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

[sunrise089]

That dragon was the last one in the world, right?

[mostly_harmless]

Don't know. Doubt it. Would have to check in legends mode.

mh

[mostly_harmless]

There a still lots of dragons around. They breed as well.
However, from the first generation, only one is still alive.

The one I killed was only 43years old.

mh

[uberfish]

The DF epic continues!

This time I'm taking an Elf Demigod so I don't have to do any powerlevelling before I travel. Non human civs don't work in this version so when you create an elf or dwarf the game drops you in a completely random town. Which means I'll probably have a long trip.



And this is our random village we start in:



Lightpoem heads to the nearby keep to talk to the lady in charge to try and get an idea of where he is in the world



Aha. Spattergates is one of the Harmless dwarf sites. This gives us an idea of which way we need to go for adventure. The southern part of the world is cold and the land often covered with snow and rivers frozen over.

We pass the hamlet of Mushroomqueen, and head north along through a snow covered landscape following the coast of a great ocean.



Along the way Lightpoem hunts various creatures for meat such as giant horseshoe crabs and two-humped camels. His wooden sword can do enough damage to disable limbs but he often has to resort to a copper dagger to deliver a coup de grace to the head, as the sword won't penetrate the skull. Drinking the various hunted animals' blood is important as with rivers frozen into ice it's difficult to obtain water.

After several days travel we reach another human nation as yet unexplored, on the coast of another sea known as the Gulf of Nature:



Asking around there confirms the location of the dwarf sites as to the north. A couple of soldiers decide to join up and see the north for themselves but decide to turn back after a couple of river crossings (ie: sometimes followers chase after something and get lost at rivers)

Lightpoem skirts around the edge of the Gulf of Nature and travels north through the Jungle of Oak for several more days, along the way hunting an Emu. He sleeps on the beach on the shores of the great sea with the soothing waves. (ie: my experience so far is that the random encounter rate is lower on beaches)

As he travels north the snow lessens. He decides to cut north through the jungle and stays awake travelling all through the night and most of the next day (because he doesn't want to sleep in the jungle) until eventually he hits the red sand of the Mostly Harmless Gulf:



Here he rests for a while. The rest of the journey to the Slippery Confederation is uneventful. Upon arrival in Freesquashes he is welcomed with open arms due to the heroic deeds of his elf predecessor; the citizens offer him a few pieces of elf-sized armour in the keep and give directions to a cache stored in a cave off to the west. He collects this without incident:



The lord of Freesquashes requests help with a couple of bandit camps. Confident in his skills and newly acquired armour that will be the envy of his people, he sets out to defeat them.

For some reason he isn't allowed to sleep in the Freesquashes keep, but since he likes sleeping under the open sky anyway he camps in the courtyard.

WTF?



Bogeymen attack in the castle courtyard!

But Lightpoem's armour deflects most of the hits.



He does suffer a cut in the upper arm as breastplates don't cover this... later someone mentions another cache in Empirestring and he'll pick up a copper mail shirt there to help

The bandit camps are relatively small ones, and cleared out solo, at the end of these two quests and the bogeymen fight Lightpoem's skills are:



Wrestler seems to go up ridiculously fast - every time I use wrestling moves (usually the choke hold) I get a ton of XP points for the skill. I didn't start with any wrestling skill and it's gone up way past sword even though I do mainly swordfighting.

Next quest is for a bleak creature: There are several types of these apparently



It's a pushover. Lightpoem has acquired a fair amount of money from the bandits and developed a taste for expensive cheese:



He's apparently now impressed the lord who sends him on an "important" mission



At the closest village to the bandit camp, it turns out there's a posse who were about to set out to lynch the bandits! (actually sometimes you turn up at a site and there are "good" humans there, but gamewise I just recruited these.)



We reach the bandit camp and catch them by surprise - it's the entire posse against two or three sentries. In desperation a bandit axeman resorts to biting a cook in the leg



The civilians continue to give a good accounting of themselves



Until a second wave of bandit troops comes in followed by a volley of arrows and bolts that take some of the posse down



The chieftess appears, a Dwarf Mace Lord! Wanting to take her out of the fight quickly as she is carrying a Masterwork flail, Lightpoem goes for the chokehold and allies quickly take advantage to steal the kill!



