Let me start this post like so many other people rightfully have: this game is brilliant!
I was playing my third fortress last night (first one starved to death, second one was reduced to almost nothing by a bear), and things were going ok. I had some farming going on, Erib the ex-mason turned trapper, and he was quite proficient at it, legendary wrestler and adept ambusher, he ventured out into the woods and wrestled deer! I had even built a bridge over the mountain river, and dug so far east that I reached a chasm. The only setback was that one of my marksdwarves had been badly injured by a snakeman, and was lying on his bed, throwing tantrums every now and then.
But then, strange things happened. At one point I scrolled over to his room to see how he was doing and... the room was covered with blood, and he was lying dead in his bed. I looked at the message buffer, and saw that I had missed a message about him going berserk, but I thought "Berserk? And attacked himself? Implausible!"
And yes, it probably was very implausible, because then I noticed that all my dwarves were fighting each other! To the death! It was carnage!
Eventually only three dwarves remained. Two of them were stuck in "Task interrupted by combat" loops every second, and the aforementioned trapper wandered around and never stopped hunting, even after I told him not to.
An amusing way to lose a fortress, but it leaves a lot of questions. Why did they all start killing each other all the time? Was it the wounded dwarf's Berserking From The Bed that made someone else attack him? And then it escalated from here?
Or did I unleash something horrible from the chasm?
Or is it a bug?
In the end, it was all fun, and I do not regret losing my fortress in this manner.
Losing is fun!
[ August 09, 2006: Message edited by: ghor ]