Good times were rolling on in the Eternal Bastion (or something like that; I forget) when suddenly, goblins decided to come over and give a good old fashioned proverbial bumfuck followed by a literal one. At this point, I should say I had begun fortifying my three-tile wide entrance with traps filled with stuff my future legendary weaponsmith was churning out.
I never got chance to use them.
Instead, my military force, at this point still under-armed and under-armored, charged out from their barracks located one floor above the entrance chamber. Oh crap. They're all gonna die. Panicking, I ordered my military dwarves to active duty: train to get them back in the barracks, but I was too late. One of them, a swordsdwarf, was already halfway through the entry corridor.
And then, boom. Martial trance.
He ended up wiping out five goblins before the rest of them ran the fuck away. His only wound was a single crossbow bolt to the thigh, which, apparently, did nothing except piss him off more, because his last victim was the poor sap who fired it. The best part? Right after the crossbow-gob fired the bolt, it ended up getting cut in a vital leg tendon and having to crawl away. It didn't get too far before the swordsdwarf was on it. Its blood painted the hillside.
Or how about this one, where I discovered how hard a cornered accomplished miner can fight? I'm pretty sure I actually posted this somewhere else, but it needs fleshing out, dammit!
Another day, another sorry squad of goblins coming to give our front porch a new layer of red. Problem is, at this point, I was starting to make extensive use of above ground fishing and had also set up a corpse/garbage pit in a brook channel. How is that a problem, you ask? Simple: dwarven intelligence. After seeing a squad of goblins before my dwarves could react, I ordered all of my outside dwarves into a burrow in the dining hall. They headed west, towards the entrance. Right as they neared the entrance, the squad intercepted them from the south. Whereas any reasonable person and most dwarves would choose to keep running into the safety of the base and its heavily-trapped entrance, one dwarf-ette, Bomrek Uristiden, thought it was a good idea to run north, away from the entrance, and into the nearby hills. I ordered my masons to get started on her coffin.
Sure enough, in a few jiffies, she was cornered. She was on a hill with map boundaries on two sides, a multiple z-level drop on another, and the goblins on the last. The goblins were racing to catch up with her.
I pity the poor bastard who did.
One goblin made it up the hill to Bomrek. As soon as he got close enough, he lost his hand. Bomrek, as it turned out, was a miner on hauling duty. An accomplished miner. Her pickaxe, as I'd like to imagine it, pierced right through the goblin's wrist and violently pulled away, taking everything below the wound with it. The goblin didn't suffer long. Shortly afterwards, the goblin died of multiple frickin' pickaxe wounds to to his vitals. The rest of the goblins hadn't even caught up yet.
Now, to put the figurative cherry on the figurative ice cream sundae, she decided to get back home by running directly through the goblin squad. Another poor goblin got a pickaxe to the lung, even though he didn't die from it. Bomrek, on the other hand, wasn't even scratched. She made it back to the fort unobstructed. The goblins ran away.
Questions like why I didn't just set up an underground water channel for fishing, how my fisherdwarves kept getting turtles from the same murky pond, and why I didn't recognize the value of a magma-powered garbage disposal are all beyond me.
Also, protip: if you want your outside-venturing dwarves to live, for the love of Armok, don't arm and draft them unless they're grade-A badasses. Giving them weapons (especially ranged ones!) and the will to fight without the skill is, as one might imagine, a death sentence.