I recently started playing Dwarf Fortress and decided to give Kruggsmash's Dwarf Fortress crash course for beginners a go...
In his tutorial, Kruggsmash invites you to add your Dwarves to squads and attack Turkeys. I had also just learnt (after what feel like years of manual d-d-directional keys-return mashing) you can use the mouse to paint more organic designations and got completely carried away. By the time I got to add them all to squads I had 38 Dwarves,, now for a target... Well I figured that since I didn't have any Turkeys to target I would kung-fu the carp out of the herd of camels because what could a few camels do vs the most powerful and superior race in the known universe?
Well, the first camel went down in no time under fists, bolts, two mining picks, four hunting dogs and a battle-axe. I was feeling so absolutely proud of these warriors and my grand achievement, that is beating to death an unarmed Camel.
But wait, something was wrong. Oh so very drastically wrong. I suddenly noticed that my fisher-dwarf migrant who had recently arrived and been shoved in hastily under a squad...also dabbled in a dash of necromancy on the side.
Well by the time the third camel went down, he had raised the first two and so the Battle of the Camels became that of the Necromels.
Lets just quietly say that what happened in our fortress, Pondercrypts, left me visibly shaken. Well I hope you enjoy multiple shades of crimson because ALL 37 of our 38 Dwarves and an additional 52 animals and guests did not make it out that fateful Summer day in 251.
The only directly surviving members were the bookkeeper and the necromancer, who later died of his wounds, while the bookkeeper was last seen wandering the halls of Pondercrypts drunk out of his skull and naked.
Strangely, I was about to abandon the fortress to ruin and burn the hard drive when Armok himself intervened, sated by the 89 lives paid in blood that fateful day. Seven perfectly healthy migrants and a small group of highly experienced mercenaries arrived.
They put down the last remaining Necromel, and after a long, very very long and brutally challenging few years, Pondercrypts is once again thriving. With over 45 members, we are stronger than ever, and our economy, thanks to shrewd trade agreements and diplomacy is booming.
Our necromancer fisher-dwarf has been forever entombed in a masterwork marble coffin as the centerpiece of our great-hall, and the pillars of the very stones that uphold the secrets of a long forgotten era are engraved as a warning to all, of the dangers of mixing Camels and Necromancy as witnessed by those who for years indirectly suffered the horrors of cleaning and rebuilding amid the chaos of an almost completely eradicated society.
Lesson 1: if you're good at fishing just stick to fishing.
Lesson 2: Camels are NOT Turkeys.
Time will tell what will become of Pondercrypts but for now, we are as rich and as greedy as ever, oblivious to the stories of the past, told by the old to keep the young from wandering the halls alone after curfew. Some still whisper of hearing deathly screams in the dead of night, and on the anniversary of that fateful day, some speak of hearing the rasp of what can only match the description of a Necromel seeking revenge for its kind once more; and, perhaps more believably, when they are alone in the quieter reaches of the fortress, others says that they have seen the old bookkeeper himself shuffling about the dark corridors mumbling feverishly as he continues searching, forever searching for something lost and never found...
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Topic: The Battle of the Necromels - A Dwarf Fortress Story (Read 743 times)