Dwarf Fortress Succession Fort "Flagcarnal"

That occurred to me but it might be stretching the advantage of foreknowledge a bit much. I'll be keeping an eye out for it though. It only took down three dwarves, well within the realm of acceptable losses.

It caused a bug. Not within acceptable losses. Best thing you can do is burrow the mayor somewhere easy to seal, seal it after you get Liaison notices, and only unseal it after making sure neither of them is a were.

he's been sealed for awhile on virtue of being a vampire, remember.

Nah, bug was caused later by me as a separate event trying to shoot the resulting weres through fortifications in their containment. And you're confusing the mayor (vampire) for the liason (werecoati). Liason is not a member of the fort so cannot be controlled. But it turned out to be a moot point as you'll soon see...

Anyway, I'm back to where I was and then some.

18th Galena

Ok, in my effort to try and detangle the mess that is our refuse disposal someone got mixed up enough to dump several butcher shop remains and a krutzing elephant corpse in the stone dump. Recognizing that we're likely to have a mess on our hands when we reclaim the lower levels and that our mishmash of temporary disposal solutions are all bad, I've ordered a ventilated chamber punched through the hillside adjacent to the current bone stockpile.

3rd Limestone

Autunm has arrived without serious incident. The weres have gone quiet. I've authorized an expidition to explore.

5th Limestone

Access to the hospital has been re-established.

I'm not sure what I was expecting. Apparently the cursed have been busy in their lucid periods - most of the blood hass been cleaned up and corpses laid out as neatly as possible in half of what were the temples.. The loose mining debris has also been collected and stacked and they removed the original upward stairs on their own. Retrieval of the bodies will begin soon.

6th Limestone

Crude walls have been erected in the bedroom wings - one blocking off most of the unfinished lower wing and one across the bedroom that used to belong to the baron. The baron's son is one of those believed to be one of those remaining among the cursed. Scratched into the stone were the following words: "He won't come out."

Gods...

Though the other wall, I have established some limited communication with the rest. One thing is clear: they seek the release of death. I don't know how it is to come about but it will have to be done.

A number of doors and furniture have been broken in in our absence. Small matter.

13th Limestone

Growling and snarling through the wall. I don't think we'll be using those lower bedrooms for a while.

The dwarven caravan has been sighted.

14th Limestone

This is terribly worrying.

Those watching the caravan observed a shocking scene; the outpost liason transformed into a werecoatil and set himself on a wandering wild yak that happend to be in his path. The caravan swordsdwarf struck him down but was mangled badly in the process. The merchants and their animals have scattered. The injured swordsdwarf dragged himself off before we reached him.

It may be that not even Mountianhome is safe from the curse.

4th Sandstone

A new migrant party has been sighten, looking extremely wary. I look at the calendar, note that it's uncomfortably close to the full moon and start bringing people inside as a precaution.

8th Sandstone

I have secured the migrants in a holding area as a precaution.

11th Sandstone

The migrants are clean. I have lifted the quarantine. It was a useful exercise for future reference. Future overseers should note the burrow marked "holding area" on the fortress map.

12th Standstone

Ingish, a child, has been taken by a fey mood.

17th Sandstone

Ingish is screaming for materials but he's been observed picking up several of the things he is shouting for and unless he wants a particular type we have all of them in abundance.

19th Sandstone

I've started drawing up plans for a small squad of hammerdwarves as a police force.

With some considerable care and application of barricades, I'm also attempting to open up some of the lower floors to mining, most importantly because the survey reports quantities of marble and to a lesser degree of demand, quartzite. If we're to get the temple project restarted, we should have the finest materials!

20th Sandstone

With help from my new deputies, Bloody Meng has been escorted to his new prison cell to formally serve his 600 day sentence for the slaughter of three children. In truth it is probably a life sentence for there's no way I plan to let him free when it's up. Eventually we'll need a more permanant solution but for now it's done with.

Oh, and I've had the position of mayor handed to one of our blacksmiths who's a daft hand at social niceties.

27th Sandstone

No, that was NOT a krutzing order to go down into the caverns to retrieve stuff left behind on our last ill-fated expidition, especially while the floor is in the process of being sealed. I have yelled at everyone who has been stupid and shooed them upstairs before anything bad happened.

2nd Timber

Apparently Ingish finally found the materials he wanted, possibly something someone grabbed from the reopened levels. Thank gods.

4th Timber

The new seal above the caverns is complete.

7th Timber

Ingish produced a willow crown adorned with gold, cloth, leather and rough gems. Nice, I guess.

