Is that just me or do the few latest devlogs suggest the beginning of the testing period and, gasp, release?
Pretty much. He did say he might finish off this release's notes by the end of January. I don't think that's quite in the testing phase, though.
I love today's poast:
Quite a while ago, we put in a few short random snippets to enable some other things we wanted, so in the little world gen it cooked up tonight, Dumur the dwarven goddess of torture decided to release a skinless lizard demon upon the world "that it might bathe in misery forever." The fiend raised a goblin army and attacked the dwarven forces in the Swamp of Fountains, killing their general and the mayor and leaving their bodies in the muck a few months after recorded history began.
This appears not to have been lost on the necromancer Thomod. Twenty years later, she raised both of their bodies using the powers given to her by the bumble bee queen goddess of murder, Ume. Using their strength and that of her other zombies, Thomod erected a tower where she went on to train four apprentices and author essays about dying, such as More Doom and the Nuanced Death. Before she became obsessed with her own mortality, Thomod had been a great hunter of the giant dingo and the leader of a small village. The bumble bee called, however, and she abandoned her home and family.
Nearby, another family was also experiencing tragedy. Or dozens of families, since the vampire Olum had killed quite a few people over the years before anybody got suspicious. Now the vampire's own family was sundered -- she had to escape the watchful eyes of the neighbors and take up a simple life in one of the villages surrounding her former home of Masterweavers. Not long after, her husband Pictham became the lord of the town, and disputes over livestock and other matters flared up. It came to blows, and in the ensuing violence Pictham struck down his wife during an attack on the village. The recent blood-drinking murder spree in her village stopped, but people were probably too wrapped up in killing each other over cows to notice.
That was all world gen, so then I started playing.
The necromancer's great-grand-daughter Nikom was a fishery worker in a small hamlet, and Sothro was the vampire's great-grand-son, laboring as a farmer outside Masterweavers until the day they decided to get married. After a short journey, Sothro stepped into Nikom's cottage and said "This is my new home," making the move was official.
Since I've been doing camera tests, I thought I might as well fix up and check out the marriage travel code. The pairings are just picked locally or according to trade links, but I'd like to think they bonded over their sinister ancestors (or the strange childhood coincidence of having younger siblings gobbled up by different werebuffalo in the same year).
The tragic stories of worldgen are pretty much my favorite thing to see in DF. The poast brings to mind a memorable personality I recently saw: a human law-giver who battled a clown-led goblin civ into peace, losing her husband, father, and daughter in the process, and subsequently profaned a temple, resulting in her exile as a forlorn werewarthog. I prefer to believe that Alu Necrowheeled was driven to profane the temple by her overwhelming grief.
I also find it very interesting that clowns are potentially even bigger elements of life on the surface world than before. This raises the question:
will piercing the cotton candy and unleashing the circus result in an actual apocalypse if they aren't contained? I don't expect an answer to that, but I can't wait to try and see what happens.