I've just started a new fortress using my Mesozoic Dwarves mod, and will record the life of the fortress here. My pc has been having a memory problem that has corrupted DF saves in the past, but hopefully this one will be lucky.
Map: A mirthful mountain with a hfs deposit, chalk layers, and a chasm. A haunted temperate shrubland with red sand and a brook.
The seven members of The Ink of Mountains crashed their wagon at the future site of the fortress Bonebed. They brought a small stockpile of turtles, fish, and cave beer, as well as a breeding pair of centrosaurus for defense and food, a compsognathus to control vermin, and the wagon was pulled by two female gallimimus.
They immediately scuttled the wagon and began moving supplies to a natural niche in the side of the mountain, overlooking the haunted shrubland to the east. Two miners quickly began isolating the area by removing access slopes in a perimeter, protecting the party from hostile wildlife but cutting off the dwarves' access to the rest of the map. The mechanic got to work making mechanisms and a lever, and the architect and mason used chalk stones to create a ramp from the shrubland to the protected fortress site, attached with a bridge that could be retracted with the mechanic's lever.
The miners breached the mountainside and began hollowing out some rudimentary living quarters, while the dwarves conceived of a plan for Bonebed: the fortress would be embedded in the mountain along the vertical niche that nature had eroded into existence, and extended outward to end in sheer vertical walls of green glass. The dwarves imagined massive butchering operations carried out against the outer wall of glass, sending a threatening message out across the landscape. This may be a brutal world, but these were brutal dwarves.
The dwarves knew that local velociraptor settlements were likely to soon catch the scent of the new fortress, so a bowyer and woodcrafter immediately began work on crossbows and bolts.
The mechanic began working on setting cage traps along the western and northern borders, in hopes of trapping breedable dinosaurs, perhaps even styracosaurus to train as warbeasts. He carefully avoided the gaping pit that split the map to the east, for the dwarves had already sighted several giant cave swallows, and suspected that it contained even deadlier creatures as well.
The defense preparations were wise, because in the sweltering heat of the summer the velociraptors attacked. The bloodthirsty invaders came sprinting across the map, but a quick-thinking dwarf managed to pull the lever and retract the access bridge, leaving the velociraptors to mill in confusion just below the dwarven camp. At that moment, all seven dwarves picked up a crossbow and stack of bolts and ran to the edge of their artificial plateau, and sent a hail of wooden bolts down upon the velociraptor pack. They snarled in pain and swirled in confusion and the bolts gouged out chunks of their flesh and tore off limbs, and blood and vomit sloshed about in the grass. Several raptors broke away from the group and began to retreat, and the storm of bolts cut down several of these as they ran. Only two survived long enough to reach the border. The dwarves put down their weapons, extended the bridge, and began adding velociraptor bones and skulls to their pile of turtle shells.
Eventually the miners dug out a soil layer for farming, but by Autumn food and booze supplies were already running low. Luckily, the cage traps had managed to snare a pair of wild centrosaurus, both male, which were easily tamed. One of these was butchered for food, but just as the meat and tallow were cooked, the dwarves became aware of a disturbance happening in the east.
A herd of triceratops had entered the shrubland, and one had gotten tangled in a web near the bottomless pit, and was being ambushed by an ancient cave spider. The spider attempted to envenom and kill its prey, but the massive triceratops was too mighty of a foe. It gored the spider to death and sustained only minor injuries, but the disturbance had attracted the attention of other denizens of the chasm. A swarm of tiny microraptors flew up out of the deeps and attacked the weakened triceratops, covering it still further in webbing and gouging at it from all sides. The triceratops flailed about and killed two of the microraptors, but it was quickly growing fatigued. Covered in webbing and suffering endless bites from the seething mass of microraptors, the triceratops eventually fell unconscious and, soon after, bled to death. The surviving microraptors, over-exerted, began to move away slowly.
Seeing their chance to free the pit of its dangers, the dwarves again took up their crossbows and ran down the mountain and across the shrubland. The reached the microraptors just as they were beginning to recover, but the barrage of wooden bolts easily knocked the little beasts out of the air and crippled their wings. Two of them managed to reach the mayor, but he suffered only minor wounds before the other dwarves shot them down.
Successful, the dwarves returned to the crude fortress to make a discouraging discovery: the newly-cooked centrosaurus biscuits had not been properly stored in a stockpile before the attack on the microraptors, and had rotted. However, the autumn crop of wild plump helmets was coming in, and one of the microraptor corpses was able to be butchered before it rotted, providing enough food to ward off starvation. Also, the dwarves discovered that they had captured a styracosaurus. They resumed work on the fortress, hoping that soon they would attract a Dungeon Master who could tame the styracosaurus, so that it could be trained into a warbeast. At some point the two female gallimimus had become pregnant by males in a wild herd, and gave birth to several hatchlings.
In the winter, the dwarven caravan from the Mountainhome arrived to trade. The farmer had spent some free time working on stone crafts, and the carpenter and been working on some surplus wooden bucklers. These goods were traded for an iron anvil and a small amount of food and booze, as supplies at the fortress were still dangerously low. The dwarves were particularly enthralled by a luxurious robe possessed by the traders, made of triceratops leather and bearing a parasaurolophus leather image of Stilledhandles the utahraptor, surrounded by dwarves. The artwork related to the rise of Stilledhandles the utahraptor as an enemy of their home civilization: The Papers of Clarifying. It was a story nearly 100 years old that the dwarves knew well, and the robe would have made a handsome addition to the fortress, but such luxuries were simply too expensive for now. The caravan departed, and the dwarves went back to work.
Two more male centrosaurus were captured, and one was butchered and cooked. The farmer had produced a decent crop of cave fern, which was brewed into more beer. The miner was at work contouring the mountainside for future construction when spring arrived, marking the end of the first year of the fortress Bonebed. Over the year the dwarves had sighted enormous, uncageable creatures such as ankylosaurus, stegosaurus, and triceratops, and they began thinking of methods to trap these beasts for their own use. Perhaps a project for the coming year.
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Topic: Mesozoic Dwarves: The founding of Bonebed. (Read 766 times)