My adventurer made it after a long journey to the dwarven lands, the only trouble being the absolute mauling of her elven companion by a grizzly bear. Tuning in to the gossip at the outlying hillocks, I decided to make my name by recovering some artifacts. Two of the ones mentioned were in the same place, a fortress now controlled by humans, inside a temple structure. The fortress looked empty, until I got down to the lower level and realized everyone was piled into this one room four or five deep, and there were a grand total of 12 artifacts on the floor of a platform atop a reflecting pool. Jumped over, nabbed them, then spent about thirty minutes trying to stand up so I could jump back to safety.
Well I made my way back around the mountain range thinking this was going to be a slam dunk, repatriating these lost treasures. Cue complete FPS death upon entering the vicinity of hammerclouted. Dwarven leaders are absolutely terrible at population control, on top of the normal populace there are at least 100 mute unmoving monks crowding the place up. I really thought my computer could handle a >500 pop fortress. BUT, best fortune, this appears to be a royal symposium. The queen is here, as are an uncountable number of barons and baronesses. I know the dwarf claiming ownership is a baroness, and half an hour in real life time crawling through conversations... she's not here. Well, this can't be a coincidence, if this is where the government is gathering, she has to appear eventually- and there's no way I have the patience to look within the fortress. It would take me an hour just to descend the staircase.
So I wait, and wait, and wait- and finally I see a baroness with her hall of residency attached. I don't even bother to suss out which artifacts she rightly wants and which she doesn't, I hand them over, take my plaudits and leave. From now on, I'll be finding a more manageable fortress to do the bidding of. I'd still like to fill the role of artifact recoverer though, I think in the future I'll settle this adventurer down in a fortress and use missions to recover them- hand wave selling them to the traders as doing the right thing.