* Granite, 115
The halls seem a bit emptier than at the beginning of my last term, except for the ghosts. Not literally -- there's only one of those, the star-crossed child mayor cAPS -- but there are only 42 of us left, plus 14 young ones. It's not as if this place has been a death trap, in fact far from it, but our losses have simple not been replaced by new migrants. Those who have passed through the crucible are practically the peers of the Stonefathers themselves: there are 22 dwarves here with legendary skills. Sadly I am the only of our Smith's Guildsman left though, and my duties as Mayor leave me little time for metal work.
My first priority must be to secure our safety, but I know that if we hope to accomplish our missions here, we must press forward. Without much support from the mountainhomes, the tables are stacked against us in the long run. I decide that we should be able to achieve at least one inspiring feat in the next year without too much trouble: to build a Pub at the very Top of the Universe. We can already see birds bumping into the top of the sky, about 10urists above the top of the tower as it currently stands.
Baron Zen is sullenly falling to despair, dwelling only on the two terrible facts which define his life. First, the loss of his hands. Second, the fact that Ishar still has a really sweet throne room.
Ishar and Darkhawk have given themselves over entirely to study of the martial arts. They've been sparring continuously for almost all of Granite. The Hammer-legion champion Mokar is in hospital with a terrible brian injury. Dr. Domas says the prognosis isn't good. He's an expert in losing patients, so I'm inclined to take his word for it. There are four poor war sauropods hanging around the hospital waiting for Mokar, or perhaps looking for their long lost masters.
Throughout Granite I gradually realize that we simply don't have the dwarfpower for major projects. Without cutting into the soldier's training time, which I really don't want to do, we only have about 15 workers available for jobs any given time, and most of them are hauling, digging, or performing basic masonry tasks. The first step is simply to be very selective about what loot we grab from the battlefield in the outer courtyard -- we don't really need orcish steel weapons. I also tear out all the cage traps on the north side of the river; I don't want to lose any workers to an ambush while they're wandering across the bridge to pick up a caged antelope. Over the course of the year I'll try to reinforce the other types of defences in the courtyard: weapon traps, turrets of course, and maybe some golems and mines.
*Slate*
I am totally on board with Panoptia's plan to try to regenerate Zen's lost hands using an unstable arcane ritual. I do somewhat question the idea of awakening a terrible and ancient evil right in the middle of the blast furnace course. I order the masons to quickly toss in a bulkhead wall before OK'ing the ritual, which will at least buy us a few seconds if something goes wrong.
There is even worse news in the forge, however. Some kind of reaction with skill Aethers has caused every stone stockpile in the fort to flood with about a thousand 200-something pound residue boulders. We can't even build new stockpiles for ore -- there is so much of this junk that it seemingly fills any amount of space available to it. First we try build an "atom-smasher" but we are too short handed to make a dent in the supply by hauling it normally. It would probably take the whole year to attack this problem conventionally. In the end, I am forced to make my own pact with the dark arts, and employ the arcane powers of 'DFHack Autodump'.
In the meantime, we start working on some extra runic weapons and platemail; these we can do immediately without the stone piles being in proper order.
The trade route is nearly overgrown with trees. Normally this would be a trivial problem, but cutting and hauling down the overgrown trees from the courtyard takes 4 or 5 laborers away from other jobs.
I take a moment to check on the Magmamancer, Meph. In addition to his skill with magical fire he is actually our third-best warrior with conventional arms: adept at throwing and skilled in melee with his weapon.
Mokar has abruptly awakened from his deep coma from the hospital, where Dr. Domas had diligently been treating his outer brain injury with soap. This therapy appearently awakened a primal craving to craft a legendary crossbow.
*Felsite*
Finally, Zen is down on Forge chase; I thought he was getting ready for his ritual, but it turns out he was just raiding our snack bar. In fact, his "Noble" work exemption prevents him from taking on menial work such as meddling with the occult. This might prove problematic.
Panoptia left us a pretty good stockpile of frag landmines, so we attempt to deploy them around a chokepoint in the outer courtyard. The mechanical components are a little finicky, but in the end we get about 5 of them deployed.
