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[i2amroy]

Just thought if anybody had any especially interesting stories of how their various fortresses have started up they might want to share them.

As for me:
I just embarked on a terrifying plains area and I thought things were going along fairly well. My squad of my three miners managed to deal with the skeletal badger man attack in the first week of the fortress while only suffering the loss of my fort's two starting dogs. I was just about done digging out the starting stockpile to move everything in the wagon off the surface and underground as well as get the dwarves to a more secure place then the starting place when tragedy struck in the form of 3 skeletal horses. I first thought no big deal, I'll just send the miners again. After all they dealt with the skeletal badger men with no problem right? Wrong. Dead wrong for the dwarves as a matter of fact. Upon ambushing the skeletal horses the miners immediately took out one no problem. The second horse then proceeded to do this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

while the other horse slew my last miner.

Within the space of about a second my fort went from a good chance of success with 7 dwarves into a possible failure in the first month (real time ~ 5 min) of existence. Currently there are two dwarves left, one a very unhappy mason and the other a grower/brewer. The horses have backed off for the moment, but I still haven't even been at this site for a month yet. Though I've got to say that this is one of the most epic fortress starts that I've ever encountered.

Update: A second group of skeletal horses showed up in the first month of summer and were lead into the fortress by a retreating cat. They promptly slaughtered the cat and then my two remaining dwarves, leading to a final score of
Skeletal Horses: 7 + 1 embark
Dwarves: 1
Total time spent = 10 min
!!FUN!! levels = probably some of the best fun I've ever had at an embark

[scion-of-fenrir]

Why didn't you just seal the fort with a drawbridge?

[Tharwen]

Why didn't you just seal the fort with a drawbridge?

...first post. Not a single person will reply to this thread after me now.

[megahelmet]

My latest fortress is on a unique location. Half serene temperature shrubland and half haunted savanah. It is also VERY cold. With water only thawed during about 2 months of summer. As soon as I started I was beset upon by skeletal gazelles. Drafted everyone with the help of the dogs put them down. Then started digging. Discovered an aquafier two levels down. A quick check showed it covered the ENTIRE zlvl. Channeled out a hole to let the aquafier freeze so I could punch through it. The dwarves decided it would be fun to start their very own polar bear club. Three died, encased in ice for their stupidity. The remaining dwarves punched through the ice and walled it off so there would be no flood if things thawed later and a quick dry moat was set up around embark to protect from any more skeletal forces. There the four dwarves worked as best they could until more migrants reinforcements arrived. Luckily, with half the dwarves already dead there was plenty of booze to be had now!

[Untelligent]

A while back I started out in the middle of a deep major river canyon that was frozen half the year. In the summer I closed the doors and let the river run over them while I did stuff down in the caverns and in the winter I worked on an ice castle jutting up from the river.

[RenoFox]

I was starting on a steep mountain, and in the very first frame: A section of the cavern has collapsed!

No one died, but my dwarves suddenly found themselves on a 5 tile wide edge between a cliff and a vertical hole down to a magma pool.

Best. Embark. Ever.