Apart from my current fortress located at
this site, I genned the world a second time and started another fortress on the site, meaning to do things differently.
I realized that my lame 'three tile wide tunnel with stone fall traps' entrance just wasn't epic enough, so I thought I'd try my hand at making something more interesting.
I started out on the east side of the map, right next to the volcano, with the plan to have my entrance over the bottomless pit. This is not necessarily an original idea, but since it's my second serious fortress, it's still pretty original to me. Plus I'd have easy access to sand early on so I'd be able to get some glass industry going pretty quickly. A glass entrance over a bottomless pit seemed pretty epic to me.
Realizing at embark that there'd be some wildlife around the magma pipe, I embarked with four prof. woodcutters to form my makeshift military while I'd be digging out the entrance.
Turns out the magma pipe had a little more than just wildlife. I'd just built an outside carpentry shop and had started digging into the hill towards to the bottomless pit when my woodcutters had to fight some ratmen. Furthermore, they were chasing away some naked mole dogs.
...Into the giant cave spider that was lurking about
four tiles away from my entrance, one Z level above.
One woodcutter didn't make it, two others were severely injured and unconcious. That's when the fire imps came out of the magma pipe to say hello.
I'm thinking I dived into the challenge a bit too early on considering my experience with DF. Then again, lessons were learned and fun was had, so it wasn't a complete waste