Bay 12 Games Forum

I've been messing with my raws and looking at various civilizations in the mods I have set up, and I've started to get a few ideas. In the past, I have found that meat/leather economies with good breeding populations tend to do ridiculously well, since you get food, bone/leather commodities, war animals, and awesome menageries to impress your dwarves. It's also just plain fun to have pits full of cave crocodiles and merpeople (yes, that thread was amazing.)

However, I'm trying to make up innovative ways to expand on this pliable economy. First off, are megabeasts, by default, capable of breeding? Even if not, it would be easily editable and would make world gen and megabeast farms an intense fortress worthy of epic stories. Now, that's really just a side idea to the main one in this thread that I want to propose.

All the sentient races (dwarves, elves, humans, kobolds, and goblins) strictly adhere to monogamy and will only reproduce with their spouse, and will never remarry even if the spouse dies. Like all mating in Dwarf Fortress, it's done through spores. As such, you can't kidnap a few traders and expect a human or elf farm up and running within a few years, as they won't mate unless conveniently married. However, two approaches could be made to possibly start up a breeding farm of sentient creatures.

One option would be to simply raise the wealth of your fortress to ridiculously high levels, then capture every singly goblin and kobold that comes onto your territory, and toss them all into pits together, and hope that you caught a married couple. If not, there is always the next ambush. Within time, this model ideally would set you up with several married pairs that would begin to create offspring that could then marry the single captives or each other to create a stable breeding population.

Another option that is much more time efficient and seems more plausible, would be to generate a pocket world (for ideal circumstances) and start underneath a human town, goblin fortress, or elf land. Depending on how war-torn your world is, you should have a town with several married couples (since they obviously live together) that would naturally breed during your stay there. It would be very easy to set up traps or chutes to slowly begin to collect the breeding pairs, and to engineer a system to "flush" their babies into a butchery, as proposed in a thread I read previously.

What I'm asking is, does anyone have any experience on this that could help expand on this idea, or rule it out? I'm considering making a test run when I get more free time, possibly after the new version as well, but not necessarily.

Discuss.

Today I decided to generate a batch of worlds to find an interesting place to adventure. After a few runs in large worlds, I found that the interwoven, super-complex relationships of all the entities made it hard to make a real impact with an adventurer without completely eradicating everything, so instead I generated a pocket dimension. Thus was born the Dragon-Planet of Typhoons, a lone landmass called the Blameless Continent with a small sea called the Sunken Blueness. The generation was very quick, and it only went 30 years into history generation before stopping.

The world was actually a relatively peaceful place between the sentient races. The humans and dwarves settled in isolated towns that were calm. One of the towns was ran by a local group of priests who erected a temple and a castle, as well as several hovels. The humans, however lacked a capital for reasons unknown, and were led mostly by a Merchant Baroness. The goblins conquered most of the continent in the absence of all kobolds, and had a healthy array of human, elven, and dwarven slaves that tended to the pikemaster that led their cult based around torture. It was all, as you can tell, rather normal...

However, the world was truly in a state of crisis. At the beginning of time, a dragon named Obin Taxfire and a demon named Smunstu Glowbrand the Lies of Fire were among the strongest forces in the land. They forced the few remaining mythical creatures -- a titan and a minotaur, into hiding in a cave where they were oppressed by the locals, only coming out to raze the occasional hovel.

The dragon was a completely independent entity, only wishing to acquire wealth as he plundered the fertile, young cities of the humans and dwarves. The demon, however, was even more greedy, but for a different commodity. The demon wished for souls and devotion, and started a massive cult called the Parched Sect which originally started with just goblin worshipers. However, as the dragon began to threaten the other races, they all joined and worshiped the demon in exchange for faith and protection. To prevent this wrongdoing, the humans created the Pregnant Faith, a religion based around Shibbi, the god of dance, and encouraged all humans to join and follow the oracular way of the feet.

Around this time, there was a lone elven civilization deep in the woods with a leader named Enure Fernskunk the Solitary Wing-Satin. He was among the only of the elves. The entire civilization had been wiped out only three years after history generation began, and all that was left was himself and an enslaved elf-girl at the goblin fortress who served the Demon himself. Enraged, Enure started a religion around the consumption of flesh, and started hunting and feasting on the goblins that enslaved his "love." Eventually, Enure killed and ate enough of the Demon's followers to pull him out of hiding, and they had a showdown that resulting in Enure killed and eating the Demon and causing the religion to collapse! With a lust for blood, Enure held off battle after battle all by himself in his Oaks of Humility, proving to be a mighty elf. This is roughly when I entered the game.

With the dragon as the last mythical creature alive, we left the Age of Dragon and Demon and entered the Draconic Age, an era in which Obin has many religious followers, but lacked an actual religious group. Instead, they worshiped him out of fear. When I entered the game, every sentient group leader gave me the quest to kill Obin -- and a few asked me to killed the last remaining other mythic, the minotaur named Tad, first.

I trekked to Obin's lair and entered the cave where I began to search for him. After a long search, I stumbled upon him, completely unharmed, around a pile of wealth. After about thirty minutes of dodging, ambushing, throwing, and fleeing, I managed to cleave my axe into his head, which resulted in him bleeding out within a few seconds. The civilizations across the globe heralded Relad Bonehowl as their hero, and the Dragon-Planet of Typhoons entered the Golden Age...

***

All of that happened within about an hour and a half. It was amazing adventure, and from now on, I'm going to do more pocket dimension adventures because the lore seems so much more concentrated and richer, and my adventurer's impact is so much stronger. I'm also going to experiment with alternate histories on this world, I'm thinking.

So, have you had any amazing lore-filled adventures, or experiences with pocket dimensions? How about a story where your adventurer really made an impact?