I think I might have just had my first instance of !!fun!!. I've played this game for two years, but I'd never really gotten the fun of having a fortress destroyed. I think I finally have though. So, here's the story of the first time I really had !!fun!! in this game.
I'll start with some backstory. I decided to try and download genesis for 0.34.11 because that was the first version I played and genesis was the first mod I tried, and I was feeling like it would be nice to go back to when you could easily get regular sieges. At the time of writing the date in the world is the 17th of Opal, 155 with a fortress founded in Spring of 151. I tried a few different thing with this fortress like making the main hallway 4 tiles wide rather than 2, but aside from that it was pretty normal. I guess I also got way too many moss dwarves, probably half my fortress was moss dwarves despite them definitely not being half the population ratios. Anyway, I ended up sealing the fortress off from the surface a lot, and decided to do it pretty much permanently probably sometime in 154 because there were just so many ambushes and I only had two soldiers armed with wooden weapons. I believe at the time of sealing I had 16 dwarves (I stopped getting migrants very quickly on this despite the population cap being 40) left which quickly dropped down to 13 from random cavern creatures wandering in, so I walled that off as my mechanic was one of those three that died before she was able to link the cavern entrance bridge to a lever.
By now you're probably wondering about this Bembul I titled the thread after. Well Bembul was a domple dwarf migrant I had gotten (for those unfamiliar with Genesis, domple dwarves learn most skills at 11% speed with a few slightly higher, but none above 50%). Initially I just decided he would be a hauler or lever puller when necessary, but at some point after the fortress lockdown I looked at his relationships profile carefully and noticed that he had been married to the earlier mentioned mechanic, and that his only daughter had died at some point in the fortress as well. I then noticed that he liked adamantine. This made me consider making him a weaponsmith, but out of respect for what happened to him, and his nice personality traits I decided I'd give him a more prestigious (in my forts at least) profession: engraver. He got to work smoothing my top floors immediately, and quite contently considering his only happy thought was being satisfied at work.
Overall my fortress was slowly declining. I had managed to stabilize, and while I had a large supply of alcohol, water, and food, my only continued source of food would be some forest cats that bred out of control due to lack of a butcher early on. Both my mason and carpenter died in the last of the attacks from the caverns so I wasn't really doing much other than mining, smelting, and cooking. I played idly for a while assigning ores for my miner to mine that were just visible from the caverns, yet not piercing them so to keep my fortress safe. I accidentally opened it up at one point, but was able to block it up before anything noticed. Pretty soon I had a massive labyrinth mine snaking all around the caverns, going up and down, with ores everywhere. I found several large veins of gold and was designating new mining locations constantly. Eventually I decided to take a break to do a few things but leave the fortress running as there was enough work queud up and I doubted anything significant would happen that wouldn't pause the game. I was wrong.
After maybe 30 minutes of not paying attention to the game I come back to a paused screen with the message "Tekkud Likotvutok, hammer lord has gone berserk!" I was incredibly confused as to how this had happened. I started looking around to realize that my fortress was down to just six dwarves: Lolor the miner, Tosid the woodcutter now expedition leader, Urist the butcher, Tosid the militia commander, Tekkud the doctor, and Bembul the peasant. Looking through the reports it seemed that a forgotten beast had attacked and killed most of the fortress, I couldn't figure out what had happened to it though. I found Lolor in the hospital resting, Tosid in the barracks training, Urist burying corpses, both Tekkuds in the dining hall, the other Tosid taking a break in the kitchen, and Bembul engraving away in the kitchen. I ordered the militia Tosid to kill the now berserk hammerdwarf Tekkud, and as he quickly ran to the dining hall I saw that his listed task was "spar". I found it fitting that that bug would trigger now as the two dwarves who had been training together for 4-5 years were about to fight. Before Tosid arrived however berserk Tekkud quickly killed doctor Tekkud. When Tosid arrived the fight ended quickly and I checked the reports to see what happened. The reports first showed some old sparring reports of Tekkud repeatedly striking Tosid, with all Tosid being able to do was block the attacks. Then Tekkud charged Tosid, they were in the dining hall fighting. Tekkud was repeatedly striking Tosid, with all he was able to do was block or reflect. Even though his hammer was just wood Tekkud still broke bones quite quickly with it, and almost immediately Tosid's left hand broke, and his axe fell. It was just four more hits until Tosid was unconscious, and just one hit until he was dead.
