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[RandAnima]

I decided to boot up some good old Masterwork DF.  I decide to go with humans, make a Garden of Gaia world.  100 years old, nothing special.  I pull up the legends to get a feel for the world.  I've poked around legends before, found them amusing but puzzling and incomplete.  I didn't know how to use the DF legend mode and the legend viewer in tandem to paint a full picture before this unassuming world.  One tiny anomoly caught my attention and next thing I know I'm deep down the rabbit hole.



Huh, I think.  Those Goblins have really thrived on this world.  At 10,905, they have double the population of their nearest competitor, the Pandashi.  They outnumber the Humans four to one.  'What is the secret to their success?' I ask myself.  I check out the largest Goblin civ, The Hell of Crying.  And I think I found a clue.  Their ruler is, and has always been, Omrist Grizzlyterror the lizard fiend.



He rode up to our plane on some crazy slade elevator, which he named The Feral Bastions, from the underworld and immediately calls dibs on the local goblins.  He crafts a mica slab and calls it The Throne of Rapidity (I'll say).  He partnered up with a...kobold goddess, The Remarkable Yell (she cried more, more, more.  I am terribly sorry.) to use the slab in a powerful ritual that bound Omrist to our plane. 



The goddess represents fortresses and wars.  Her stated goal was to drive the construction of great forts and test them with a state of eternal siege.  The Thrones of Rapidity is then sealed in The Feral Bastions, in the heart of Scourplagues, the heart of Omrist's coming empire.

I'm hooked.  This guy fascinates me.  I can't even say why, really.  I mean, this is pretty standard DF stuff, right?  Is it though?  This guy just seems wierder the more I dig.  Like the fact that this puissant lizard fiend, ruler of the largest goblin empire ever assembled, seems to have exactly one kill to his name.



I dug, that pandashi is nothing special.  He was kidnapped at age five, apparently worked for his captors for five year, until Omrist murdered him.  His family is nothing special, their civs were not at war.  There are pandashi citizens in The Hell of Crying, so it's not a racist thing I guess?  I wonder if he tried to escape, or rebel.  He must have done SOMETHING to be to only kill of someone who should by all rights be a serial genocider.

I just noticed that The Hell of Crying worships no gods.  That makes sense.

Next I look into enemies Omrist and his crying horde have made.  I had this idea that they could be potential allies in a war that's bound to find me eventually.  Nope.  You see, no one can stand Omrist Grizzlyterrors.  Beings my citizens would live in terror of (if I didn't have the habit of finding them more immediate things to fear) have decided that Omrist is just a asshole.  My favorites, in order of being declared an enemy:

Year 1:  Ethithi Achedkeepers the Urns of Mist, a blizzard incarnate.  Just, whoa.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

At this point, Scourgeplagues throw three parades in a row, because.

Year 3:  The quilbeast(?) Chuckedauthored.  I like this guy because he almost sounds like a Supernatural reference.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

         The sphinx The Poetic Poet.  Gotta love his playful use of language.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Year 4:  The zombie quetzacoatl Aroz Galleyspawns the Grand Saturninty of Bandits.  All the what's.  All of 'em.  Aroz in goddess of everything, and has nine pages of enemies because noone likes a greedy goddess.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

At this point The Hell of Crying declares war on The Sword of Rights, and lots of people decide they don't much like that.  A couple stand out.

Year 5:  The vile plague wraith Sedj Tuggednourish the Mean Snarl.  See, this is what I'm saying.  This guy is comfortable introducing himself as a VILE PLAGUE WRAITH.  But he isn't putting up with Omrist's shit.  Sedj also tries to catch all the spheres but noone holds it against him because he's dead.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In fact, all of Omrist's enemies aside from Aroz the zombicoatl are dead, and the argument could be made that she doesn't count.  The list of enemies goes on, but they all have two things in common.  They are all dead, and neither Omrist nor his subjects were the killers.  Coincidence?  Dare I hope that I can ever find out?

And that, baywatchers, is how I lost an entire afternoon because I thought to myself, "I wonder why there are so many goblins?"  I've been wanting to do a story fort for awhile, and I think I'd like to give this world a try.  But first there are more rabbit holes to become wedged in because I am neither rabbit sized nor shaped.  I'm going to keep exploring, see if I can make any kind of sense of anything, and then find a place to embark and a story and perhaps game play reason to do so.  I wonder what the other goblin civs are like?

