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[janglur]

Have you ever had any truly awesome fortress survivors, who have hung on despite all odds?

Stumpy McGee (Olin Dorenkivish, Bone Carver and former mayor) was the only injured survivor of the devestating first ambush that killed 15 out of the 36 dwarves in the fortress.  She lost one leg, a hand, an arm, and lots of little cuts and bruises.  She survived, somehow, despite being utterly useless.  I keep her around as a sink for my infinite food stockpile.  (over 14,000 total food and 5,000 booze and climbing.  X.X)

Gutscats the Disturbing (Led Ushatrur, Cat) is wandering around on his third year with a broken leg, broken rib, motor nerve damage, sensory nerve damage, and and trailing his intestines across the floor, tripping unwary dwarves.  He is the only cat I will allow to live, because he just barely made the Dwarvenlyness cut.
Plus, he serves the purpose of being one of those 'invisible men' things, except mostly for the digestive tract, and a cat.  Watch as vermin pass through his trailing intestines!

Cough Pneuman (Tekkud Momuztathtat, Bone Carver and also former mayor) was caught outside during a goblin crossbow tournament.  He was the target.  He has for two years sported a torn artery in his chest, and an infected lung wound.  He allowed his bones be set and sutured, but shrugged off the doctors afterwards.  "I can live with Pneymonia!  *HACK HACK*"



Who are your epic war heroes with the purple (or flashing red) hearts?

[Vehudur]

One of my forts had this one crossbowdwarf, who was one of my original 7 dwarves.  Every single conflict this fort had he took part in.  Every single conflict he took part in he got some sort of injury.  When the fort hit y40 he had one eye, one arm - still somehow managing to use his crossbow - and so many scars you wouldn't be able to recognize him from his self 40 years past.

He was pure badass.

[BigJake]

Start a fort, get food going, get smelters going and I don't have a single military dwarf.  As soon as my first weapons start coming off the line a goblin ambush shows up and I lose a couple dwarfs.  I draft 6 dwarfs real quick, outfit them with whatever scraps I've got and send them out.  They're victorious but only one survives.  A "very flimsy" and "very quick to tire" high master lye maker.  He became attached to and named his copper axe, lost his right hand, 3 fingers on his left hand and an eye during the fight.  Years pass in which I build dozens of elaborate traps to make up for the fact that I've completely ignored the military.  Urist McLyemaker is still the only military dwarf and I don't recall him having a combat stat above 5.  A mountain titan made of salt shows up and shit turns pear shaped.  You forget one little fucking door, etc.  Long story short, survivors: 3; two miners who walled themselves in 100 z-levels from the action and Urist McLyemaker, still wearing nothing but a copper breastplate and axe.

I feel bad I don't even remember his name.  Zal Somethingorother, I think.

[Loreweaver]

I had a swordsdwarf once, endearingly named Durkums.

Now... Durkums was a stocky little lass. She did her thing, she kept guard, and changed profession many a time through the years. Eventually she was my go-to girl. "OH NO! MEGABEAST!" Someone would shout, all of a sudden my glance shot to the menus. "Durkums. This one is all you." She was my militia commander and she was my right hand dwarf. At one point she also held the bookkeeper title on the side. She, in all her efforts, never once sustained an injury of any kind. No matter what she went up against, other dwarves were the fodder. She fought giant ticks, bile spewing nasties and scaly things, not a scratch.

At the ripe old age of 52, she was unfortunately involved in an elf trap. I opened the floodgates before she left the basin, and sadly, she was consumed in the all-destroying magma.

Durkums, I miss you.

[Dakk]

I remember an axelord I had who got crippled below his waist while fending off a small siege by himself. The goblins were trying to invade through the only entrance to my fort, a 3 tile hallway. Basically he was the only soldier to answer my order, and took out the siege by himself. Thing is the first gobbo that fought him, a speargoblin that was apparently leading the siege, managed to pierce his spine and crippled his legs. My axelord killed all gobbos that rushed into the hallway by himself while crawling around, nothing but a steel axe and a bronze breastplate to protect him.
He survived and served as my captain. It was fun to see him crawling around towards rows of gobbos.

