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[Norwegian Chris]

So I've been playing for a few months now and one of my earlier ¨good¨ forts had a peculiar occurence happening to it. I had about 100 dwarves, with thirty or so relatively skilled soldiers clad in full steel armor and weapons (silver blunt weapons) and when I was visited by an FB with the tagline ¨Beware it's deadly dust!¨ I had no idea what to expect. I figured this was going to be easy seeing as how I had previously defeated a ¨Noxious Secretions¨ FB without any casualties at all earlier but boy was I wrong. Needless to say, my military was wiped out in literally seconds, a fact to which my eyes widened and I panicked. I promptly enlisted all my civvies in the military and sent then at the beast in hopes of defeating it. When I finally reigned victorious I only had three dwarves left, two of which were children. This didn't really affect me too much though because I can honestly say I had a good dose of both uppercase Fun and lowercase fun.

Now here's the real issue; I later went into the legends to get an overview of all the events that occured in my fortress from founding to downfall and I noticed something peculiar. Towards the end of the entries I noticed A LOT of messages along the lines of ¨Urist McDwarf1 was struck down by Urist McDwarf2¨ AFTER the FB had rudely dropped in on my plans for greatness and BEFORE I said FB was finally slain. When I checked the legends entry for the FB in question, he only had six kills to his credit out of the hundreds of dwarves that died in my fort. So my question is, does dust cause Dwarves to somehow ¨Frenzy¨ and go apeshit on their fellow colonists? This is the only conclusion I can arrive at, because I highly doubt I suffered a Tantrum Spiral seeing as how practically none of my dwarves were EVER allowed to socialize, meaning the amount of friending going on was minimal.

So... What killed my fort?

[Fredd]

 I agree with you. The dust drove them insane

[Taranli Maren]

My experience is that dust knocks your dwarves back.  They die when they hit a wall.  I would expect that fighting one of these in an open area would result in better success.  (In my case, I got lucky.  After my military was wiped out, the siltstone forgotten beast was bitten in half by a dog.)  This death by wall might account for the beast not having many kills.

I'd bet it was a tantrum spiral effect, as unlikely as it sounds.

[ImBocaire]

Yeah, the problem with deadly dust is that it acts like cave-in dust, which means the monster is basically breathing directed explosions. Also, even if you didn't let your dwarves socialize, the FB probably destroyed a lot of furniture, including a fair amount of masterwork furniture. That's enough to make the makers of the furniture tantrum, which would be enough to set off a spiral.

[KtosoX]

The first thing that came to my mind was a dust that causes the affected dorfs to explode upon death. Dwarf 1 dies to injuries and explodes, which leads to dwarf's 2 death, who then kills dwarfs 3 and 4 and so on. Imagine employing such a FB upon an entire goblin siege…
But yeah, the answers above are probably right.

[trees]

Deadly dust usually carries syndromes, so maybe it was some sort of loyalty-cascade-syndrome?

[Aachen]

Only if it's in reaction to a syndrome; there aren't any "mind-affecting" syndromes per se yet.

[thegoatgod_pan]

The beast probably went down faster than you think, then the sadness over the dead caused a tantrum spiral.

[Rallan]

My experience is that dust knocks your dwarves back.  They die when they hit a wall.  I would expect that fighting one of these in an open area would result in better success.  (In my case, I got lucky.  After my military was wiped out, the siltstone forgotten beast was bitten in half by a dog.)  This death by wall might account for the beast not having many kills.

This. Dust was originally coded as part of what happens when you get a cave-in and the knockback effect of cave-ins was coded into the behavior of dust, and the game doesn't differentiate between cave-in dust and megabeast dust. Which means that megabeasts who produce dust are ridiculously Fun, because dust is unblockable and undodgable and will throw all the derps in the affected area. So even if you've got superexperienced derps who can go solo against half a dozen dragons because they can block fireballs all day long, they're still going to get thrown around like ragdolls when you've got a monster with a dust effect coming at them.