Bay 12 Games Forum

I recently converted my girlfriend and her friend into DF players, and now that they have a bit of a handle on the basics and can play, I wanted to do a succession fort with them! We are playing Afteract, the dwarven fortress settled by The Unseen Baldness for the glory of The Hairy Arrow.

The Healing Mire seemed like a great place to set up the fortress, seeing that it was right next to a nice river, and HAD NO AQUIFERS!!! We embarked at once, saddling up with a few dogs, cats, and as much liquor and seeds as we could.
All of the dwarves have special titles, like Chief Pick, our glorious expedition leader. We came well rounded for whatever the site would throw at us, but didn't bring much skill in the way of working the metals of Afteract. I decided to leave them with their base names, and just note them by their jobs (because that's the only reason dwarves are important anyways, pffff.)
The dwarves finally arrived at the site, and I took a quick look around the map and delved out some quick lodgings.
It was a pretty basic layout. Farm at the top, a stockpile for seeds, a spot for the Trade Depot, a stockpile, and a few food related workshops going down nearby. I didn't grab a screenshot of it, but there were totally dead river otters littered all over the place after my dogs wandered by and decided they looked tasty. <_<
I really don't like having such a direct route into the fortress center though, and it makes me a little worried that I would have so little space to fight off invaders before they had us blocked off from food, booze, and anything needed in the stockpile...

A few Z-Levels down, I decided that the dwarves here had a good place to live. There weren't any terrible clouds, wandering zombies, or anything intensely !FUN! from the beginning. They would each get nice rooms, even if they were just migrant scum, and I started delving out the heart of the fortress. The miners worked pretty damn quickly, and my heart skipped a beat when I realized that they were digging the whole area out of limestone (delicious flux...) and striking hematite in the process. Not even done with the spring, I had most of the makings of steel here in front of the hardy dwarves of Afteract!
After all of the workshops I needed had been cobbled together, I thought immediately back to that hallway that scared me so badly... I didn't want to have to deal with any invaders being able to wipe me out in one good charge, I thought a drawbridge would be a good idea.
Drawbridge is down...
But pull the damn lever and watch them go FLYING! It makes my black, tiny heart flutter a little bit when I think of all the people I could murder with this set up, and how few could get in after that. Currently, the entire fortress can thrive with no outside contact, but it would get pretty cramped, and all of the animals outside would die...

In mid spring, we must have been doing something right! I checked the status screen and it turned out that somehow we had brought almost 5,000 dorfbucks worth of stuff with us, which had me a little confused.
But it was a good place to start from now! I had all the makings for steel in the few layers I toiled through, but I looked out at the trees, looked back at my paltry number of workers, and thought the most pure word Armok had graced us with: MAGMA
I spent no moment wondering if it was a good idea or not, I just ordered them to dig. Down, down you go! Down to the blood of the earth, the cusp of the crust!
Aha! The first cavern layer! This is good- wait, those are antpeople? Uh-huh... How about we don't breach into this caverns for a while, eh? I don't want their crawly little antennae thwacking my dorfs in the beard. Knowing this situation, they would get butchered and eaten... I kept ordering the digging to proceed, and had to arrange some very odd tunnels to avoid breaching the caverns and having to deal with all the muck inside of them. The second cavern confirmed my suspicion that I should just stay out of them until we could dump magma through all of it and cleanse the unholy from our proper place of living.
A blind cave ogre with scatter remains all around it? Yeah, I'll pass on that one for now. I just want to be armed with the might of magma! I will wield steel and fire against our enemies! ...Unless I just don't get around to making a military. Peasants look better covered in the sweat of industry rather than the blood of whatever, I personally think.
All industrial thoughts aside, I ordered them deeper and aha! Cavern number three, check. Suspiciously empty, I thought. Hmmm... Must be a clever ruse to lure my miners in there and lose our picks! No ogre will outsmart the dwarves of Afteract, but that means there is only one thing left to do to get at the vitae of the earth! DIG, YOU WORTHLESS MINERS! NO BREAKS! NO PARTYING! DIG!
And at last! I swear I'm not crying, it's just the toxic fumes coming from the semi molten zinc, you foolish ones...