While Tekkud and Tosid were fighting, most other dwarves continued as they were, except for the expedition leader Tosid who kept running into the dining hall then running back into the kitchen upon seeing Tekkud. I took this time to investigate what had happened further. It seemed that there had been three forgotten beast attacks, not just one. The first fought with a cook, a child, and a baby and managed to kill the child before doctor Tekkud found it and just punched it apart because it was made of water and just tapping it would break it. The second was much more dangerous, however its first fight was against the miner who was able to wound it decently well due to legendary skills with his copper pickaxe. Somehow the miner got away and to the hospital, and the beast later horrifcally maimed another child, as well as injure the expedition leader a good bit. However eventually the furnace operator started fighting and killed the beast in 9 hits without letting it get in 1 on her.
The third beast however, was far more dangerous. A great eyeless frog. It has a round shell and it has a bloated body. Its scarlet skin is leathery. Beware its poisonous bite! It quickly killed the cook, then went on to maim and poison a baby and child. It also fought the expedition leader (a bone/leathercrafter at the time) for a while before ripping off enough limbs for them to bleed to death. It then maimed another child, as well as the furnace operator and her child. Unlike the others however, nobody showed up to punch this one five times and kill it. I then decide to investiage what Urist the butcher had been doing. I watch him haul body parts from the tunnel to the caverns back up into the cemetary. However, I soon notice that the forgotten beast was sitting in the the bedroom floor, distracted with its destruction of all the exceptional statues in the hallways.
I noticed a lot of combat reports show up in the main messages, and quickly went up to find Tosid the woodcutter/expedition leader fighting berserk Tekkud surrounded by dying cats. I saw one of them die and quickly checked the reports to not spoil the result. The hammer lord might have had legendary skills, but they only had a wooden hammer, and had for some reason traded their masterwork wooden shield for a standard sun gold one. Tosid however had a copper handaxe and 5 points in axe skill that I had given her on embark in case of emergency, though I had never imagined the emergency would be this. I wasn't sure who was going to win going into it. The first page was mainly Tosid landing good hits onto Tekkud, her axe tearing his hand muscles, quickly dropping his shield, then soon after his hammer Mekurgidur, and being deflected by his scorpion chitin robe. Tekkud got a few hits in, mainly biting Tosid's left lower arm and fracturing the bone. However, the next page started with Tosid breaking Tekkud's foot, while all the hammer lord could do was bite. He got some good bites in, but Tekkud's attacks were outnumbered 3 to 1, and by the end of the second page Tosid had managed to bleed Tekkud to death.
Despite winning a difficult battle against a great foe, Tosid was not happy. She lay over Tekkud's dead body crying for several minutes. The chief medical dwarf had been her lover, who she had seen killed before her very eyes. She was thirsty, her clothes were old, she didn't have a proper bedroom, there were ghosts all over the place, and she had just lost several friends to tragedy. Elsewhere in the fortress Urist started bringing the cats back into the kitchen in case any rodents showed up, Lolor continued to rest on his broken left elbow, and Bembul was still in the kitchen, doing his job. He didn't have a proper room, he had to sleep on a rough cave floor, he was being haunted by several ghosts, but he was satisfied with his work so he was content.
Eventually Tosid gathered the strength to move, but she was still miserable. She was rescued by Urist and brought back to the barracks' one bed to rest. Meanwhile Lolor the miner was starving and dehydrating to death, and Urist was watching his friends' bodies decay while being haunted by his own child.
So for now this is where our story is. Only four dwarves left, two with broken bones, three are completely miserable, and the only one that isn't is a domple dwarf engraver. I'm open to suggestions on what to do and comments on the story, sorry it's so long it's just as I was playing I could see all this happening and imagine the story unfold. To me that was the real fun. Imagining Tekkud and Tosid sparring in a barracks, then suddenly fighting in a dining hall, imagining the chief medical dwarf saving children from a forgotten beast, imagining Tosid standing over the bodies of two Tekkuds in shock. I felt I had to tell it this way. I could provide a few screenshots later, but for now this took 2 hours to write and it's 12 AM so I should be asleep.
Oh! As for why I named it after Bembul, I just really liked Bembul, how he's the only one still doing his job even though he has trouble learning it, how he has so many bad things happen to him but is content with just doing good work. Also I realized after writing that Urist was a legendary crutch user the whole time and is still using one, so maybe that makes him a bit more interesting.
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Topic: The Story of Bembul Sibrekzoz (Read 1054 times)