer human caravan came through, and THEY brought some useful stuff and were actually willing to trade it! Never thought I'd say the words, but thank Armok for the Tallboys... the sensible ones, anyway.

Right after the caravan left and we were scraping together our new goods, just to help things along the Mayor decides that she has a hatred for bracelets!  Don't make or trade them.  I don't mind telling you I about threw a tantrum right there!  Didn't that daft old biddy realize that we need to trade?  Fine, no bracelets it was.  Told the crafters to focus on musical instruments until 'Er Upstairs came back to reality.  Mad old coot. 

Meanwhile, I told the mining teams, spread out.  Look everywhere down there.  The Royal Survey swears there's metal here near the surface, and if they found it, heads stuck deep in their bums as they are, surely you lot of fine young dwarfs can locate some!  Two old-style tons of increasingly exotic gems and three exhausted jewelers later, the word comes up... metal!

Bring it up to smelt, I yelled, and booze for everyone!  They brought it up, alright.  I should have known... no dwarf gives a generic answer like "metal" without there being a falling rock trap attached loaded with bad news.  I tell you, it was the second time on that mad venture I could have wept.  Magnetite?  No.  Hematite?  Afraid not.  Even limonite?  Not so much. 

GOLD.  They found GOLD.  Mother of Sorrows and Pain, the last thing we needed.  Now I know what you lot are thinking, sitting there with your eyes shining and that far-off look... and you've never been more wrong about anything.  Old, rich cities love gold.  Kings love gold.  All dwarves love gold... but gold ain't the bones of the earth, it's the fat.  Gold can't protect you; gold armor is useless and gold weapons even worse; gold is shit-useless when your city is small and undefended, and worse, it makes you an easy target.  All it does is sit and look pretty while your people are being murdered all around.  Goblins want it, dragons want it, thieves want it, everyone wants it but we dwarves seem to be the only ones who can actually be bothered to MINE the stuff!  Everyone else just wants to TAKE it.  The first stinking caravan that got anything with gold on it, in it or attached to it would spread the news like a plague.  I knew then that the storm was coming.  Things were fixing to get ugly in a hurry.

[Iamblichos]

Well  so last night we had got to where... oh yes, the gold.  I see some of you still shaking your heads, thinking "He's mad, I'd love me own gold mine!"  Uvast in the back there, with that sour look, he knows... started a mine of your own, I take it?  Thought so.  That much care and worry leaves its mark on a dwarf.  I'd take it kindly to hear your tale sometime now you've heard mine.

So, there we were, on top of the biggest lode of gold ore on our side of the continent.  We had more gold than five smelters could make into bars.  What we didn't have was any way to defend our asses while we smelted all that gold!  Dangut had an old copper war-axe of his granddad's, and some folks had some leather armor scraps, but we were starting out at the bottom of the barrel and it was headed downhill from there.  As if the lack of iron wasn't bad enough, we didn't even have copper, let alone tin to make bronze!  I tell you it was only a matter of time.

Our second caravan came through from the Capital, and miracle of miracles in addition to all the useless garbage they had a few iron and bronze weapons hidden under a bale of llama wool cloth.  We took everything they had, even useless stuff, along with any armor they had on the cart.  Sadly, the gems weren't enough to pay their inflated prices, we had to start dragging out the gold.  Well, Fardim (the old shite that was leading the caravan), his eyes fair to popped when we started hauling out ingots and ingots and ingots of shiny yellow death metal, along with some of the instruments, toys, jewelry and other things the craftsdwarves had been able to make with it.  We didn't have a soldier worth a fart in a rainstorm, but we ended up with a skilled goldsmith... sometimes Armok has a sense of humor that just won't quit. 

Before he left, I swore old Fardim to secrecy, told him to go to the King's Court and tell them if they didn't send some soldiers to Steamybellows and soon, a wonderful opportunity to be richer than rich would end up under a pile of gobbo bedding.  Oh yes sir, yes sir, I understand, he says... wouldn't dream of talking, closemouthed, that's me, I'm your dwarf.  Lying old sod...  Within a month a wave of immigrants 40 strong comes rolling in through the swamps, and each of them said the old bastard was yelling about gold to everyone he met.  Needless to say not one of them had any combat experience at all.  I heard he met his end a few years later in a troll ambush, and I hope they ate him tongue first.

So now the fat was well and truly in the fire.  I set up a militia quick as I could, got them a barracks and set them to training, but when even the teacher don't know his axe from his ass it's a little hard for the students to learn much from him!  I didn't have much hope for the situation, to be honest.  We were deep in the kack, and sinking by the minute.

