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[slMagnvox]

Despite a network of traps and my best intentions, a foolish child was hanging outdoors and got goblin snatched!  I'd never had that happen in one of my forts before.

It made me think of Adventurers and the Dwarf Fort.  The kidnapping of a child should generate a quest.  When the fort has quests available, adventurers might show up and offer the Mayor their services.  Someone must rescue that child, her father was a weaponsmith of much reknown.

Linking quests to the Mayor seems natural, since that behavior is already pretty prevalent throughout Adventure mode.  Even in the human capitol, the Mayor has quests to give along with the Human Leader's quests.  A new "Quests" screen would be awesome, maybe linked off the [c]ivilizations page, or just in the [z] menu.  If we could assign a squad of our own dwarves to a quest, that too would be incredibly fun.  Or maybe only allow our champions to try their hand at adventuring for fame and glory of the mountainhomes.

Possible Fortress Mode quests:

Rescue a kidnapped child
Slay a named beast
Raid a kobold/goblin population

When the King (or at least Baron) is in town

Slay an epic beast (dragon, hydra, colossus)
Kill the ruler of a kobold/goblin civilization

Depending on when and how much more questing Toady gets into the game there could be scores of new quests.  And many could be locally generated by the events at our Fortresses.  Anyone else have ideas for plausible Quest types that could be generated at the Fortress?

[Cuddlefish]

Some quest ideas:

Procuring rare materials (rare gems that could be used to satisfy nobles or for other reasons)

Find powerful items and retrieve them. Items you created in other fortresses that are of sufficient quality (masterwork or artifact) could be learned about somehow, and you could send adventurers after them. If, say, there is an adamantium short sword somewhere in the world that you made, you could maybe retrieve it. Or if you want that artifact table from the last fort for your dining room. Additionally, the game could pre-generate a number of legendary items to use for this.

Find and recruit specific types of dwarves. You could send someone to search for a highly trained weaponsmith, for example, and they might return with a Grand Master or Legendary one.

Return with live captured animals for your zoo. You could send them after polar bears or ogres or harpies or whatever.

What I'm leaning towards here is an adventurer job and either a quests screen that appears when you get the mayor, or a building like a tavern or something that allows you to queue quests as tasks, like other buildings allow you to do.

Then your adventurer enabled dwarves will take quests from the queue and leave the fortress. You would probably need some mechanism to allow them arms and armor or they will likely have little chance of success, so hmm... I actually favor making this a job for the military. In the squads menu you can set squads to "Accept Quests", turned off by defualt. Then the squad will take quests from the queue as mentioned before.

The squad would leave with its equipment and the rng would do some automagic mumbo-jumbo to see if they succeed and if they come back with injuries or casualties. Your chances of success could be affected by some factors: distance to travel, relative danger of your surroundings, relations with surrounding civilizations, and of course skill levels of the dwarves and their equipment.

Returning dwarves would gain experience but have a good chance of being injured or killed.

An added bit of flavor is that caravans could give you bits of news about your heroes: "The humans mention that they have heard that Rak Rakurst has died, and that Melbil Dwarfguy now commands the Anvils of Burnings.

[Funkadelic Jive Turkey]

I'm still lousy at forum citing so I won't, but if you look up what Toady has stated on how army raids are gonna work, if you can have adventurers work the same way, with a notify\control trigger, that would be ideal.

Edit: Nice brainstorming for quest topics btw.

[ June 02, 2007: Message edited by: Funkadelic Jive Turkey ]

[slMagnvox]

quote:Originally posted by Cuddlefish:
<STRONG>Find powerful items and retrieve them.</STRONG>

Woah, that'd be pretty damn cool.  And ties in nicely with the artifact class legends.

We'd need a mechanism for discovering legends like you've mentioned, via caravans or even an exploration type quest.  As for outfitting adventurers, perhaps only our own Champion level dwarves would be allowed to adventure in addition to the visiting, non-native adventurers.  Making it more of a late game strategy.  Equipping them with excellent gear would be of course half the fun.

