After spending about 2 hours generating worlds today, looking for the one "keeper" that was just the way I wanted, I decided to go through legends viewer looking up all the megabeasts that had died in world generation, and their killers. The vast majority seemed to have been offed by random adventurers with no prior kills to their name who were subsequently murdered after going after another megabeast. Then something caught my eye, an event titled "The rampage of Tod Oxaunt" in the events page of a hydra named Rubsit Greatestyearlings the Strong Pelt, during which Rubsit and a female human were slain. Looking at the respective pages of Tod and Rubsit, a surprisingly coherent narrative unfolded before me.
At the turn of the year 141 in the Realm of Dawn, Tod Oxaunt was a young guard (a maceman) in his home town of Runcrewed, a small, mostly quiet hamlet on the borders of the Realm of Music. His wife of nine years at that point, a hunter named Mos Slingmonks, had just given birth a baby girl, Apug Zealscorched, the couple's fourth child, all of which were alive, healthy, and not enslaved by goblins; life was good for Tod and his family, but sadly this state of affairs was not to last.
In the mid spring of that year, Rubsit Illudleteng the Strong Pelt, a hydra associated with strength, rebirth, and muck that had troubled the Realm since the dawn of time, came to Runcrewed in search of new prey. It found Mos Slingmonks, perhaps out hunting, and struck her down without mercy. How long it was before news of this tragedy reached Mos's family is not certain, but Tod saw to it that Rubsit would take no other victims. Tod confronted the beast in Runcrewed, avenging Mos in a battle that cost him his left ear, with this overarching series of events going down in history as the rampage of Tod Oxaunt.
In the 34 years between this event and the end of world-gen, Tod's life has been fairly quiet. He's pushing 55 now, with his own parents both alive and in their 90s, and more than 6 grandchildren by his eldest son, who followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a maceman guard in Runcrewed.
Bravo, Toady. Bravo. It's a simple story of monsters, murder, and vengeance, and I suspect the rampage being named for Tod is unintended (if highly fitting), but it's always nice to see events like this pop up in the legends of dwarf fortress.
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Topic: Tod Oxaunt: Another fabulous example of emergent storytelling in Dwarf Fortress (Read 1913 times)