First sign of trouble comes when this horrible scaly thing with glowing eyes comes crashing out of the woods, big fearsome lizard monster, just about scared the shorts off the poor herbalist as she was gathering up her weeds.  She came hauling it back in the main entrance like her head was on fire, claiming a dragon was in the woods!  Took two days to coax her out of her room again.  We were still too dependent on the overworld to just go turtle, though don't think I didn't want to... lock the doors and let the giant lizard pound sand!  But that wasn't an option.  Fine, says I, today is obviously the exam day for the militia.  Run along, boys, and may Armok take the blood of your enemy and not yours.  If you die, make sure your damn weapon comes back with the body, because it's worth a lot more than you are.  Best o' luck to ye.

Up they roll to the plateau top, where this thing is yelling its name is Daslut something-or-other (I'd go mad too, with a name such as that!) and it is the were-gila monster we have all feared.  Now, I don't know about you lot, but I'd never heard of a gila monster.  Clearly, this was some deity's idea of comic relief left over after the joke went stale.  Come to find out, that was the day the joke was over.  Right about the time the militia rolled up on it, day broke and the beast turns back into a human woman!  Whackity-chop, that was it for her.  Barely enough left to carry to the refuse pile.

Now... and I see Uvast shaking his head back there... this is the worst possible thing that could have happened.  For one thing, the soldiers all strutted around like they had saved the world.  They wanted to claim they fought the terrible beast, leaving out the part where she turned human again just as they got there!  Not only did this make them arrogant, it also made them seriously underestimate the threats this wide and scary world just loves to throw out.  Thought they were favored of the gods, they did.  Wandered around for weeks, doing the "glorious victory" routine until we were all sick to death of them.  They managed to whack a couple of kobold thieves too, which added to their delusions of superiority. 

Then it happened.  With the autumn came the greenies.  Apparently word of the gold strike had made it into the hills.  Twelve to fifteen gobbo spearmen came rolling in from the north woods, all set for trouble.

Now, your goblin, he's wily.  I know a lot of dwarves disregard them, make fun of them, and so forth, but your goblin is a true bastard, and a worthy opponent.  First off, they never fights fair... if you get a single gobbo, he's going to leg it, he only wants to fight when the odds are in his favor.  Second, and this is a right bitch, nothing suits them more than shooting you from cover!  That lot are famous for their ambushes.  So, just as I feared, out rolls the militia, convinced they are the saviors of all dwarfkind, and got slaughtered to a dwarf, quicker than you can kill and dress a chicken.  Now the fox was truly in the henhouse.  All the dwarves in the settlement start running around like headless birds, shrieking and screaming and basically telling the goblins "no opposition here, come murder me if you please!"  I told them they needed to get the hell out if they weren't going to mount a defense, but after another twenty or thirty of them died pointlessly, I said to hell with it.  No gate worth mentioning, not enough traps, no way to get wood or enough food under the hill; we were screwed.  Too much time mucking about with gold, too little time setting up a good fort.  The sensible ones among us ran up the "Abandon the Settlement" flag and legged it out the back of the mines.  I don't know what is left of old Steamybellows, but what I warned the King about came to pass after all... it's probably a goblin fort now, with King Gobber sitting on a pile of dwarf bones and drinking out of a gold cup we made for trade, wearing the bracelets that ignorant Mayor wouldn't let us sell.  She might be part of his throne for all I know, daft old bint.

Go back?  Hell no, I'm not going to go back!  Why the hell would I do that?  It was a miserable place to live.  Weren't you listening?  It was a pox-ridden swamp!  I came here to Stonetooth to get away from that sort of foolishness!  This is the life for me... much calmer, work to do, good fishing, plenty of iron and good craftsmanship, good cooking, pretty halls, pretty women, it's a damn good life you dwarves have, and you don't know you should be grateful!  Try living in a hole in the sand in the middle of a swamp and see how you like it!  Me, I'm for another drink.

[CaptainArchmage]

Great work! Do you still have the save anywhere?

[Iamblichos]

Thanks 

No, I just abandoned the site and started a new fort somewhere else in the same world.  I seem to have bad luck with metals other than silver and gold  :/  So many of my forts end up with one, both, or something completely useless like zinc 

[Iamblichos]

Funny enough, a survivor from this fort just showed up in my current fort... I hadn't seen one in a long long time.  Guess posting the stories caused him to get resurrected 

[CaptainArchmage]

You can just post the save that you have right now; I’m sure people are going to take an adventurer to your fort.