I'm a scientist at heart, someone who loves to pick apart the workings of things in order to better understand them. However I am also a lover of great stories and one who can easily find them within even the most unassuming places. These two things have driven me to begin a project which is ambitious to say the least, I will attempt to map and catalog the genealogy and history of one family within DF, from World Gen till the end of their line. To give you an idea of what this looks like, this is my family tree with only two generations.
If you want to actually read it, you'll need to download it and zoom in.
Now, rather then ramble on aimlessly about my goals for this project, I figure it's better to address questions you may have and explain myself like that.
What is the Purpose of this project?Simply put, the purpose of the project is to gain a better understanding and respect for the complexity of Dwarf Fortress interactions and history. Few of us can truly grasp the sheer size and complexity of interactions which happen within the world generation and this project is a way to visualize these rather abstract ideas. Beyond this it could be somewhat of a bragging point for the df community, an example of the complexity of the game and a potential draw to new players.
What are the goals of the project?The first goal of the project will be to complete a record of the family up either through the end of history or till the end of the family line. From there we can begin doing more in depth tracking and really flesh out the individual actions and stories of the family members. We can do time lines of wars and conflicts and the family's interactions with them, maps of the bloodline's spread through the years and finally investigate and expand upon the stories of the more interesting members of this heroic bloodline. In the end it would be a complete history of this family and it's place within the world.
What family line is the project following and why did you pick this family? The Project will be following the line of Timta Weakenedshells The Outrageous spray and his wife Tunem Mazesurprises. The selection process was a fairly simple one. First we eliminated Goblins and Elves, mostly because of their immortality and how that would inevitably spam us to death. This leaves us with Humans and Dwarves. Of these two races I picked the the only person who had a title, a man who's town has been at war almost since year one. So far, in the generations I've mapped, Only 25% of the family made it to old age, there is roughly a kill per person and about 70% of the population dies in combat with the elves. I believe this was good choice.
This sounds interesting, anyway I can help? Yes, in fact, please help me. This project is of such a size that, without at least a little help, I'll probably be working on it for darn near forever. The actual work that volunteers will do is rather simple and easy but it saves me untold amounts of time. Basically, what they would need to do is to look at one of the child bearing couples listed on the end of the tree and then catalog their children like so
Name
(Title)
Birth date, death date, Number of kills
Cause of death
If there is no title or no kills or a death of old age simply leave these sections empty. If they are married do the same with their spouse but in red for wife and blue for husband. Please do this in Arial 12 point font with the bold option enabled. When that is done simply put a black box around it and that is it. In the end you should get something like this
Breeding pairs usually have somewhere between 2-6 kids, meaning that to cover one pair's family you'll have to look up only about 4-12 people. It would probably take you about 30 minutes, if that, but a few people working together could save me hours or even days worth of potential work. If you would like to help, make sure to tell everyone what family you're going to be working on so we don't get a bunch of duplicates and just post your results like the example above so that I can cut and paste them onto the tree. Once again, I thank anyone who can help with this as even one family will save me time.
This copy of df contains the world which we will be using.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3SGMFSN1Feel free to ask questions or comment on the idea. Updates will be pretty much whenever I can. Thank you.
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Topic: The DF Geneology Project (Read 936 times)