Newbie Dorf here. I put off playing DF for ages because I just couldn't see what all the fuss is about, and I'm finally getting it.
I admit I was bored at first - walling yourself in with a bajillion traps is safe, but also boring as hell. That fort fell due to a misunderstanding over how to transport caged prisoners resulting in an entire goblin siege force been released right next to the dining hall. I could have savescummed, but at that point it felt more like a mercy killing.
My new fort has been much more fun. First, it gets attacked by a dreaded Were-Tapir! I panic, pull everyone inside and raise the drawbridge while I frantically try to train marksdorfs in hopes of killing it from a distance - at which point it turns back into an elf and sheepishly wanders off the map.
A little later, a dorf gets possessed. He grabs a workshop and starts ranting about bones. I don't know what his problem is, we have plenty of bones sitting in the refuse stockpile. I give up on him and assign a pack of wardogs to eat him when he goes crazywatch over him.
Suddenly, a Werellama attacks! There was a big group of human traders with swordsmen and pikemen guards in the depot at the time, so I left the drawbridge down. Not my problem if a human ends up fuzzy on the full moon, and I wanted to see if my earlier panic was justified at all.
The werellama gets halfway to the depot, then turns back into a dwarf. He begins the same sheepish retreat back to the edge of the map - and runs into my hunter, who promptly wrecks his shit. Seriously, he emptied a dozen bronze bolts into the retreating Werellama and left a trail of blood and gore across twenty tiles. On a related note, my hunter kinda scares me. He totally ignores 'normal' prey like weasels and whatnot - he prefers alligators. If it isn't capable of biting a dwarf in half, he doesn't bother hunting it unless everything else is already dead. Despite being an excellent marksdorf, he never gets a quick kill - his victims always have multiple bleeding wounds before they die. I think he aims for the legs on purpose.
Anyways, while I'm busy admiring the kill, my possessed dwarf comes screaming out of the fortress and drags the werellama's corpse back to the workshop. Moments later, he begins construction and makes - an alligator bone chest. The hell? How the hell do you get an alligator bone chest out of dwarven werellama bones? On second thought I don't want to know.
While all this is happening, a bunch of buzzards swoop down and try to steal from the supply depot. On the way down, the pass over a couple weapon traps armed with iron spinning blades which detonate them like some kind of feathered hand grenade. The resulting rain of gore completely covers the trading depot - and the now-traumatized human traders. One piece of buzzard somehow ends up twenty tiles west inside the moat, but pretty much every other piece landed on or next to a human trader. Seriously, there are maybe two tiles in the entire depot which aren't covered in blood and buzzard guts. It was the bloodiest mess I've yet seen in dwarf fortress, and it still cracks me up thinking about it.
A little while later, my miners were interrupted by Crundles in the caverns. Not knowing what a Crundle is, I panicked (again) and sent my military charging down the stairs to rescue my fleeing miners. They covered four z-levels in gore, and my hospital is now stocked with soap made from Crundle tallow.
I love this game so much now.
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Topic: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas (Read 8286 times)