Bay 12 Games Forum

But then how will we properly menace the elves with our socks?

Could someone explain the appeal of the orcs to a Masterwork newcomer? How are they different from goblins? What's their modus operandi? Etc.

Thanks!

My understanding is that orcs are significantly more honorable than their shorter cousins but had a "How the Mighty have Fallen" moment at the hands of the elves that made Orcish society as a whole more opportunistic and war-mongering. Like, if you look at Goblin ethics, it's pretty hard to imagine how their civilizations hold themselves together when any crime for any reason is considered "a personal matter". Orcs meanwhile, need a reason to kill someone- goblins fight and kill because they enjoy causing pain, orcs fight and kill because they depend on raiding to survive and just taking things without defeating the owner first is dishonorable and would make the orc no better than a kobold.

I thought I was doing pretty well for my double-haunted mountain/forest start; I had a well set up, secured farms, an airlock to the outside, a nice military armed with glumprong shield and copper hammers, there were numerous zombies but even civilians could put them down easily enough. That's when it got me, complacency.

I was setting up a secured butchery (traps along the hallway to rebutcher anything that decided it wasn't dead yet) when I made one fatal mistake. Earlier I had set an order to haul refuse from outside because there were some fresh kea corpse corpses I wanted to take advantage of before  lockdown- and I never rescinded the order because I forgot. Meanwhile my waterbuffalo had succumbed to a mortal wound after being one the wrong end of a pack (flock?) of harpies and so when I made my much larger refuse stockpile for the specialized zombie butcher, my poor stupid dwarves had their first casualty hauling it's bones in through the airlock, five minutes later, they had their 7th casualty and I was down to 14 panicking beards, and so on and so forth until this monstrous cow skeleton had succeeded in what a veritable horde of undead birds and zombie batmen had failed to for a year.

That's vanilla behavior, entertainers and mercenaries go wherever they want without regard for diplomacy. A few months ago I got an entire troupe of goblin bards.

If Titans were to be turned into guardian deities of the land, what about the elves? Don't they worship exacly that?
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Eh, not necessarily. Depending on how the cosmology looks from world to world, titans could be interpreted as mere "incarnations" of a natural force rather than the entirety of the force itself. A lot of pantheisms have similar ideas, like the Egyptian Pharaoh being an incarnation of Osirus or all of Hinduism's thousands of gods being the expressions of Brahman.

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Something I suggested a long time ago, but probably still can't be implemented in DF is the notion of 'cave sickness.' Unlike cave adaption where dwarfs spending too much time in caves become dependent on them, the idea with cave sickness is that elves that spend too much time underground become increasingly ill to the point of death. You could tweak the numbers so that it's a really bad idea to send elves underground unless it's life or death, and living underground permanently is entirely non viable. But like I said, I don't know if that's doable.
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Humans in 6.2 already do that, to a point. They'd slow down and frequently blackout from dizziness unless you kept everything in the sunlight and/or kept the miners on rotating shifts. I think there was talk about extreme cave sickness causing boogeymen to spawn around them, but I never witnessed that happen myself in the 20 or so human forts I did with extensive ill-advised mining.

How about troglodytes as a cavern faction? They could have castes based on overworld races that have gone feral after staying underground away from civilization for too long. Maybe give them a rare "shaman" caste that can instantly convert fortress populations into more trogs if they get too close.