started an island fort in a savage ocean to try and see if i could find any (slightly modded, for the sake of hopefully surviving on land) whale people. no luck on that so far (it hasn't been very long, we've only been here a little over a year). considered trying an arctic embark for the chance at some narwhals, but the place that felt most interesting to me was in a tropical ocean so that's not happening. kinda wondering if i didn't include enough ocean in the embark, since what i do have isn't especially deep (only a few z levels).
but i was talking to a friend of mine about the whole whale people quest and explaining how animal people work, and that got me thinking:
this is actually a fairly big island. big enough that there's actually a couple of other sites on the other side of it. two abandoned elven retreats. they're actually part of why i chose this island over an arctic retreat, i'm really curious about what happened over there. haven't sent anyone to investigate yet (been too busy taking care of other things to train up a proper military to deal with whatever killed those elves), but the world map says there's "no civilized population". part of me wants to check legends mode, but i'm holding myself back so i don't ruin the surprise. more fun this way.
but now i'm curious about something (that's probably extremely unlikely to actually happen, but we'll see).
i haven't found any caverns yet, but eventually i'll stumble into them. and when that happens, i'm likely gonna have to deal with some animal people. if i avoid them long enough (try and keep my dwarves out of sections of the cave i know they're likely to be and whatever else i can figure out to minimize unnecessary deaths), will murders eventually happen between the animal people?
and if so, is there a possibility that the exiled murderers might wander into my fort?
and if so, if i drive enough exiled murderers and/or tavern visitors onto the surface and away from my fort over many many years, will they eventually be able to stumble their way into those abandoned forest retreats, claim them as their own, and make an aboveground subterranean animal person civilization?
like. this probably isn't something that's ever gonna actually work. but i wanna know if it's feasibly possible. because it'd be neat (and sorta funny if they end up being cave swallows or bats).