So I'll add:

An Explore quest that has a chance of discovering legends, legendary artifacts or legendary creatures.  Even if we aren't able to go and retrieve them for another few versions it would ensure adventures always had something to do.

[Captain Mayday]

Actually, there are only really a few different sorts of quests in any case. It really is all in the details.

You have retrieval quests, which can be such things as rescue this person, or steal this item, or return this property.

You can have extermination quests, which can fall under 'kill this monster' or 'wipe out this group'.

Then there are protection quests, which fall under 'escort this person/object', and 'hold this area against the enemy'.

Finally there are exploration quests, which is mostly just scouting or patrolling.

You can mix these together and get a damn fine adventure, though.

[TotalPigeon]

I'd favour having no control over dwarves you send out to adventure, it'd be more fun finding out from the caravan. Be good if you could create an inn for random adventurers to stay in too, while they were on their quests.

[Funkadelic Jive Turkey]

Total Pigeon, you wouldn't have to. I think (at least for armies such is the case,) Toady is planning a prompt with a choice to take control or auto-resolve. (I think maybe a 3rd would be nice of watching but no control)

Also to slMagnvox, I don't like the idea of only sending out champions cause I find the most fun battles to be with the intermediates. Champions just kill everything no problem until they meet an arrow or a skeletal elephant. Basically battles get SUPER deadly, ussually in your favor till that one lucky kobold.

[ June 03, 2007: Message edited by: Funkadelic Jive Turkey ]

[slMagnvox]

The Champion concept seemed natural to me, and had a, err, balanced feel.  It could make visiting adventurers more of an important, exciting event while I work hard training my own cadre of champion level adventurers.  Meanwhile, adventure mode adventurers just start with a handful of skill points and some basic gear.  In our forts, just recruiting a second year Axedwarf and a couple peasants (think Drunks) and wishing them good luck would be equally excellent.

Building or designating a "tavern" sounds great.  Even disregarding any potential adventuring, I'd always thought there should be something more than stockpiles to formalize my piles of booze.  Tavern, mead hall, beer garden, lounge.  Certain there are some other threads discussing the idea, but I'll happily endorse involving a tavern of sorts with our potential adventuring.

[hactar1]

On a similar note, I was thinking the other day that it would be cool to launch settlers from your own fortress, just like the original seven you pick from the start-up screen.  You could build a Pioneer Depot just like the trade depot, build wagons and assign mules to it, pick provisions to go in the wagons, choose some dwarves, and send them on their way.

If simultaneous fortresses are not planned, this party might be available later as a pre-set launch option.  It would be MUCH fun to be able to have a well-equipped, highly skilled starting seven, as long as you actually had to work to equip them that way.

[TotalPigeon]

And why send just seven? Fortresses can grow to huge sizes, theoretically having room for thousands of dwarves. (Not that I'd appreciate the hell of micromanagement that would involve). Point is, you could easily send a large team to work on a new fortress, perhaps as many as forty or fifty dwarves.

[Misterstone]

Maybe it would be fun also if your dwarves could assign quests to adventurers who stop by your fortress for a visit.  Say some goblins or a kobold makes off with a valuable masterpiece or artifact... hire an adventurer to go get it.  You could then fete and reward the adventurer lavishly if he or she succeeds.  Sure, you probably would rather your own dwarves be doing this, but no doubt there are situations where you can't spare an able-bodied dwarf to go trouncing off after an item like that.

[slMagnvox]

quote:Originally posted by Misterstone:
<STRONG>Maybe it would be fun also if your dwarves could assign quests to adventurers who stop by your fortress for a visit.</STRONG>

The whole premise is really based on visiting adventurers.  Being able to assign our own dwarves to adventures is just speculation.  The only thing we know for sure is that there has been discussion of visiting, non-native adventurers visiting the Fortress in addition to new migrant groups, caravans and siegers.