It began, as most good stories do, with a drunken bet. Iden and Ushat were arguing, as always. I mean the two are as thick as thieves, but they will argue about literally anything. Bronze versus lay pewter. War hammers versus spears. Llamas versus alpacas. This time, it was about elves. Not whether they were good or bad, to be clear. We were all in agreement that elves were the worst. No, this argument was about *why* they were so terrible.
Iden maintained that it was the wood thing. "They refuse to share their fancy techniques for harvesting living wood, and then they get angry when their neighbors have to cut down trees!"
For Ushat, it was the meat thing. "I mean sure, that's terrible, but that's not the worst thing about them. They won't eat normal meat, like llama or steelhead or giant cave rat, but they're happy to chow down on the bodies of their enemies after battles. If you're gonna be a vegetarian, be a vegetarian! Some of my best friends are Lenshamites! None of this back and forth crap."
This went on for a while, the two yelling and spilling wheat bear and cherry wine as they gesticulated wildly. And then Udil got involved, which is never a good sign for anyone. I'm pretty sure Udil hates the elves as much as any dwarf. Yes, she follows Lensham Snarlingdawn, as do I, but counter to popular belief, the Lenshamite religion is not based on elven ideology. Yes, Lenshamites are vegetarian, and yes, we love to commune with the natural world, but it's not an elf thing. We'll happily chop down a tree if we can plant another one in its place, and the cannibalism thing? Ugh.
Anyway, I'm getting distracted. My point is that Udil does not have any special love for the elven race. And yet, she just can't resist sowing chaos. "Ha! I bet neither of you could last a month without eating meat."
And that's all it took. She didn't even have to set any stakes. Just the idea that there was something Ushat and Iden couldn't do was enough to set them off. One month and an astonishing quantity of alpaca cheese later, and they were still avoiding meat. Neither one wanted to be the first one to cave in. After a while, they weren't talking about besting each other anymore. They were talking about besting the elves at their own game.
The plans for an expedition started off almost as a joke (which is the other way good stories begin). They could find a spot near an elven settlement. Someplace with good soil, plenty of ore, and maybe even some clay and sand. They could bring a few sheep for milk and wool and set up a bunch of subterranean farms. Almost everything a dwarf needs is there, underground. What do we need wood for anyway?
Who needs wooden cups, chairs, and chests when you've got metal goblets, stone thrones, and glass boxes!
Fuel? Dig up some bituminous coal and lignite! Or better yet, just drill straight down to the magma seas below!
Beds? Well, okay, *some* things need to be made from wood. It's not like we could make a *bed* out of rocks. We're not savages, after all! But we could trade with the elves for that.
It was an intriguing challenge, and soon, they got Udil and me making plans too. We'd need to dig deep and fast to get to the magma sea, so that we could make things like metal bins and armor. But we'd need a temporary settlement near the surface for that first year or two. And boy, that first year would be pretty rough. Until we could trade for grown wood, there are certain things we'd just have to do without.
Would it count as cheating if we could make a few beds out of the wagon we already had? "No," Ushat declared, "the trees are already dead, so we might as well make use of their 'sacrifice'."
I almost couldn't hear the scare quotes...
Pretty soon, we were actually buying supplies for an expedition, with Ushat at the lead.
Everyone who wanted to come with had to sign The Simple Treaty, which was true to its name. There were only three rules:
1) No killing animals that haven't attacked us.
2) No chopping down trees. (Woody fungi count as trees.)
3) No purchasing or bartering for products that were produced by killing animals or cutting down trees.
We recruited a few more Lenshamites, most of who were happy to keep being vegetarian, though they thought the wood thing was weird. Oh, and Cilob. I'm still not sure why she came a long. Not that I'm complaining! We definitely need her farming skills.
So, migrants, if Earthspeaks is the fortress you've decided to make your home, you'll have to sign on to the Simple Treaty. By sheer dwarven stubbornness, we will out-hug the tree-huggers, we will out-love the animal-lovers, we will out-elf the elves!
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Right, so I know there's a vegan succession fort (
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=181079.75) on this forum already, but I'd already started this fort when I saw that, and this is a little different (no wood!), so I'm going to try it anyway.
After I ended up playing my first fort (
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=181220.0) so conservatively as to not have much "fun", I decided I needed a bigger challenge. So I made a new world without quite as many resources in it and set myself this absurd challenge.
I strongly suspect that my dwarves will mutiny long before we get a chance to get enough grown woods to provide everyone with beds, and getting the magma smelters up quickly is going to be tough.
But dwarves are stubborn, so who knows!
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Topic: Berâm (Earthspeaks): Out-hugging the Tree-huggers (Read 1413 times)