I humbly submit Knottower, a 10-year-old fort on the verge of some evil mountains. It's been a busy 10 years; you should have no trouble adapting any one of the overengineered projects into a deathtrap, if you so desire, and there's all the magma and water at fort level you could ask for. We're at war with the humans; I haven't heard much from the goblins lately, but I'm sure they'll be back. The fog on the mountains creates husks, but doesn't leave a husking dust residue or anything. The military's very well-trained, but everybody's very well-socialized, so a good place to start might be killing some of the more popular dwarves. There are 90 kids; the first fortress-born will be growing up in a couple years.
If you want to keep the workflow jobs going, you'll need dfhack r3, but since the goal is to destroy the fort I guess you won't really need to (-: . Other than that, there hasn't been a lot of dfhacking aside from periodically destroying old clothes and keeping track of levers.
are some pictures of a few places around the fort: the gate, the fort itself, the well/power generator/arena, the cavern access points, and the magma pumpstack.
is the fort itself. Sorry it's not on dffd; apparently it doesn't accept compressed files, so I'm not really sure what the deal with that is.
An in-character introduction follows. I may have gotten a bit carried away.
My Lord High Inquisitor:
In my recent visit to the fortress of Knottower, I was greatly disturbed by much that I saw. From the first steps I took on the land claimed by the self-styled queen and her court, I knew something was seriously wrong. I nearly vomited, not just in the awful glare of the accursed sky fire, but due to the stench of rotten corpses all around me. The grounds are littered with dead bodies of humans and goblins, inexplicably stripped of all clothing and weaponry. As I approached the gate, someone took a potshot at me from the ramparts and I heard raucous laughter from several men and women in the walls. Inside, my eyes were immediately assaulted by a golden statue of an elf: the infamous war criminal Fela Creweddawns, heir to the throne of our ancient enemy. Far from condemning her brutality, the statue celebrated her taming of the local bobcats. Do they truly think that just because they've come across the world and away from the elven menace, they can flaunt it so? It's a disgrace. And this is far from the only statue of Creweddawns; half the populace, it seems, has statuary of her in their private rooms.
As I stared, aghast, at several degenerates milling around this statue, several dead-eyed soldiers walked by me. One, a young mother, had her baby casually strapped to her shield! I asked where they were going, and their leader, a beast of a man, grunted only that it was time to cull the undead again. I followed them outside, where I watched in horror as they mutilated a group of small children running down the mountain. I am not ashamed to say that I wept and vomited on seeing this horrific sight. The place is filthy enough that I'm sure that the stack of tears and the stack of vomit are still there. I don't know how long I stood like this, but I was soon taken away by the cringing mayor, the appropriately-named Tosid Bentfigures. Bentfigures seems to have appropriated most of the real civic power in the fortress; many dwarves will not work unless she signs off on their job, and she alone knows what the fort produces. It is she who has been somehow talking merchants into taking home ragged clothing in place of worthwhile goods, and as she spoke to me I swear I was almost convinced she was sane. Despite her hideousness, she is incredibly charismatic and I found myself rapt by her words. Finally, I broke away to try and find the local nobility and take them to task for their laxity in running the fort. I banged on the Duchess's door, and a filthy peasant answered. When I told her to fetch her mistress, she croaked with laughter and called to her equally churlish husband, in a dialect so thick I could barely recognize it as Dwarfish, "Who does this fool think she is?" Needless to say, the meeting with the Duchess did not go as planned.
Finally, I met the upstart queen and gave her the chance to surrender herself to the mercy of the true Underking in the Mountainhomes. She met my suggestion with derision. She took me on a tour of the fortress. I saw things you would not believe. Piles of things that somehow defy the laws of physics. An enormous magma-pumping operation. A staircase cleverly constructed so as to allow light from the Skyfire to defile the purity of the Stone. And finally, what is perhaps the true source of this place's madness, truly a sight of awe and horror: Knottower has tapped the legendary Bluemetal. Down in the depths of the magma sea, I found myself shivering with fear even while I sweated in the intense heat, but she seemed wholly unaffected. "Behold the might of Knottower," she cried, her eyes watering and flitting about madly. "What can your Underking offer that could compare with the glory of this place?" She began to cackle loudly, and I would swear that I heard something beneath my feet not laughing, but...screaming. It is then that I ran, all the way from the very bones and blood of the earth, past the hospital where one of the dead children was being dissected, past the kitchen where they were preparing the tainted flesh of a beast I cannot name, past the piles of dimensions unknown that defy you to look at them, past the expressionless militia, and finally out onto the open road. I am honestly surprised they let me live.
My lord, I apologize that I cannot deliver this missive to you in person, but I fear that even my short time in that place has made me unfit for further service. Whenever I close my eyes, I see unspeakable visions and hear sounds that, for the sake of your own sanity, I will not attempt to describe. And lately, in those sounds, I hear voices. They...I am ashamed to say this, but they tell me to go back. To go back, take the pick still clasped in the dead hand of some miner long-dead, and...strike the earth. Strike the Bluemetal. And they whisper a name I have never heard before, but that somehow...resonates, that seems like I've known it all my life: Armok. But I shall not listen. I shall not return. I shall wander the wilds, and shall abstain from liquor in order to forget. Before I go, however, I must finish this letter and give it to a courier.
To conclude, my official recommendation, my Lord High Inquisitor, is this:
Burn it. Burn it to the ground, salt the earth where it stood, and fill it in with the blood of the earth. Kill every degenerate man, woman and child in that horrible place and burn the bodies. It's the only way to be sure.
When you've done that, find me in my cave outside the nearby human township (whose population lives in fear of our people, thanks to those brutes at Knottower), and kill me.
Author
Topic: The Fortress Destruction Club! (Read 6003 times)