Bay 12 Games Forum

What it says on the tin, pretty much. It's always kind of annoyed me TBH that objects can't be custom-engraved the way walls and floors can. You're pretty much totally at the mercy of artifact makers when it comes to decorating objects, and the end result is usually that the image is something completely random and arbitrary rather than (as should be the case) something meaningful to the player. Does anyone else feel a similar way? Figure I can't be the only one who wants to engrave custom images depicting my favourite worldgen battle onto the weapons and armour of my militia.

Adventure mode board seemed like as good a place as any for this question.
To the point, I've heard stories from some bay12 forumites who have adapted their DF worlds to their own tabletop RPG campaigns, and thought it seemed like something I might want to try myself at some point. And so I'm curious, what are some opinions on the best TTRPG system to emulate a vanilla DF world (as in a somewhat more fleshed-out, cohesive, and actualized version of the game DF is right now, putting aside mythgen and other major future overhauls)?

I know D&D 5e and Pathfinder are popular choices...but while I have nothing against these systems on their own merits, I personally don't think they're the best at simulating vanilla DF in its current iteration (at least not without extensive homebrewing and house rules). I'm eager to find out whether anyone has used alternative systems to better effect?

I do already have a system in mind, but I'm always curious about alternative opinions.

[LARGE_PREDATOR] ones in particular. It would be a nice little touch if walking into a lord's keep with your pet tiger provoked a similar reaction to what walking in with a drawn weapon currently does.

"Is that a giant tiger? That's alarming!"

An exception, of course, would be elves and "at peace with nature" civs in general.

Just started a new dwarven fort, "Tightropeherds", in a 1050-year-old world generated with kiiranaux's Highfantasy Mod pack, and decided I wanted to try my hand at documenting its history in story format as it plays out. Expect sporadic posts varying in their length and level of detail, since I'm busy in my personal life right now, but I'll try to stay as committed as I can.
NOTE: This is not a community fort nor do I have any plans to make it one, it's just my own emergent story that I don't feel like flooding the fort discussion thread with. Enjoy!

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Leader's Log 1, Spring 1050, Year 1 of Tightropeherds:

To Her Majesty Ifik:
It is I, the leader of "The Salty Coils" expedition, writing to report that the initial journey to the embark site was a success. Well, all things considered. We lost one of our shoveldon pair (the poor beast collapsed in a sudden blizzard just a day or two out of the Mountain Halls) and we had a great deal of difficulty getting her mate to continue onward without her. At least all seven of us dwarves arrived here in one piece, so it could've been a great deal worse. In any case, it's been unanimously decided that this hill is where we will begin to delve Tightropeherds, for your glory and the glory of all Star-Sapphirite dwarves!

Given your vague directions I'm still not quite sure why you ordered us to colonize this place, but I trust in your wisdom, so we'll try to get it in as good a shape as we're able before the onset of Winter. Our group, aside from myself, consists of two miners, a carpenter, a stoneworker, a jeweler, and a fisherdwarf, who will hopefully provide enough work to sustain us until our first migrant wave. Food and drink supplies should be enough to get us through our first few seasons, if we ration them properly. If worst comes to worst we can butcher some of our livestock.

Being a dwarf who tries to count his blessings, I should note that at least our surroundings don't appear too hostile. If I were one of the tree-huggers I might even call these wooded hills rather pleasant, though a few drakes have been spotted lurking in the surrounding rivers that I've told Omshet (our fisherdwarf) to be wary of. In any case, he's to suspend all fishing until we have a basic meeting hall carved out, so hopefully the drakes will have cleared out by then.
Expect another report from me before the end of Summer, if you don't receive it then know that I and my expedition team have met a horrible fate.
Your Loyal Subject, Dalek "Sequentialstair" Otigostcunorushat

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Glossary of non-vanilla elements:
Shoveldon: A stocky elephantoid native to the deep caverns with four spade-like tusks, utilized by dwarves as a beast of burden.
Drake: = Scaled Drake, an alligator-like draconic creature capable of breathing magical fire and possessing the strength to maul most humanoids.

This might be moddable in the current version of the game, but if it's not I've been thinking about how something similar to the [INTERACTION] tag could be used for immersive little touches in adventure mode that might draw attention to a character's personality quirks or physical features, or just generally employed to add a more narrative feel to adventure mode text. Things like "Urist grins, revealing his widely-spaced teeth" or "Ago yelps in terror and stumbles back from the recessed-chin troll". Just the sorts of things that seem to me too specific to certain situations and characters to be easily moddable with the current [INTERACTION] tag.

Thoughts?

Now that necromancers and demon lords can turn entire regions evil with their influence, it seems kind of weird that the surrounding civs seem mostly ok with this. For instance, an elven civ would probably be upset that huge swaths of their forest are dead now thanks to the necromancer who set up shop nearby a few years back. It might even serve as an incentive in itself for them to take violent action against him. Of course I'm no coding expert, so I have no idea how easy this would be to implement, but presumably some kind of emotional trigger would be possible.

Just had my rat man adventurer encounter a hamlet under raid by bandits. Oddly, while the bandits did follow me as though they were going to attack, they just stopped when I did and I was even able to have a perfectly civil conversation with one. Not sure if this is already a known bug on the tracker or not, but if it is then sorry for wasting your time with this post.