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[Potato9999]

So in real life, it is possible to "milk" venomous creatures for their venom, the most common use of it being to turn it into antivenoms. While this is too far into the future for the DF setting, I suggest an alternate use for the venom in the game: Weaponize it.

Imagine if your dwarves could capture a giant cave spider and milk it's venom. Or create a controlled colony of smaller, but still deadly, snakes and spiders. The venom could be stored in barrels, and when an attacker comes, your marksdwarf would dip his crossbow bolt into the barrel and, with a single shot, take down a goblin.

This next suggestion is more sci-fi, but what if the venom could alternatively be boiled into a gas? Stored in glass canisters, the gas bombs would be flung out of catapults or dropped from the walls to wipe out groups of enemies.

[LMeire]

...
This next suggestion is more sci-fi, but what if the venom could alternatively be boiled into a gas? Stored in glass canisters, the gas bombs would be flung out of catapults or dropped from the walls to wipe out groups of enemies.

I like the idea of poisoning in general, but this part doesn't actually make any sense if we're still talking about snake or spider venom.

In most cases, the heat required to boil venom would just destroy the proteins in it and render the toxins inert. Now an aerosol could get it airborne, but even then, it would only be effective against enemies that already have an open wound somewhere because venom in particular doesn't work without direct contact with the target's bloodstream.

[Potato9999]

...
This next suggestion is more sci-fi, but what if the venom could alternatively be boiled into a gas? Stored in glass canisters, the gas bombs would be flung out of catapults or dropped from the walls to wipe out groups of enemies.

I like the idea of poisoning in general, but this part doesn't actually make any sense if we're still talking about snake or spider venom.

In most cases, the heat required to boil venom would just destroy the proteins in it and render the toxins inert. Now an aerosol could get it airborne, but even then, it would only be effective against enemies that already have an open wound somewhere because venom in particular doesn't work without direct contact with the target's bloodstream.

So it can't be made into an airborne form?

[cochramd]

Technically, you can do this already. Although there is no "poison ammo" task, you can get your bolts covered in poison if you set your mind to it. While implementing tasks to simplify the matter would be great, the military is a bit of a mess with bolts right now, so that'll have to wait a while.

[NJW2000]

Poisoned weps are even simpler, and as effective. But it's still a nightmare, AFAIK, to get stuff out of barrels and on the ground, though you just need to drop the weps in them once you do that. And make sure nobody touches them without a layer of protection.

[Sirbug]

We already have mechanics for gas spread (miasma). I hope one day we'll get poison gas traps - brewed in metal barrels, released on trigger.

Poison weapon is for invaders. It's hard for me to imagine situation where poisoning a goblin in combat with slow acting poison would not be redundant.

[LMeire]

...
This next suggestion is more sci-fi, but what if the venom could alternatively be boiled into a gas? Stored in glass canisters, the gas bombs would be flung out of catapults or dropped from the walls to wipe out groups of enemies.

I like the idea of poisoning in general, but this part doesn't actually make any sense if we're still talking about snake or spider venom.

In most cases, the heat required to boil venom would just destroy the proteins in it and render the toxins inert. Now an aerosol could get it airborne, but even then, it would only be effective against enemies that already have an open wound somewhere because venom in particular doesn't work without direct contact with the target's bloodstream.

So it can't be made into an airborne form?

Not by boiling animal venom, no, but I imagine some sort of air-pump assembly could use those glass bottles you were talking about to instead make poison-grenades with compressed air and a liquid/powdered toxin- that is- a primitive form of aerosol delivery. From there I'd go with a poisonous plant like Machineel, Aconite, or Christmas Rose; plant toxins like those tend to work fairly well with just skin contact.

[dwarffortressftw]

What if you could poison a river that crosses into an enemies territory (that also happens to be within your fortress), thereby killing the inhabitants? Another idea is to pull a Mongol and launch diseased creatures (possibly your own dwarves) into the enemy. Should the invaders return they will spread that disease throughout the city. The biggest issue I see there, though, is containment. Chances are, if you have a disease common enough to launch at the enemy (especially if it's an airborne disease), you probably don't have much of a Fortress anyway. Plus, enemies and friends alike would avoid you like the plague.

[cochramd]

We already have mechanics for gas spread (miasma). I hope one day we'll get poison gas traps - brewed in metal barrels, released on trigger.

Poison weapon is for invaders. It's hard for me to imagine situation where poisoning a goblin in combat with slow acting poison would not be redundant.

Depending on your choice of poison, I wouldn't call it redundant. Say you're using GCS venom; if it kills a goblin before the bolts do, then you've saved yourself some bolts. If the bolts end up killing the goblin, well, you've probably still saved some bolts because the venom caused paralysis, making the goblin easier to hit. If you're fighting something bigger than a goblin, then the poison is unlikely to kill them, but even partial paralysis should prove helpful in killing them. Now if you're using GDS venom, oh boy, every single one of your bolts is a death sentence. This might be overkill if you've got Legendary+5 Marksdwarfs using their masterwork or even artifact crossbows to fire masterwork steel bolts at copper-armored goblins, but it can make a big difference against any large buddies the goblins might bring along, as well as attacking semi-megabeasts, megabeasts, titans and forgotten beasts. And don't even get me started on hunting! It will never cease to astound me how many bone bolts some animals can absorb before they croak....

[LMeire]

So I looked up the history of chemical warfare on Wikipedia since the title mentioned chemical weapons but nobody's brought up any specific examples yet. I thought it was kind of overdue since one might expect a civilization that lives almost entirely underground with a collective distaste of nature to have more mineral poisons than not.

Some highlights that might work well in fort-mode:

• The Spartans burned a mixture of pitch and sulfur to suffocate Athenians during the Peloponnesian War; they did this in order to capture a city rather than defend it, but I think it'd work just as well if not better in the confined space of an underground entrance.
• Similarly, in the third century, the Sasanids used the smoke from burning asphalt to kill 20 Roman soldiers in ~2 minutes.
• The English navy apparently destroyed a French fleet by blinding the enemy sailors with quicklime in the 12th century.

Technically smoke traps are already a thing, but only because of the probable bug that keeps creatures from trying to escape smoke-filled tiles when the only way to do so is to move onto another smoke tile.

[Deboche]

I'm pretty sure poison will be implemented sooner or later since it's kinda already in the game and it's historically accurate to have poisoned weapons and handy poison vials for assassination.

What we should be discussing is how far this poison stuff should go. Paralysis, necrosis, hallucinations, rage induction, haitian style zombification, supernatural effects and so on.

Scopolamine might be too dark though.

[LMeire]

I'm pretty sure poison will be implemented sooner or later since it's kinda already in the game and it's historically accurate to have poisoned weapons and handy poison vials for assassination.

What we should be discussing is how far this poison stuff should go. Paralysis, necrosis, hallucinations, rage induction, haitian style zombification, supernatural effects and so on.

Scopolamine might be too dark though.

I'm confused, do you mean discuss what should be mechanically possible or just what should be allowed by default Dwarven ethics?

[Deboche]

Mechanically possible.

[LMeire]

Well from that list, hallucinogens seem like they'd be the most FPS taxing to simulate; unless it becomes possible to make attacks or dodges at/from nothing that would probably involve generating fake creatures that only the afflicted would perceive and react to. An AoE hallucinogen could get really laggy if every invader saw different visions from one another.

[Deboche]

Maybe there could be a chance for them to lie on the floor and space out, go berserk or panic or something. And for attacking stuff, they'd just treat any object as a threat, whether it's a wall, a rat, a tree or whatever, quixote-style.