So I've had real fun for the first time! Rather than abandoning a fortress due to losing interest, making a boring mistake or suffering FPS death, I've just watched a fortress I was still invested in destroy itself down to the last remaining dorf. Gather round, fellow urists, and let me tell you the anticlimatic, uninspiring demise of
Usith’ugog, Grim Bane, the tower of hubris.
It all started when a few dwarves back at the homeland, The Abbey of Permanence, started a movement to settle The Worthless Glacier, an aptly named frozen wasteland where the atmosphere itself was cursed with evil. Why? Those who understand dwarven culture already know the answer: because. They got the idea stuck in their busy, crafty minds, and that was it. They'd prepare carefully and, with much hard work and heavy industry, they’d extract a living from nothing but ice and earth. They’d fend off invaders from nearby lands and terrors from below, and then – these fanatics preached – eventually they’d prosper and thrive into a mighty new Dwarf Fortress, and finally they’d create a marvel to astound all races: a mighty white tower, reaching up to the skies with opulent noble rooms and libraries and temples and workshops – all built entirely of ice, and sustained by an underground magma-based metal industry. The Tower of Ice and Fire.
Grim Bane was the third expedition to The Worthless Glacier, and the first to have any measure of success.
The first attempt at building the settlement, bright-eyed with megalomaniac visions but quickly doomed, was
Usithzanos, Grim Hope. Within one season they were forced to give up and hurry back, after a tragic accident in which their miners, trying to engineer a way to pass through the icy-cold aquifer, succumbed to an unexpected flood and froze, left encased into the ice forever – along with their precious, irreplaceable copper picks, rendering further minework impossible.
The second expedition, who named their future fortress
Zêvuttarem, Dread Fate, did manage to breach through the aquifer safely, to carve themselves a place to live, and to survive long enough to increase the settlement into some fourty-strong heads. But life within ice is unforgiving, and any small mistake may bring about failure, disaster and shame. The dwarves were trying to solve a recurring problem: water from the well would freeze inside the buckets, making it impossible to treat those injuried from frequent encounters with the local yetis, up there in the cursed touch of horrifying evil mists. Trying to move the irrigation systems deeper underground, a single false move resulted in a fast leak with no hope of being plugged. The surviving dwarves abandoned the flooding frozen fortress in a resentful, humiliated hasty step.
The third fortress in the ice was Grim Bane, and it grew deep into the bowels of Earth, and it prospered. Three time’s the charm, as the elves say; what they don’t tell you is that the word “charm” originally meant “to trick into a harmful desire”…
Sure enough, Grim Bane too had its share of early difficulties. Beyond the ever-present yeti and the (now widely feared) business of handling water under ice, they also had to provide shelter and food for about a fifty refugees from Zêvuttarem, who huggled together in their simple linen tents there in the ghastly weather. After accommodations were provided for them, some
genius manager ordered the dwarves to deconstruct the linen pillars, not realizing the terrifying danger of horribly dangerous… linen ceilings… falling
right on one's head. A few lives were lost to this mistake (and a few arms and legs to the yetis), but at least the fortress got a seemingly endless supply of cloth material, with which it could make bags, with which they could store flour and seeds and sustain a healthy underground agricultural industry early on; master cooks turned its produce into much sought-after delicacies, traded with caravans (with great profit) for everything the land couldn't provide. The settlement grew and grew; this time they took a hell lot of care with the waterways, and their hydraulic engineering provided the civilization not only with irrigation and wellwater, but even with fancy waterfalls to delight the taverngoers and clean the injuried from infecting globs. The dwarves started exploring the underground caverns, solving once and for all the chronic lack of wood, and providing a place (albeit a fun one) for grazing livestock to grow large before slaughter; various redundant systems of drawbridges would seal the caverns safely, in case of a visit from something the military couldn't handle. A separate tunnel of descending ramps was carved directly into the rock, never touching the caverns, and reaching down to the magma sea below the world. Engravers carved the entire long winding way with minecart tracks, connecting a wealth of magma forges to a crafty magma chamber, down below, where iron carts could be dipped in and filled with the eternal fuel. The Land-Under-Ice was deceptively rich in minerals, providing large veins of magnetite, tetrahedrite, galena, native silver; and marble to flux magnetite iron into steel. The dwarves were ready to start phase 2 of the Great Tower project: the red-hot metal industry, supplying a strong military force with finely crafted heavy metal.
It was then that they met their doom… in the form of a single werechameleon.
The creature took a few dwarves unawares until the stopgap battleforce (still supplied with assorted caravan-bought equipment and who usually stayed nearer the underground caves) managed to reach the surface and make mincemeat of it. A few of the survivors were bound to be contaminated, the dwarves knew; but they assumed they could deal with that problem when the time came. That was a mistake.
The first couple of outbreaks were handled easily. A dwarven child turned and started killing merry taverngoers (many of them still refugees from Dread Fate); the military killed the child. An injured patient at the hospital murdered another, before the military killed him. So far there were no casualties in the squad itself.
