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[simonthedwarf]

Say what? Ghosts can scare dwarves to death?

Obviously my dwarves need to be tougher. This calls for the prolonged agony of another bowyer.

[javierpwn]

Uuuuh, that ghost will actively seek out random people and animals, and scare them to death....

Best to memorialize them.

Berserkers tend to become "violent" ghosts, who will mangle animals, or tear off random limbs

[Loud Whispers]

I like to imagine the ghosts are giving the other Dwarves visions of a world without booze.

[Hyndis]

A berserk dwarf is almost always a violent and murderous ghost even in death.

Dwarves who die from other causes may haunt friends or relatives, which gives them a negative though. This can drive them to madness, but a legendary dining room more than outweighs the negative though from a single haunting. You could also get forlorn ghosts, which will haunt the location at which they died but will otherwise remain inactive and motionless.

See here:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Ghost

Only dwarves who died after going berserk are a threat. The others are mostly a nuisance. Engraving a slab or entombing the body (or even part of a body) will satisfy the ghost.

[thegoatgod_pan]

There are two kinds of murderous ghost: the kind that scare to death (instakill) and the kind that dismember by instantly removing a body part (usually leading to death from bleeding). Slab it!

Not always, but often berserkers in life

[wierd]

It's a shame we can't weaponize killer ghosts.  I imagine an army of killer ghosts rushing a goblin invasion, and instakilling them all in a spray of blood, with useless crosbow bolts shooting everywhere... oh, it would be glorious!

I wonder... can "ghostiness" be imbued directly via a custom syndrome?

[Di]

No, it can't ghosts are hard-coded and inert to all means of interacting with them.
Someone mentioned shotgunning the camel into ghost knocking the latter to the ground though...

[simonthedwarf]

GREAT! A new ghost, which after searching through 1000 dead/missing entries and the "Engrave.."-job I cannot find.

There used to be some kind of DFworkaround with this, but I can't remember what.

[wlerin]

I believe the workaround is "don't entomb caravans", or possibly "don't cull unimportant historical figures". Neither of which can be done once it happens, obviously.

Runesmith should be able to eliminate the ghost, but in my experience they don't attack all that frequently (well, if four times a year can be considered infrequent), so as long as you still have migrants coming in, there's no reason your fortress can't survive.

[Finn]

GREAT! A new ghost, which after searching through 1000 dead/missing entries and the "Engrave.."-job I cannot find.

There used to be some kind of DFworkaround with this, but I can't remember what.

"tweak clear-missing" might return the dwarf to the list so he can be memorialized.  If that doesn't work then "tweak clear-ghostly" will erase the ghost but leave the square it was standing on unusable.

[enizer]

i had one of those ghosts that hang around the place of death, he got crushed by a bridge, the enterance to my fortress, even since then he was about 75% of the time around that bridge, scaring everyone entering or leaving my fort

i wonder if he could have been useful in any way... are goblin sieges scared of ghosts?

edit: i also had a vampire ghost in 34.02, the ghost had the persons orginal name, while the corpse retained the vampire name, making that ghost nearly impossible to find and slab

[Lich180]

The command should be "tweak clear-ghostly (unit name)" to get rid of a bothersome, unslab-able ghost.

"tweak clear-missing (unit name)" might need to be used as well, I've had to do both before to get a ghost to leave. But at least then you can slab them.

[TruePikachu]

So http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=70423.0 has been removed? Awww...

[wierd]

"It's a dead man's party! Who could ask for more!? Everybody's coming; leave your body at the door!"

[fourpotatoes]

There are reports of dwarves in fell moods killing ghosts, so if  you can arrange for nobody to be closer to the butchers' than the ghost is when a fell mood strikes, you could turn your ghost problem into an artifact earring.