An illithid warband appears on the north side of the river, but kill themselves in a forest fire. Let us hope all our enemies are so stupid.
Zen can't even change out of his tattered clothes, let alone wield a spear again, so for now I relieve him from military duty and set Panopticon II up as captain of the guard. We condense the melee guard back into two squads; The most promising new recruits are transfered to Darkhawk's command in the Anvils, hopefully to soak up some training.
Now that Mokar is up and about, he's back to his job of dispensing justice too. He just hammered some poor furnace operator to death for 'violating the Baron's production order'. I have no idea when this supposed crime took place, and in fact there are a LOT of dwarves queued up for justice for 'violation of export prohibition' too, but that was the only one with Zen as the injured party. Hopefully the others are noncapital offense, we have a perfectly good dungeon, and can't afford any more offhand deaths.
*Hematite*
Zen just went from miserable to ecstatic; since his wife the Baron-Consort had a kid. Zen suddenly finds the energy to begin to meet with these five diplomats hanging around the tower: a Drow Diplomat, human diplomat, drow hoardmaster, dwarven outpost liason, and dwarven clerk.
I am trying to set up constructions to keep us secure on the top side, so we can focus on our primary missions here. I begin working on a roof for the inner keep, since we've been assaulted by flying goblins in the past, but the workload proves to be beyond our current capabilities. We'll just have to keep any flying creatures out with steel. The ground path, however, we can do something about. Following a suggestion Meph made a few years back I order the masons to put in some bridges that can be collapsed to form an "emergency tunnel" that keeps the trade road open, while blocking off all other ground access. I didn't activate these barriers most of the year, but it seemed a precaution that we might need to stay alive. (Note also, the diplomats tend to arrive from the south, not on the trade road, so they're probably toast if the barriers are up. And, that Frost Giants can simply ford the river.) The lever for the barrier is in Meph's house; the other important levers are down by the Meeting Hall, and they're (still..) labelled with Notes.
Some of our enemies are at war with one another. A deep drow assassin just killed a illithid thief in our courtyard.
*malachite*
Besmaretes has been made a county, and Zen's mood improves a bit more. See Zen, that's why you should have meetings. The dwarven 'clerk' turns out to be a second Outpost liason. Attending to happiness of the fort more generally, we're installing a zoo and statuary on the pleb wards, and some artifacts in public places.
Zen agrees to a peace treaty with a human. I didn't know we were at war.
Again, like every month, our runners report the movements of antmen armies in the deep. Our miners haven't really had a chance to swing their picks this year -- I dispatch them to both the 2nd and 3rd level caverns to carefully carve out a couple observation posts where we can see, and where our ranged warriors might find a good post. This job will probably take them several months, but there isn't much else to mine, other than a bit of coal and flux now and again.
We have two *spare* masterwork welded mithril zweihanders, a couple masterwork welded wolfram hammers, and a slademantine short sword. Among other good stuff. I check our stockpiles to make sure some of this is getting moved down to the forges for Runic treatment. The miners struck some more mithril, so I also queue up a mithril mechanism for Golem forge, along with metal furniture, crafts, and ammo. Again, this seems like a short task list, but will actually be enough work for months if not the whole year.
Crossbowdwarves have not generally won great renown in this fort, but Morul has overcome some gruesome injuries to become Proficiently skilled, and turns out that she shot down several of the goblins' Flying Ant mounts in the great battles of 114. In recognition I upgrade their 'squad' of 2 to javalineers -- we have plenty of equipment -- and I'm also issueing the crossbows and some rudimentary armor to a civilian militia (myself, Dr. Domas, Manager, Broker, etc.) This squad isn't intended to go on active duty but just gear up and provide a bit of self defense capabilities. We'll at least be able to get some bolts in the air if we get a nasty surprise from more flying assault bugs.
Zen's meeting with the second clerk made us a Duchy of the Realm.
There's a lot more action in part 2
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Topic: ☼Angelictower☼ (overseers wanted: new fort soon!) (Read 39194 times)