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Read the full story here.

Spoiler Alert: The story told herein contains some situations which are generally considered spoiler material by the DF community. Proceed at your own risk.

Chapters:

• Springtime at a Haunted Glacier Volcano
• Sanguine Summer Snowdrifts
• Self-Sufficiency in a Terrifying Glacier
• The Foul Fog comes to Roomcarnage
• Diplomacy Beneath the Oily Furnace
• Tragedy upon the Ice of Ghosts
• Delve Greedily, Delve Deep
• Tales of Greed and Industry
• The Worshipers of Zon
• Histories of Cupidity and Toil
• Playing With Fire
• The Water of Ghosts
• Ice Fishing and Other Futile Efforts
• In Places Deep, Where Dark Things Sleep
• The Foul Fog Conspiracy
• On Thin Ice
• The Gathering Storm
• The Pig Tail Fiber Trousers Crisis
• Stories of Labor and Dynamism
• Waiting For Urist
• The Last Days before the Heat
• A Fortress of Ice and Fire
• Liquid Fire and Frozen Blood
• Of Rats and Dwarves
• The Attack of Rupola the Steamy Scabs
• Yarns of Desperation and Mystery
• Glacier, Glacier, Burning Bright
• Glacier Caves and Obsidian Blocks
• The Foul Fog Conspiracy Thickens
• The Vigilance of Vampires
• Ghosts of the Past
• Five Exorcisms and a Waterfall
• The Knowledge of the Dwarves
• Dwarves on Fire
• Spiels of Modesty and Determination
• Double Vampiricide
• A Dwarf by Any Other Name
• The Last Great Deluge
• The Return to the Surface
• To Kill a Mountain Titan Foul Fog Zombie
• Sagas of Violence and Uncertainty
• The Wealth of Roomcarnage
• The Attack of the Foul Fog Conspiracy
• The Curse of Rith Craftportent
• On the Edge of a Blade
• Legends of Patience and Enterprise
• The Attack of Simo Veiledsins the Obscure Terrors
• In Which a Yak goes Stark Raving Mad
• Ézum Earthwane Takes the Plunge
• Warm Meat, Cold Meat; Fresh Meat, Old Meat
• A Migration to Death
• From Blood to Bolt
• Ice Gauntlets and Obsidian Revisitations
• Chaos amidst the Ice of Ghosts
• Myths of Betrayal and Slaughter
• The Consequences of Mourning
• The Death of Kadol Worklimb
• Glacial Victories and Crushing Defeats
• The Road to Roomcarnage
• A Year of Greed
• The Militia Commander's New Clothes
• The Army of the Momentous Dye
• A Decade in Darkness
• The Twilight Years
• The Millstone of Time
• Whispers of Suicide and Despair
• Urist's Bane
• Losing is Fun
• Those Who Remain
• The Last Offense of the Momentous Dye

---

Since the early May of 2014, I've been capturing the story of my most recent fortress, Roomcarnage, in the style of a traditional Let's Play. Each chapter of the story so far consists of a single imgur album containing dozens of images with captions. I've been publishing the story on reddit, where it's being rather well received, and I'm eager to share the tale of Roomcarnage also with the bay12 forums.

What makes the story of Roomcarnage unique amongst Dwarf Fortress Let's Plays is the extensive use of .gifs in the storytelling process. Each chapter includes a large number of .gifs in addition to still images, which help to capture the dynamic nature of the game, even while it is paused.

As I produce additional chapters, I'll edit this thread to include them here. Of course, I'm more than happy to answer any questions about the fortress itself, my overseeing techniques, my storytelling method, or anything else you can think of.

Please enjoy!

             Correspondence from Syrupurns
                      a Dwarf Fortress tale

                      introduction:

    Simply put, this thread is an in-character narration of my current fortress, Syrupurns, presented in the form of a collection of letters, delivered to the capital whenever a dwarven caravan successfully leaves the map after trading. While it is primarily an independent work and not a community fortress in the traditional sense, I am leaving the fort open to community involvement. In these early years of the fortress, participation is limited to writing correspondence to Syrupurns. Once the thread has developed into a more traditional narrative (i.e. when the queen migrates, and there is no more need for written correspondence), I suppose community involvement could also become much more direct.

    In many ways, Syrupurns may be considered a sequel to Weatherwires. The grand scope of an excavation megaproject lies at the center, although I predict (and hope) that the emergent storyline in Syrupurns may prove to be very different in nature than Weatherwires. I am aiming to improve upon a number of "mistakes" I made while narrating Weatherwires - most notably including my decision to begin the narration from the very beginnings of the fortress, and also my unwillingness to use DFHack and other third party applications, besides Therapist and visualizers. By doing the former, I hope to finally follow up on a promise I made to another forumite to produce a "guide" of sorts for those who wanted to do projects of a similar scope as the great dome of Weatherwires. As well, I hope that beginning the story at the beginning will prove to be more compelling. As far as my abstinence from DFHack, Runesmith, etc., there were certain bugs which arose over the course of Weatherwires' 100+ years of gameplay. These bugs became parts of the story, it is true, but I could not really report them to Toady, since I'd used mods of a fairly invasive nature. With Syrupurns, I will be able to report any strange bugs that occur - certainly based on observations in Weathewires, there may be some very interesting ones. The only exception here is that I have and will continue to use alternative save files and DFHack to glean extra information about the world and the characters, for strictly storytelling purposes.

    Lastly, I'd like to point out that, except for a few arbitrary decisions here and there, I will try and let certain systems already in place in the game - justice and military training, primarily - serve their purpose without any help from me. That means no danger room type exploits, and no punishing of nobles or other dwarves due to my own knowledge as the player. If a vampire is in the fortress, it's up to the captain of the guard to figure out what's going wrong before it's too late.

