Suds: I feel like the liaison who turned up once but never again was actually from the house, but the guilders definitely haven't sent one - or, if they have (ie the sole liaison was from the guild and I'm just misremembering, which is totally possible), he hasn't shown up again for twelve years.
I had a similar thought about the Ratskins and guns; like, maybe they could make musket cartridges from gunpowder, paper and lead or something. Got the custom reaction/gun comps items sorted now and that seems to work, so my hardy 'skins can make muskets but not, say, wooden autoguns. Was thinking about maybe adding some custom crossbow bolts like 'poisoned tips' and such, but I dunno if that would work and/or if it'd suddenly make them heinously overpowered. It's fun to try though.
So far I've just got them using "makeshift picks" (the cudgel becomes a 'haft' which steel or ferrum's then added to, much like the nailbat reaction) rather than rockdrills, which does have the effect of making them noticeably less efficient miners in conjunction with their learning mining slowly, but there's definitely something a little bit odd about the image of a bunch of Ratskins mining into the hive terrain, so your idea about somehow extracting scrap from the environment seems like a better approach.
It occurred to me as well, of all the factions in-game, Ratskins seem like the most likely (fluff-wise) candidates for using dorf-style nightmare trap mazes (or at least that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it); their settlements (such as they are) would probably be semi-hidden and defended by warriors and trickery, not towering walls and heavy stubbers. Speaking of which, got to put them into action for the first time yesterday; they're freaking awesome. Is the transformation back into hiver a time-based thing, or is there an internal ammo counter on the emplacements?
I was being a bit in-character with the "blood daemon" stuff; what actually happened, as far as I can tell, was that there was one chaos cultist and one actual vampire (the aforementioned daemon). I thought the latter was the former, but when the vampire started biting people in the middle of the siege room, the cultist went nuts as well. Dunno if they were actually connected; if not, that cultist completely screwed themselves over, because I would've thought the problem was solved after killing off the vampire
Been keeping notes on my Orlock save, so I'll post some more stories later on. Nothing's been quite as much Fun as that first siege, but millisaurs are certainly not to be fucked with.