We rush down the slope to cut the archers to pieces before they can do any more damage.



Unfortunately while Lightpoem is running around killing them they get a few more shots off. Fortunately they either get blocked, or hit allies. Unfortunately, eight out of the fifteen villagers died during the fight.

Dwarf clothing, oddly enough, fits elves. So Lightpoem trades in some of his cloth gear for leather, and in another WTF moment finds he can wear three long skirts at once without impairing movement.



He asks the villagers to return home, but having had their taste of fame and glory they can't imagine giving up their new life as adventurers, even though a few of them are missing body parts and the lord gives the following quest

Now, before this he asked me to kill the dragon Harmless was sent after. It was apparently common knowledge that it was already dead as "quests" just showed "report death of dragon X." When I talked to the lord he just said "whatever, news of faraway lands doesn't bother us.". Then "Go kill this other dragon."



Lightpoem can see the greed in the eyes of his companions as they set out eastwards towards the Girlish Bridge. No one knows why it was called this.

The dwarves have long since gone home, leaving their trash around, and wild animals have moved in. The well is still functional, though



After crossing the bridge we head southeast, only to be ambushed by goblins while we sleep at night!



Still not fully awake, the villagers stand no chance and are slaughtered

Lightpoem avenges them but wishes they hadn't been so greedy. Rather than recruit more humans who will probably get themselves killed, he decides to go on alone.

More hunting:



Close now to the dragon lair, Lightpoem's path is blocked by a river canyon... but what's this on the other side. A dwarf?

[uberfish]

A bridge with a view of a spectacular waterfall crosses the canyon



And there's a viewing platform with Lightpoem resists the urge to jump off



The dwarves had built themselves a little undeground burrow



And a long stair led down to the water's edge



Where there was a memorial to casualties



Lightpoem crossed the bridge to the waterfall itself and then swam in the pool with the alligators (who ignored him, being an elf.) He came close to drowning due to the strong currents but managed to find the platform and haul himself back up in time!

The dwarves were happy to share some of their yak tripe and dwarven rum in return for stories of the outside world and wished him luck in his fight with the dragon

the lair was close by: just 5 tiles east and 2 south of the tourist attraction of Lenswash. He enters the cave cautiously.



Wait... isn't this the wrong dragon name



Lightpoem fights the dragon, blocking its fire with his shield and slicing into the creature's legs.




The fight is over surprisingly quickly when the dragon leaves an opening for a headshot:



Time to loot!

... oh WTF, that's not loot, that's another dragon!?



This dragon is a lot more aggressive and repeatedly charges Lightpoem, knocking him over every time he tries to stand up!



Fortunately with his back to the wall he finally dodges the charge - a good thing, as being knocked into the wall would have probably resulted in a stun and being fried.

He needs a good hit to stop the charge action, and gets it



This dragon was apparently the one he was supposed to kill in the first place, and it took a lot more punishment than its kin including resisting multiple blows to the skull



But once its legs were disabled it was helpless apart from its fire breath which Lightpoem had the reflexes to block.



in the cave there was... a third dragon??



Dwarf Fortress: Where autoattacking causes you to BITE A DRAGON IN THE HEAD



After a long and exhausting fight he beat the third dragon too. He decided to carry one of the dragon skulls around with him for luck, and take the severed dragon nose back to the Empirestring museum with enough dragon steak to last the journey back.

Oh, the loot was crap and half of it had been set on fire anyway.

The reception back at the lord's keep was underwhelming



... Well, thinks Lightpoem. You didn't tell me about the two other dragons. And now you want me to kill ANOTHER totally irrelevant dragon. That isn't near your country at all or really threatening you in any way.

And he realises the true intention of Lord Obin Felnastrisp; he doesn't care for the lives of adventurers. He will use them to deal with bandits, but a popular adventurer is a threat to his own position. He was never meant to return from the dragon lair in the first place, and the lord will simply send him on more suicide missions until he dies.

However, he is now a legendary hero to about 400 (seriously) different entities after slaying the dragons. He resolves to leave the Slippery Confederation.

