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[Gwolfski]

>"Develop properly? Pretty sure we were just going to bury and/or burn them. And if whatever's in that box really is nasty, shouldn't we want it out of here? We've had plenty of eldritch mishaps in the last couple days, last thing i need is some demon snacking on the haulers - not that we have a lot of those left."

> It would've been a lot safwer, if I bought the box. I couldnt open it, so safe!

[chaotic skies]

<<1. Gwolf, you didn't even hear him. He sealed himself in his room hours ago, and you're nowhere near him. 2. I don't think you need explosives. You guys will probably anger Amp, and end up literally bringing the entire fort down on our heads. As in, OHMYGODTHEENTIREMOUNTAINJUSTCOLLAPSED level of destruction. Just sayin'.>>

[Amperzand]

[You may have me wrong, Fish. I have little objection to them dicking around with explosives. On the other hand, neither of them has any magic, so you could basically kill them with great ease. There is nothing stopping PvP combat being a thing, though there will be consequences for everybody involved, and if I see somebody's actions as being pointlessly disruptive and trolly, it will end badly for them.]

<<1. Gwolf, you didn't even hear him. He sealed himself in his room hours ago, and you're nowhere near him. 2. I don't think you need explosives. You guys will probably anger Amp, and end up literally bringing the entire fort down on our heads. As in, OHMYGODTHEENTIREMOUNTAINJUSTCOLLAPSED level of destruction. Just sayin'.>>

[Thank you, you seem to have the rules pretty well down. Of course, I won't kill everybody for one person's being trolly, I'll just kill them, in as reasonably a manner as I can find.]

[TheBiggerFish]

((It's an in-character objection.))

[Amperzand]

[I think I may have misunderstood who said what. :V Get avatars, y'all.]

[Regardless, I feel there is something I can make clear. All the stuff I directly prevent people doing, I don't think they're actually capable of doing. I may suggest that something not be done if it's likely to end badly, but I won't prevent anybody doing things if they're actually capable of them. It won't necessarily work remotely like they wanted it to, but if people want to mess around with high-explosives sans all training, there's no reason for me to stop them.]

[chaotic skies]

<<I'll stop them though. I would rather not having untrained people messing around with explosives. Especially since those people don't exactly have a good track record with dangeroius things.>>

[Amperzand]

[Fine by me.]

Gwolfski and Chaotic Skies begin preparing for a major construction project by the river, doing much of the fabrication themselves for a lack of workers.

A deal is struck with the merchants, with them giving the fortress most of their stock, and a pair of the guards agreeing to carry messages to the Mountainhome from the survivors, eager to ask for help or contact families with news. But what will they be paid in? Some of the cost was absorbed by small crafts made in free time, and a discount was secured by sending a decorated musket as a gift to their king, but there is still a reasonable deficit in need of solution.

Spoiler: Murdoc (click to show/hide)

"That many corpses, all filled with nastiness and left to fester for days? I'm not sure you'd have an easy time burning them. As for the box, I assure you it does not contain a demon."

[TheBiggerFish]

Take an inventory.  If all else fails, get a small diamond.  Like, actually small.

[Amperzand]

The fortress has preserved food for five months, though salted meat and dried mushrooms will go poorly for already plummeting morale, booze for four months given losses during the battle for incendiaries, cisterns containing clean water for eleven months, and indefinite supplies of water in the caverns, their purity uncertain.

The ammunition stockpiles contain two thousand loads of ball and musket powder, also useable for the revolvers with differently sized shot, four hundred cannon charges, fifty shells for the three howitzers, one hundred and fifty shells for the two repeating 25mm guns, six hundred rounds for the six remaining rattlers, two hundred fifty for the leverguns, a hundred rifle cartridges and a mixed supply of three hundred-odd rounds for the stubguns, mostly flares.

There is armor, steel and leather, for fifty dwarves, with twenty shields of reinforced wood, ten mining picks, and about seventy steel melee weapons, mixed among swords and axes. There are thirty-five muskets, six submachine guns, all in need of repair, seven lever guns, in similar condition, twenty revolvers, twenty-five stubguns, since they were mass-produced for their simplicity and necessity for cavern scouting, two sharpshooters' rifles, eight cannons, three howitzers out of four, since one partially exploded after a lingering fire in the battle, and two repeating 25mils. Additionally, about two hundred kilograms of dynamite, in sticks of a half-kilo.

