Re: PBH Sneak Preview

sw wrote:
On 2008-05-23, Justisaur <justisaur@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Wow that's one hell of a story from a computer game, better than a lot
of pnp game stories I've heard. I haven't gotten around to checking
it out, I guess I will.

Generally the best Dwarf Fortress stories are the tales of when
something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

Heh. Many of my stories involve magma management and trying to save time. Like the time my obsidian factory got an unnoticed hole punched in the floor because I'd caused a deliberate cave-in to speed up mining (one of my old mineshafts was directly underneath it), and then next time I flooded the factory floor with magma I didn't notice my entire enormous multilevel mineshaft complex slowly filling until it set one of the furniture storerooms down there on fire (once a mineshaft is abandoned I figure I might as well make use of the space). My dwarves spent a rather frentic time ripping down every stone door they could get their hands on and rushing to barricade the flow before valuable ore faces in the deeper parts of the mines got covered. One of my engravers somehow got himself set on fire in the process and ran screaming through the fortress all the way to his room, where the other dwarves had no choice but to lock the door to prevent the fire from spreading. I was much more careful in my mining orders after that.

Or the time I had a bunch of miners digging out a huge multi-story magma reservoir while the magma was already slowly dribbling its way through the chute I'd carved in the mountain, and then my carefully-timed operation was thrown into disarray by a goblin ambush. To keep the partly-complete reservoir from being flooded too early I had to divert the flow down an emergency overflow outlet that led into the local brook. While the screams of battle raged on top of the cliff, and lava poured into the water generating enormous clouds of steam, a lone fisherdwarf sat on the shore at the cliff's base and utterly refused to budge. Kept fishing even with lava flowing on both sides around him, it was sheer luck that he wasn't engulfed. Finally, the battle long over and the overflow staunched at its source, the fisherdwarf packed up his gear and walked across the brook on freshly-cooled obsidian to return home. Empty-handed. "Something must've scared the fish," he was heard to grumble in annoyance.

The dwarves are given enough of a NPC bio that you have to almost work
hard not to characterize them once one of them does something to stand
out.

I had this one stonemason who absolutely insisted on building the final segment of retaining wall for a magma channel from the _inside_, trapping himself in there. Tried everything to convince him that the inside of the magma channel was not a safe place to stand while laying those stone blocks, but he just wouldn't listen. "Can't get the seams tight working from the other side," he explained. Finally I commissioned a low-cost granite statue of the mason and placed it inside the channel in exactly the place he insisted he needed to stand, preventing him from standing there and forcing him to finish the work from the correct side. Later, when the floodgates opened and magma flooded through, the statue melted away to nothing in the course of just a few weeks. I'd hoped that would drive home my point about safety, but I think that idiot mason was simply satisfied that he'd been able to keep an eye on his work from the inside even if only in effigy.

Respect magma and it can be safely managed. Hurry too much and one thoughtless mistake can result in a lot of damage.
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