    Enjoy reading,
      DS

From my fortress diary:

25th Moonstone, 182, Early Winter - Water flooding of the top of guildhalls began this month, but with the sealed passages between the buildings accidentally closed off, the dwarves (restricted to the interior of the halls, via burrows) pathed along the exterior avenues. Four dwarves perished when water flow pushed them off of the streets to fall many z-levels to their deaths. Additionally, one dwarf died on the surface, slain by a goblin ambush before the military could rush to protect him. The total fortress population has been reduced to 96, with no new dwarves having been born since 157.

Welcome to Nugrethshorast.

DFFD: Weatherwires (year 185)
DFMA: Weatherwires (upper fortress), Weatherwires (lower fortress). Also, the full and final map, dated 226, one full century after embark.
TOUR: Starts on page 35. It's extremely image-heavy, so beware.
ADVENTURE MODE SAVES: Explore the fort as an adventurer!
    Solon Townclenched, the last dwarf.
    Vucar Tombdeath, plump helmet woman.
    Osman the Puzzle of Poisons, forgotten beast.
    Èzum Openeddoors the Robust Stoker of Lances.
STORY: The Saga of Weatherwires, extracted and presented in a single downloadable document.


The fortress is a collection of free-standing structures, carved from natural rock, and housed inside a hollowed-out hemisphere. The bottom of the grotto is the bottom of the upper cavern layer, and most of the structures have been carved to match the arrangement of pillars and cavern walls of the caverns. The entire project took the majority of the summer, with the outline of each layer having to be carefully calculated (there was a lot of math involved), and carved out before the next could be worked on.


As it turns out, the Merchant of Echoing (the fort's parent civ) was destroyed by goblins during the first few decades of world gen, so when Weatherwires was declared the Mountainhome (shortly after excavation began), no queen arrived - she had been dead for more than a century. With the duke (Kogsak Murdershot) dead in a recent tantrum spiral, the only 'royalty' left in the fortress, and thus in the entire civilization, was the duke's wife and four surviving children. At this time (around the year 135), I resolved to make the dome the last impregnable bastion of dwarfdom in the world.


Of course, once the dome was excavated, the massive amount of stone piled at its bottom was debilitating to my framerate, a problem which I resolved by flooding the entire affair with magma, pumped in from the adjacent magma tube. Many dwarves gave their lives in the excavation and flooding of the dome - I thought that my supply of dwarves would be neverending, between immigrant waves and new births. I could not have been more wrong.


In the hopes that the dwarves, sealed underground, might procreate and develop into an essentially limitless civilization, I organized them into clans. Each dwarf that was born in the fortress was given a nickname that was the same as their father's surname. The late duke's children were named princes and princesses, and given the nickname "Murdershot," in honor of their dead father, the last royalty of the Merchant of Echoing. A tantrum spiral or two later, the fortress population had dipped down to about 150, but no immigrant waves had arrived to replace the dead. I assumed then that the civilization's dwarven population had been exhausted, and all dwarves living in the fortress were, indeed, the last of their kind.


In 157, Kol "Languagemetal" Claspedrelief was born. His birth went unheeded for several years, until the following journal entry:

16th Obsidian, 164, Late Winter - All remaining stone dumped, and the bottom of the dome channeled out. The dome is finally contiguous with the upper cavern layer, and thus the excavation portion of the project (not counting housing within buildings) is complete. Also, the fortress, despite containing married couples who have produced children before, has stopped producing new infants. The only child left is Kol Claspedrelief, of clan Languagemetal, and at 7 years old, is the youngest dwarf in the fortress.


Since that journal entry, nearly two decades have passed. The fortress population has dwindled to 96, a combination of engineering accidents, pond grabber ambushes, and the occasional lucky goblin. Kol "Languagemetal" has been designated "The Youngest Dwarf." The surfaces of the four separate guildhalls have been flooded with water, to allow the growth of wild fungi. Eight guildhalls have been carved out of four free-standing structures, connected by a series of causeways. The royal family (of which a mere 3 remain) are housed in their own suites in the citadel located in the north part of the dome.

With no immigrants, no merchants, and no children, these dwarves are the last of their kind. Theirs is the saga of Weatherwires.

The names in this story have been altered to protect the innocent.

My last (also first) fortress was totally isolated from anything but a Dwarven civilization, so I'd never experienced a true goblin siege. I had no idea.

First of all, one of my peasants was taken by a fey mood. Almost simultaneously, a force of evil appears on the map. 40-50 goblins, many of which wield crossbows, led by a fearsome axelord. The peasant is forgotten.

I mobilize my frugal military (10 wrestlers, 4 hammerdwarvers, and my axewielding Captain of the Guard) to the entrance, behind the traps and the great hall. The first wave of goblins is caught in the first row of cage traps - but about 10 break through. One squad of wrestlers rushes out to the entry hall - a grand room, about 10 by 40, with engraved olivine floors, flanked by golden statues - to meet the enemy. They are mowed down by goblin marksmen, who then proceed to shoot through the doorways at my Captain's squad, who moves forth to engage.

At this time I get the announcement that the Captain's infant daughter has been shot out of her arms by a marksman. She flies into a berserk rage, slaying many goblins, but soon suffers fatal wounds. I decide the time has passed for direct engagement, and pull a lever, opening up the whole floor of the hall, and everyone tumbles down three z-levels and is crippled.

At this time, the peasant goes berserk. Apparently he didn't get some raw gems or something and decided it would be a wise idea to throw a child against a wall. This just happened to be another child of the Captain.

Turns out I survived the seige - my squad of hammerdwarves, aided by the human liaison who happened to be in town, beat back the rest of the army. But now I've got a depressed child who's lost a mother and two siblings to goblins. What should I do with it?