Bay 12 Games Forum

Personally I think the idea of formal schooling for dwarves doesn't really fit their societies or economics. Most dwarves are essentially peasants and peasants throughout human history learn by doing, by being involved with family/community labors, or by apprenticeship. The idea of the classroom came into being as human societies turned towards the model of the nation-state and as those societies depended more and more on intellectual skills. Of course, academies and the like have come into being at various times in history, but most often they were for the children of the rich and pertained to the study of rhetoric, philosophy, etc.. Dwarves just don't need that kind of education, and it wouldn't make sense to impart them in a classroom setting. Not every or even most dwarves are going to be a blacksmith or leatherworker, and learning those things in real life requires a certain amount of doing them. The model I would propose is an apprenticeship model: for different skills, dwarves can't pass certain skill levels and/or learn much more slowly than they would without being apprenticed to a more experienced dwarf. Things like farming, most people can learn the basics of in a day and get better over time with marginal improvements except when they're managing their own farms (that is, in real life). Furrow soil, put seeds a certain space apart--bam, you're done learning, now go do it for the rest of your life, peasant. For things involving real craftsmanship, like carving and especially blacksmithing, knowledge and advancement is not easily achieved on an individual scale without someone else to teach you. Skill acquisition as it is is already a little too amenable to mass production: if the goal is a medieval style of life, slowing things down is more called for.

Yeshua, Ghostly Carpenter has risen and is haunting the tomb!

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Hmm... how to be interesting. How to be interesting indeed... I need a project.

Drop a giant plug into the magma, and laugh in delight as the surface is covered in burning, magma, and death.

Jesus has become enraged!

Jesus throws a curse!

The spinning Curse strikes the fig tree, withering it!

***

Jesus is throwing a tantrum!

Jesus has crafted whip, a rope reed fiber whip!

Jesus has toppled a money changing table.

Jesus throws Rome 78 gold coins [500]

***

Noah, Farmer, has been possessed!

Noah begins work on a mysterious construction!

Noah has built Ark, a palm Ark!

To make this Fun, the necromancer should be as much a problem for a fortress (many unhappy thoughts, for example) as he should be benefical (raising undead minions; elves will frequently ambush or siege you instead of arriving to trade; etc.)

Since my first post in this thread I got to thinking: what if a necromancerdwarf were both antisocial and beneficial to the fortress?

Imagine if every wave of migrants had a low possibility (.01%?) of smuggling a necromancer into the fort. After a while the necrodwarf sneaks into the crypts, raises a whole army of undead dwarves, goblins, trolls, and elves, and wipes out the conventional population. Suddenly it's necromancerdwarf fortress mode. The necrodwarf has his or her crazed designs and interests which the player must fulfill, lest the necrodwarf become bored with life and decide to stop living. Zombie miners and masons build an obsidian tower for him or her and mindless craftszombies produce low quality items with which they glorify the humongous ego of the necrodwarf and brutish weapons to defend against the armies of the living aligned against the necromancer.

There should be signs for the player to be able to watch for, of course, like how that one dwarf's age seems to change every time it's checked, or how it likes "corpses for their obedience".

In short there are ways to make it interesting. IMO it should either be difficult--like requiring occasional irreversible sacrifices to keep working--and with drawbacks--like having every civ declare war on the fort when necromancy is practiced there--or it should completely change the nature of the particular fort.

(They were caught in wood cages.  The dragonfire burned the cages away while the cage shielded the trolls.)  Once the trolls were dispatched a crew was sent up to recover the non-incinerated goblin armor.

Aha! There's my solution. Wooden cages for the trolls and fast units. Trapped in magma the cages will burn away, then the trolls will burn too.

So I'm setting up a magma death room for sieges, slowly filling it with gruesome iron statues. So far whichever dwarf has been making these iron statues has favored images of fire snakes and forgotten beasts and best of all a statue of Usen Searchhelped the Gate of Healing--a god of sacrifice. Looking through the statue list I also noticed a masterful green glass statue of Stakud Perfectclasp, the duchess of the fort, surrounded by large roaches, looking terrified. It now stands at the foot of the duchess's artifact dacite bed. I like to imagine her going to sleep looking at the statue.

So please, share your dwarven art which, for whatever reason, brought a smile to your face--through schadenfreude or simple amusement.

Dog cancels Do Anything Else: Powerleveling.

My experimental fort, Paintedseeds, has rebounded fully from the events of my last post (at the end of which something like 80 dwarves were dead) and has become a county. Since I have elected not to bury or memorialize most of the dwarves--even still, the above-ground tower has a whole level devoted to coffins, and the frequent goblin sieges and ambushes leave no shortage of dwarf corpses littering the landscape--a steadily increasing number of ghosts now inhabit the fort, many of which periodically take limbs off of or kill the living dwarves. Unfortunately the ghost of the dwarf who went into a fell mood and made a dwarf bone ring out of a baby and who liked to scare people to death as a ghost was accidentally put to rest.

Just a few z-levels of progress has been made on a magma pump stack: I have no idea how other people do it, this shit is time consuming. I was hoping to have a magma doom lever to melt goblins on the surface like in Boatmurdered but since I've put hours into figuring it out with so little progress I have decided I will try to bring the sieges to the magma rather than bring the magma to the sieges. I will make a staircase down to about the level of the second cavern, at the bottom of which will be a big chamber with iron bridges sealing off both escape and entry to the fort proper. A magma pipe will let out directly over the center of the room. Iron statues, preferably of forgotten beasts and night creatures, will be displayed prominently in the room, as though to announce to the goblins that they are about to be sent to a very miserable afterlife.