Bay 12 Games Forum

We were sent here. The outcasts of a civilization, accused of crime after crime - some of us guilty, some of us innocent. It matters little now. Our enemies will be many.



Sent on a one-way trip to provide a bastion against the hated elves and goblins to the southeast, a warning post, in exchange for not being executed.



The area we are going to has some trees. In fact, it borders the savage and untamed forests to the east. Still, I fear the rumors I have heard of these mountains. Even just skirting around them, we lost many to strange rains and oozes. Yet we dare not turn back, even when our guards disappeared one night and never returned.



Still, dwarves are hardy creatures. How hard could it be...?



By the time we get there there are only seven of us left. We should have stopped earlier. Nothing for it now - we must get underground quickly, or the rains will be the end of us.



Fortunately, we have some skilled dwarves to help us make our start. With stalwart companions such as these, surely we can bear any catastrophe.



The ooze in the mountains that continually rains from the sky burns like molten lead. It stops in a curtain at the very edge of the mountains, where the grass begins to grow. It is like the forest itself rejects it. Some splatter falls upon the grass - and what little does fall there kills it. Perhaps one day this place will grow to consume the world.

We set our camp at the very edge of it, beyond where the rain splatters, and hope we do not have to relocate. We fear the river, you see. It flows into the mountains. True, the water upstream is safe, but what if something could swim through it, against the currents?

You would not believe the things we have seen.



We immediately start hollowing out an underground burrow with space for the precious supplies from our wagon, which we start moving inside, and a trade depot. We struggle to bring the wood in and start making doors. There is a flurry of activity. We try to make doors, but there is just so much to do...



The goo quickly grows so intense that it has coated the mountains entirely, and yet when we are outside cutting trees, we can tell there are things moving, far off in the distance. Creatures that should not exist, cannot exist. What kind of hellspawn could survive this deluge? If this had happened before we had arrived, not even us few would still be alive.

I hope that we can finish the doors and bring everyone inside before-*A smudge is left on the page, as if the writer was startled by something.







They're dead! They're all dead! Some sort of giant, rotting cow - animated by forces I cannot even imagine - killed all of them! No, four or five rotting cows... The best dwarves I had ever known, the hardiest, gone! I... I must...

I must go outside. I will not die here in the burrow.

Armok curse the men who sent us here!





--

"Hm." Shorast tapped his finger on the yellowed page of the journal. "... Where are the bodies, then?"

"Did you find something, Shorast?" Kadol called, ambling up behind him with an armful of cloth from the wagon.

"Yes. A journal. All of them are dead, Kadol."

The rest of the guards in the party turned and stared at him.





"All of them perished on the journey, or while here, thanks to a band of reanimated cows. Or water buffalo."

"Are you sure?" Kadol furrowed his eyes, scratching at his beard. "There are no bodies."

"The necromancers must have gotten them." Kulet piped up, animatedly. He was the youngest of the Queen's Guard that had been sent.

"Maybe so, lad, maybe so." Shorast sighed, then looked towards the burrow. "... We should bunker in. We have already lost three of our party."

"What, and stay here until winter? Are you mad?" Kadol blinked in astonishment, grabbing Shorast by the shoulder.



"The cavern is prepared. All we have to do is move into it and wall it off. We have enough supplies to last a year." Shorast blinked, in turn, in surprise at him. "Unless you want to tell me that you want to march back to the mountainhomes with no armor and little weaponry?"

Kadol stared at him for a long moment, knowing he was right. The bloodrain that they had encountered had irreversibly damaged their armor and steel weaponry, corroding it away to nothing. All they had left was a few bronze and copper things.

"Yes, you're right, of course." Kadol said, after a long moment. Then his head snapped over, and Shorast spun around. "What in Armok's name is THAT?!"



"... I think we found where the bodies went." Shorast groped for his sword, but did not find it. Of course. He left it back in the wagon. Foolish. The practiced warrior in his brain was probably still thinking he had his steel sword - the bronze weapon never really felt like his.

Shrugging in amusement as the ruined skeleton came at them, he shattered it with a single punch. Bones flew everywhere.



They were interrupted by a scream from behind them.



A horse skeleton had snuck up behind one of the men in the company who Shorast had never learned the name of. As one, all of them rushed to help, screaming war cries.

This was a huge mistake.



The noise attracted others. Soon more came, and more, and more. The same horse skeleton that had attacked in the beginning seemed invincible - their weapons and strikes and grapples could not harm it, and it broke arms and legs and skulls with but a careless kick of its hooves.



Standing in the middle of the carnage, Kulet stared, weaponless, watching as every dwarf around him fell. Then he lifted his hand and screamed, and charged, his mind lost to beastial rage.



The skeletal horse, later to be known as 'Fasteneats', and the partial skeleton of one of the undead from the first expedition, both fell upon him. They took their time, ripping off Kulet's extremities, and then they callously walked away, leaving Kulet to be torn apart by the undead yak retainers that followed them.



Kadol cried. He crawled forwards, and he stopped to cry some more. He crawled, blinded by pain and rage and sadness and emotion.