[RandAnima]

Hello again.  I forgot to mention a couple curious things about Omrist and his horde of Hell Criers.  They may become relevent, as they represent outstanding mysteries that still surround the fiend.

First, they have been at war with a kobold 'civilization' for sixty-six years.  How?  The Hell of Crying destroyed a warwolf nation in seven years.  In seven years of that war and the sixty-six years fighting the kobolds, Omrist has never lost a battle, nor lost a single soldier.  He has also...not killed a single kobold?  Well, obviously he hasn't killed any, he's only killed a young pandashi FOR REASONS THAT WILL FOREVER HAUNT ME.  What I mean is that in a series of nine battles through which they claimed three enemy sites, the goblin hordes have killed zero kobolds.  Brah, do you even demon?



Second, though historical records show no sign of Omrist ever engaging in any kind of non-panda combat, he's nonetheless picked up some impressive skills.  When?  Did he just slap Neba that hard?



Okay, this guy puzzles me, something isn't clicking.  Let's move along.  There is another strong goblin nation in the same area of the world.  The large nightmare hosts 3,000 greenskins to The Hell of Crying's 5,000.

The Large Nightmare:                                  The Hell of Crying:

                     

Let's take a look at their leader.



A cavy demon.  Huh.  Well, at least it seems appropriately demonic in its behavior.  It's waged a solid century of war with three different civs, there have been terrible losses on all sides, but she is almost always victorious.  This is apparently what she was charged to do by her corporeal sponsor, Torish.



That's odd.  Inferno went to war with the very civilization that reveres their benefactor.

And that's when it clicks.  Omrist and his long, bloodless war.  Why has he not crushed The Mirthful Spicy Blight after sixty-six years, given that he could wipe them off the map any time he wanted?  That's not what he wants.  That's not what he's FOR.  The Remarkable Yell charged him to create the need for grand fortresses and to test them.  At first he seems distracted, and goes after the local warwolves.  I wasn't sure why.  Were they just in the way?  Was it a means to test and refine his troops?  As it turns out, they were just clashing with his depravity.



So, after this, he gives The Mirthful Spicy Blight twenty-three years of peace.  Then he leads his vast army and takes three of the kobold's four settlements.  Then he leaves them alone for six years, as they recover, train, and prepare their defenses.  He assaults, and this dance repeats for sixty-six years.  He's forced The Reckless Yell's chosen people into one great camp and continues to try them and spur them on to greater heights.  And the whole time, no goblin or kobold soldiers are lost.  He never raises a hand.

I'm onto something here.  I'm close.

What about his combat skills?  Where did he learn to fight?  All I can say with any degree of surety is that it wasn't in this world.

Is...is Omrist Grizzlyterror a good guy?  Hear me out.

I don't know what he had to do to get to the top of the underworld heap, earning his shot to ascend to the material plane.  We can only guess that it involved plenty of combat and a lot of observing.  So he wins, and rides his hellish wonkavator to the Garden of Gaia.  To stay here he must accept a pact with a local god.  He sets to it with determination and skill, but also with an absolute minimum of blood shed.  Did you notice that he's an expert pacifier?  He's tired of war.  I wondered why his kingdom was so populous.  Is it because he has worked to keep them safe even as they indulge their penchant for plunder?  Has he cared for them, shepherded them, channeled their violence toward the goal that keeps him here?

I don't know, but here's what I think.  Omrist has retired.  He's tired and over the whole thing.  He even named his new kingdom 'The Hell of Crying.'  He finally claws his bloody way from hell to here, and what is the first thing that happens?  A kobold goddess requires that he carry on warring or face...what?  I wonder what happens if a bound demon dies.  Does he return to the underworld to await the next worldgen?  Does he end?  I wonder which Omrist would prefer.  He almost seems to be doing the bare minimum to honor his pact.  Is he lazy?  Noble?  Simply insufficiently evil?  I think at the very least, he's a bit more Miltonian, a touch more tragic than your average fiend.

Okay, one last goblin civ.  The Dreamy Thief (lolwut).  This, the smallest goblin nation with a bare 1400 citizens, breaks the trend by NOT having a demonic ruler.  Though they did at first.