[darkflagrance]

In one of my Fortress Defense Mod forts, I had two axelords who got their arms ripped off by harpies with whips, and now sit in my dining hall and reminisce.

In a generational fort I made, I had a soldier who lost his lover, parents, and all his siblings to spiders, while during the same siege my fort was reduced from over 150 to 47 souls, many of the latter crippled permanently. He became one of the commanders of the recreated military, gaining more fame after losing an eye. When the spiders returned, I piled the five or so members of the military into a chokepoint where the spiders couldn't see my knights more than a few at a time. Thanks to their silk, the spiders incapacitated most of the rest of my army, but my commander managed to get in enough attacks quickly enough to defend his squad, while at the same time rocketing spiders into the nearest wall.

He died while on duty. While he was standing guard as my haulers looted the remains of a human siege he'd put an end to single-handedly, an ambush of fire imps set him ablaze through his armor and wasted him.

[Particleman]

Not quite a year ago I played as humans for a while for the hell of it. I also duplicated the goblin entries a couple times and renamed the new ones (hobgoblins and orcs), to avoid bugs.

Bear in mind this was back in 40d, when a single champion clad in iron was a match for a dozen goblins at a time- more, if you gave him steel.

Anyway, I had a "fort" of about 80 humans. They lived aboveground in skyscraper wooden houses, again, for the sheer hell of it. The entirity of thier trade goods consisted of socks. I wanted something different.

There were ten soldiers, and exactly ten suits of armor. No more, no less- if one died, he got replaced, but I had precisely ten soldiers, and no city wall.

Now, if someone died, I erected a statue on the spot and surrounded it with weapon traps, the number and material of weapons varying based on the combat ability of the deceased. Civilians got traps filled with no-quality wooden weapons (I'd added a reaction so I could get thousands of no-quality wooden weapons, mostly to train with.) When a soldier died, the traps that later surrounded the site of his death tended to take out quite a few goblins. These were the ONLY traps I used.

Now, this was a small embark and there was little to do, so everyone except the military was idle a lot after a certain point. I'd had some tantrums when invaders killed a few people, but they tended to be small and easily contained. Then one day I reached the saturation point where practically everyone was friends with everyone else. Prime material for an epic tantrum spiral.

One day, some invaders managed to take down a few of my champions through sheer force of numbers, then proceeded to get all up in my town and jack shit up (about half the military was sleeping at the time.)

The tantrum spiral was fucking amazing. It was the first I'd seen, and a thing of beauty. Before it happened I'd had about 90 people. Around a year later, I was down to about a dozen- four of which were soldiers, and one of the others was the fisherman, along with a few other random schmucks. Naturally, I had enough food and booze for that dozen to survive for the next century or so. So, just out of curiosity, I kept playing.

No migrants, and the non-military survivors were too busy burying and cleaning up to do much of anything else. This went on for about another year or two. I gave away massive piles of crap to the home city and whoever else came by, but I never got any more migrants. Eventually I got attacked again, by a huge force. They proceeded to wrestle my remaining soldiers to exhaustion through sheer force of numbers, and only then did they succumb to the invaders. They killed the remaining civilians, then left. All but one...

The fisherman.

Guy didn't give a shit about anything. He was one of the founding seven, and he had no family or friends. He just sat there by the river, periodically pulling out a fish and throwing it in the stockpile with the others, while more than two hundred corpses, human and invader, rotted into skeletons around him. That was it. He just sat there with his fishing pole, not giving a fuck, and with no cares or worries in the world. Guy just wanted to fish. He'd climb up the stairs, past the empty bedrooms of the other people who had lived there, to go to sleep, and he'd step around and on bones and bloated, rotting corpses on his way to get a drink or a meal, but it didn't bother him. Nope. Just him, his fishing pole, and the river. That's all he needed.

