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[Gatleos]

By which I mean, what is the bloodiest, most gruesome fortress you've ever had, whether it be due to sieges, ambushes, freak accidents, etc.?

My worst so far is the appropriately-named Ilonmuzish, "Moonmartyrs". The landscape is coated with blood, vomit, and corpses, and the entrance-way houses a mass dwarf grave. Dwarves are going insane all over the place, and my population has dipped into single-digits more than once.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Most of the landscape around Moonmartyrs

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yup, all of that is body parts (hands, legs, torsos, etc.) and corpses. The first thing caravans see when entering my fortress is a mass grave and blood-stained walls.

Mass graves, rivers of blood, horrible corpse-littered fields in the aftermath of a great battle - it all makes for some pretty gruesome forts. What's your worst? Oh, and pictures are optional but appreciated. 

[lanceleoghauni]

Where was the post about the aztec fort?

[Bhaalspawn]

would a large pool with 70+ dwarf corpses (and pets) count?

[Gatleos]

...Probably.

[Bryan Derksen]

Bonesringed. A massive edifice of flint and steel sitting in the middle of an evil swamp, with a hollow clear glass pyramid over the central courtyard. The capstone of the pyramid was made of unicorn soap, and I ranched untamed unicorns that I'd captured from elf sieges. Below ground, carved from marble, was the arena where the unicorns were slaughtered... by my fort's tame werewolves (tearing them apart before they died meant more bones and meat would be produced). The arena had the dining hall wrapped around it on the second level, with glass windows overlooking so everyone could get a good look.

The werewolf arena is also where sieges go to die. I had a system that could catch entire sieges intact, a system of retractable bridges made out of clear glass blocks over a pit filled with cage traps. If the cage trap capacity was exceeded, the bridges would be re-extended and the pit slowly filled with water so that the uncaged would drown with air and blue sky visible directly overhead. The corpses would be left on display underneath for future sieges and traders.

Edit: I neglected to mention the details of my ranching techniques. Since the unicorns were untamed and hard to control I didn't keep them penned up as a herd in a field in the traditional way. Instead, each unicorn was pitted into solitary confinement in a one-tile stone cell with a locked door. Whenever one of them gave birth I would unlock the door, allowing the mother and foals to "escape" into the cage-trap-lined corridor. The caged unicorns were then distributed to empty cells or to the arena, depending.

In a few some cases, for reasons I wasn't able to fully characterize, a freshly-born unicorn foal would consider its mother and siblings to be "hostiles" and would fight them to the death the moment they could stand. This was somewhat disappointing when it happened, even if the unicorns tore each other into as many pieces as the werewolves would have, since pitting stuff against my werewolves in the arena was how I was training them up and giving them names. If attackers had ever managed to make it past the glass siege trap, through the steel gates and curtain wall, and overcame my military, they'd find themselves up against approximately 60 war-werewolves that were well-trained in unarmed combat.

Such a pity that fort is stranded in 40d-land. I hope to recreate Bonesringed's key features in a 2010 fort someday.

[Zaerosz]

TRUE DORF.

[Fenwah]

Not quite as gruesome as the rest of these, but I made a small fort for the sole purpose of designing and testing the first incarnations of piston pumping. I embarked with dwarves only skilled enough to survive and build my pump. The miners mined, and everyone else sat in a dank hole, with no beds or furnature and a bare minimum of food. Poor work conditions led to many miners falling to their deaths or being crushed in cave ins. When the magma work started more than a few workers were incinerated. Once all the skilled dwarves were dead I just abandoned and reclaimed with a fresh set of dwarves, and continued my experiments. This fortress was more or less a forced labour camp.

So if you ever build a magma piston, or any other insane piece of dwarven technology, remember that the road of progress is paved with the bones of those dorfs who gave their lives, willingly or not, for SCIENCE.

[Heavenfall]

I built my graveyard stockpile at my entrance. After a tantrum spiral where I lacked coffins, the surviving dwarves hauled all the corpses to the entrance. Any trade caravan that wanted to visit had to drive their wagons and push their animals through a 40x3 corridor filled with nothing but corpses and body parts.

Welcome to Pillarsmokes.

[Zaik]

i just recently had a fortress where my elephants and cats totally got out of control pupulation-wise, so i had 4 butchers going nonstop for hours killing them. Bones and miasma everywhere, after i killed something like 100-150 i gave up and flooded the whole place with magma just to kill them.

[Ieb]

One time in 40d I got really tired with the migrants showing up in huge waves that always halted advancement of the fort's other, better branches, to house them all.

So I decided that I should do something about it.