He checks out the "evil" area to the northwest, but the Suicidal Prairies were just like normal prairies except with purple trees. A disappointment.

While he was travelling in the human lands south of the Gulf of Nature he remembers there were sinister dark towers and decides to investigate.

Passing through the swamp he stops at exactly the same river the previous Uberfish did; the remains of the carp encounter are still there



A villager told him that only a legendary hero like himself could travel without fear of bogeymen at night and it proved to be true. Neither bogeymen nor goblins nor anything else dared ambush him as he made his way back south through the endless swamp

He knew he was back in the south lands when he came across a partially frozen river



Eventually he reached the tower. The necromancers were supposedly peaceful - but raised dead bodies in the tower to attack anyway. So he sneaked about a bit until he got a headshot lined up on one standing in the door:



A second necromancer and a bunch of zombies chased him out of the tower



He sliced the necro's arm off and the necro immediately REANIMATED HIS OWN SEVERED ARM and sent it in to attack. Hardcore

Anyway he picked off a few zombie legs trying to make them lag behind so that he could get clean attacks on the necromancer without being mobbed by zombies. After landing a couple of nasty slashes he had to back off to avoid being overrun, but



The necro finally bled out and he could clean up

The entrance room was clear. Oh. There's a lot more necros and undead upstairs...



The necros could reanimate anything close to them no matter how many times it'd been killed. Corpses, dead necros, loose body parts... the solution Lightpoem came up with was to try and lure a few at a time then throw the bodies a distance away from the tower entrance. This made a mess.



The next level up. Reanimating their own arms appeared to be a standard necro tactic



and yes, someone promptly reanimated this head



The corpse disposal area got increasingly messy.



Next level up the tower had a bunch of books... interesting



Anyway to cut a long story short Lightpoem destroyed many, many necromancers and zombies in the tower with the same sort of corpse disposal and swarm avoidance tactics. At the top there was an ancient slab...



This didn't seem to do anything - apparently elves can't become necromancers

The books were - odd:




yep Istro Stasisfin wrote a book about his own book telling people to give him his own book... Obviously self-indulgent.

Another necromancer, a dwarf had written no less than three books about himself:

The Dwarf
The Dwarf: A Brief History
The Dwarf in the Modern Era

The slab was a bit too heavy to practicably take as a souvenir so it was left in the front room of the tower. One of the books was about the secrets of life and death. Lightpoem took it along with a couple of books with silly names which might find their way into one of the museums at some point.

For now, he headed to the nearby village of Lovedrills and decided to take a break and enjoy his fame. (Fighting more bandits or vampire hunting wouldn't be that interesting - but I do have one or two epic scale ideas that these guys might come out of retirement for.)



The rough map of his extensive travels.

[uberfish]

Legends: History of a Necromancer

This Istro Stasisfist guy actually turned out to be an interesting character if self-indulgent:



after taking up 3 unrelated professions and deciding to worship a damp flower, he became the high priest of the cult

He then gave all that up to be a necromancer



And started writing books (mainly about himself)



Before finally getting killed by an elf and his body reanimated by one of his colleagues.

[NobleHelium]

Did you get any instances where necromancers were able to cast without any hands/arms? Since it says they gesture.

[mostly_harmless]

Awesome, Uberfish!

In frozen areas, I think you can melt snow at a campfire for water.

I never went into necromancing myself, but I believe there should be a acquired skill in the "x"-menu (where you do the butchering). Not for elves?

For fighting undead and necros, it would probably help to use a weapon that does not severe so many body parts, like a hammer or such.

As for retiring and reactivating, I was thinking it should be possible to create and retire a bunch of Demigods and then create a posse out of those.


mh

[uberfish]

Necromancers are quite weak physically and I'm not sure if I actually cut both arms off one. Against them I was mainly going for the head and torso for quick kills, rather than concentrating on disabling them like I do with soldiers. Swords are versatile weapons and DF actually manages to convey this well, as you can slash to try and sever limbs or thrust at vital organs.

Elves can't become necromancers for some reason.

[Gustaran]

Is it possible to attack the questgiver? It would have been a funny turn of events if you killed the Lord after deciding he was trying to betray you...