17
« on: July 05, 2012, 09:37:04 pm »
I built a modest fortress into the side of a volcanic mountain-island. Water was scarce but I dug deeply enough to find a subterranean ocean. The winters were long and came early, all surface water freezing over in Autumn and holding over until late-spring, and it took three embarks before a team of dwarves could survive through it. Once the first winters were passed, things grew easier. A nearby pond was drained from below to make plots for farming and everything seemed up and up.
But somewhere along the line, as it often does, trouble reared its ugly head. Although some minor enemies stepped out from the darkness of the caverns, they were too far down to reach my dwaves on a completely different cavern connected only by a large cylindrical open shaft in the middle. Forgotten Beasts came and went, none able to reach my dwarves... at first. Then one day a one-eyed gecko that shat webs somehow spawned in the waters at the edge of the map and came up to my dwarves. I had defenses in place but none of my highly-skilled marksman-spear dwarves could maneuver all caught up in the strings of sticky webbing. They fought for a long time but they all died.
By the time the Forgotten Beast made its way up to the fortress itself I realized I had deconstructed the bridge that blocked the hallway off from the caverns. I had gone maybe 4 years without any noticeable threat and when I decided to expand a bit I was going to rebuild the bridge. And the forgotten beast came when the new bridge was not yet linked to a lever.
I had to abandon the fortress. It took over half a dozen expeditions full of weaponized dwarves to reclaim the fortress. Each time they arrived four foul and frenzied forgotten beasts would come from the depths and slaughter them. Finally the last was dispatched and the dwarves entered the fortress only to find the bottom caverns where the water source lay absolutely covered in armed and named amphibian men, olm men, and the remains of numerous beasts -- including a cave dragon which apparently came out of the dark and fought the armies of whatever was there to kill it. I held on to that fortress for another two and a half years but that entire time was spent trying to piece together the remnants left behind from the dead. And dwarves started dying by the tens or going mad from the legion of ghosts that arose from previous occupants. My list of dead and missing were pages and pages long, encapsulating the entire history of the fortress and all the ghosts seemed to come out in my farming fields where my brewers were. No one wanted to work. The ones that did literally died of fright or went mad, killing their kin. Dwarves starved. Rot began to spread, probably the remnants of the blood of one of the ancient beasts newly dead.
In the end it was too much.
I abandoned.
Reclamation isn't worth the trouble. All the magma forges and obsidian in the world can not make that endeavor sweet again.
