I'm surprised this is considered a novel idea. This was the ONLY way I played until v0.34.x (for reasons I'll explain below).
Ahh... not that a single measly year of worldgen spinning is gonna do much for the "not many dwarves" and "you will only engrave cheese" problems.
The latter is a failure to pick a suitable engraver with 'high tradition' personality and starting the engrave spam too early. By the time you've levelled up a tiny handful of engravers to legendary, you should have had some invader kills or masterworks and you are practically guaranteed to have had some administrative events (mayor elections, commander appointments, the founding of your fort).
For extra spice, make an adventurer in the dawn of time world first and go on an epic massacre crusade. THEN start your fort in the region where your adventurer made the most mess. You will now (with traditionalist engravers) get nice memorials to your awesome adventurer.
Alternatively, go mod the raws (or grab something pre-made like Dig Deeper Gold) to have a lot more possibilities for artwork, like "treasure heap", "burning wagon" and "bloodied elf skull".
More importantly, the early nature of the civilization means that a disproportionate amount of your historical figures are weremigrants/vampires so be prepared for waves of Friendly Migrants that camp out on the map edge.
Wrong. This is the DAWN OF TIME. There hasn't been any time for necromancers, vampires and werebeasts to be 'appointed' by curse or whatnot. They don't get created when the world is born (unlike megabeasts and forgotten beasts). They are made by converting historical figures - this takes time. This is why if you want lots of these sorts of horrors, the optimal worldgen length is about 100 years.
The issue with embarking on year 1 is that there aren't many dwarves in the world.
Before v0.34.x this was irrelevant (I never had problems of running out of migrants) but now that the game cares about historical figures it's different. Back then, migrants and invaders were simply spawned out of thin air so long as entities could reach you. Indeed, for most goblins they're still pulled out of thin air because they weren't important enough to actually get recorded as historical figures but I suspect a proper population pool is consulted when they spawn.
I should run another Year 2 fort in DF2012 some time and see how it goes.