pontifus
@pontifus

The idea was I'd roll up a new Dwarf Fort world and then mess it up pretty badly in anticipation of adventure mode in a few months. Instead I accidentally made a fort in which the dwarves are as bad of ass as they are dumb of ass.

I didn't document the save well enough to do a good fictionalized retelling or anything, but I can at least draw these clowns. So let me introduce you to a few of them.


pontifus
@pontifus

Further dwarves for your consideration. (Note that one of the pictures this time has some weird, though very mild/cartoonish, eye/hand stuff.)


updates

  • Mörul is a duchess now.
  • I found a little iron on the map, supplementing what I can scrape together from the caravan, which is nice considering some things that come up in this post.
  • I almost lost the fort due to a demon with flesh-rotting blood, not because it did much damage to the dwarves, but because every dog and most cats walked through the blood and subsequently spread the smell of decay throughout the entire fort, which pissed the dwarves off. The casualties included both animals from last time, Kulet Lolumkonos, the cat that punched a dinosaur in the head, and Rakustonshen, wereporcupine-slayer and lord of dogs. Probably my all-time top two saddest fort mode deaths, but they've been suitably memorialized in the burial halls.
  • Then I caused even more problems for myself by making a new drinks stockpile and accidentally forbidding access to it. But it's fine. We're fine now. As Bob Ross famously said, we're wet, we're slick, and we're ready to go.

ustuth mistêmmözir, shounen hero

ustuth mistêmmözir, precocious dwarven child
This is the fort where I learned that one of the tasks kids can perform now is dumping creatures into pits. A pit can be designated above any open space, and Ziriludos is a volcano fort, and so assigning things to a pit usually involves what you'd imagine, give or take the obsidian diving board specially built for the purpose. A lot of things end up in the cave entrance cage traps and, well, you have to remove them from the map somehow to mitigate performance impacts, so ... suffice to say we've got a lot of emotionally hardened children here.

It's easy, after playing this game for years, to think of the various horrors the dwarves experience as rote game conceits rather than events in characters' life narratives, and to make no effort to avoid them. With that said, I do have a nonlethal pit for trying to free gorlaks and other various cave-dwellers who did nothing wrong other than run in an unwise direction when scared by the cave crocodile vanguard, but it doesn't work very well. Usually they end up running back into the fort, picking a fight or bothering an animal, and getting pulverized despite my best efforts.

One of the kids who laugh in the face of danger because of all this is Ustuth Mistêmmözir, age 10, and this quality served him well the time he punched a forgotten beast to death.

On the one hand it was a beast made of steam and therefore pretty lacking in structural integrity. On the other hand it had one of the more dangerous FB abilities, deadly dust, an AOE that can poison dwarves while tossing them into walls and one another. It was enough to get the beast past the crocodiles, at which point it encountered Ustuth, who'd been hauling something in from the caves. Ustuth didn't run. He simply turned around and, apparently unbothered by the dust, blasted the thing apart with his fists.

the dwarven child punches the forgotten beast in the right upper leg with his left hand, breaking away most of the tissue! the dwarven child punches the forgotten beast in the lower body with his right hand and the severed part sails off in an arc!

illustration of the previous combat log. ustuth punches the beast, which dissolves into undifferentiated mist

Lest you think it's just Ustuth, here's a combat log of a different kid chasing down a troll for no reason other than that they happened to see the troll. I mean actually chasing--the troll actively fled from this small child.

combat log in which a different dwarven child bothers a troll, including punching some of its teeth out

My commitment to fighting all the monsters notwithstanding, I think it's a little boring to lean hard into the alcoholic berserker and stoic warrior archetypes. Most games propose a definition of "bad guys" and then let you massacre said guys; what makes DF stand out is that the dwarves play instruments and recite poetry, and pass along the knowledge of those things, as eagerly as they fight. Truly they live in a society. But it's also true that the game often prods you in the direction of violence--a lot of dwarves show up with a desire for regular martial training, if not fighting outright, and they get upset if you don't meet those needs.

