I was looking something up about DFHack earlier, and came across a steam thread where folks were arguing like, weirdly intensely? about whether or not the stories that come out of the game are embellished, or genuinely emergent, natural things that unfold in the game itself. I'll just say, the weird part wasn't that people disagreed, but that people treated it like a political argument and were just constantly trying to be as condescending to the other side as possible. So obviously I'm not gonna post on there, but I do have some thoughts about this as someone who has played this game for my entire adult life.
So first off, you 100% do get wild stuff in the game, and you don't even have to dig that far or use that much imagination to see stuff that is genuinely funny and interesting. Most of the time that's going to be pretty tame, but still fun and interesting to see play out. I had a fort earlier this year where a 90 year-old mother with like a dozen kids and great-great grandkids visited my tavern with 6-7 surly goblins as part of a dance troupe. All of them were in their underwear and dancing, but the goblins were talentless, surly, and just got drunk and berated people. The grandma though... the grandma was a multi-legendary performer who had created world-famous artwork. My dwarves watched this old lady do a nude dance so moving that it caused multiple dwarves to rethink their outlook on life and decide to be better people. Dancing that woke up their belief in the essential goodness of other people. All the while her goblin partners got into fights and spilled drinks on people.
All in all, that's a pretty harmless story and the stakes weren't high or anything, but it was really cool to see play out! Most of the wildness of the stories you get is pretty dependent on how you play and the risks you take. "Fun" is used by players as a euphemism for "death and destruction" but it has its roots in a thing most long-term players end up doing eventually: taking big risks in order to challenge themselves and generate interesting stories.
You can build a very stable fortress, dig down to the magma sea, trap up your entrances and wall off all the caverns, use careful methods to explore adamantine veins safely, and not let any visitors into the fortress except via airlocked trade depots. A fortress run this way, provided you keep enough materials on-hand for strange mods, will run more or less on its own forever with no problems or issues.
If you want to take risks, see wild shit, and taste a little glory, you can do stuff like have your military patrol the caverns rather than seal it off. You can antagonize necromancers via the world map or move to a haunted biome, set up a tavern and have to deal with strange conflicts and thieves and all of the things that come with a lot of visitors into your fort.
I sent some dwarves out to attack a necromancer tower once, it hadn't had contact with me, but I wanted to see if I could seize some artifacts and get my hands on a necromantic tome or something. My squad of elites never returned, but about a year later someone in a tavern shares a rumor and I notice that they're listed as imprisoned at the tower now. I think to myself, "who would possibly know what's going on in a necromancer's tower except..." and pause the game suddenly. I look over to the "other creatures" tab and see a necromancer visitor. Not that unusual but I look at his home civ and realize he's the ruler of that same necromancer tower, and he was just in my tavern telling everyone about how he trapped my squad. I send my army to kill him, but it's too late - he's at the edge of the map before my dwarves can even make it to the surface, and his army of the undead shows up to siege my fort right before he scoots off.
There wasn't really any gameplay reasons to do any of that, but it's a really neat interaction I saw play out. It didn't really get me anything, but it was a fun little risk I took and even though I lost a squad, it was a very fun narrative that came about through a mix of my direct actions and some blind luck. I didn't embellish it at all here in this telling, but it lives in my head as something rich and interesting that was genuinely unique in my years of playing DF. By pushing and taking risks, I can get one or two singular gems like that out of any fort, on top of the dozens and dozens of more-common stories I see play out in a fort via some menu digging and keeping tabs on a few specific dwarves as events play out.
