About taverns and inns:
Will there be more types of transient visitors from surrounding sites besides the usual traders and envoys?
For example: visiting relatives, farmers from a hill trading some greens at a 'foodshop' for coin then buying manufactured goods, like mugs and socks from a 'goods shop'. Adventurers! looking for good equipment, supplies and quests/rumours. etc.
I like this idea, unless they are ‼Adventurers‼ then I'd rather keep them away from the booze
This specific question is covered in a DF Talk episode. Basically Toady plans for a wide array of characters to hang out at the inns/taverns. Mainly adventurers, but bandits can also be around there and maybe cause a bit of a stirrup, but not always. With bandits and multirracial civilizations there might be also a chance to have goblins peacefully strolling around your fort. Implementing music and musical performance could lead to wandering bards. Hopefully we could also see liars and con-artists impersonating all the above people and scamming the hell out of our dwarves.
The actual quote is this one:
Where it gets more interesting is when you involve people that aren't economically a part of your fortress, then you've got people that you'll actually be able to charge for drinks, charge for staying, if you want to: it might not be something you want to do to a diplomat, but it might the dwarven way of doing things. I haven't quite decided about that particular one. But you've also got merchants coming in, and depending on the location of your fortress you might also have travellers showing up or bandits showing up. There's nothing that says that the bandits don't hang out at a dwarven tavern and then move on, because there's plenty of them just lingering around, and also if you build your fortress out in the wilds they're more likely to be the closest people. This might be the time when we start making adventurer type people and mercenary type people move around a little bit and in that case you'd have some additional visitors there as well. I know in the first release which is going to predate the tavern release there's going to be people moving between towns and villages, going to markets and so on, and depending on the location of your fortress you could bump into some people's associated movements like that, although jamming your fortress in between the villages and towns ... that's a little tight. It'd be kind of funny, but it's a strange location for a dwarf fortress.
Mercenaries and swords for hire. That's pretty rad.
RIght now, as the world advances, people tend to be more and more related between themselves, with historical figures having a lot of cousins, aunts, brothers and stuff. If visiting relatives are implemented, we could expect huge family meetings per dwarf (with all its deadly consequences) and related shenanigans. It might be pretty cool.
It would be great to send an army marching off to attack neighbours. Maybe you're at war with the elves, and you want to wipe out the elves that have been attacking you? Send thirty tough dwarves after them, keeping a few home to cover goblin defence, and when your soldiers return home, they'd have goods from the elves. No more elves attacking you, or maybe you could have an option to show some mercy, and the next caravan to come by has a diplomat, offering lower prices for peace. This could be a use for mounts too, send your dwarves off on some mounts and they'll get to the enemy faster and carry more. If you raided goblins, you could get rare war creatures, like trained ogres and cave dragons.
You're supposed to be able to do even more than that! Not just sending your elite, fortress-groomed dwarves into the fray, but also leading a pack of drunks and poorly trained militia from the hill sites to where the battle rages. Spoils of war and loot surely is planned, although I can't remember where I have seen that. Maybe it was a power goal or something like that.