Almost as if the rest of the world could hear our screech of victory, migrants arrived. Mwuhahaha! More hands to breathe life into the monster that will be our smelters and forges! They even brought us a weaponsmith! His previous experience with metal will be useful... In a moment of creative genious, I brilliantly and originally named him "the Metal". You would never understand the correlation, my mind is an enigma. Or perhaps the fumes of melting metal are messing with me... I distinctly remember forgetting something about a military. Oh, it must have been nothing! I have more pressing things on my mind, like the metal of the gods!

Some of the migrants are rather ugly, I think. To keep myself from having to disgust myself with gazing on their horrific visage, I order them to man the new smelters. Boom, problem fixed. Now they all look like little motes of coal!
A portrait of the migrants, by Urist McSmoothness:
Even ugly migrants hidden under layers of soot deserve a place to stay though, so more rooms are made for them. Equal, but they're not quite so when I have yet to install a waterfall for them to wash off, ho ho! (And I never will install one. Dirty migrants.)
And early autumn has swung around by now, which seems rather speedy for my miners! I really should get more people to whip them off of breaks... It would be a great investment. With early autumn comes the caravans of the dwarves! With no diplomat, or any notification that there wasn't one here... Strange. As you can see, our fine chefs have been cooking just about everything in sight until I remembered that cooked plump helmets give no seeds. Then they cooked every fish, snail, and item that littered the ground, walked on it, or even looked at it. Alongside of that were our crafts, which got better as we banded them with gems and such! Too bad we didn't have some steel stuff around to give to them! Drat! We will need more eager hands to-
Someone is listening to my prayers, I think. More dirty migrants! Well, some of them aren't too terribly dirty... but the metalsmithing industry will fix that!

Ah, something in me just loves the look of these numbers... The rest of me says that it could be much higher once we start pouring more sweat and body parts into the liquid steel! Picks are forged and handed out to those whose jobs just aren't important, and so many are reassigned to the smoke breathing monsters I've created! Steel pours out in fountains as the leaves drop off the trees(Which I thought was DF raining blood out of the sky until I checked what it was. The leaves surprised me more than the blood...)
Everything is going well! I know I'm still forgetting something about arming dwarves or something, but it can't be important in the slightest... Oh well. It isn't like our fort even needs protection! We'll vent the fumes into invaders and get everyone so sooty they can't tell which is friend or foe.
But alas, my industrious system is bothered by this dwarf! A strange mood, huh? What's strange is that you stopped pumping the bellows and started derping around in some bowyer's shop! Leave it alone, it's a silly idea anyways!
...
Oh, oh this is GREAT! We'll get our expert blowgunner Urist McRapewhistle to use it with the copious amounts of darts we have! It'll thwart every megabeast that will ever prowl this way in search of our steel and gold! /s
Now that you're done making this little whistle, get back to working in my little sweat smelter.
But the end of the year concludes peacefully, and without much event. 22 dwarves live in Afteract, we have zero military, but I did turn plenty of the steel into huge, huge serrated disks of death and placed them in the main entrance! Everything is moving along well, but with the first year all done and so much wealth created, I am expecting my friend to have a rough time with whatever comes after it all!
Keep an eye out for her post tonight, and after hers will be my girlfriend. If anybody else wants to get involved with these guys, I'll leave it up to them.
/dropsthemic

The Legacy of Hada Freeblade

The Dimension of Prophecies is a dark world, full of war, and monsters. Civilizations span the globe, dominated by demons, hindered by ancient grudges, and haunted by the creatures of the world.
Armies clash, and blood soaks the ground. Dragons soar, and villages are left in ash. The thrones of tyrants and demons rest on the bones of the downtrodden.
But this is not a tale of woe, but the saga of Hada Freeblade, the man who dared to rise up among his peers and change the world.



And so it begins, in humble Beanknots, the hometown of Hada.
The lad, no more than fifteen, aspires high. He is most certainly not a man of looks, and knows it, but he sets his sights on other things though, things greater than himself.
He aspires to be a hero. A champion of the people, and of good.
Under his blade, dragons would perish, titans would fall, and the demons of hell would go running back at his sight. Tyrants would fall, towers would topple.
Hada would save the Confederacy of Brims, and the world.

