Bay 12 Games Forum

aight at this point i feel like i might not make post 2 cause of how much i have to write for it along with the amount of screenshots i took, or I might continue on trying to finish it and stay determined but who knows

I was looking forward to reading the second part. Also there is no obligation to use all the screenshots, or summarize everything that happened. Just the highlights would be fine too.
Also nice to see that Pik and Desli have been on the move again. I actually tried to visit them during my turn to gift them a few gremlins. Sadly I could not find them.

Edit: One of those new hamlets Eric pointed out (Coalford) was actually settled by a single gremlin and a group of turkeys. It's one of the gremlins that applied for citizenship in Mischieflaws, Imiwe Hoistedjumped. Good to know gremlins are free to move about when they are proper citizens.

I've edited the turn list, let me know if it needs further work

If you start with a party of multiple peasant adventurers it is kind of arbitrary which of those you consider your main character. It is fine to continue as long as one of them survives. Feel free to pick the save back up again if that's the case. Adventurers that join the party during the playthrough don't count.

Crashes happen a lot unfortunately. Feel free to write about it, your solution sounds good.

After the gremlins applied for citizenship I fired all the dwarves and let the gremlins have their jobs, so these are not events generated by the game itself.

I failed to get them to breed as of yet. I started my adventure with 50% males/50% females, but I managed to only gift away female populations , as you can see in avolition's screenshot . Will need to fix that in a later turn.

Our travels had been relatively peaceful, but that had to end sooner or later.
That end came in the form of a dingo attack in the deep of night. A single unarmed gremlin is easy prey for a dingo, but the beasts horribly misjudged our numbers. The dingoes mauled one gremlin in their surprise attack, but then all 349 remaining gremlins piled on the dingoes. None of the gremlins were armed as they left their stone axes behind in Mischieflaws, but the dingoes stood no chance.



One gremlin stood out in the battle. He killed three of the four dingoes, which is quite an achievement because all 349 gremlins joined in. That is not all that is noteworthy. I know for a fact that all the gremlins were generated out of thin air at the top floor of the museum, but their bodies do seem to have a physical age. Aye Coloreddoctrine is one of the few that should be considered just a child, I would estimate him at no more than seven.



It was clear that gremlins have the potential to defend themselves in battle. And there is more good news. I found that gremlins will happily bond to other people.  As long as these other people take good care of them, they can safely adapt to the world, without me having to take care of them. I started out with leaving small numbers of gremlins behind in Mischieflaws, then travelled back to the museum. I gave away gremlins to a lot of people, including quite a few adventurers of the museum. They all promised to take good care of their new companions as well!



And that is quite a responsibility! A gremlin can live for a thousand years, so it is not a short time commitment.
Now that I know that my gremlins have a future I can rest more easily. I will retire to further educate the 300 or so gremlins that remain with me, and hope they can have a positive influence on the world.



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OOC: I will play a bit more gremlin-fortress now, with a more sane number of gremlins. I have obviously not been able to give everyone gremlins, but a few of the adventurers I met in the Museum, the Shelter of Adventures and Waterdeeps now have one, or a few companions. Feel free to give them away or whatever if uninterested 

Also, while trying to give away the gremlins I ran into a nasty bug, apparently the gremlins I tried to leave behind earlier (the ones that went missing) were still listed and whenever I selected one the game crashed on me. I found that it has likely already been reported on the bug tracker, here. I would not know where to begin fixing this with dfhack, but according to the report it is possible. Anyhow it likely only affects my character, these are the offending gremlins (got the list from fortress mode, where they are still listed as "bonded":

By sprinting ahead of the gremlin pack I can spend at least part of my time outside of hearing range of the goblin jokes, making the journey a lot more pleasant. I have made a worrying discovery however. It appears that the gremlins that I left behind at the museum and other sites have all dissapeared, and I can only conclude they must have been unable to survive without me, or the rest of the gremlin pack. There is no trace of them. 31 gremlins are lost and only 350 remain.

I should have predicted this. It is a common problem when trying to reintroduce species back to the wild. Creatures bred in captivity lack the training and experience necessary to survive in nature, or in this case civilisation, and quickly perish. It was a mistake to abandon them so quickly. I must prepare the other gremlins better, and the only way to do that is by spending a long time training them.




I talked to the dwarves at Waterdeep, a fortress at the source of the Purged Loot. I need them to assist in constructing a fortress for the gremlins, where I can prepare them better for their future. I hate dealing with dwarves, but only they are allowed to build new settlements.
As expected the negotiations went far from smoothly:

“So mr. SquareWheel, you want to make use of our services to build a fortress for you? First of all,  who will be going to live there?”
“The gremlins, and me. There's a lot of gremlins, but they will assist during the construction of the fortress"
“Gremlins?” That is not possible I am afraid”
“What do you mean?“
“We only allow intelligent creatures into our fortresses as inhabitants or visitors. Gremlins are too short, it is well established that you must be this tall to be intelligent” (The dwarf pointed to a height somewhere halfway his beard, indicating the height of a kobold)
I responded angrily: "I’m two heads taller than you, it may be better to drop the argument about heigth and intelligence”
“Stop insulting me, mr SquareWheel! You will have to enter all of the gremlins in the animal category instead. They will not be allowed to work and must at all times behave behave like proper animals.”
“Master dwarf. I did not mean to insult you but we simply need them to work or we will not be able to feed 350 gremlins and provide them with clothing.”
“Clothing!!? Mr Squarewheel you know as well as I do that clothing a gremlin is strictly against regulation DF0.47.05!! We can provide clothing for any creature of a variety of sizes that is listed in the appendix of the regulation, but even though it covers a lot of creatures such as elephant men, undead and even  rodent men, it is clear that gremlins are not listed. We simply can not allow this.  In fact, mr. Squarewheel, I can read your thoughts, and I will assure you that none of the creatures that are listed in the appendix are even remotely as small as the gremlin, so do not even try to work around the rules by seeking a substitute."
 