The goo was slowly dissolving him. It did not match the pain in his heart. His skin blistered and bubbled, his clothes dissolving away.



The droplets of acidic rain intensified once again, forming pools around him. He crawled still.



He did not see the zombified half-corpse of one of those who had gone before, shambling towards him.





It did not kill him quickly, as he desired.

I generated a world this morning. I should have taken screenshots, and then I could have easily made a little story out of the tale of the adventurer that follows. To assuage my grief at not having the time, energy or raw materials to make a story out of this guy (mostly because I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year and don't want to start an entirely new project, forum or otherwise) I'll share his story so far before I get to the present.

I generated a demigod adventurer who focused on wrestling, as I've had little luck with weapons as of late, ironically enough. I spawned in a little two-village civilization, but I couldn't find a single soul in any of the villages. I moved from my starting town to the next village, but found only burnt out villages and a run of hogs, who I killed for meat. Then I bedded down for the night inside one of the abandoned houses and was attacked by bogeymen, confirming the place was completely abandoned.

I've found the best method for dealing with bogeymen is to charge them, knock them over, grapple them by the head, gouge out their eyes, and then stab them in the head in roughly that order. So I did. Four bogeymen, four kills, no injuries. I am liking grapple-happy wrestlers.

I cross the mountains to the north, sneaking the whole way to train things up, and make it to the other side, although on the way to the mountains I am ambushed by a goblin axeman and hammerman, the former of which cuts deep into my left arm as my right one relieves him of his eyes. I killed both with their own weapons using nothing but my right hand. Fortunately it healed up with only some sensory nerve damage.

The village of the civilization over the mountains is populated, fortunately, and after staying there for a day, I ask them what I can do for them. They task me to kill a night creature to the south. I conscript two crossbowmen and head that way.

We run into Bleak Woman consorts, the shadows of men who were kidnapped by the Bleak Women, and fight four of them. My wrestler's spear and bare hands do little damage, so I use my knife to slash their heads off, being unable to strangle them or incapacitate them through pain. Then we fight two Bleak Women themselves. All were outside the lair, which I thought was odd, but I checked my adventure log and the creature I was supposed to kill isn't dead yet. So I look around for her, no doubt thinking that she is just a straggler, when I find a door and enter the lair proper.

I got the announcement that my fortress had been made into a mountainhome. A bunch of migrants arrived. I waited expectantly. No monarch. Not even a corpse from a queen that was too old and rapidly decayed into ash. The migrant wave ended quickly. I thought the message must have been erroneous. The queen was a mason, and I couldn't find a single dead mason even in the aftermath of a bloody siege.

Then, later, I found out that I had several legendary weapondwarves in my fort. I was surprised by this until I looked it up on Magmawiki and learned that the monarch generally comes with a bunch of those. I completely missed them, meaning they must have come in from another part of the map. So the monarch was supposed to spawn, but didn't.

Either that or she dropped dead and her entourage was already heading towards the fortress and never noticed. That's one problem with having people attending on you that "Don't care about anything anymore", I guess!

Anyone experienced anything remotely like this? And since all I am is a barony right now, can I still get promotions, or is the dwarven liason's recommendations forever denied to me and as such I will never actually be upgraded? Although with the king here but dead, the site is already a mountainhome, so I suppose it doesn't matter, but I am wondering.

Needless to say, I have not seen one, but it seems this world I have generated has chocolate demons.

Sadly, I'm doing one of my crazier fortress ideas and building an aboveground fortress in a forest, so I don't know if I can break into hell and see if there are any. But who knows, I may be able to.

My fort now has a goal!

Also, I'm mental-imaging them as cacodemons from Doom 2, except made out of chocolate.

Not a very safe place to store one's belongings.

Not that I want to rush you, Fox, but I was just wondering - is there any estimate for when there'll be a new version? If so, what's in it?

Maybe you need to set up a progress report, like Toady.

I just found out that if your leader is on death row, and you disband and then recreate the liberal crime squad, your leader is released from prison as if nothing had happened and in fact is not executed on the set date.

The standard knife gotten from the Oubliette is pathetic. We need combat knives! Stilletos! Pocket knives! Each of them would be for a different use.

Pocket knife = Equivalent to the knife we have now. Not very effective but cheap.
Combat knife = Costs 80-100$. More powerful than the knife.
Stilleto = A knife that's used for stabbing only. Gives a bonus when attacking in concert with the Stealth or Disguise skill, or if the Conservative isn't alarmed.

Which brings me to another concern - we need a new combat system, because spending an entire turn to stow your rifle/shotgun/pistol and pull out a knife when it runs dry is just flat-out ridicoulous. It should be possible to designate an alternate weapon, and have each individual Liberal switch between them at will. This raises some problems - it wouldn't fit with the current combat systems. Liberals would need to act individually.

As an extention on this (though not for it alone) I would suggest having each liberal able to perform an action individually in one turn if you would so like instead of everyone doing the same thing. As an alternative for this, make switching one liberal's main/primary weapon not end the turn.