The other thing to bear in mind is, the Oar of Principles is a grim place. It's losing several wars simultaneously and some of its most prominent gods are concerned with death, and this is what the dwarves make art about.

the dusts of oblivion is a reflective poetic form concerning the concept of death, originating in the oar of principles. the form guides poets during improvised performances. the poem is divided into an octet and a quatrain. a form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines have similar grammatical structures. each line has four feet with a tone pattern of even-even-uneven. every line of the poem has an initial caesura. the first part is intended to make an assertion. the second part is intended to invert the previous assertion.

Maybe once the fort's done and I can get into legends, I'll try to find some of the edgy bards who come up with this stuff. In the meantime, though, what we've got is children punching giant ancient horrors so hard they disintegrate.

raguokum, "blamesing"

raguokum the cave swallow woman. imagine a rito from botw but like 20% more bird
I don't get aboveground sieges, but I do get hostile bands of cave swallow people. If they have names known to the dwarves, it's usually because they did something like kill a forgotten beast. Or a sufficient number of dwarves. Raguokum did both.

Cave swallows may not look very threatening, but don't let the face fool you. These little jerks are the main reason why I need decent armor--they can show up in large numbers and with weapons and shields made of any normal metal up to and including steel. It's hard for most things to land a hit on the militiadwarves at this point, but vs. a steel spear, copper armor doesn't do much other than slow the wearer down. Raguokum has an only okay bronze spear but a steel shield, and she seems very fond of shield-bashing things in the skull.

It continues to be kind of a letdown that you can't do more in fort mode with animal people and other "uncivilized" intelligent creatures. They have a little more agency during world generation--they're basically hunter-gatherers and don't interact with the town-building civs much in terms of either trade or war, but individuals can join civs if they want and at that point act like any other civ member. In particular, plump helmet men seem to have a tendency to join dwarf civs, and who doesn't want a bunch of sapient mushrooms running around? That fort mode relegates these people to the role of either wildlife or chaotic evil random encounter monsters (outside the narrow context of tavern visitors, if you aren't on an island and actually get those) is both boring and contrary to what the game does with them otherwise. Granting that the devs don't have infinite time and this'll all probably work differently a few major updates from now.

mestthos sodelkonos, king of the oar of principles

mestthos sodelkonos, the king, an older dwarf with an annoyingly large family
Another thing that happened recently is that Ziriludos became the capital. Exporting an unconscionable amount of wealth in the form of cut gems and damaged clothing sufficiently impressed the king. In fact I'd planned for this for a while because I wanted to see the (relatively) new endgame stuff, so his rooms filled with gold furniture and artifacts were ready for him when he showed up.

Now that he's here and I can click on him, I can look at the extremely complicated royal family from his end. The standard romantic/domestic arrangement for a respectable head of household in this kingdom seems to be a spouse and two other partners (cf. Bomrek), and Mestthos is no exception. Good thing not all his nieces and nephews are barons considering how many of them live in the fort now. Interestingly, one of his many cousins was a were-gila monster who attacked the fort years ago.

His favorite thing and the focus of all his unreasonable demands is thrones, which I guess is appropriate. So now the animal trap garbage dump is an animal trap and throne garbage dump, but at least you occasionally need chairs for something. His biggest issue so far, other than his kingdom falling into ruin back on the mainland, is that he has nobody to complain at when he smells a miasma because nobody outranks him. Heavy is the head that wears the ≡sheep wool cap≡.

These days, when the monarch shows up, they'll ask for symbols of office made of superior metal. I had a few things on hand I could repurpose for this, but one was made to order.

rakustonshen ïlul idar is a well-crafted frosty metal short sword

We had a king in Ziriludos once. Rakustonshen Ïlul Idar--Tombchant, Lord of Dogs.

hang on, the watch crocodiles noticed something

the bronze colossus snuko ganzongosp ekûng has come! a gigantic magic statue made of bronze and bent on mayhem.

zalud nåst


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in reply to @pontifus's post:

Initially read the description for Sibnircagith as "comical giant olm-leather helm" and wondered why you modded in oversized novelty headwear. Now I can't stop thinking about Dumed Dimmadome of the Dumedolil Dimmadome.

in reply to @pontifus's post:

Not sure if it's, like, geographically possible to do that in this fort, but definitely in the next one in the hopes that I could at least get some of these dwarves as migrants.