I just did a horrible, horrible thing, Bay12. But I meant it all for the best. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Fair warning: it's a long-ish story with an ending that was nightmare fuel for me, but may be pretty tame by Bay12 standards.
Seizedfurnace looked, during the planning phases, to be the perfect site for a fortress. The environment was wilderness enough to have abundant trees, fishing, and hunting, but not wild enough to present serious danger. Best of all, it had the magic combination of a volcano and an aquifer, promising endlessly working forges and rich obsidian farming to the dwarves who could successfully tame the elements.
The initial phase of the fortress seemed promising. Recent changes in the laws of physics meant that magma flowed much faster than planned, leading to the loss of several miners and several near-fun incidents, but the mountain proved to be shot through with veins of pure native gold! The dorfs happily set to smelting and crafting, continually amazed at the prices useless golden crap brought on the free market. The mountain did display a regrettable lack of other minerals, and the one attempt at obsidian farming went awry and flooded a level of the fortress with magma, but the dwarves were unconcerned. They were slowly but steadily buying weapons from every caravan that came, training a militia *ahem* recruited from among the less useful migrants. And damn if they weren't making money. Lots of it.
You can probably see where this is going.
Two squads of goblins showed up with troll support while my militia was still using copper weapons and breastplates, with a few (but not enough) imported items jazzing it up. They hit while a caravan was in town, meaning that when I sounded the alert the dwarves all finished hauling their goods to the trade depot, THEN went to bring in their livestock BEFORE heading for the shelters. I had to order my militia out, past the traps, to avoid a mass slaughter of civilians...which I did, but at the cost of a mass slaughter of the military. Sixteen casualties out of a military of twenty, including most of the expert marksdwarves who had been the really effective killers. They managed to fight the goblins off by falling back past the entrance traps, but it was a near-run thing. Naturally, the outpost liason who was in town at the time decided in the middle of this desperate fight to discuss next years import and export agreement. Keep calm, carry on and all that.
The threat was gone, but in reality the damage was done. Twenty-odd deaths in a fortress of 110 or so meant that everybody had lost a friend or family member, the entrance was choked with vomit, blood, dismembered goblin parts, and miasma while everyone's buddies rotted on the garbage heap for lack of coffin space. Of course, that's when a group of migrants show up. Yeah, welcome aboard assholes.
As you can probably guess, this lead to a full-out tantrum spiral. Burying the dead and cleaning up the mess happened, but too late, and not even the most luxurious appointments could reverse the deadly effect. After the fifth murder by a tantruming dwarf, it was time for desperate measures. I sought out twenty or so dwarves who seemed a) mentally stable and b) in family units/relationships with other dwarves who were mentally stable, and drafted them all. I stationed their squad outside the fortress, ordered all the remaining civilians into the dining hall...
...And then forbade the only doors leading in.
Picture it, if you will. A bare handful of dwarves shuffle wearily back into Seizedfurnace, through the entranceway where so many of their brethren died. As they descend down to the first level they can hear it, a horrible drumming as tens of dwarves beat against the solidly barred doors, screaming, trying to force them open. There is food and water in the dining hall, but all of these dwarves are on the edge of madness. Only a matter of time before one of them runs amok, and they cannot chance he will knock down the doors. "Armok have mercy on their souls. And ours," the leader mutters, as he gives the orders and walls are built up in front of the doors.
They tried to go on. They really did. They buried the dead that were left, as hospital patients slipped away and they cleared the last of the murder victims off the garbage pile. Their one mason worked in the remaining workshop on the upper level, turning the stones his brothers and sisters brought into coffins and memorial slabs, trying to ignore the screams from the other side of the wall. In among them he could hear the mayor's voice, shrieking something about the export of harps being prohibited, dammit! They got crops growing, a still and a kitchen working, and wandered aimlessly among halls built for five times their number, but in the end it was all too much. An engraver snapped first, an unhappy dwarf who had been brought along because his father was the one blacksmith with his wits still about him. After the other survivors throttled him with their bare hands a shearer awoke in the hospital to find all the other patients dead, and ran screaming to rend and kill until they had to send him where all the others had gone. Then their last doctor snapped in the middle of a party, perhaps unhinged by the lives they had sacrificed in vain.
Meanwhile, in the sealed-off portions of the fortress, the inevitable played out with agonizing slowness. The dwarves tantrumed and fought each other, then slowly died of thirst when they were wounded as others shrieked and smashed around them. Miasma choked the once-grand dining hall and its rich engravings of happier times. And finally, inevitably:
This, my friends, is the dwarfiest moment I have experienced yet playing Dwarf Fortress. A child who had been born in Seizedfurnace and would now die here, was finally pushed over the edge. He entered a martial trance, eyes wide and teeth bared in a horrible rictus, running among the rotting corpses, moaning wounded, and heaps of discarded cave spider silk trousers as he clawed at everything that moved. Two of the wounded died by his hand before a strong dwarf caught him and battered him unconscious, sinking him down to the floor. Shhh, little one. Shhh. It's all over now. For you.
Note the crowds of other near-insane dwarves and the ones wandering around in a daze.
Another followed him, as the last survivors clawed at the inside of the locked doors to escape. And the miasma multiplied, tempers flared, and more deaths fueled ever increasing savage violence. The ghosts of the unburied dead rose, further pushing the living towards the brink. My favorite part was when an elf caravan arrived and had one of the merchants go stark raving mad at what he saw. Yes, really. It probably also had to do with the trade depot being destroyed while he was halfway there, but I think it was the sound of fifty dwarves chewing their own beards as they tried desperately to escape the cave of misery they had created.
And that's how I learned the true meaning of Dwarf Fortress.
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Topic: Seizedfurnace, Or, Hell is Other Dwarves (Read 727 times)