These spies can arrive as migrants and will cause all sorts of chaos in your fortress - mostly by pulling random levers, emptying cages, and poisoning your citizens. Left alone, these will mess up things pretty nicely. Fortunately, you'll have a weapon to counter this new threat.
What if I'm hyper alert?
What if I watch an immigrant myself, having no 'watcher' critters, and decide that I'm satisfied that this immigrant's a spy?
Can I give my military a kill order for this spy (assuming it really is a spy) and have them execute the traitor without causing a loyalty cascade?
And when I decide someone's fake and foul and off them (through miliary means or through some other more subtle unfortunate accident), will their corpse or anything else they leave behind offer any proof I was right?
Or will I be left forever wondering if I am more paranoid than crafty?
If that spy thing is possible, it is going to be very Fun indeed.
One question, however: why lizardmen?
I figured that I had to use a race opposed to the dwarves. Lizardmen are crafty and have "sappers" already, so they seemed the most appropriate.
That's what I thought at first, too. I mean, lizardmen look nothing like dwarves! The skin, eyes, tail... everything is a dead giveaway. Game wise this is awesome. But lore wise, it's a little hard to explain.
Reptilians are masters of holographic technology, which they developed before any of the other races came to be, but you can still catch glimpses of their double eyelids! 
I... don't understand why this is.... hard to understand.
It's ok for any race to be a were-whatever, right? That doesn't really jar anyone's senses of immersion?
So there's a trickster god (of the lizardmen) who loves chaos, confusion, and, well, tricks. There's many forms of 'smitten', and one of these many forms can be 'ignored'. And when the gods ignore you, other gods that usually cannot touch you can have their way with you. I feel no sense of disassociation in the idea that 'good god A' could get so mad at a defiler (accidentally or not) that 'all good gods' turn away from that one. At this point, 'Bad god A' can do their dirty work, and does so, sometimes by creating a variant of 'wereform curse' specific to 'Bad god A'. This curse essentially replaces that unlucky (or awesomely unwise) dwarf with a lizardman spy who has been trained and groomed for this purpose and was just waiting for the opportunity to act.
People used to believe stuff like this, this was why once upon a time people didn't do stuff like spill salt - and if they did, they threw a pinch of it over their shoulders. When you spilled salt (pure Earth), you were believed to have sullied its pureness - and offended the spirits of the Earth that protected you from a great many malicious other spirits. This turned the Earth spirits away from you, and those evil ones could sense this and would come leaping for you to cause you whatever sort of misfortune was theirs to give. You threw some of that spilled salt over your shoulder to scare and sometimes outright harm the spirits leaping to take you - and demonstrated to the Earth spirits that you retained your faith in the purity of Earth and your respect and desire for protection - it was a plea for needed protection that was usually answered by forgiveness and continued protection. And if you didn't throw some salt over your shoulder, then the wicked ones probably would have their way with you and who knew what might happen then!
I
like this, Narhiril. This flows for me, and I can't wait to have more reasons to watch 'my' chosen people even more closely than I do.
Poll
36 (26.1%)
Author
Topic: *=*=* Legends of Forlorn Realms (LFR 2012) v0.21a *=*=* [DF 0.34.11] (Read 403640 times)