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[Geesuv]

I was pondering the new Undead and Necromancer stuff and I started thinking about the old trope about monsters living in plain sight and interacting with society.
It might be cool if, once in a blue moon, a dwarf will migrate to your fort who is more than he seems. Most of the time he acts like normal dwarf but occasionally he will sneak into another dwarfs room while he sleeps... Afterwards the victim gets an unhappy thought about feeling drained.
This is just an example with vampires being my inspiration, this could happen with other mostly human monsters. How nasty would it be if you had a dwarf which turned into a werewolf once a year and rampaged for a while?
If this could spread you could find yourself with a fort overrun with the damned, with the vampires attempting to take over perhaps?

For this to work the dwarf would need to keep things from the player. Lie about skills and personality traits for example. The best way to detect them should be observing their behaviour. In the previous example, seeing a dwarf that keeps sneaking into rooms is a big clue. Dwarves that don't drink would be another, horrible to contemplate, clue.
This would also open the door to a special Witch Hunter-type noble. You assign them a dwarf and they prosecute them to try and expose them as a monster. But Armok help you if you are wrong, other dwarves would hate watching the friends suffer needlessly...

[tHe_silent_H]

would be funny if the undead(zombies, skeletons) decided they had the rights to live like a normal citizen in a city.

[Cerol Lenslens]

I like this idea, but a few details might make it very weird - the Doppeldwarf would count as a dwarf for most purposes - have skills, be renamable, perform tasks, fight off invaders, etc, correct? And presumably he counts as a dwarf for the headcount, too. Which means that if Urist McMasquerade is the only survivor of some siege/beast/tantrum spiral combo platter, the fort would keep running like a normal fort...

No real problem there, but if the curse was contagious, you could have an entire fort of a hundred of these guys or whatever, and no actual dwarves. Just night creatures pretending to be dwarves for the benefit of other night creatures... (which might not even be the same kind, if multiple migrant swarms brought in more instances) Would they feed on each other? If they had better stats than regular dwarves, wouldn't that encourage players to *make* them take over?

[Urist McArmok]

Sounds fun. Night creatures don't seem to be stupid, and fortresses (sometimes) offer better(?) living conditions and feeding opportunities than the woods.

would be funny if the undead(zombies, skeletons) decided they had the rights to live like a normal citizen in a city.

Didn't Terry Pratchett do that?

[Owlbread]

Sounds fun. Night creatures don't seem to be stupid, and fortresses (sometimes) offer better(?) living conditions and feeding opportunities than the woods.

would be funny if the undead(zombies, skeletons) decided they had the rights to live like a normal citizen in a city.

Didn't Terry Pratchett do that?

I'd always thought his zombies were worth a book dedicated to them, or the boogiemen etc.

I like this idea though. You don't quite need to class the dwarves as night creatures, you could just have a sort of mythical creature, like the fairies of old. Old tales from the British Isles spring to mind of fairies being exactly like human beings, save for one or two specific characteristics that gave them away. I can remember one involving a fairy being hooded (I think these stories were Irish or Scottish), but you couldn't see his feet below his cloak. I think another involved a fairy with a dagger or something attacking a man, who stabbed the fairy, drawing thick, mealy, green blood.

I think this would be quite a fun thing to add to the game, it'd just need to be very rare though so we wouldn't become wise to it. I really like the sound of the witch hunter noble too. He could be quite fanatical.

[DrKillPatient]

Of course, then we need crazy deluded witch-hunting dwarves who become incredibly paranoid and kill anyone who looks vaguely suspicious. Urist Witch Trials, anyone?

[Naryar]

Finally an use for these barrels of blood !

[Crioca]

I cannot, possibly, ever, imagine wrapping my head around the idea of a dwarven vampire. It's just too strange.


I think this is a great idea though. Especially if once they've arrived the treat all outdoor areas as a restricted burrow during the daylight hours.

Urist McVlad cancels job: "THE SUN! IT BURNS US!"

[Owlbread]

I cannot, possibly, ever, imagine wrapping my head around the idea of a dwarven vampire. It's just too strange.

Yet strangely delightful, no? I think once you get past the initial oddness of it, it fits quite well, like eating a bar of chocolate at the same time as salted crisps. I think it produces quite a strong image of an unusually pale, sunken, dead-looking dwarf, his beard matted with blood. I like the idea of doppelganger dwarves too, so the player would have to worry about which of the two was the imposter. I could see certain dwarf fortress games becoming some sort of Ice Fortress Zebra.

[Neowulf]

Actually, DF dwarves could already be discworld-type vampires, the reformed ones.
They're already completely obsessed with booze and get very very cranky when they don't have any, plus sunlight is really bad though the average dwarf wears enough armor layers to never actually touch sunlight.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Sounds...creepy. And difficult to get rid of.
Great for DF.

[NW_Kohaku]

It might be cool if, once in a blue moon, a dwarf will migrate to your fort who is more than he seems. Most of the time he acts like normal dwarf but occasionally he will sneak into another dwarfs room while he sleeps... Afterwards the victim gets an unhappy thought about feeling drained.

For this to work the dwarf would need to keep things from the player. Lie about skills and personality traits for example. The best way to detect them should be observing their behaviour. In the previous example, seeing a dwarf that keeps sneaking into rooms is a big clue. Dwarves that don't drink would be another, horrible to contemplate, clue.
This would also open the door to a special Witch Hunter-type noble. You assign them a dwarf and they prosecute them to try and expose them as a monster. But Armok help you if you are wrong, other dwarves would hate watching the friends suffer needlessly...

How often do you really just sit there and observe random migrant dwarves, or watch residential areas of your fort, rather than watching the industrial sections? 

At the same time, if I have a vampire in the fort, and they don't spread their curse, and don't kill their victims, and they still do actual work, and the "drained" unhappiness is no serious threat towards a tantrum spiral, then whatever, just don't make a mess, and I don't care. 

Better yet, if they get some sort of vampiric superstrength or regeneration so long as they stay underground, I'll happily keep a vampire in my military, and send them into the caverns.  (Especially if they just drink draltha blood or caged goblin blood or something...)

[cameron]

I'd assume that the unhappy-ness would be large enough to be a serious threat.
There could be perhaps suspicions in the dwarves' thoughts and eventually some sort of announcement so as to draw the player's attention

Actually if the vampire actually started slowly killing dwarves that would get the attention of a player

[gordy]

Have a noble witch hunter like the bookkeeper who has settings about how far he is willing to go to find the night creatures. At one end barely caring but at the other completely invasive at routing the creatures from the fort (bad thoughts when interrogated or accused)

[Tharwen]

The problem I have with this is that I never really take notice of the exact traits of my dorves beyond their skills and nobility. I would never pay attention enough to notice that some of them were 'feeling drained' every so often, and even if I did, I might not have the patience to look through all of them to find one that is acting weirdly.