10th Timber

There's not been much progress on the werecoatil problem but latest word is that two more have since died and one of the children has come of age. In addition to the new mining tunnels I am having an oubliette constructed between the hospital and the bedroom floors. It's within easy access of the well system should the means to flood it be desired but I am no mechanic and would surely flood half the fort if I tried it. The thought of sending them down to the caverns to seek their own ends crossed my mind but it would open us to more trouble than I want to deal with. And the milita, in spite of all evidence, are strongly resistant to the idea of shooting their own through fortifications.

1st Moonstone

Winter has arrived.

8th Opal

Nothing much to report for a while. I think we've finally about solved our stockpile backlog though. The trade depot is not a storage unit, people. All project are moving forward as fast as they're able.

edited 2nd Aug '16 8:24:06 PM by Elle

I wasn't confused. The Liaisons meet with the highest ranking nobles. Which is probably a baron now, I guess. I forgot we had one of those. If I were you, I'd build the noble quarters in the same place as the holding pens, and have the liaisons meet there so you can seal them in for safety. Stick the Trade Depot in a place more easily cut off from the fort, too. With a covered access-way to protect people going there.

If no one else does it before my next turn, I am making isolating the outsiders a priority, just to keep us safe from other things. As an overseer I'd rather be closer to the guy who got Boatmurdered's elephant problem under control with cage traps than the one who built Project Fuck The World and set up the downfall of the Fortress.

Man the liason was a Weir critter. I wonder how many more of the critters are out there.

The next Liaison will probably be another werecritter. Or a Vampire. Or a Goblin. Or a Goblin Vampire married to a Goblin Werecritter.

...Your just saying that hoping it happens.

It's not like I'm going to kill off the Liaison by accident if they aren't cursed or a goblin or a cursed goblin or anything.

edited 2nd Aug '16 9:05:40 PM by Journeyman

I've made it to spring. Should I carry through to summer to make up for what would have been the rest of Lance's turn? I'd at least like to get the oubliette I'm digging finished.

Edit to add: Apparently children that turn into weres get bugged - even though the game says they grew up, they still operate as children. I've made a backup point from which I'll try to coerce them into the oubliette.

Edit 2: I found a workaround that un-bugs them - issue a civilian alert after making sure they're outside the area of the alert's burrow, then cancel it as soon as they've moved. Continuing with that from the backup point.

Edit 3: I'm wrapping things up from mid-Spring. Just dotting i's and crossing t's and cleaning up after myself.

edited 3rd Aug '16 2:24:39 PM by Elle

Save is posted. I couldn't actually find graphics files to clean up, so someone might want to check it. (Maybe the game cleans up after itself?)

Final journal later this evening (I want to do some story stuff) but some notes for the future:

• I've got milking, shearing, metal smelting, charcoal making, training ammunition making, hunting amunition making and food and drink making on repeating schedules in the manager. It will sometimes spam at you if it can't find a thing even though the thing exists, it just needs time to get where it's needed. Check the [c]onditions in the Manager before you go messing with them.

• The freshly dug out corner in the quarry/stone piles is meant to be a metal bar stockpile once it's cleared out, consoidating the crapton of it we have scattered around. Let there be bins. All the bins.

• Seriously, keep an eye on the storage so things aren't backed up in the trade depot where they aren't accessible to use. I made two furniture stockpiles, an unsorted-junk stockpile, the new stone/block stockpiles and two huge wood stockpiles. I was also partway through expanding Journeyman's workshop stockpiles.

• We have so much fallen wood outside that you may sometimes need to forbid it if you want any hauling to get done inside. I forbade most of it at one point because dwarves were going so far afield for it Also, the elves are cranky now, but we shouldn't have to cut much of anything except for space-clearing for a while.

• The channeled-out outline across the river is the new temple site. Consider the gauntlet thrown down.

• Our marksdwarves function like a full-time military now and are mostly outfitted (they need metal caps). Also, they have fortifications to shoot through. Deller's hammer guard needs hammers and armor as outlined in the uniforms section (metal breastplate over leather armor), miners need armor which I didn't really get around to determining. Bloody Meng and the Weres are in a squad for the times I've needed to order them around to places.

• The southernmost smelter has been uncoupled from its stockpile links so it could find the stuff I marked to be melted down - melting items has to be queued up manually for those who didn't know. When we have burned through those, we should have enough material to make some steel (we have marble for flux now!) and a fair amount of bronze (the bronze should probably go to the armor until we can afford better).

