So I had a really successful fort (by my standards) going, and I was just starting to smith some equipment for my military (because I am a retard and always leave military till last) when I was suddenly ambushed by goblins. Now, normally this wouldn't be a problem since I have an airlocking system of drawbridges making it impossible to get in without my say so. However, at this moment I had both bridges open for dwarves to do some construction work on an above-ground structure outside of the main walls. That, and there were 3 separate squads. They came in, and managed to slaughter about 30 of my 52 dwarves before I managed to shut them out. Now they were stuck in the entrance hall, knee deep in dwarf gore, and the 20 or so surviving dwarves were cowering in fear and vomit.
This is where it gets awesome. I decided to quickly throw together a slapdash militia with no training and little equipment and just throw them at the goblins. I did so, and they got slaughtered, but managed to push the goblins back upstairs and into the airlock where I trapped them. Now all I had to do was wait for the human caravan to show up in a month or so and the guards would finish them off.
But then it all went spiraling out of control.
Tantrum spiraling, you might say. My dwarves started throwing tantrums and going downright insane. I had a dwarven child throw a tantrum and
punch a stone door off its hinges. During the chaos my last miner, who was monstrously strong at this point since he'd been mining since embark, went berzerk and slaughtered 5 children and 3 dwarves. Now all I had left was the berzerk miner, a metalsmith who had also gone berzerk, and a crafter who was still sane. I locked the miner in the grand hall and the smith in one of the noble offices, leaving the crafter the only dwarf in the fortress.
I COULD REBUILD.
So I set about rebuilding the fortress, dragging corpses up to the refuse stockpile as my catacombs were full up, and clearing the blood from the walls. There was food in there to last a full hold for years, so my single crafter would have no worries. She was called Zuntir. Zuntir, the Dwarf that Lived. For the first month or so every action was constantly interrupted by tantrums as she worked out her grief and anger, but eventually she became level headed enough to just get on with it. With one exception. She slept in the tomb I had designated for her. She had her own designated room, but she would not sleep in it. She always went to her tomb. Acceptable quirk, thought I, so I let her carry on with it. The human, dwarven and elven caravans came, but each time Zuntir was tantruming and I couldn't get her to pull the lever to let the caravan in and the goblins out to their doom.
Finally, after about a year, once she had gotten over her grief, I got the bridge open as the human caravan arrived. They laid waste to the goblins, and it was safe for Zuntir to come to the surface, and she did. She shouldn't have. What she gazed upon, as she came blinking into the stark light of day, was a slaughtering field. Horrid, rotting, dismembered corpses of her friends, lovers, colleagues and leaders lay strewn across the grass, their blood streaked across the walls. Grazing animals lay festering in their fields, even the human caravan that greeted her had taken grievous injuries and lost one of their men, who lay crippled in the moat outside. It was all too much for poor Zuntir, and she went insane, and the fortress died with her.
Emergent stories like this are why Dwarf Fortress is the best game ever.
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Topic: This is a tale that needs to be shared (Read 1327 times)