"She was a gecko monster.  He was one of the only ones of his kind."  Sounds like a tagline to a possibly watchable Ben Afleck rom-com.  Then I notice that (S)he is associated with lust, trickery and lies.  Oho.  I see what you did there RNG.  Then he, which is to say She, was killed by a bronze colossus.  So being bound permanently to this world is not the same as becoming immortal.  All She was charged with was to lie.  Did he not do that?  She IS the god of lies.  Was, rather.

Then something historic happened.  In the year 5, a goblin was crowned queen of a goblin nation.  For five minutes (may not have actually been five minutes).




She is promptly replaced by 'a insatiable greed.'  Wow.  This is amazing.  Picture it.

:  "The King is dead!  Long live the king!"

[An ABSTRACT CONCEPT enters stage right, slaying BAX through unclear means.]

:  "M-M-MONSTER KILL!  I am your new queen.  Any questions?"

:  "Ah gots one!  Are you, like, a thing, or what?"

:  "That was rhetorical."

:  "Seriously, though.  What do you look like?  I'mma have a tuff time 'graving you on ANYTHING."

Welp, that's it for now.  Tune in next time when I fixate on something inane and analyze it into complete nonsense.  I may be giving the pandashi a day in the spotlight next time, though I haven't decided.  Something tells me it won't solve the murder of Neba.

[bloop_bleep]

Amazing storytelling. Keep it up.

[RandAnima]

Thanks
I intend to. A note on the humans, before I continue to ignore them in favor of the appendices. There are 2,500 humans in the world. About 1,400 form the only human Civ. The rest are slaves to the goblins. Goblins RULE this world.  The rest of the races have survived by staying out of the south west quadrant, mostly avoiding wars with them. It'll make for an interesting fort.

[Liber celi]

This is cool. I imagine the goblins and the kobolds engaging in ritual maneuvers with coup sticks and referees. All overseen by their benevolent-sinister non-lethally militaristic satan figure.

What happened to She? Is it a spoiler?

[RandAnima]

Excellent question!  Not a spoiler, here is She's story.



Basically a Bronze titan showed up and just started ganking goblins.  She was killed.  The colossus wandered off and the site was claimed by a sentient blizzard.  Later the Hell of Crying showed up, drove the angry weather pattern out and reclaimed it.

[RandAnima]

Well hello.  You're just in time.  I'm going to solve a nineteen year old murder.  Well, not solve it.  It's been solved pretty much since it happened.



Says right there, murdered.  Open and shut case.  Of course the defendent is the ruler of one quarter of the world, so jury selection is going to be tricky at best.  What I want to know is FOR THE LOVE OF ARMOK WHY?  Remember that after chest bursting his way up from hell, he went 81 one years without fighting a single thing.  When a sky dragon destroyed one of his towns and took it for her lair, he didn't send an army or march himself to meet the foe.  It just sorta mysteriously died about a decade later, and they reclaimed.



Same story with a titan that same year.  Point is that strangely enough, we're not talking about a violent guy.  So why did he kill a young slave who didn't even qualify as notable?  To solve this mystery we'll need to understand Neba Kindscarlet.  To do that we'll need to understand the pandashi of The Golden Medallion. 

They are a fairly strong nation, right up with the human's 1,400 citizens.  They have twenty settlements, which is higher than any of the goblin nations.  They've also lost fourteen to furies, raptor men, and the goblins of The Large Nightmare.  They tend to lose a lot.  All the time, in fact.  They have managed to rule themselves, mostly.  Nine out of ten ruler were pandashi.  The exception was empress number seven.



As far as I can tell, Valo had no home before Beardedpeaceful.  Her name is pandashi, and there are about nine other pandas with the same name.  She may have been an imposter?  And if I'm reading this correctly, she became empress by stealing the crown.  That's amazing.  She died fighting a titan, too.

Interestingly, she was queen when Neba was abducted.  Neba was abducted at age five.  His family had founded Summerbodice.  As I find him in the legends now, I may have a small clue.



Could it really be that simple?  He became a citizen, apparently, and then a bard.  Then, because he was a brand new bard he sucked at it so Omrist snaps?  Did she speak truth to power?  I can't make that fit somehow.

So I dig deeper, and things get really baffling.



Seems they had quite the influx of acclimated abducties.  Neba had been a slave for five years prior to this.  I assume the rest were taken the same time as her.  So they all get jobs and maybe even beds and then this.



