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[Felblood]

My two cents: Lovecraftian HFS good, Exorcist HFS bad.

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 Also, it takes away from the mysterious and powerful nature of them if you have a guy who can simply flip to page 53 of the "Dealing with Demons Handbook" to say an incantation to drive them off. To me, they should be unknown, possible almost incomprehensible horrors, rather than a known threat. Obviously making them too Lovecraftian just leads to an automatic game over, which I think is kind of a lame ending. Dwarf Fortress is all about the horrific, drawn out endings your fortress, and bringing back the "You dug too deep!" screen wouldn't really be a good idea in my opinion.

Actually, decrypting the journal of a corrupt warlock to learn the spell to banish the Sons of Yog-Sottoth was the main quest of one of Lovecraft's stories. The protagonist almost always survived the original Lovecraft stories, he was just marked so terribly by what he had seen and done that he could no longer function in society. Usually, it was some thing that he learned about himself, not the dark gods, which unmade him.

As for dealing with them, I like the ideas of driving them back temporarily with the military. I think it'd be awesome if you could only drive them back to the entrance or so, and had to reseal the pits by creating an adamantine wall. I see them as easily breaking through normal rock, although that obviously isn't possible in the current version. It seems like it could be a nice epic situation if you had to drive them back enough with your doomed legendary military, while a master mason works to seal them inside. That seems like it would be a great situation, and it doesn't really require much change in the mythology whatsoever.

If many of the suggestions here are implemented, adamantine isn't going to do the job, we need something stronger, like er...

..enchanted adamantine? (magic arc)

...the fresh blood of a murdered god?(currently an impossible quest, and probably a bigger can of worms than the clown car)

...a ritual so dire that it destroys the souls of the casters, requiring you to train a mystic of some sort, only to lose him. (magic arc)

From the gameplay side, DF is about management, planning ahead, and solving problems that arise, either through your own failings (booze shortfall), scripted events(invasions) or through happenstance(invasions coming early, during a booze shortage).

In this respect, an insurmountable challenge would be a remarkable shift in tone. When your fort crumbles, it's because you didn't design it well, or didn't prepare for invaders fast enough, or miscalculated in your magma system, or something like that.

When I say I want the game to randomly screw over the player, I mean I want to have problems suddenly arise, that I can test my skills and preparations against them.

The game that really hits the sweet spot here for me is Warcraft 3 total-conversion mod Resident Evil Versus SWAT 2: Aftermath. This is a game where a pack of lethal monsters can leap out of any shadow, at any time, and rip your head off. Dispatch them quickly and efficiently, and proceed toward your objective, or you're dead. Few have the determination to master the skills you need to beat the lowest difficulty level, but there are those who have conquered the highest level in a solo game.

Like the great roguelikes of yesteryear, that clearly had an influence on the design of DF, a small band of mortal heroes struggles to fight an enemy beyond their comprehension. The RNG reserves the right to throw more at you than you're ready for, and the game can seem sometimes to be unbeatable, but it can be done, once you have the skills to see the possibilities. Losing is fun, and every loss not only teaches you about the game, and gives you some (extraordinarily minuscule) mechanical advantage or otherwise leaves a small mark in future games.

Put a LAN together, dig out your battered WC3 CDs and play this game with your friends. When I talk about a well paced battle for survival building to an epic climax, this is what I mean. Every wannabe game designer should taste this game, so that they understand what it taught me.

The HFS should be like that.

[Detoxicated]

I personally think that the HFS should include all of the mentioned ideas. Insanity, Death, repeating spawns coming out of the pit, sick engravings, Demons trying to take over power, bloodbaths, leather armour made of dwarven leather for some demons etc. etc.

Spawns should never end, unless you send in a special fighter class, the Paladin, or a fighter and a Priest, who exorcize the place. Once it has been exorcized , the well of demons has been dried. You could also add a possession demon, who possesses workshops or furniture in your fortress.

If you had a possessed carpenters shop for instance, the carpenter would occassionally build a bone equivalent of the furniture (bone bed) which would be more valuable, but also once a certain amount of things created from the shop, the carpenter would change into the headdemon, and the workshop again would spawn "endless" amounts of demons. This would emphazise the line between hell and reality, as a gate to hell could be anywhere in the game.