I finally accepted a deal as I had no other options. According to my calculations it would take two years to uplift the gremlins to full citizenship, at that point they should be able to make their own clothing. After the main contract was done the dwarf handed me an enormous stack of paper sheets. "Please sign a form in triplicate for each gremlin" He demanded. "Without it we can not leave!"



I will spare you the details of my time spend in the dwarven fortress. It was terrible, and a complete failure. The seven dwarves that were assigned to the mission were as strict on the rules as the trader I spoke to earlier, and we simply could not provide enough food for the gremlins. I knew they were carnivores and had assumed that they would happily eat eggs or prepared eggs and had planned accordingly by ordering a large number of turkeys from the trader. In no time we had thousands of eggs. I had ordered the dwarves to work full time in the kitchen to boil those eggs. But the gremlins would only eat raw meat,and did not touch the eggs. The horses and yak cows that were brought along were devoured in no time, and the seven dwarves could simply not work fast enough to butcher the turkeys in time and there were only keas to hunt. The turkeys would also only have lasted a month or two at most. It was simply not possible to feed 350 gremlins with a working population of seven dwarves. I decided to leave with all the gremlins when the situation grew desperate, as I knew they were able to forage for their own food outside in the wilds.

So now I find myself again in the wilds, with a horde of starving, desperate and angry gremlins.   

I will put the save up for you on monday, if that helps in planning.
As for my adventure, it is not the Treatyseed thing, I don't think I'd be up for a task that daunting.
It is something different from the regular adventures though, and we have discussed it before. Here we go.

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Can Mischief save the world??
by Midas Squarewheel, head ecologist of the museum.

Dear reader. Before you lie the incoherent writings of Midas Squarewheel, the new head ecologist of the museum. I am but a simple scientist, and my deeds may not amount to much, but I feel it is important to put them to paper. The world needs to be saved after all, and if I fail, others may read this and prove to be more successful. 

Recently the museum has made some funds available to hire an ecologist. They ended up hiring me for the job,  Midas Squarewheel, in most aspects a fairly average human. I fear that if they had hired an elf, he would have gone mad within days, due to the current state of things.
In fact, because of the current situation I can only assume that the museum must have hired an ecologist out of a feeling of guilt as the effects that the museum itself has had on the world’s ecology are nothing short of catastrophic.

In the Third Age of Myth and before the world had a thriving ecosystem, with megabeasts as top predators, living together with many other creatures in an intricate web of relationships. The adventurers have destroyed all that, by killing every last megabeast and by unleashing terrible plagues on the land.
I’ve heard all the excuses. They say that we are better off without the Dragons, Rocs and Hydras, they claim it is well known they killed people on their rampages. But the truth of the matter is that by removing the top predators, the whole ecosystem becomes unbalanced and will collapse. The data shows this clearly: every other population, even that of all sentient races has been in decline over the last centuries. Mass extinctions are everywhere. The Golden Age is not truly golden, it is an age of rot and decline. If nothing is done to stop this we will end up in an Age of Death. The rate at which the intelligent races are dying is far in excess from the few sentients that fell to megabeast raids in the early ages:



Even the dwarves that initially seemed to profit from the decline of the others have been in a steady decline over the last hundred years.

Raki, the mad monkey king was the first to recognize these facts. This was still in an early stage, well over a century ago. If only his reaction had been different. He chose a path of revenge and destruction and only ended up making things worse.
No, to save the world we have to heal it. We have to reintroduce key species to stabilise the ecosystem. The megabeasts however can no longer be saved. The last have died. Necromancy is no cure, it is a curse that will only make things worse. Our only option is to look at important species that are at the brink of extinction now, and try to save them, that way we can stop the decline, and maybe we can turn it back around.

This line of reasoning brought me to the gremlin.
Yes the gremlin, one of the most remarkable creatures that used to live in our realm. They were by far the smallest of the sentient creatures, even a moth man or a kobold stand at twice the height of a gremlin.

They are well known for their mischief and their stealth. Despite their size a single gremlin could bring a whole dwarven fortresses to ruin by pulling the right lever. Their cleverness and unique features were an important balancing force in the ecosystem of Orid Xem, but today they are all but gone. Rumours exist of populations deep below the world, but they are just rumours. Official counts tell us that today, only one Gremlin remains in the world, in the Teal Pit, a cave on the inaccessible “Dreamy Island”. I had therefore abandoned all hope that the species could be saved.



Untill one day an old man showed up at the museum with a caged gremlin. He told me that despite the fact that this particular gremlin was resistant to sunlight, I should never let it come in contact with water, or feed it after midnight.

I am of course first and foremost a scientist, and curiosity got the better of me. I did both of those things the same night.

Now I am in command of a gremlin horde of 381 gremlins..