First update: no screenshots, because I've never had to post a screen before and don't know where to begin.
Journal of Shaman, Goatgod_pan.
I was drawn to this fort by the compelling nature of the venture: to commune with our birthright; the caverns below.
I had settled here, staying deep down and had little to offer of my skills, until at long last the beast came with whom we could commune: Stospdab, a great three-eyed scorpion, charteuse and emanciated. He settled in our lake, and before long I began to understand the whispers of this lovely creature: it wanted me to rule.
Those of you who wonder at the wisdom of listening to a Forgotten Beast, consider: a good third of the fort worships a god of disease represented by a rotting dwarf. Surely my shamanism is not as troubling as that.
I announced myself simply by seizing power from some fool, some months later she seemed to be reelected mayor, but by then my plans were in motion.
I was horrified to learn that the surface (oh how I long for the caverns again) defenses consisted of...well...nothing.
Not even dogs in a bloody pasture. No wall, not even doors. I suppose the bridge might be sealable, but no fuckin' way am I looking for someone sane around here who knows what lever seals it. And besides its apartenly farm bleeding central upthere. BY my account we are farming enough to feed 10000 dwarves. But do we have booze? No. No booze. No armok-be-damned booze, and no barrels and one sill and not even a fucking well!
This is a sad place and everything is made of salt.
No I mean it.
Everything on the surface is built of rock fucking salt. There are literally herds of wild goats licking the shit out of every wall and surface. We don't even have hunters to get a benefit out of it.
What the previous founders spent their time doing is questionable.
I find:
A. dozens of forbidden dead dwarves lying around in the middle of major passage ways. Horrible!
B. A mason shop full of animal bones. Weird?
C. A burial ground composed of a dozen coffins in a row. on the OTHER side of the wall keeping us safe from our noble three-eyed scorpion friend. Problematic.
D. No metal industry.
E. No military of skill or training facilities. Gutsy
F. Religious dwarves who worship 1. a rotting dwarf of disease. 2. chance and gambling. 3. rains and storms. Peculiar.
I find a strange structure with beds. Hospital? Barracks? Who knows, I am ignoring it.
I find...BLOODY ARMOK WHAT THE DEVIL IS THAT...THATS WHERE ALL THE WOOD WENT!!!
Words cannot describe what I am seeing: in a fort with no wall we generate endess water power to no purpose what so ever. Lovely.
No I am building a palisade, a circular palisade, keep it rock salt with orthoclase support pillars. And by way of entrance, what we, in the mountain halls call a "dodge-em trap".
I am building a legendary well room and reservoir with the artifact mechanism I find left behind.
I am building a mayoral room complex and using the artifact table to build a meeting room.
I am setting up a simple flooding device for a tree farm
I am getting a militia to train and archers to shoot archery.
I shall dig to magma and set up a metal industry.
I shall make a coffin complex.
I swear by the end of this year, I shall become ever so close with Sposdab the three-eyed scorpion. Indeed I shall carve his very bones.