The fortress itself has some six hundred bars of iron, a hundred of fully processed steel, three hundred lead, a hundred-fifty copper, sixty silver, ten gold, fifty of various minor materials, sixty tonnes of charcoal, and about a thousand logs, mostly cavern fungiwood.

The merchants brought small jars of many spices, adding up to about ten kilos, a chest of medicine, ten barrels of foreign liquor, five bars of tungsten, two of platinum, one each of titanium and aluminium, a small chest of rare gems, two entire Nether-Caps processed into mobile form, a masterwork sword as-yet unpurchased, and the enchanted box.

[I probably won't be making a running tally, this was rather a one-time deal. If popular demand is a thing, I might actually do something long term and implement a real resource system, but I'd rather not.]

[TheBiggerFish]

Hmmmmm.  Maybe we could sell them some food.
How's our capacity for regaining food supplies?  Or do we need to work miracles?

[Amperzand]

The four subterranean fields, built and fertilized with cavern vegetation and sewage, grow slowly indeed, and had been planted in a cycle before the siege. The next harvest will be in two months, provided they continue to be tended adequately. The dwarfpower shortage makes that difficult, but a migrant caravan is due in roughly a month, per the last message from the Mountainhome. The aboveground gardens, built in the same manner but planted with sun-loving growths, provided, alongside a small pasture, much of the fresher food, and were destroyed in the fighting.

Additionally, to clarify the dwarfpower situation, there are twenty-five local dwarves alive, ten of them incapacitated, plus the Homelanders.

[Chevaleresse]

>Sell them a couple spare guns and accompanying ammo - they'll probably fetch a fair price and we'll be trying to manufacture something better in the meantime anyway. Half of the gold can probably go too, same for the silver - I doubt we'll actually be needing much of either. Offer a small portion of our steel and a somewhat larger portion of our iron if that isn't enough.

As far as what else they have, we can skip on the rare metals and gems entirely unless Fish needs them for something. (I'm not exactly a metallurgist, but I doubt we have any actual use for tungsten at the moment given the amount of effort it would take to actually work with it, same for titanium. Aluminum might have more use, but is needlessly expensive for said uses. Platinum is just heavy and pretty, and if we need it for some sort of primitive electronics we have gold already.) The masterwork sword is also probably not worth the price. The medicine chest and the other chest are both things we want, and the liquor and spices will be good for fortress morale. I'm on the fence about the nether-caps; I feel like nether-cap is probably magical to some degree and that we might be able to come up with some usage for a live one but nothing comes to mind.

So yeah, I return to the caravan and negotiate this out. Also, if I actually know them (do I?), I suggest that Fish and the rune mages work together to make some sort of healing device. If runes modify physical properties, they can fix a dwarf, right?

[TheBiggerFish]

Indeed, a better Healing Canteen Enchantment is a good idea.

How are our own gem stocks?  Becaise we might actually need some of the gems, though diamonds go well for everything.

[Amperzand]

The fortress has a very small supply of gems, mostly semiprecious, and not counting the immense pile of diamond in the basement.

[I'm assuming all the PCs know one another to some degree, basically because you're the only people in the fort more than a generation removed from medieval dirt-farmers, and have months and months with almost no sources of entertainment to encourage interaction.  Platinum does have some quite interesting uses in rocketry and similar advanced fields, and you can cut the tungsten into shape with diamond-edged blades. Aluminum and titanium are, indeed, fairly useless in such small quantities. The Nether Caps are probably dead, though you might be able to pull off some shenanigans with planting spores.]

[Gwolfski]

Look around for architecture books and physics books. Refine steam engines, get parts for more.and 'tidy up' some of the diamonds.

"If I want a nice underground palace on the caves, I'd better make sure it ain't gonna fall on my head randomly. Or when Porkins has an accident with his explosives."

"Oh , the pile of diamonds. Might stash some for a rainy day. I'll just take an unnoticeable amount and make sure no one sees me, or Fish will probably will go ballistic again."