The goblins finally remembered that they resent the fact that I plopped my fortress down right between several of their most important sites, and sent a small siege to burn the dwarves out. Unfortunately for them, they sent about 50 more-or-less unarmored goblins, brainwashed civilized people, and troll slaves to take on six fully steel-clad, dead-eyed veteran dwarven berserkers. Needless to say, this did not end well for the goblins. I can only hope they'll send better troops when they realize the full scope of the threat these dwarves represent to their brutal hegemony here in the frozen North.
The humans, apparently furious over the
murder of their last diplomat a few years ago, but too lazy to do anything about it until now, followed up by sending about twenty poorly-armored recruits mere days after the slaughter of the goblins. The gates to the fortress are an abattoir, and even the hardiest of haulers is continually horrified by the dead bodies they've been asked to dump down the magma chute.
On the civilian side of things, I've decided to take advantage of the dfhack tweak that fixes the bug that causes candy cloth to deteriorate like regular clothing. Now, a handful of dwarves are running around the fort in legendary clothing that will last them the rest of their lives, even if they live a very long time. I hope eventually to put the clothier, weaver and dyer out of a job (and let them retire young to lives of blissful hedonism).
The queen and her entourage arrived, and to my great pleasure,
none of them were vampires--I still haven't set up an appropriate punishment for the leeches I already have bricked up around the fort.
Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, the execution of a caged troglodyte unwedged the map's animal spawning, and my traps are now filled with elk birds and coyotes, which I plan to tame and immediately slaughter, and rutherers, which I intend to domesticate. I've also determined that to slaughter any creepy crawlers you have your trappers catch, you
cannot domesticate them. If you leave them wild, a butchery job will be queued automagically, but if you tame them there appears to be no way to mark them for slaughter, unlike every non-vermin creature. Oh, well.