• I've decommissioned the upstairs dormitory and put the downstairs one into use. All the nobles are also now happy too except for the baron wanting a tomb.

• I've not appointed a Hammerer, I leave that to the discression of others.

edited 3rd Aug '16 4:46:24 PM by Elle

Next up is Matues!

Matues has until next Wednesday, 8/10, to pick up the game.

ETA: My bad.

edited 3rd Aug '16 8:48:57 PM by Journeyman

So Matues has to travel back in time to the tenth of June for their turn?

What, like it's hard?

Journey: Lol Nah it's ok. I couldn't resist the joke.

Pfft, yo, Time Travel is easy. The hard part is not messing up the future.

...This is a DF succession fort messing up the future is pretty much the only real option.

edited 4th Aug '16 4:53:31 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Bah, we've only used time travel for fixing bugs and really bad things.

Singular thing. There's no respite from were coati. Wonder if tuefel has nightmares about the doomed timeline.

16th Opal

An architect, Kumil, arrived with the fall migrant party. Between him, Elle's sketches and my own ideas, we've started to draft plans for the new temple. The site will be placed across the river and it's size is nothing less than ambitious; it will probably take several years to complete. It will rise from the earth in a great white spire and its rooms will be wholly dedicated to the glorification of the gods - a monestary, library, great chapels, purification baths, sculpture gardens for meditation, a mortuary for the honored dead. If it suceeds it will be the glory of the continent and the envy of Mountianhome.

Of course, we have to survive to see it happen. The fortress will be were we will continue to live and work for some time to come. If I am remembered in the years after this, I hope it's as the one who brought us back from the brink of disaster.

Gods willing, let there be no more dead children.

I am thinking we should train and arm as much of the population as possible. There must of course be dedicated military squads and we cannot take everyone off of regular work but it should be possible to alternate training and work. With the material to make combat gear in such short supply perhaps we should start by militarizing the mining corps and training people in the wrestling arts.

Eventually, we will have to breach down to the caverns again. We are not short of wood yet by a long shot but we are using it at a steady rate and clear-cutting the surface entirely would deprive us of useful sources of fruit, as well as put us in bad graces with the elves. I know many dislike the elves but we can't afford to antagonize anyone we don't have to; if they try to impose a limit on our wood collection someone's going to have to try tapping a magma tube to keep our metal industry going.

19th Opal

I've named Tuefel the head of our miner corps. It's mostly honorary untill we get armor for them though. We've found Casseterite in the lower levels which means tin, which means we should be able to make bronze eventually. Steel should be saved for weapons.

20th Opal

Krutz. We have none living among us with wrestling skill right now; any who had it are dead or cursed.

15th Obsidian

Eshtan, a brewer, has been posessed by the crafty spirits and claimed quite a bit of wood, leather, fabric and copper.

23rd Obsidian

Eshtan had made a wooden scepter. It looks nice I guess.

1st Granite

It's the first of spring. I have a forbooding feeling that if something dangerous is going to happen, it will be this season. I nearly forgot that the aniversery of the first werebeast passed some days ago.

As if to underscore the fact, the wet weather has caused some of the blood of last year to seep up through the paving stones in the entrance.

4th Granite

The elven diplomat arrived ahead of the caravan. As expected, he got pissy about our tree cutting. Off the record, if they want to complain about it the least they could do is bring us coal. Fortunately, most of the clearcutting for the temple foundations is done.

7th Granite

I stand corrected on the blood - apparently the giant rat we were trying to tame got loose and one of the dogs got at him.

15th Granite

The elven caravan is arriving.

18th Granite

The elves don't have anything too excitng. In the intrest of diplomacy we've bought out their exotic fruit, some toys for the children and another duck for our egg supply, as well as presented them with a few of our gold crafts as peace offerings (bribes).

I guess we should be thankful that we're actually in a state to trade with the elves this year. The diplomat isn't pushing the point about the trees just yet, so we are only at the Official Repremand level of behavior for now.

(OOC: 26th Granite - A forgotten beast has spawned in the lower caverns but too far down for any of the dwarves to notice.)

1st Slate

Ground has been broken on the new temple foundations.

10th Slate

I've gotten tired of waiting for haulers to clear out the last of the debris from the oubliette. In this window between moons, we have escorted the remaining cursed into it. There are now four left. As what is probably a futile gesture of token mercy, I have allocated them a coupple barrels of alchohol. The room is sealed wtih a drawbridge so there is little worry of anything breaking out. All of them are emaciated and half naked, keps alive only by the foul curse.