The third outbreak was
messy. While the civilization busied itself polishing the gravitational physics and friction of the intricate, attention-intensive magma-loading system (now all but completed), a bunch of victims in the hospital all turned at the same time at the full moon. Dwarves passing nearby bravely tried to intervene, with the result that every single surface of the hospital ended up coated blood-red. The military killed all the lycanthropes, but not without losing a few soldiers this time. Realizing the situation was getting serious, the administration decided to leave the survivors and injured locked from now on – something they
definitely should have been doing from the beginning – as well as to kickstart a soap industry to help cleaning the mess and preventing sickness.
Down in the dark hallways leading to the ancient caverns, someone was murdered.
The military hurried to the scene, expecting more werechameleons to dispose of; but what they found was one of their own soldiers, uncursed, standing over the mutilated corpse of a fisherdwarf, the warrior's eyes red with berserk madness. As her former friends put her to eternal rest, a brawl started in the tavern, progressing into a mess of a fight.
By the time the administrators realized they were undergoing one of the dreaded dwarven tantrum spirals, it was too late. The lethargic government was still frantically trying to order the production of coffins and memorial slabs, to turn on the pretty waterfall system, to quarantine citizens in safe areas, but there was no one listening. In a seemingly blink of an eye, the settlement went from almost a hundred citizens to sixty, thirty, fifteen. Then they were six; all too injured or insane to do anything, except one. The last somewhat able mason crawled on his own blood through the stairwells, but he had to pass through one of the disabled berserkers; an insane wretch who could no longer move, but could still bite. The lat mason won the fight, but at the cost of his own mobility.
Grim Bane was now down to five incapacitated dwarves at various separate locations, all parched and starved; plus a number of surviving visitors who inexplicably decided to hang around in the carnage that was now the tavern hall, its air, once filled with local folk-music, now full of sickening miasma. Perhaps they saw no chance of surviving another journey through the ice; perhaps they wanted to stay near the food until the caravans came. At any rate, they did nothing to help, not even carrying the rotting corpses away. It wasn't
their fortress, so all of this was Somebody Else’s Problem: not my circus, not my monkeys.
The only thing that the moribund citizens could do was to hope against hope for new immigrants, who would tend to their wounds, clean the horrors, turn on the waterfalls and restore order and sanity. Lying in their pain, they watched time pass by, helpless.
That's when the Forgotten Beast came.
Githu (“Sin”, in the human language) was
a great tortoise with lidless eyes. Its blood was deadly venom, and with its huge leathery wings it could, impossibly and unstoppably, fly.
The dwarves laughed in their madness. The gods had evidently decided to make an example out of their hubris. The abomination flew through the natural areas of the caverns, where one of the survivors lay; Tekkud Boatswheel the ranger, author of
And He Sang 'Ruler!' and
It Must Have Been Dung, who had traveled so widely before settling in Grim Bane. Tekkud was still sane, even after having to kill her fellow ranger Zon Merchantgold after witnessing his murder of three innocents. As the monstrous turtle flew near, she feared the worst; but for unknowable reasons the underground horror seemed more interested in rushing to the dwarvenmade tunnels, where it promptly set to destroying doors. Tekkud had a glimmer of hope. Two more doors and the beast would break into a cavern waterway (originally built to flush a drowned body and various items from an underground lake); perhaps the monster would manage to flood everything and drown itself, and even in their deaths, the citizens would have the last laugh. But, no, she wasn't thinking straight: they had built the waterways too well. All water paths were sealed by rock-solid raising bridges, and not even this building-destroying monster could break through that. That was the entire idea, in fact. How ironic that, after losing two fortresses to floods, their long effort would ultimately fail due to the lack of one.
Then something strange happened. After smashing its first rock door into pieces, the monster went right by the waterway, touched the next door with its spindly antennæ, and… stopped. From that moment on, Sin did nothing else. It just stood there by the door, its blocky sienna-colored scales glistening moistly in the now uninhabited depths. Who knows what was going through its mind? As far as dwarvenkind can tell, it may be there to this day, still waiting for… something.
Time passed. One dwarf died of thirst, then another. The annual human caravan reached the site; like the dwarven visitors, they were utterly indifferent to the closing act of the ongoing tragedy. No migrants arrived. Tekkud was now the last surviving citizen of Grim Bane. She elected herself mayor-by-default, in a fit of irony.
A
second Forgotten Beast arrived then; this time it was a man made of charcoal, Dusak (“Mite”), who squirmed and fidgeted constantly. Tekkud didn't have even the strength to be darkly amused anymore. Like the turtle monster before him, this new bizarre lifeform showed no interest in a mere moribund dwarf, choosing instead to pass the time swimming in the lakes, and denying Tekkud the glory of a battle-death.
Realizing the dreamed immigrants would never come, Tekkud thought of using the last of her energy to take a chisel from her toolbelt and engrave a final testament to Grim Bane, as she heard so often told in dwarven tales of fallen fortresses. But even if she could use her arms properly, the dark grainy earth of the cavern floor, soft with deep growths of subterranean fungi, was no material for any sort of lasting engraving. She could do nothing. She lay on the ground not far from the livestock, and could see their animals huddling together to graze, safe from the butcher at last if not from cavern predators; with her throat parched, she could all but feel the airborne droplets of the nearby dark lake where the fisherdwarves used to bait cavern fish. These were the last things she saw as she quietly passed away, and with her Grim Bane, and the dreams of white towers in the frozen wastes.
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Topic: My first real fun experience. Glacier fortress didn't go as planned. (Read 1777 times)