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[Ward]

I am a fairly new player, and I still mostly explore the early to mid game without delving too deep into the late game. I get a nice military together, a nice tavern, a library, and at least a couple temples. I use a basic drawbridge to seal myself away from large threats unless I have the dwarves necessary to deal with it head on.

Anyway, I have recently started paying more attention to the justice tab. It has been my experience that the justice tab will essentially stay empty for the first few years of a fort, and then all of a sudden there are a few thefts or attempts. Interrogate a few visitors and dwarves and it doesn't take long for a pretty serious explosion of uncovered plots, aliases, and confused foreigners.

A recent fort that I have been lovingly caring for has a particularly impressive group of criminal organizations who have taken an interest in my artifacts. In the past, I have simply convicted any potential criminals, but this time I decided that I would interrogate the criminals first - and it led to a TON of plots being uncovered.

Thieves, agents, and bosses (some identified, many not) quickly filled my counterintelligence tab. I began making it a habit to question all visitors about their involvement of every unsolved crime and implication in my cold cases tab. This would then lead to even more organizations being uncovered with their own plots.

Most organizations seem to involve only three people. A 'thief,' A 'member,' and a 'boss,' who will often also share a name with the organization itself.

While a few only included a thief and a boss, there was one organization which included TWO thieves, a member, and a boss. In total, there were probably about 9 organizations that had plots relating to my fort (at least the ones that I found).

One notable criminal was an elven boss (or maybe a member) who was involved in a 165 year long coup attempt of my dwarven government, several theft plots, at least one assassination plot, a coup attempt of my site's local government, and (literally) over 100 aliases... Their interrogation report took up the entire screen, then some.

This got me wondering why it seemed that there were SO MANY rather small orgs rather than several larger ones. Is it uncommon for an organization to include more than one member and one boss?

I had a member of the guard corrupted, countless peasants, even some skilled laborers... EVEN THE OUTPOST LIASON ADMITTED TO EMBEZZLING...

Over the span of about 8 years, I would estimate that there were at least 30 plots (not including misconduct), 20 criminals (not including unidentified bosses) and, again, around 9 criminal organizations.

With my most complex org containing one boss and one member (and 2 thieves), I was wondering if anyone had any stories or explanations about how large orgs form, how they are often discovered, and what they get up to in fortress mode.

EDIT: I play legacy. not steam release.

[Zazmio]

It seems like the outpost liaison is always involved in some conspiracy.  They end up getting arrested by my sheriff a lot, and often for plots not involving my fort.

It's amazing the amount of effort that goes into plotting to steal your artifact cat leather left high boot, though, and how easily your craven dwarves are corrupted.

[Ward]

That's hilarious - for a while the liaison would be the ONLY person that I wouldn't interrogate because I figured someone in such a position would be immune to corruption... very funny how wrong I was.

I was really hoping someone would know something more about larger organizations with many actors, but very interesting nonetheless.

[Mobbstar]

Does every organisation have a different boss?  Can a member of one organisation be the boss of another?

[Ward]

It is my understanding that the 'boss' IS the organization. They are the primary schemer of the organization, and if the boss were to be named 'john,' then the organization title would also be 'john.' At least, I have only ever seen organizations that share their name with the boss. Unidentified bosses will lead unidentified organizations, for you do not know their identity yet due to features of the interrogation and justice system.

In this way, a boss who has multiple members is just that - one organization with multiple members.

I do not know if a member of one org can be a boss of another. Hopefully someone with more knowledge can tell us.

[therahedwig]

I was really hoping someone would know something more about larger organizations with many actors, but very interesting nonetheless.

From my time poking around in the legends, larger orgs definitely exist. It's however very tricky to get that data out of the interrogations, especially because a good chunk of the bosses you get cannot be interrogated themselves (because they aren't present). Doing some DFhackery on my current .47 fort, large part of the involved organizations are also just basically necromancers and their 10+ zombies that count as their assets, which might be a case of Fortress mode in particular mostly (or only) having 'steal artifact' plots getting executed, and perhaps only necros really care about artifacts that aren't theirs.

Adventurer mode allows you to go into towns and annoy people in the keep, but interrogating in adventurer mode is tricky and I haven't really figured out the precise skills (like, persuade and intimidate are obvious, but...).

I suppose someone could go and send out raids for artifacts that have nothing to do with the fortress to see if that gets anything but the whole region's intelligent zombie population to visit, but this might also all be a case of missing villains functionality.

[therahedwig]

Ok, I dug into adventurer mode a bit with a bunch of demigod adventurers who had all their points stuck into persuasion (a bunch, because if you put all points into persuasion you haven't got points into anything else, so a number of them met their ends on bandits and nightcreatures), and got you some images.

Spoiler: A lot of villains stuff that should prolly be spoilered a bit (click to show/hide)

The biggest I found is this one, a goblin soldier named Zolak Assaultcruelty, with about 15 people:


After that, this one, whose head is the local goblin crime lord Smunstu Cloutdooms who was really irritating to interrogate because he hangs out in the catacombs, and starts running through a bunch of rooms halfway through the interrogation, and catacombs are really annoying to navigate. It's about 9 people.


Finally there's this one, which I captured because it contains an assassin.


Now, here's the real kicker, Zolak, and the figure who hired the assassin, are both lieutenants of the Smunstu Cloutdooms. In fact, with a lua script to create a graphiz dot file, we get the following (I was hovering over zolak here, but I didn't capture my cursor, Cloutdooms is in the center, yellow is lieutenant, cyan is asset):



When you interrogate, and find a connection between two organizations, the UI will merge them. However, I cannot connect the lieutenants to the kingpin, because only 'reveal schemes and plots' reveals connections, 'who do you work for' does not right now (it's because there wasn't enough time). This is probably why interrogating intelligent undead doesn't do much as they can't really reveal for whom they work just yet.

Also interesting is that the lua script avoids noting down the connections where a dude is dead, because otherwise it'll very easily pull in all crime organizations in the whole world, which is particularly facilitated by assassins for hire (the assassin I found is also a thief-for-hire for two, three other crime orgs in differrent sites, they are somewhat invisibly in the top-left of the graph).

[Ward]

Ok, I dug into adventurer mode a bit with a bunch of demigod adventurers who had all their points stuck into persuasion (a bunch, because if you put all points into persuasion you haven't got points into anything else, so a number of them met their ends on bandits and nightcreatures), and got you some images.

Delightful to gain some insight into this - thanks so much for your detailed analysis. I really enjoyed seeing how large organizations can function. Very interesting to see a chain of command going boss -> member -> asset -> member -> thief.

Much appreciated.