That's the very next thing that happened.  For real.  Note again it is specifically 'murder.'  This was not a slave revolt.  There are not notes of any injury.  It appears that each of these nine slaves was one-shotted by a surprisingly diverse crew, including Omrist.  What. On. Earth.

One line down it becomes clearer.



The murders were ritual.  I can find no record of The Named Labor anywhere.  It is not under books or artifacts or anything.  Omrist broke his good guy streak to help craft something so dark it is hidden from the very code of the universe it is running in.

So I solved the mystery.  Yay?

[auzewasright]

Copy the save, go to adventure mode, and try to find this book.

[NJW2000]

Ptw.

[Kametec_Housen]

How did you figure out that the murders were a ritual?

[RandAnima]

I'm not completely sure that they are. It's just how it looks when nine murders are committed in unison. It makes a cool story this way, and it's all I can think of to explain the deed, so I'm rolling with it.

Auzewasright, that was my first thought as well.

[RandAnima]

This is cool. I imagine the goblins and the kobolds engaging in ritual maneuvers with coup sticks and referees. All overseen by their benevolent-sinister non-lethally militaristic satan figure.

That's hilarious and almost exactly how I pictured it.

[RandAnima]

Hello!  I didn't see you there.  Still don't, but that's beside the point.  Today I want to take a look at the humans that I'll be playing; The Splattered Confederations.



We are situated quite near to the Hell of Crying's lands, there's even a bit of over-lap.

We were ruled by a human queen for less than a year.  Since then we've had a sky giant for our monarchy.  Curiously the coup was bloodless and Queen Mobmu led a full life.  She even wrote a series of books, and became countess of The Stable Society.



Also, yes.  The human capitol is named Nuditypiss.  The humans named it that, as Queen Simem hadn't arrived yet.  As for the books they appear to be essays in a larger volume and I cannot find what that might be called. 

She was countess of a town called Burialcraters, home-sweet-home to the 27 vampire citizens of the human nation.  All of them in one town.  Named Burialcraters.  Kind of odd.  The town's records contain their fair share of thefts and violence, but mostly it's an endless series of festivals.



They've been partying nonstop ever since.  Seriously, a half dozen festivals a year every year to the current date.  It's like Rio but with more vampires, or so one would assume.

Well that was fun, but let's check out Queen Simem Spikesivy.



That's a lotta spheres!  They're also pretty balanced toward the 'positive.'  I keep reading and find that while we are ruled by a sky giant, we haven't noticed.



It's a good thing she has power over lies, because when you're fifty feet tall and have been ruling longer than the human life span, it's kind of a hard sell. Oh, wait.  We don't think she's a human at all.  We think that she's Uda the Mellow Plate.



So it's kind of neat for the Splattered Confederacies, believing that we are being ruled by a benevolent goddess. That explains why Queen Mobmu gave up her throne.  Not that it's a good idea to refuse to abdicate to a giant, but it's hard to argue that you have a divine mandate to rule with actual (not actually) divinity.

All in all, a pretty neat civ.  I think I'm ready to start maybe actually playing the game.  If this chapter didn't feel as 'entertaining' to you as the previous ones, sorry.  I probably haven't uncovered an appreciable fraction of the oddities in this world, but I have satisfied my curiosity.

So my plan is to embark nearish The Hell of Crying's capitol, Scourplagues.  I think the humans should try to make peace with them.  Goblins rule this world, and Omrist's kingdom is the strongest and maybe a little less evil than the rest.

I haven't decided what direction to take the fort in.  Succession may be fun if there's an interest in that.  I'll definitely accept dorfing (I mean huming.  Dwarves didn't make it through worldgen) requests and reader suggestions.  I'll also dip into legends periodically as we encounter more history in the narrative.

I'll be starting up fortress mode within the next few hours.  In the mean time, if there are any suggestions as to biomes or embark preparations you would enjoy seeing feel free to pipe up.

Cheers! 

[bloop_bleep]

So this giant just came by and convinced the civ that it was their goddess? Now that's some quality liecrafting right there.

[Glass]

Well, Simem is associated with (amongst fucking everything else...) birth, family, pregnancy, and marriage, just like the god, so...
Who wants to bet that Simem is Uda?