It's the "continue on your way" part that prompts me to write this reply.
I've been thinking over how I'd like to see some unity/continuity between adventurer mode and fortress mode. I've seen many suggestions about adventurer embark options, and I mostly agree about it all. The part I think most people are fuzzy about is the "Continue on your way" part.
First major problem: What happens if your founding adventurer dwarf dies? Ideally, an other dwarf could take on the job. But who and why?
I noticed a personnality trait that relates to adventuring: "Likes adventure" or a message of that nature. Why not simply tag adventury dwarfs as potential adventurers? They could be ordinary dwarfs, with benefits. Adventuring benefits. When non-player fortresses get implemented, maybe we could start an adventure by selecting one of those "adventury" dwarves and clicking "Start Adventure!".
Of course, the major obstacle is the definition of an adventurer dwarf. For this to work, it would need to be a regular dwarf, with all the same mechanics, but with additionnal properties/methods. A subclass, if you will. Anything the adventurer does different than a normal dwarf would be implemented in the derived class, things like ownership checking and thoughts, I guess. The fact that the dwarf is an adventurer would most likely have effects on skill performance, since there is two sets of skills right now: adventure skills and fortress skills.
I don't know exaclty how the code is structured, but I'm thinking all of these questions would be resolved by properly subclassing a dwarf to become an adventurer. We definitely would be able to go back and forth between fortress mode and adventure mode, at the dwarf level. There would still be the problem of world information to be loaded, but with the increased world animation, I'm guessing most problems are already solved. And when non-player fortesses can run, everything will be in place for Dungeon Keeper - style play.
An other point to note is the end of the two distinct skillset. An adventurer would start with the same skills as a regular dwarf does, with the same interaction possibilities, but would gain adventuring skills. Instead of making two complete skillset mechanings, we'd need a single unifying skillset that can be expanded to provide an "adventurer". If we go down that path, it may be possible to completely alienate "nobles" or "merchants", if we wish the majority of dwarfs to simply ignore those skillsets. Multiple inheritance could also let us separate each skillset and combine them again on dwarfs for whom those skills are relevants. That way, we could have "civilian" dwarfs, that only have farming and other utility-based skillsets, while we could have a "noble", "merchant", "military", "adventurer" of death.
The point of this post is not to try and sell the idea of "civilians" that don't have access to other skillsets, but in fact to enunciate this fact: Restructuring the adventurer definition to become a subclass of a fortress dwarf is necessary for fortress to adventure mode transitions. An other less important point to be made is that the restructuration will positively affect the user-experience for adventure-mode.