Journal of Mensrea: marksdwarf
10th of Granite, year 70
The Mountainhomes, Armok....still in the mountainhomes...
Everyday brings me a fresh new batch of nightmares. A brand new hell. Sitting here, surrounded by screaming children, quarrelling animals, toiling peasants...they don't understand the terror that lurks just beyond the veil of granite and dicite our so-called nobles saw fit to erect.
To protect us. Hah.
..but everyday I spend here is a day that I get weaker. Meanwhile our enemies - the gobs, the orcs...those fucking giants -are squatting out in the muck..
..getting stronger.
My SO says I need to tone it down. Says I'm losing my grip on reality..that at this rate, I could break at any moment and wind up as one of those gibbering lunatics we have locked up in the dungeons. I say that when a Dwarf cannot fulfill his lifes ambitions that madness is an inevitability. I say that this place is a tomb where they lock young Dwarves up to wait to die. That sort of talk is liable to get you hammered around here.
I'd been stationed here for months; forcibly committed to this endless, static routine. We guard the entrances to the fort, keep an eye on the caravans, try to drive off snatchers, thieves, and those vile animal people. What good does it do, though? Tucked away in our safe stone hole..we grow weaker, while they grow stronger. Attacks grow more frequent, more vicious, more depraved..Last week a gob cut a kids arm off trying to snatch him up. What they can't carry away whole they are pleased to take piecemeal. You try to tell your freinds, your family, any poor schmuck ass mushroom chomping shitbag who will listen...but the horror is overwhelming..words cannot describe. Their eyes glaze over and you know your words are just bouncing around a hollow echo chamber. They cannot understand.
So now I'm here, writing in this fucking book. 'Cause that will put my mind to rest, says our shrink. Course I think it's all a pile of wambler shit; SO and command say otherwise. Better do as I'm told. Only thing worse than the gobbos is that Armok damn hammerer.
21st of Granite, year 70
Finally some good news. I'm gonna be getting out of this Armok damned tomb. Some new opportunities have opened up and command says I'm the guy for the job. Looks like I will be a military attaché to a group of 6 settlers. Though its being referred to as a reclamation party, due to some..catch..that was not fully explained to me. But it's not my job to ask questions: just show me where to point a crossbow. Even if I do have to babysit a bunch of brats and at least one self-important pencil pusher, it beats sitting around here waiting for the giants to snuff us out.
I have to admit, the prospect of seeing some action again gets my blood moving. I've been penned up in this silver cage too long, I've gotten fat and I've learned more about brewing than fighting these past years. I'm more than eager to get the hell out of here.
16th of Felsite, year 70
Its been a month on the road so far. Our group is mundane: 2 miners, 2 farmers, a skilled mason/carpenter and one bag of gas that calls itself an "expedition leader". They possess a nice mix of skills though, some claiming to dabble in herbalism and the "leader" boasting of being able to knock down trees in a single swing of the axe. Any other time or place and these kids would be sitting in a dining hall with no cares other than boozing and knocking up some poor, bearded floozies. Now and here though they are tools of fate, gears in the mighty engine of Dwarven commerce. At the least they make up for their lack of skill or wisdom with an abundance of bravado and enthusiasm. They have taken to calling our little band "The Whip of Apogees". At the least the mountainhome was kind enough to provide us with some drakes; 2 breeding pairs to be precise. I have found more kinship in their cold eyes then in the eyes of my pink, soft brothers. I know that in a scratch at least the drakes won't turn tail and run off; they will stand and fight and die, if need be. You have to respect at least that much when it comes to animals.
We have seen forests, swamps, plains, vast swaths of farmland, a couple Human settlements and plenty of devastation in between. Seems that anything not made of steel grade ice is want to be crushed, stabbed or flayed in this region. The locals huddle indoors at night. Numbers are the only thing that guarantee survival here.
Sure, we've been harried along our route...mostly animal men. Nothing the drakes couldn't handle, though at one point I loosed a bolt into the brush and heard a terrified howl as something shambled away from us as fast as its remaining limbs could carry it. A few red eyes, burning with malice, staring out from the brush, tell me that goblins are watching, too. They will not attack us like this though. They will wait until we feel safe, wait until were hunkered down in some new hole, before they start the harassment and screening attacks. Before they come in force to steal what we have and make thralls of our progeny.
It's only a matter of time before the gobbos hit us now, and when they do these damn peasants will get bled to the last.
