4th Granite, 592
Journal of Creiyd Lulldiamonds
It was the fifth of Timber when I left for the outpost Cavebrands, a small fort far to the northwest, at the foot of the Renowned Beak.
Cavebrands is the only dwarven outpost left in the world, and the only one far from the Mountainhome. The idea was to establish a new foothold for dwarfkind, so that our fate was not bound to a single kingdom. Unfortunately, no one has heard from the outpost in some time. It is my duty to take control of the outpost, find out what has been going on, and report back to the Mountainhome within the year.
It was a long journey, fraught with peril, but thanks to my trusty donkey Shelia, I made it to Cavebrands without injury, after only three months and a day. When I got there, I immediately felt that something was wrong. There was an unnatural red tinge to the water here. Perhaps it was stricken with a strange disease.
By the gods... what happened here?
As I stood there dumbfounded, I was greeted by a cheery dwarf nicknamed Kagus, who was Chief Medical Dwarf and the founding overseer. "Welcome to Cavebrands," he said kindly, extending his hand for me to shake. I looked at it. It was covered in a mixture of dirt, soot, and blood so blackened it was impossible to differentiate between them. Very slowly, I accepted the handshake.
"I'm Creiyd," I said in a monotone. "I'm, I'm the new... overseer..." I trailed off. On the journey here, I had prepared a lengthy introduction for myself, but faced with this stunning display of mortality, it didn't seem fitting.
On the way there, we passed through the barracks. As a doctor of many years, I couldn't help being appalled by the filthy conditions in this supposed infirmary. The unmistakable odor of rotten flesh issued forth from the room. One dwarf moaned on his bed, twisting in agony, wrapped in mud-stained cloth. Two others lay in the room, quiet and still. I believe they were dead. I looked sideways at Kagus. How could the Chief Medical Dwarf allow this? Does he not know better?
Not soon enough, Kagus and I stepped through Slowpoke's office, which was so barren it lacked even a door. Slowpoke was a pale dwarf who looked like someone who barely ever got good rest, and he didn't seem to notice as we entered, so preoccupied was he with the ledgers on the table before him.
"Lord Slowpoke?" I said. "I am Creiyd Uvardoren. I'm here to take control of this outpost in the name of Queen Matobok and all The Lancer of Trenches."
He looked up. His eyes were glazed, and he spoke in a raspy voice, "You've finally arrived. How many do you have with you?"
How many? "How many what?" I asked. "I've come with my personal belongings and only my donkey for company.."
"Ah... well... right," he said, muttering toward the end. "We'd sent out a ranger, you see. Requesting help. I don't think he made it." Saying this seemed to trigger some bleakness within him, and he sunk back into his chair, gripping the wood of it tightly as though he should fall off.
"Please, sit down," he said suddenly, motioning at the rock-laden floor in front of his table. I looked over at Kagus, who grinned sheepishly at me.
"I will stand, thank you," I said in reply. "Pray tell me what has happened here. It looks like Death Herself stalks this place."
Lord Slowpoke lifted a flask to his lips and drank deeply. "I became the esteemed overseer of Cavebrands about one year ago. Before my reign, a previous ruler had unearthed a wondrous underground cavern..."
"I know this," I interrupted. "I've read all the earlier reports, outdated as they were. But the deaths, sir. Please explain all the death."
"Goblins," he said, and his face contorted into a mixture of hate and abject terror. "These days, in this land, there is a new breed of goblin. They are not frail or cowardly as a goblin ought to be. They are swift, merciless, and cunning. Entire squadrons of dwarfs fall upon their weapons.
I stared at him and said, "My good dwarf, do you really mean to tell me that
goblins are solely responsible for the carnage here?"
"They're invictible!
Invictible, I say!"You mean invincible?" I offered.
"I mean invictible," he replied. "It took ten of our greatest champions to bring down four of the monsters
after they had been heavily wounded by the troops they had slaughtered."
"Gods..." I think I said, and I wondered if these goblins were truly so mighty, or if perhaps our military might was less so.
We sat in silence for a while. Hellish screams spilled out from the depths of the fortress and echoed throughout the halls.
"What in the stone?" I whispered.
"Draltha," said the overseer, looking up with a worried expression. Kagus left the room in a hurry. Slowpoke continued, "They flooded in from the underground. At least seven of them were ravaging the fort at any given time, slaying whoever stood in the way of their rampage."
"Even now?" I asked in alarm.
"Yes, I can't stop them!" Slowpoke screamed. For a second he seemed to blank out of consciousness, but then awareness returned to his eyes and he said, "Kagus will organize the military. Hopefully this will be the last trouble for a while."
