"You have been struck down." - Dwarf Fortress Adventure stories

[uberfish]

claimed

I'm going to do something completely heretical to DF and... play an elf

[mostly_harmless]

None of the human clothes and armor will fit you.
Also there is no elvish civilization nearby. The next one should be where the canyons are.
Good luck.
Mh

[Jkaen]

This is entertaining, love the memorial bridge.

Would suggest a small fortress at the spot of her death, with steps down to the river

[mostly_harmless]

This is entertaining, love the memorial bridge.

Would suggest a small fortress at the spot of her death, with steps down to the river

Hmmm, good idea.
A little tourist info hut, with stairs hacked into the cliff leading down to a platform over his place of death.
Should not take more than a year of construction time.

Any takers?
Otherwise I might give it a go when uberfish is done with dying as an elf.

mh

[uberfish]

So I created the following character:




Weirdly, I start in a human village on "The Great Hill." Anyway the backstory was that rumour was dwarves were chopping down trees to build some sort of large project and elves wanted to find out what was going on.



Elves start with high speed but crappy equipment (wooden sword and shield, rope reed fibre clothing)

Anyway I headed west out of town and soon hit what I thought was a lake; I felt swimming skills might be useful so went for a swim... a couple of screens to the west I didn't hit the other side of the lake and decided to cut south, but the water kept on going

I guess this must have been the ocean, a long swim to the south later I hit a beach somewhat hungry but having become a Talented swimmer. There's a crab and some albatrosses on the beach to solve the food problem and I play with the wrestling system some



Skills have grown



Emerged on a large area of plains, The Fragrant Prairies. I recruited a couple of followers from a nearby fortress and went to look for a goblin dark fortress for adventure following the map directional indicator to the site I found nothing. Guessing it might have been underground I went to the next goblin site... still nothing

A web search revealed that goblin/elf/NPC dwarf sites don't even exist in the current version This might be a long term problem due to the armour size issue mentioned by MH.

Crossing a river I have an extremely silly encounter.




My followers are fighting wild boars which are also fighting hippos for no particular reason. The hippos take forever to kill but I was able to do some hippo wrestling for fun



Later we get attacked by kobolds



Even a wooden sword can do damage against poor armour



The kobolds had a bowman somewhere out of sight! Fortunately it's busy fighting some random lions offscreen...



Wrestling proved a fairly efficient method of disabling enemies and my ally takes advantage of the situation



I managed to upgrade my wooden sword and shield to Iron versions. My team killed 4 kobolds before my followers were crippled and the rest of the kobolds had cleared out the lions and started shooting arrows at us. As should be clear from my earlier run I'm extremely paranoid about enemy archers which are severely overpowered. So I decided to just run away.



At the next rest stop I discovered an unusual sight: Dwarves had scattered a lot of crap around this area for some reason.



It turned out there was a bridge! (btw this puts my character's starting location at the far Northeast of the world map) The dwarves offer some conversation but it seems they're mainly interested in packing up and going home, having finished their job



And left some memorials to people killed in construction accidents





The dwarves were not chopping down any more trees so I let them be and headed west into the Slippery Confederation lands.



I talked to some people and got this



Sounds interesting but I want some armour of the right size first. Since dwarves and goblin fortresses didn't look like an option I decided to get some recruits check out the catacombs in Empirestring.



We immediately found some action; I had adapted my combat tactics to specifically target vulnerable arms/hands in order to minimize the chance of retaliation



I was able to upgrade my clothes to leather but there wasn't anything in the way of good armour



I did however manage to recover a MH corpse



which was dropped off in the main temple area with some human sized gear left in the side room

[uberfish]

Empirestring market. I tried some of the local delicacies (angelshark liver) but although there's plenty of Iron human sized gear here this doesn't help me. The catacomb goblins didn't have good gear so the only option for an Elf adventurer in this version might be to specifically order stuff from dwarves (by creating a fortress)



So yeah,.the stupid goblin overlord was still a problem but I don't particularly want to fight him without armour. Interestingly there was also a problem with a goblin spearman terrorizing a food store in town.

I went to investigate but never found him. Checking the quest screen showed that the goblin had gotten killed before I got there.



More quests for outlaws! This one was interesting and I couldn't turn it down




We engaged in combat. I chopped the right arm off the outlaw leader! Unfortunately before I could kill him, there was an enemy crossbowman (SIGH) and after all my followers got owned I had to run away.



while going to recruit more people I ran into the town to the south and found an interesting target: A hungry head!



Recruited some odd companions (including a goblin living peacefully as part of the town)



There were skeletons and things here, but fortunately not of the animated variety



After a long trek through the mazy layout of the catacombs I ended up going on a long loop and finding the hungry head in a room very near the entrance





Despite its fearsome appearance it wasn't very hard at all compared to bandits:



After killing a lone outlaw in the same catacombs who apparently moved in after I got rid of the head, I decided it was time to go back to the outlaw camp I ran from earlier. This time I stayed in sneak mode and headed straight for the crossbowman while my followers fought the melee guys



hey this guy still had my previous character's blood on his nose!



The fight wasn't going well in the meantime



I successfully sneaked up to the crossbowman but what's with enemy ridiculous dodging skills



Oh wait, what's that I have an easy shot to the head?



*splat*

in the meantime the rest of the fight really wasn't going well



An enemy maceman who couldn't stand up tried to fight me but frustratingly still defended 10 attacks or so, so I backed off as the two uninjured survivors headed for me

Tired of running, I strung them out to fight one at a time but my target kept dodging... and when I did decide to back away I made a mistake and did so on a diagonal and the enemy was able to close and land a lucky hit to my leg disabling it.

And that was pretty much the game. I'm not sure if the original spearman I was after had died or was still lurking around crippled somewhere.



At least this character made quite a name for himself:

[uberfish]

So yeah. It seems armour, or some sort of power levelling, is a necessity, which unfortunately makes life difficult for non human characters. Combat's just extremely lethal. Trouble is I know of no good source of non-human size armour since only humans have towns in the current version. Unless you build a fort.

However I did cross over half a continent and find the Harmless Bridge, and join the Slippery Confederation as a hero. With a title.

also somehow I'm both an enemy and hero to The Shameful Dungeons. At the same time!?

[NobleHelium]

Well you're "respected for heroic acts" which is not exactly the same as being a hero to them.

[mostly_harmless]

Hi uberfish,

well done for an elf, and only on hero level as well.

From what little information is available the historians of The Slippery Confederation have pieced together your travels like this:

And placed your origins on the eastern side of that large bay.
If correct that, is a lot of distance Uberfish Shorelocked travelled!

I am very thankful you retrieved Harmless "Strappingraptors" Cebetislur's body! He was the very first adventurer. What a noble act from an unusual creature like yourself (No elves in The Slippery Confederation; Only the last two Harmlesses have seen them in far away lands!).

Will you continue or supply the save file?

mh

[uberfish]

I think Shorelocked was probably a bit further north than that. I'm going to at least get someone to clear out the stupid goblin overlord in Empirestring and the bandits that killed 2 of my characters to free up other quests.