I have not played Dwarf Fortress, and when I real people's stories about playing, it sounds like they're pulling a Goncharov. That's gotta be some sort of endorsement, right?
Everything feels like a collaborative attempt to imagine the most unhinged fantasy sim game, and start telling stories that take place inside this ridiculous collective hallucination. Oh, some giraffes got into my keep and there was blood fucking everywhere. Let me tell you about the were-pangolins and how it took fucking years to un-curse everyone. My dwarf had to stop manning the siege equipment to give birth.
Except the game exists and these are all real stories. If you were to actually try to Goncharov a fantasy sim, you wouldn't get stories half as good as what actually happens in Dwarf Fortress on the regular. If it didn't actually exist, I would not suspend my disbelief for a system like "we generate the world by simulating ten thousand years of actual geological erosion," and certainly not for "pantheons are generated the same way."
You tell me any story that happens in Dwarf Fortress, I'll believe you.
Yeah we killed a liche and kept its phylactery in the pantry to keep ghosts out, but a baby ate it by accident and turned into a new lich. But because it started from a baby with lower movement, it can't actually go literally anywhere. So we just put up a rope around it to keep the dwarves from getting too close. But then when a vegan necromancer invaded with his army of were-cornstalks, the fighting got to close to the lich and now we have a haunted underground cornfield that constantly spawns zombie were-corn. It's been on fire for twenty years.
Like I said, I've never actually played the game, but I assume this exact thing has happened at least once.
