A couple from my long-running 31.25 fort:
Aban Gearedwild (The Granite World of Minds)
Started out a basic hammerdwarf given the standard substandard training of my fortress. He was part of my pathetic military when I faced my first titan -- Gurmus, a one-eyed mouse with a knobby shell and fire breath. While charging my fort, Gurmus dove into a murky pool that my walls straddled. Four of my ill-trained, ill-equipped hammerdwarves followed him into that watery pit, and only one, Aban, emerged having slain the Titan. He lost his right hand in that battle, but decided that hospitals were for sissies and he was always more of a lefty anyway. The world passes into the Age of Legends on the next 1 Granite.
Aban went on to make an artifact, bash ambushes/sieges to bits, kill a couple forgotten beasts in a boredom-dispelling attempt to unseal the caverns (4 FBs died in total, bum rushing the breach, but I couldn't really consider the caverns claimed and had to lock it back up.). By this point he was inexplicably about twice as fast as the rest of the military, and it showed when he walked up to a cyclops and killed it in two hits (one to the leg, knocking it down, and one to the head that was fatal) before it got more than halfway towards my fort or any other soldiers arrived.
Tulon Rhymewheel (The Spiral of Furnaces)
Tulon was the first dwarf who really caught my notice as a character with something of a story. She was drafted along with her whole migrant wave into a marksdwarf squad upon arrival, and when the caverns were first opened, lost her lover (same wave immigrant, same squad) to a particularly nasty cave fish man... she broke every bone in that creature's body by beating it with her crossbow until another dwarf finally put the sucker out of its misery and stole the kill. I thought that was cool enough, but a couple years later I'm under perpetual siege (turtled) and notice the mayor is mandating Bolts, fittingly enough... and guess who the mayor is! Her little military junta was short-lived as another dwarf took mayorship shortly after we finally broke the siege. When the choice to have a baron rolled around, I named Tulon because she had been my best mayor so far. The world passed into the age of legends on 1 Granite, literally a day after the liaison left and Tulon was promoted to Baroness. Knowing the mechanics now, Aban gets the credit for the age change, but really...
As a noble, she still fought, and earned herself a title for shooting goblins dead. She ALSO had an unfortunate love of aluminum that I couldn't provide (my home civ had no access to it) and sentenced a few dwarves to prison -- aka dehydration in my ill-designed jail -- over that. Whoops. Still, badass stuff kept happening around her, so I never arranged an accident and we eventually got some aluminum from human caravans. Eventually, the "king arrived"... but no actual monarch showed. Turns out my civ didn't have one left. So, that made duchess Tulon the highest authority in the land, too. Interestingly, at this point her only friends were Aban, the dwarf that stole her murderous cave fish man kill, and a couple other legendary champions of the fortress.
That's about where I left the fort -- It's still alive, I've been waiting to go back to it when I've devised a suitably fitting end. Whatever happens there, I have a distinct feeling Tulon and Aban will be alive at the end, when the abandon comes.
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Topic: Your most badass Dwarves? (Read 2970 times)