20th of Felsite, year 70
Chatter around the campfire has..illuminated some of the details command managed to leave out. This mission is not as straight forward as had been explained to me. No surprise. What I did know was that we would be braving hostiles and some hellish swamp to establish an outpost on the fringe of our civilization. Borders need pushed outwards and the mountainhome needs its ores. The catch is that we aren't just establishing some new fort, but that were reclaiming an old one. Not so much a fort even, just the site that was selected for the fort. See, something happened to the first wave of settlers. Something that either drove them off or ground them up into blood sausage. No one knows exactly because we never received word. The autumn caravan arrived at an empty camp, littered with animal skeletons and scattered belongings left to rot in the muck. Scavengers probably tore up the place and picked over the valuables, this we're sure of. What we don't know is what managed to drive off a half dozen committed settlers before they even managed to dig so much as a trench to shit in. Whatever happened those soup sandwiches didn't leave so much as a bloody -pigtail sock- behind. Spooked the traders, that's for sure. Spooked command too. If they are pushing this far into our territory all the way from the glaciers, unseen and unheard, things do not bode well.
28th of Felsite, year 70
After months on the road we have finally arrived.
I have seen some miserable, stinking, fetid piles of Jotun shit in my life, but this place really takes the syrup roast. Its a swamp, this I knew, but what I didn't know was how damn hot it would be. This place reeks of boiling decay. You can't move without sweating, you can't sweat without sweating, and the pests are fist sized and hell bent on gutting us. I wasn't truly surprised then when we came upon a broken down wagon surrounded by drake bones. Maybe the poor schmucks had sense enough to beat a path out of this Armok forsaken muckhole and not look back. The traders should have made note of this places...climate when they made their report to command. Maybe then there would have been some amount of understanding and they wouldn't have assumed the worst. After all, these Dwarves are not fit to labor under the hot sun, command can't honestly expect them to willingly stay put in a place like this for very long.
Sadly, my realizations have no effect on my companions. The peasants are even more spooked now, seeing the discarded wagon and drake skeletons. Maybe they do have a point; what dwarf in his right mind would leave without even packing up, and how could the former settlers have hoped to survive here, in this desolate mire, without so much as a plump helmet spawn or a beast to watch their back?
Nevertheless, our stout group must press on. We should take a day to inspect our surroundings and make note of the local features before we strike the earth.
29th of Felsite, year 70
After thorough inspection we have determined the following:
-The area does possess abundant minerals, with traces indicating everything we would need to be self sufficient and then some.
-Somewhere there is a active volcano that fortunately, has not erupted. We may be able to tap it for magma. The kids are calling it "The Anal Fountains". Such is my life, situated in a hellish swamp, on top of a volcano known as the anal fountain.
-There is an abundance of snakes and water fowl in the area, good for hunting and making boots.
-Though a mire, the gently rolling terrain affords a certain level of drainage in certain spots, permitting a settlement to be built on something other than shifting sand or muck.
-Numerous ponds are teeming with fish, shellfish, and other hideous mutations that Armok willing can be skinned, cooked and eaten.
-The soil level, according to our resident know-it-all "expedition leader", is shallow. We will be forced to establish our initial farms very close to the surface. I don't like it, but there's not much to be done aside from some fancy irrigation science. A luxury of time and technology that is currently beyond our grasp.
Finally, one of the kids spotted a goose today with a peculiar silver hue. The creature must have struck him in some way because he proposed we name the settlement SILVERGOOSE. Very creative of him..I'm sure this one will be a fort researcher if he doesn't wind up in some gobs goose-egg-and-dwarf-meat omelet.
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I accidently embarked once without setting up dwarves labors. I know, what a nooble...rather than lose the fantastic site though I decided to abandon and reclaim. Since I had spent most of the embark points on the drakes there wasnt much to reclaim but some seeds/meager rations, drake bones, etc.
I have actually played through the first year at this point and have some notes on paper and a dozen or so pictures which I will post properly soon enough. However, I wanted to do the intro first. Still waiting for someone to take turn 2 so please weigh in. I just want to share one thing that I feel is a nice achievement: we have a steeloak farm and the plans for an herbalist. All we need is some sawblades for the sawmill and we can start steel production right away (and those could be made with copper which has already been dug up).
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Topic: ☼SILVERGOOSE☼ Of Masterworks, Mephs and Magma. (Read 23975 times)