Ever since the migrant wave of 20, pushing the place to 27, I worked on my entrance. What was first a 3-tile wide corridor for getting goods through became a 1-tile entrance after a retractable bridge, with a platform suspended in the air, a 10+ level drop straight down to my dining hall(I had built clear glass walls around the dropzone, why, more on that RIGHT NOW).

Migrant waves arrive.

Migrant waves get drafted.

Migrant waves are told to wrestle on the platform area.

The survivor(who didn't dodge down the platform) is accepted into the fort.
Further additions included two similar areas, except one with magma, and the other with water and captured underground river animals. The water one was a disappointment, turns out that even drowning dorfs can easily injure snakemen and other things so much that they become useless as dorf-eliminators.

But at least the migrants were a lot easier to house. Just mine one corridor with 20 rooms, and it took a looong time for that to fill up.

Sometimes I was merciful and let two dwarves in from a migrant wave, in case one of them was a metalworker, otherwise useful and so on. Children were allowed to enter, usually orphaned by the point the bridge to enter was lowered.

They made good haulers once they grew up.

[Aspgren]

I designed a dungeon, which I was supposed to dump immigrants into.. but I never completed it. It were to consist of a retractable bridge that drops the immigrants into one of 6 platforms.
"Armoks luck" which was a platform that took them back.
"Armoks wrath" which was a pit of magma. killing them instantly.
"The wet trial" which was a long pool for the dwarves to swim through to reach the fort.
"The trial by arms" which was a pit filled with hostile creatures that had to be passed to enter the fort.
"The labyrinth" which was a labyrinth filled with preassure plates. if the dwarven pathfinding took the wrong path - they died.
"The fall" out of ideas - i just made a long fall. survive it and you can enter.

i just recently had a fortress where my elephants and cats totally got out of control pupulation-wise, so i had 4 butchers going nonstop for hours killing them. Bones and miasma everywhere, after i killed something like 100-150 i gave up and flooded the whole place with magma just to kill them.

I've found that the most effective way of dealing with these things is to designate magma or a chasm or something of the sort as a pit and just tell them to haul all the animals in there.
EVERYONE in the fortress will take part in the genocide. It's pretty great.

[breadbocks]

Wait, we need to choose?

[Brandedahall]

pretty much mine is:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

i was playing a different game at the time and didn't realise untill i remembered i was playing df *facepalm*

[deoxy]

i just recently had a fortress where my elephants and cats totally got out of control pupulation-wise, so i had 4 butchers going nonstop for hours killing them. Bones and miasma everywhere, after i killed something like 100-150 i gave up and flooded the whole place with magma just to kill them.

I've found that the most effective way of dealing with these things is to designate magma or a chasm or something of the sort as a pit and just tell them to haul all the animals in there.
EVERYONE in the fortress will take part in the genocide. It's pretty great.

My personal favorite way of dealing with this problem is also my entry for this thread.

In my current fort (still in 40d), early on, I got breeding pairs (or more) of several pet animals.  Also, I got lucky on embark and had a breeding pair of muskox pulling my wagon to match the breeding pair of 2-humped camels that I brought.

Anyway, it's a "no migrants" game, so I really didn't need nearly that much stuff, and after a few years, it was really getting annoying.  So, since I was short on labor (no kids had reached adulthood yet) and I wanted as many stacks of bone as possible (for a custom reaction I had), I created a tall tower to the top z-level, built a bridge-platform, and put my only meeting area out on it...

Then I deconstructed the bridge.

Hundreds of corpses.  Thousands of body parts.   What a mess.

And I still giggle when I describe it, over a month after the fact... heh.

[Hyndis]

I once embarked on a terrifying glacier. I was under endless siege by undead elk along with the occasional undead polar bear or wolf.

I had gigantic stockpiles of bone in huge heaps all around my fortress, piled everywhere. Walking through the fortress you would see dismembered undead elk on either side of the corridors, presumably will twitching with the undying urge to consume dwarven flesh.

My military was armored with undead elk bone armor. Those slain by the undead would be dumped into the heaps of rotting bone lining the walls of the fortress, and then a new recruit would pick up that undead armor.

No farming was done. All food and booze was plundered from foolish caravans wiped out by the undead hordes.

One child after another went into a fey mood, claimed a craftsdwarf workshop, and began hauling elk bones into the workshop. They produced endless variations of elk bone artifacts, decorated with images of flies, maggots, traveling dwarves, and cheese.

The topper was an artifact bin made out of horse bone. It was made from the horse that hauled my wagon. A 3 year old dwarven child made it.

On the item in elk bone is an image of a horse. The horse is screaming. On the item in elk bone is an image of flies. On the item in green glass is an image of maggots. On the item in gabbro is an image of a dwarf. The dwarf is in a fetal position.