He sat there, fishing, for another two years. No more invaders- evidently they'd forgotten about the settlement, or considered it totally sacked, or something. I got caravans, but one guy couldn't bring enough stuff to give away to the caravans coming by to get immigrants coming again, so he didn't bother. Just look over his shoulder at them, give them a wave, and go back to fishing. No more migrants ever came.

So he just sat there, for another couple years or so. He was more than set for life. He'd never have to worry about providing for himself, with all the food, booze, and clothes left over.

Then one day, there were no more fish in the river. And he just got up, dusted himself off, and left.

[Zaerosz]

*weeps dwarfly tears*

[Encased in burning magma]

I once made a bugged adamantine artifact, worth around 60 000 000 DB.

Then the siege came.
My military (20 danger room-trained adamantine wielders) got completly slaughtered, my war elephant horde too, as did the cave crawlers, my livestock, the tigermen, and half my civilians.

I noticed my strongest military dwarf was still sleeping. Then she woke up. Kib, the Rough Fur of Voicing, worshipper of a divinity of war, metal, and fortresses.

She was no ordinary dwarf, you see; she had slain a great many forgotten beasts and nasties from the depths and from above, with her named axe, "The Fed Rampage".
So she dived right into the middle of the siege. I wrote her off, and worked on trying to wall the survivors.

Far later on, I noticed that no goblins were coming. Pressing F2, I zoomed on to the battlefield.
Blood, a great deal of blood, and ichor, from many different creatures, everywhere. Body parts strewn across the land.

And in the middle of it all, Kib, hungry, thirsty, and drowsy. She took joy in slaughter recently.

As for her injuries, she had a yellow wrist. I like to think she sprained it while mowing down the goblin horde.
She was also the sole survivor of the following tantrum spiral. Eh well.

[Grelf]

In one of my earlier fortresses, I wound up losing everyone, except a bald, fat, creepy looking child. That child hung on for 3 years before a migration wave actually succeeded in making it into the fortress. The 21+ z level pit traps I had in the entrance hallway kept the kid safe for the 3 years, but the gobbos outside kept killing the new immigrants.

Was truly epic.

(The kid later died to falling into said pit, and in tribute to his death, I melted him in magma.)

[Audioworm333]

I had a swordsdwarf once, endearingly named Durkums.

Now... Durkums was a stocky little lass. She did her thing, she kept guard, and changed profession many a time through the years. Eventually she was my go-to girl. "OH NO! MEGABEAST!" Someone would shout, all of a sudden my glance shot to the menus. "Durkums. This one is all you." She was my militia commander and she was my right hand dwarf. At one point she also held the bookkeeper title on the side. She, in all her efforts, never once sustained an injury of any kind. No matter what she went up against, other dwarves were the fodder. She fought giant ticks, bile spewing nasties and scaly things, not a scratch.

At the ripe old age of 52, she was unfortunately involved in an elf trap. I opened the floodgates before she left the basin, and sadly, she was consumed in the all-destroying magma.

Durkums, I miss you.

I shall make a +Dolomite Bracelet+ in her honor.

[alway]

Ral the peasant. On releasing the fun stuff from down below into my fort, it proceeded to slaughter most of my 44 dwarves. One of the two survivors was Ral, who was the only one with a pick. The fun stuff (and forgotten beasts too for some reason) seemed to bug and all congregate onto the same square. Of the 75 fun stuffs, about 45 were all standing on the same tile. Ral, seeking revenge for his comrades, channeled out a room above them, then proceeded to drop a rock on their heads, killing all 45 on the time. In that way, Ral killed nearly 3 times the number of fun stuff as the rest of his comrades combined.

[Loreweaver]

I shall make a +Dolomite Bracelet+ in her honor.

I will send word to her next of kin, I'm sure they'll be enthralled. :>

[Jordrake]

Haha. There are no survivors in Fortress Mode.