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Hada Freeblade found an old, battered scimitar one day at the market. His eyes sparkled and admired every inch of the worn weapon. It had stories ingrained in the metal, of blood and battle. He saw it, and he knew he had to have it. Weeks were spent slaving under the owner of the stall, every coin earned with hard labor. Every day he prayed to the gods that nobody would buy the scimitar, and every day, they passed it by. Every day, he gazed into the tarnished surface, rubbing his ratty shirt over it, as if to coax the mysteries from it.
It was a silver scimitar that he earned from his work. It was pocked and marred with years of use, and notched countless times. The handle is a mere wrapping of decaying leather and frayed stitching, but it is his sword, and he loves it.


"There goes Hada again... with that blade of his. I swear, he must have cut the heads off of a hundred flowers already." Xugot, a miner by trade, give a sigh and a shake of her head, looking to the companion on the porch of their meager building.
"Well, at least he's getting better with it. He's dabbling, maybe a novice, but he'll improve with time." Nac the Weaponsmith added, watching the boy swipe and feint at a passing butterfly. The two watched on in silence for a few minutes, watching Hada swing the blade at a hitching post.
"The Silver Scimitar has stuck in the -Palm Wood Hitching Post-!" The blade seemed to sing as it buried itself into the tough wood.
"You twist the Silver Scimitar in the -Palm Wood Hitching Post-! You remain in control of the Silver Scimitar!" Nac and Xugot both cocked their heads for the last line, not certain if they were hearing things or not.

After a few more minutes of silence, Nac finally spoke.
"You know, I've got a big old hunk of iron in the shop. Some sort of shield in bad need of repair. I'm a weaponsmith though, so I don't really do shields... do you think Hada would want it?" She tried to sound hesitant about the idea, but her bluff was lost on Xugot. The sly miner nodded slowly, trying to bite back the small smile brewing on her lips.
"Just some shield, huh? Well, if you aren't using it, see how he likes it." The woman replied cheekily, knowing that the old girl would gladly give Hada the shield.

Nearly two years later, Hada swung and swirled the scimitar as if it were as light as a feather. Its now sharp blade swung through the -Palm Wood Hitching Post- as if it were nothing. The top half of the post collapsed into a heap on the ground, rolling slightly away from the fiercesome Hada.
"I've got all of my things together, and I'm ready for adventure. I should probably go ask around though, and see what I can do first. Maybe my friends will know..."

-------------------

And so begins this story! This is all just stuff that I wrote up to set the tone of the story. So, the next few updates will be about Hada Freeblade and his quest to rid the world of monsters, and become famous!

Now, let me get down to the meat of this thread. I'm a writer. I write. So I reeeeaaally wanted to write a story for Dwarf Fortress, and this is as close as I could get. Because I suck at fortress mode.
Now, I'll be doing a story for Hada as I play along through my game of Dwarf Fortress, but once he dies... then you get to take up The Legacy of Hada Freeblade. I'll upload the world after his death, and then you start a new adventurer in it, and try to accomplish Hada's task of saving The Dimension of Prophecies.


THE OATH OF HADA FREEBLADE
"Here on this day, I swear on all that is good and true.
To protect the weak and defenceless,
To give succour to widows and orphans,
To refrain from the wanton giving of offence,
To live by honour and for glory,
To despise pecuniary reward,
To fight for the welfare of all,
To obey those placed in authority,
To guard the honour of fellow warriors,
To eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit,
At all times to speak the truth,
To persevere to the end in any enterprise begun,
Never to refuse a challenge from an equal,
Never to turn the back upon a foe.
Not for Kings or Gods, but for the goodness and justice of the world."

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If you want to play one of the adventurers upholding the legacy of Hada Freeblade, simply say "I swear The Oath of Hada Freeblade and will uphold it in trial and tribulation, fire and flame, and in the face of all adversity."

If you would merely like to be dorfed as one of the companions of good old Hada or the upholders of his legacy, simply say "I swear to uphold my comrade above all, The Oath of Hada Freeblade, Faith, Charity, Justice, Sagacity, Prudence, Temperance, Resolution, Truth, Liberality, Diligence, Hope, and Valour to the grave and beyond."

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I hope you enjoy the story.


P.S. I wonder how many of you will notice that The Oath of Hada Freeblade is mostly the Chilvaric Code. Sneaky, eh?