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[amade]

Twice already a tavern brawl started when an artifact hunter is spotted sneaking around my fortress. Usually, these skulkers get spotted outside my fortress proper but somehow it starts a fight amongst my visitors in my tavern, and drags my dorfs into it into and devolves into a loyalty cascade. Looking into the units screen, I can see only the skulker(s) marked as hostile, but the ones actually throwing the first punch are the visitors in the tavern. Why exactly is this happening?

Note: I'm not averse to tavern brawls because I like it as part of my fortress and it keeps my doctors busy. But while I can understand brawls starting because someone had one too many drinks I just don't understand why they happen when someone is caught sneaking outside.

[PatrikLundell]

It's typically caused by the skulker's pals. Artifact hunters often come in groups (never declared: they just trickle in one after the other and are announced as visitors, and I'm not aware of anyone finding the data structure that link them together). Then one of them leaves, only to more or less immediately return as a skulking thief. As soon as the thief attacks a resident or your guards attack the thief the infiltrators go into action, causing mayhem. They can attack your dorfs, while still claiming to e.g. socialize, they can run around, scared of your horrible dorfs, and they cause your dorfs to be scared of the horrible infiltrators, causing widespread interruptions. Since they're not indicated as hostile, it can be a real pain to locate them. You can avoid some of these cascades by allowing skulkers that flee when detected to get away without a fight, but there's no way to avoid a fight when they decide to attack.
The loyalty cascade happens because some of your dorfs have been befriended by some of the infiltrators, and take their side when your dorfs start to defend the fortress.

The infiltrator groups can to be huge early on in the fortress history, including exceeding the visitor cap, but tend to get smaller over time (so once you're capable of dealing with large outbreaks they no longer happen). Artifact hunters (that didn't attack you) can return later as regular mercenaries. I think the number of artifact hunters plummeted together with the rest of the mercs when mercs were redirected into merc companies (which the fortress has no interactions with), though.

[amade]

Ah, now that I understand it I can live with it, even though the last brawl had incapacitated 3/4 of my fort (mostly own citizen-inflicted wounds) and resulted more than half a dozen dead dorfs. I could think of the undeclared hostiles as deliberately causing confusion when one of their own is discovered. If so, well played. A couple of them escaped, and I wished I remembered their names so I can properly hold a grudge against them.

Time to pick up the pieces and ban visitors from my main tavern, I'll open up a small outdoor tavern just for them.

[PatrikLundell]

If you use DFHack you can assign nicknames to them (this is how I've been able to see that they come back).
Also note that you can't keep your dorfs away from the outdoor tavern: some will go there anyway as there's no such setting as visitors only.

[FantasticDorf]

Worth just mentioning on the side, dwarves often have quite pent up brawling needs that supercede any sort of behavioural reaction that they'd either ignore or run away from a issue once the need is full. I've observed complete cowards run to get a punch or kick, fill needs to green in then turn tail completely, and with every punch to another neutral dwarf, dwarves are escalating the conflict by addressing their friends comparative to who they are punching.

X happening somewhere, causing a reaction somewhere else used to happen when soldiers were pitted too, but that's a bug that's since been patched. Massed military wrestling, short of bugging toady for suggestions of gymnasiums and other sporting things, or more easy erratic behaviour fights, appear to be the way to go to keep ontop of the issue. Or just avoiding crowded taverns and guests.

[amade]

So far the outdoor tavern has been working quite well. My dorfs don't frequent it as much and rumour sharing has plummeted. I gave away the one artifact that was attracting a lot of troublemakers to a quester and that combined with the lack of loose lips I don't seem to have any more people trying to sneak in, though it might also be as PatrikLundell mentioned that it had simply tapered off. I'm seriously considering putting a tavern keep and a few performers into it just to get things lively again.