Bay 12 Games Forum

Stress test the adventure mode politicking' and succession. We know that you can start working for a petty lord or some such, and that you can depose them in favor of another candidate who is already trying to take the position. I assume you could then do tasks for the new management. If this extends to dwarf and elf sites (I refuse to assist goblins) the player could completely reshape the world with a demigod adventurer and a cadre of companions. Maybe even favor one group heavily so one family ends up in charge of all of the dwarf sites, or put two people that don't like each other in power and see what happens. The possibilities are nearly infinite!

Dear Tekkud Rathastis, Chief Mason,

When I set out with the intent of building a castle aboveground, I knew that I would need a lot of stonework done early. That's why I brought you and your two subordinates along. To expedite the initial building process. You must have known this, so why is it that only one of you is ever working at a time? There are plenty of boulders to make into blocks, and plenty of constructions have already been planned. Yet you and Inod are always drinking, sleeping, or "on break" while Tobul does all the work. We are NOT taking shelter underground, so our survival depends on your hard work. We've already spotted dingoes across the river, and giant thirps flying around the top of the hill. They seem to be pretty common in this area.

Food for thought,
The Administration

Currently working on nailing down my character's... character. Hopefully my meager contribution ends up worth reading. Also, isn't killing everyone in the fortress kind of a foregone conclusion?

Bad news. My internet connection will be... intermittent for the next few days because of hardware upgrades and my service provider's general unhelpfulness, so I will probably disappear for awhile. In the meantime and in an effort to get discussion going again, what do people think about verbs? How should they be conjugated? How should tense be noted? How should new words be created? I will close the poll on word order sometime tomorrow if I get a chance, or as soon as possible after that, and put up a new one.

Cheers!

Apologies for my disappearance, I had some computer trouble.

@lue
I was just going to leave the poll up until a new one came along. Or at least until a couple days pass with nobody voting on it.

As far as etymology goes, I see languages as having been given to all the different races by their creator(s), since they all just kinda drop in from nowhere (evidenced by the "First of their kind" thing they get.) They have a fully developed culture and language at the beginning of time, so that would best be explained in-game as them being created that way. The other way you could approach the question is to say that the races are the descendants of older groups that either no longer exist or aren't recognizable as precursors to modern races. There are pretty big differences between the different languages so I it can safely be assumed that their root languages were geographically isolated or at least came from different sources. That still doesn't solve the question of the "original" but I'll move on before I write an essay on Dwarven anthropology.

All that said, etymology is a good way to go about expanding the dictionary no matter how we decide to approach it elsewhere. Some words should definitely be completely new to give it some variety and just generally fill it out, but more esoteric words or terminology ought to be combinations along the stripe of Halfling's biology terms. That's basically what they are IRL but with latin/greek roots. It's a moot point, but if any language in DF is the language of science it's Dwarven. It would be nice to see humans borrowing terms for chemistry and engineering from Dwarven. Elves would probably have a slip in biology, but I'm getting ahead of myself again.

I feel like reading that comic puts me on some kind of watch list...

Although, with my recent googling of ammonium perchlorate and other combustibles (I am a chemistry major) I probably wasn't doing too well to start.

Beards of War: Blood Faction
When Dwarven miners come across a hidden underground chamber, they release a vicious race of underground monsters upon the world. Many fortresses are overrun in the initial fighting and sealed off from the outside to keep these creatures underground. The war continues to rage deep underground in the caverns and the depths of the Dwarven tunnels. With the whole civilization on the brink of annihilation and the requests for help from the Humans and Elves ignored, it is up to an elite team of Dwarven Hammerlords to reach the chamber and stop the tide at its source...