It just blows my mind what soap-opera-like high drama can come out of this game. Had to share this one:
The scene: a far Northern taiga / rocky wasteland map with a large, difficult-to-bypass shield aquifer; constant blizzards, surface water frozen all year round, as harsh and forbidding as they come (except maybe for the same conditions with a saline aquifer.) A desperate fight by the tough-as-nails original settlers finally managed to find the right corner of the right biome to sink a shaft past the aquifer and the riches of the earth were laid bare - a rich lode of native aluminum, the prosperity of the colony was assured - though not without the cost of several dwarves consigned to watery graves in aquifer-breaching accidents.
But tragedy struck - due to the combination of a large, perhaps unnecessarily complicated but otherwise extremely worthwhile and well-designed but not-quite-completed irrigation project, and the exhaustion of the original booze supply sneaking up on me, most of the original settlers and most of three successive waves of immigration were wiped out by dehydration. Despite emergency maneuvers on my part it was down to three dwarves - the expedition's original broker, upon whom the mantle of expedition leader had fallen, a cagey old miner from the original group, and a frail little child of immigrants, her sibling and parents lost to the drought.
I thought I'd found the fix that would save them - a single remaining accessible underground room left from previous explorations, clear across the other side of the map from the settlement, with a floor of damp stone - but fate is a fickle mistress. As the last miner stood, pick in hand, ready to open the floor of the room and allow them all to slake their terrible thirst (literally at the last second, he was standing right adjacent to the floor tile and it was blinking) he was struck by a tantrum. He shook it off, again lifted his pick, but fell stone dead of thirst before he could strike.
The final leader of the camp wrested the pick from the miner's lifeless hands and made ready to swing - but he too was struck down at the last instant by the black hand of fate and the pick clattered from his deadened grip. The life ebbed from the limp body of the remaining child, scion of a mighty race, her final breath crystallizing in the frozen hyperborean air as the stale stench of death gathered...
When at that very moment four more migrants strode in off the tundra.
So the vital heartbeat of the hall continues amongst the pitching out of deceased owners' personal possessions from their reclaimed bedrooms and cries of "Bring out yer dead!" For now, that is...
It's Shakespeare on the Oregon Trail, I tell ya. Procedurally generated.
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Topic: Little Fortress on the Prarie (Read 1080 times)