Ropesplatters was my most successful fort to date--indeed, my only successful fort to date.
I lost it once to a GCS mishap and a bit of boredom--I accidentally left a door open in the the silk farm, my weaver was killed and got stuck on the drawbridge, and then every dwarf in the fortress spent weeks upon weeks filing into the room to grab his corpse, getting confused and walking back out. I had no idea he was dead, or what was going on with the massive lineup in the dining room, until I found the corpse and realized the lineup was a funeral procession. I atom-smashed the body and carried on, but it kind of felt "meh" for a while after that, so I abandoned it.
It wasn't long before I went in to reclaim it, though. I had a couple of ghosts show up, and I couldn't engrave slabs for them or find (one of) their bodies, so I had a Ghostly Carpenter hanging around the fort from day one. No big deal; he didn't bother my dwarves too much, and I thought he was a pretty cool guy for the most part. Anyway, it took what felt like a long time before I wrangled the fort back into working order, but we made it there eventually. Got food production up and running, found some cotton candy and got a decent military going, and actually got enough of a stable population to get a Mayor. (My expedition leader and Manager had been in traction for two years thanks to a mining mishap, otherwise I'd have appointed him).
Granted, I made a few mistakes here and there. Appointing the alarmingly-skilled axedwarf migrant as the captain of the guard and equipping him with adamantine everything (we'd found a couple of veins by this point) gave me two things: a pile of corpses, and an axedwarf with a cool nickname. But still, the fort was stable--to the point where, as before, I felt a bit restless. Besides which, the fort was getting a bit gnarly and the game was starting to crash sometimes, like when I put my errant captain on Deathwatch and sent him to go slay a Forgotten Beast. It's my fault, really, for trying set up a simple purification system for the cistern and flooding the upper cavern level as a result (remember how I said I made a few mistakes? Yeeeaaahhh...)
So, I decided to abandon it and give Adventurer Mode a try. But since I already had adamantine production going, I figured I might as well leave some nice gear for my hero to pick up; I could have just stripped some gear from the military, I know, but I felt like they'd earned it. So I set to work making a full set of armor, battleaxe and... an adamantine coat.
That coat... I never knew that one decision would lead to so much heartache. Shortly after I decided to spend the extra time adding in that one little bit of flair, the outpost liaison arrived, and informed me that we were about to become a Barony if I so desired. Well... since I was going to be spending a little more time here anyway, I figured, why not. Besides which, Tulon deserved it. She was my Legendary Miner, Militia Captain, and I think most successful surviving military dwarf at the time; she certainly had more kills than any of the other founding members, and had taken out the majority of a squad of goblins who'd killed her husband on her own. I thought that she would make a badass example of what Dwarf Nobility should be.
So, now my soon-to-be-abandoned fortress was a Barony. Meanwhile, strand extraction and weaving was still going on for that coat, so I had time. That's when winter arrived, and I thought, "well, since the river's frozen, I might as well try setting up the dam and fixing the well and waterfall like I was planning to do once winter arrived..."
So I did that, and all the while Tulon was down in the dirt with the other miners, getting her hands dirty. Damn good decision, that was, appointing her to the position; her only mandate was not to export Zinc, and we didn't even have any Zinc. The Mayor could've learned a few things from her, if you ask me.
But anyway, all stories come to an end. The cistern was set up properly so that the well would always have pure water, the waterfall was fixed so that I wouldn't have to rebuild grates every spring, my mechanic finished setting up the floodgates and hatches mere days before the spring thaw, and the coat was finished soon after.
I took a last, longing look around Ropesplatters. I knew that as far as the game was concerned, once the fort was abandoned all the dwarfs would be gone, fled into the wild. But as far as I was concerned, Tulon would be leading them all to the mountain homes, to reclaim that holy place from King Kivish, the Shadow Woman Spouse who'd ascended to the throne just before they fled to reclaim Ropesplatters.
Sure, I was still abandoning the fort just to snag some gear for an adventurer--but the thought of what the dwarves were abandoning it for made me feel a little less bad about it. So I hit Esc, and scrolled down to Abandon Fortress...
...And the game crashed.
So, everything that had come to pass--the Barony, the reworking of the fort, and that Armok-damned adamantine coat--never happened.
In retrospect, I rather wish that this was a story about how that inspired me to keep the fort alive--and, if I'd had a save after Tulon's ascension, that would almost certainly be the case!--but after losing all that work, I just got frustrated and abandoned it anyway. No gear drop, no nothing, I just ripped off the band-aid.
Since then, if you want a bit of an epilogue, my third adventurer finally made it to the fort, just to poke around a little, and ended up slaying both of the Forgotten Beasts that had been poking around the caverns. They somehow managed to climb their way up into the fortress proper; I assume that's why the random axeman that I ended up recruiting was there in the fort. I ended up losing my right arm from the elbow down and my entire right leg, I contracted a syndrome that made me constantly vomit blood, and it took a damn long time to kill that giant ant, but those Beasts who kept crashing my game died by my (remaining) hand. And after finally making it back to civilization, my hero retired with a crutch under her arm and a smile in her heart.
So... what's the point of this story, then, if it's not a saga of last-minute redemption and inspiration to carry on? What did Ropesplatters mean to me, in the end? Well, the answer's simple, although it took me a while to see it. I think that, after all this time, I finally get it. I finally understand what that old Bay12 mantra really means.
Losing is Fun.
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Topic: Requiem for a Fortress (Read 1258 times)