Is InkMans ink intentionally deadly? Weird question but strange things has been happening to my fort located in neutral savage part of the map.
There was a single wild Ink Man in the wild some time ago and he tried shooting some of his ink at my newly arrived immigrants, for some reason his ink was frozen in projectile form, he missed all of his shots but some of them landed on the 1 tile wide bridge that was leading to my fort. Nothing scary happened at this point.
As seasons changed Ink Man went away but his projectiles melted and left a puddles on my bridge. Before next caravan arrived I had placed some traps just behind the bridge and when elves came I just saw my dwarves rush to the trap line to pick up a caravans worth of free stuff as all of the elves were dead, no combat log whatsoever.
Other caravans came, results varied, but most of the time at least one of the traders ended up dead, my dwarves were safe up to this point. Finally a Mountainhome guys came so I watched them carefully, they crossed the bridge, then the traps, unloaded their goods... no causalities. I was finally able to trade and didn't want to miss the chance, sold a bunch of stuff, bought some.
Finally the caravan packed up and was on their way to leave the map when one of the traders dropped dead. My greedy dwarves didn't wait even 5 frames before rushing to collect free loot, put the stuff in stockpiles and suddenly I saw reports of my dwarves suffocating in total 6 of them, all just by the well. They were probably the ones that did the hauling.
Not sure if I was just unlucky or is the InkMans Ink this deadly in general.
EDIT: Update: Unlucky dwarves left two pools of ink and an ocean of vomit on my main staircase, had some more casualties soon and tantrum spiral kicked in. Mighty fort destroyed by a single Ink Man.