"How often have you said that?" I wondered aloud.
"Too often," he admitted, just as a dwarf roared banefully over the din. A crashing sound was heard, followed by a piteous weeping.
We finished our conversation shortly thereafter, our dialogue punctuated by the shrieks of draltha, dwarf and dog alike. I tried desperately to ignore them.
"One more thing," he said as he gathered his papers and tablets. "Remember to disarm the lever in the main entrance. Somebody was an idiot and left it connected to... Well, I don't even know to what, but hopefully it's connected to the drawbridges."
And then he stepped out of the office, leaving me with more questions than answers. I looked down on the table, and saw a most noteworthy signet ring.
"Adamantine!" I shouted, appealing to the sky in laughter. "Always in the most hellish places!"
I spent some time in the office, thumbing through Slowpoke's notes. It seems there had been an ill-fated plan to construct a gigantic pump to a vast ocean of magma that lay far below the earth. The magma would be dredged up to above the ground, where it could be directed to necessary areas of the fort, and deployed as a trap, or a weapon. Sadly, the project was never completed. A pity, really. It would have been nice to have a accessible lava pit to dump all this refuse into.
There is a room filled with the remains of countless animals and several dwarves. Eerily, there is no smell.
It seems that Slowpoke suffered from chronic nightmares (which he kept logged), in which he would see Cavebrands ruined in a variety of ways. Most seemed to involve goblins, insanity, and flooding, but a few times, magma was the culprit. A few of them were so dizzyingly horrifying I cannot rightly describe them. He counted with painstaking detail the hundreds of times he has watched his friends die while in the reaches of sleep. He has my pity.
Most of the other records were more mundane. During the summer, Slowpoke seized the alcohol from some humans who had come to trade. I hope that doesn't haunt us later.
The dining room is littered with rotting corpses. I... I don't know what to do.
These dwarves... I cannot imagine how these dwarves have endured these conditions for so long. I have always heard the awful stories of outpost life, but this? Nothing could have prepared me for this.
Well, the first thing I'm going to order as the new administrator is door construction. There are hardly any doors in this place.
* * *
More to come. That's about it for now. Hope this is what you were looking for, LS. It looks like my turn may take a bit longer to get through than tomorrow night, but I can promise detailed and frequent updates as I play.
Also, I loaded and saved with 31.03 -- just to get that out there for the next person. Everything seems to be working alright and I haven't encountered any real glitches yet, but then, I haven't played all that much either. Stay tuned.LordSlowpoke's report (spoilers spoilers spoilers)
I actually played ten years worth of gameplay time here. And I'm trying to made it the most dwarven way to die in history, involving opening up <redacted> Or an ultimate magma pump connected to a Dwarven Superreactor which outputs over 20 thousand units of power that pumps out the entire Magma Sea and drops it upon the goblin armies, the entire fortress, and is able to pump it right back.
Oh, and we have no bauxite it seems, so save up that steel and the raw adamantine mechanisms.
About the reclaim parties: The goblins are invictible. Invictible I say. It's our version of the bronze colossus, except if we ever get the colossus we're gonna get raped like a... in fact, raped so hard I have no word to compare this to. Hell, I even played with DF raws, memory, everything, and to recover even the entrance we need 10 full-adamantine grand masters. Ten, damnit! And I mean swordsmen here! All they have is three bowmen and a goddamn maceman! [/nerdrage]
.....
Well, there was a Draltha flood from the underground - at least 7 of them were ravaging the fort at any given time, any given hour, killing a few dogs which thought it's a good idea to bite it.
I also said "fuck it" and directed the brook straight into the underground to stop the Draltha flood.
Then a human caravan arrived, we stole some booze, since the brewsters died (all three of them!). Then the dorfs arrived and we bought even more booze, and I got an artifact worth 604k made out of adamantine and cassierite. It's a ring that menaces with spikes of adamantine and is encircled with cassierite, the core material is adamantine.
Have a full list of the deaths I got:
12 of them were purely goblin-inducted,
3 of them were semi-goblin inducted, then a tantrum spiral killed it off,
4 of them were failures at creating the BFMP (Big Fucking Magma Pump)
Seven of them were purely <redacted>
And at last, exactly 22 of them were caused by water overwhelming the bunker (you have no idea how hard it is to actually build such a thing in middle of a flood)
In total, that's 48 times the fortress crumbled, plus 66 dorfs within... giving a total of 3168 casualities during my year. Dwarves are expendable, sure, but this is my personal record.
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Topic: Cavebrands (Read 68564 times)