Ouch. FB syndrome?
Demon syndrome. Connecting the dots, I think it might have been the same disease that killed the first expedition. Not to be underestimated, at all.
This forum is literally the best DF story I have ever read, seriously. Exactly the right amount of backstory, exactly the right amount of explanation, strikes the right balance between practical behavior and whimsy. You sir are a bloody good writer!
Personally I've reached the point in DF where I find it difficult to be whimsical, I find myself caught up in a routine of practical, safe actions. I've really been enjoying Roomcarnage as a purely practical LP but compared to this it feels kinda clinical and sane.
This fort also has a nice blend of everything that makes DF great, !SCIENCE!,Drama,Brutality,!FUN!, Pride and Sillyness.
!SCIENCE! in the form of mentally bleaching and intentionally infecting migrants until they are sorrowful killing machines. Drama as the fort has gone on long enough that children are growing into full adults and having epic backstories. Brutality around every corner. !FUN! with obscenely powerful foes both living, dead and otherwise. Pride in legendary dwarves, masterwork crafts, and epic megaprojects. Sillyness because only a DF player would think to necromantically reanimate a girl's severed arm and display it in her room.
I applaud you sir and everything you stand for.
Haha, bloody well thanks! I must comment on something I find particularly interesting, in regards to whimsy. Silentthunders has been one of the most conservative Fortresses I've ever created. While it has always had an open path into the Fortress for invaders to use, said paths have been fortified to extreme lengths; some contingency measures to this day I have never felt the need to use, and some like the raven bomb were decommissioned and incinerated before they ever saw use. In hindsight, incinerating and smashing hundreds of captive undead ravens seems wasteful now, so much more could have been done!
But back to the point, if I was never highly protective of my Dwarves lives, never so calculative - there'd be no more Fortress. A population collapse would inevitably result if too many Dwarves died or a single tantrum spiral occurred, as the only Dwarves the Fort can draw on are native borns and not immigrants - the last immigrant wave was at the 9th wave before the eternal necromancer siege "the attack of volcanoes" began. The last project which disregarded Dwarven mortality rates was the 8th wave, when I still believed that Dwarves would be Silentthunders' most ubiquitous resource, when they in fact turned out to be rarer than adamantine.
Necessity and excessiveness have gone hand in hand; when Captain Cerol was savaged by ravens in the year 413 he died not of his wounds, but of thirst because the brook had frozen over. So naturally the Dwarves laboured to dig a reservoir, and to make sure the reservoir never emptied it was dug to such an extent that it could hold over 52,500 units of water with around 132 wells to ensure that there would never be a queue for fresh water. This sort of excessive response to any problem the Dwarves faced has been commonplace in just about everything I've done in this Fort.
- The Dwarves were unhappy from undead attacks; everyone got a grand bedroom to cheer them up - each grand bedroom the foundation for a tower, wall segment or citadel.
- The caravans came with wealth but Silentthunders was not particularly rich in minerals in the upper layers, so a thriving textiles industry was developed which saw thousands of masterwork cloth crafts, clothes and ropes made for the caravans. Unfortunately caravans ceased going to Silentthunders, so the farming industry became solely about producing a gargantuan variety of alcohol.
- The initial surface building was highly dangerous, with areas frequently becoming overrun with undead and the risk of areas and indeed the entire surface being lost to the undead was real. There are old drawbridges, moats, fortifications and stores inside of Fortress subsections, owing to the days when entire areas would have to be shut down and isolated form each other. Much of these fortifications are now useless, but still stand monument to worse times, or have been converted to new uses. Much of the dining hall Fortress (as the dining hall is a Fortress) is now used to contain any miasma from rotting food, what blocks bolts can block bad smells.
- Sneaking necromancers caused a massive undead raven outbreak which saw the mobilization of the entire Fortress military and several areas shut down. In response to future infiltration, over time 2,000 traps of various design have been placed around the Fortress, although a third of them are mostly ornamental (but still functional) wall spikes.
Perhaps the funniest thing of all, at least to me, is the idea that I intended for Silentthunders to be a disposable Fort. I wanted the Fort to dig deep quickly, create masterwork adamantine armour sets and then wait for the goblins and undead to come. From there I fully expected my 100% military recruitment Fort to die a noble death, I even willed it so; with its defences overrun and its last Dwarves ambushing goblin squads in brutal room to room fighting. Then an adventurer would make a pilgrimage to this hallowed Fort, find a full armour set and escape the hordes of undead left behind to explore the world, which I had modded to include cities for Dwarves, Humans, Goblins, Elves and Kobolds (as this was before they had individual cities and Fortresses). It looked to be promising at first, with goblin ambushes testing the Fort's defences... But then the Fort entered a new era. The "temporary" workshops in the grassy core of the Fort became the permanent hub of tradesdwarfship, the isolated bunkers became interloping fields of death-dealing citadels, the forests were cut down in full to fuel the booming forgeworks and were paved over to prevent them growing back and the heroic Dwarves I expected to die became heroic Dwarves who refused to die.
Worst of all is that war changed. The goblins never came back, replaced by the necromancers; a war fought with cloak and daggers, yet at the same time a war fought against hordes and walls of undead elves. A monotonous onslaught of zombies accompanied by the neurotic search for invisible foes.
The attack of volcanoes still continues. There is one necromancer still out there unaccounted for, the first necromancer of the 'bells of amusement,' the last necromancer of the bells. I know he's out there somewhere, but I can't find him - 2,000 traps, 40 patrol squads and 50 war boars and eagles found nothing but more elf corpses. And I can't abandon the Fort either. Normally I'd be able to and the Dwarves would move on with their lives to greener pastures, but abandoning during siege - and there is only eternal siege, would doom them all to starvation, a most ignoble death. The infecting and science came from a different time, to be sure; one much more reckless and aggressive in its pursual of Dwarven survival (I am disappointed I never found a vampire to create a well of unlife). But the brutality, the pride, the masterworks, projects, children and heroes - they have been born from a most curious marriage of conservative calculations and mentally unstable overreactions. The Fun comes around when I get bored with the Fort's success and try to find ways to direct it to doing something nice. Like sacrificing things to the Quarry, the Moose pit or creating an underwater dome. Frivolous yes, but much Fun.
"Well Doctor, how's he doing?"
*doctor pulls out a chart, looks over it, realizes he can't read and tosses it over his shoulder*
'He's got some blisters.'
"Where?"
'Mostly everywhere, especially his lungs and eyes and brain.'
*they're both silent for a moment*
'Needless to say, this is not good.'
Sig'd, genuinely made me laugh. For the most part the doctors are highly competent, as they did manage to save Titanslayer Vabok and Champion Uvash from these kinds of diseases before. For this one... I'm not sure what's different. Maybe it's because the disease incubated and then struck suddenly, whereas the former two were struck immediately and immediately got care. Maybe the former two didn't suffer massive internal organ failure. Probably.
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Topic: Ravens are murder. [SPOILERS] (Read 169721 times)