The children...well they were once children, technicaly they came of age over the past year. I scarce know if I can describe it; their minds were broken. They seemed stuck in child-like make-believe as if to deny the reality of what they'd been through. They were unwilling to come out of their rooms and had to be force, especially young Meng. He kept repeating things...'Wanna play with Ishky' he howled. 'Didn't mean to hit him...made Ishky turn red...'

In the room we found the mangled corpse of the child who had been reported missing after the evacuation.

Nil has the kids tonight. If anyone needs me this evening I'll be in my office with a rum barrel. It would be best if no one needs me.

11th Slate - private journal (written on a seperate page in a lopsided, shaky hand, as if the author is writing it while throughly drunk)

It was worth it, right?

We saved the fort. Without the measures we had taken the curse would have taken all of us.

Even after only a year it gets hard to remember what happened that week. In one version, someone is telling me that one of the bitten children is out of the hospital and won't take orders from the adults. Did I tell them to lock them in the room? And yet I took the time to make sure we rounded up the escaped livestock before the seal was in place...

In one dream, I suffocated Iton in his hospital bed so he would be spared the curse. In another I was trying to, and his body twitched and cried out and I fled sick with panic and I don't know if he was really dead. In another I hear his screams turn into howls. After a year the corpses of the dead were decayed beyond easy recognition. I know we entombed something in Iton's coffin with a broken toy that had been clutched in his fist that we knew he liked, but were they really dwarven bones? Were they even his?

When Ingish was screaming in the craftsdwarf shop for materials I knew we had at hand somewhere, I feared we may have to lock him in if it looked like he would secumb to madness. And I would have done it. I am not a butcher. I do things that must be done even if I hate them...

Gods, it was worth it, wasn't it? It was right? Tell me...

(here the writing trails off into illegable scrawl)

15th slate

Today I am standing down as Overseer for the time. Part of it is tradition, part of it is my husband insisting that I have been overworking myself and that I need more time to spend with the baby. I will retain my post as Captian of the Guard however, so as to retain a hand in the direction of the fort, the temple and its safety.

I have written up notes for my predecessor outlining the projects that need finishing and made sure a copy of the scroll from the Mountianhome is with the papers. In a few hour I'll be making the anouncement in the dining hall and it will be official. I'll also have a speach for them.

"Dwarven brothers, sisters and friends, those of us sitting here today are survivors of a great trial and many have been forced to make sacrifices along the way. Now as we come through the other side, battered but stronger, our on survival secure for the moment, we must not forget that we were sent here for a purpose: for the glory of the gods, all the high gods. To build in their name a temple that will proclaim their strength to all the world. And it can come to pass...but we will have to fight for it!

Be glad for this period of peace but do not let your guard down. The dark forces that cursed us will surely try again. The races of the land will grow jelous of us for the gold and silver we bring up from the earth. Even some of us may fall sway to the wills of the dark powers which should not be named. To survive them, we must be stronger yet! It may take force of arms, it may take the strength of walls, it may take the force of will. In whatever way we can, we must fight! And we must even be wary of our own for as we saw, not even the Mountianhome may be safe. Let us grow stronger together! Let us work hard and fight hard so that one day, at the end of long years, we can see the fruit of our labor reaching for the sky and stretching down through the earth and the world will know, for all the blood and tears that have been spilled, 'Darkness has no place here!' Our fortunes rise and fall together!"

edited 5th Aug '16 10:10:47 AM by Elle

Has anyone PM'd Mateus? Post history shows him/her as active but not so much in this forum.

Since I wasn't' sure anyone else had I shot Matues a PM. If others sent one well Matues is now informed pretty thoroughly.

edited 5th Aug '16 3:53:11 PM by TuefelHundenIV

From the Journals of Journeyman Bronzepelts:

Holy Krutzing Shorast I should have worked on the military. I mean, I got the hospital set up, and that helped, but still . . . We needed better soldiers to hold off the damn weres.

Looking at it, I'm not sure if the others are being merciful or just prolonging the weres' suffering. If we had the extra resources, I'd say drop a pick in there and let them dig out their own spaces. Then drop in the tools for making amenities like food and clothing and beds so they can live in comfort. Or if the others were cold hearted enough, build a damn drawbridge somewhere and flatten them under it.

My apologizes! I'll be able to pick up the game by Monday at the latest- I'm over at a friends house without my laptop until then.

Thank god for Internet capable phones.