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

[Tasunke]

yea, lets adventure into hell first .... eh?

Or is the idea to make several hell entrances first with our massive superforts :P

[mostly_harmless]

Once we do the fortress, I suggest we take it easy and develop naturally, to maybe explain things a bit for the lurkers and beginners. The nasty stuff comes eventually.

mh

[Tasunke]

Yea. I figure the natural fortresses will start out as simple things that will only die off due to silly randomness, bad weather, or hordes of FUN

I mean, assuming digging too deep is even what kills the next fortress (could well be goblins for all we know), it may take a fortress achieving 'grandiose' status before it will likely end up getting to that point. In which case .... does anyone say grandiose trap-filled MEGA RUINS? Holla! :D

[mostly_harmless]

Well, a well developed grandiose fortress is likely to be protected by a crack squad of killer dwarves. And there is a chance you can put up a fight against the FUN. After all Tasunke Dwarf managed to kill one invader before being slaughtered and he only had an axe and no armour.
But, I agree, the fortress is more likely to starve or end in a tantrum spiral.

mh

[Tasunke]

After all Tasunke Dwarf managed to kill one invader before being slaughtered and he only had an axe and no armour.

BOOYAH! WHO's the BADASS?

[uberfish]

I reactivated Uberfish Circlecut the human swordsman. I checked for zombies in Freesquashes but couldn't find any - there were lots of random teeth and things scattered around though which hadn't been cleand up, but no zombies or anything. Disappointing. I then set off for the dwarf fort:



Outside the walls there were a few dead skeletons. There was a trap at the entrance but Circlecut detected it easily and went into the courtyard.



There was a statue of a triangle that was on fire. With a minotaur killing a goblin. Not sure why dwarves would make a statue of a minotaur killing a goblin. This was worrying.



The dwarves had carved out some completely random rooms on the first underground level.



And below this a small apartment complex:



Lower down there were stairs to a cave where there was another skeleton. So far there was no trace of what had killed these unfortunate dwarves...



and another cave entrance on the floor below where there were more random traps.



Circlecut checked out the cave...



A monster of ash ambushed the party out of the darkness! It was a giant antlion made out of ash... however it seemed the ash was easy to cut through as the leg was sliced off easily.

For some reason this didn't stop it kicking Circlecut so hard that he went flying into a wall and got stunned. The demon proceeded to kill one of his companions



... and then charged circlecut again and killed itself on a counterstrike.



So apparently being made of a weak material like ash makes things easy to kill. Hitting a large creature in this game in the thorax would generally never be able to instantly sever it. Useful to know.

I had a quick look at the caverns but they're utterly un-navigable due to being a horrible maze of Z-level ramps and things. Not sure what the developer was thinking with these.

Circlecut wandered through more and more mine tunnels deep beneath the earth



and was charged down by some sort of giant flying dinosaur



Well charging is just clearly imbalanced in this combat system... things can charge at you, supposedly miss, collide into you anyway and knock you down... which reduces your speed to about a third and also makes you easier to hit.



Well, my next action is to stand up and I proceed to get owned by some awesome kicking skills on the part of the pterosaur and then toasted by a fire breath.



... that didn't go too well.

[uberfish]

ok so I reactivated Istro Stasisfin the necro!

His entire zombie army had deserted him, but he still had his trusty spear, and along the way he encountered a couple of alligators and wild boars, which he killed and zombified.

At the river by the fortress there were a couple of hippos. The alligators took them down and Istro could easily stab them in the head killing them! I was feeling good about having a couple of hippos in the army but...



there was a giant sponge in the river. Apparently giant sponges are immortal because nothing Istro or the zombies could do was capable of actually killing the thing. Unfortunately, undead are dumb and will just keep on attacking their target mindlessly and you can't do anything to recall them. So I pretty much didn't have an army apart from a couple of rubbish partial dwarf skeletons from inside the fort.

I didn't find the pterosaur fiend again but I did find this:



It was the adamantine vein... a stairway led to a pit into unknown depths



So let's see I'm a necro with no army in front of a one way trip to hell

there's only one thing to do

JUMP



(I did cheat by saving the game first... it was quite a long fall.)

Istro broke both legs but sleeping at the spot he landed for an hour healed them up due to adventure mode quirks - his toe remained broken.

Hell was a huge cavern of black stone with chasms leading to glowing pits - presumably the centre of the earth. Many strange creatures dwelled here




They spat goo which fortunately seemed to be harmless. These enemies took a lot of punishment before going down.

Istro continued his journey through hell...



The next demon encountered was a mud fiend, something made out of mud with 3 tails. Similar to the ash monsters encountered earlier they died relatively easily on being hit



... another demon group. Steam monsters were very fast, very evasive but also instantly died if hit in the body. however they were quite capable of charging and inflicting annoying knockdowns.



and of course knockdowns were very dangerous with other creatures around such as these Quail Devils



The quails, apart from their poisonous gas (which didn't seem to do much either) functioned much like any other very large creature: they took a huge amount of punishment before dying



Because the steam monsters were much faster Istro was able to fight them separately before taking on the quails.

More weird monsters. These took EVEN LONGER to die, I had already pierced the heart 10 rounds ago.




And another one nearly knocked Istro into the glowing pit!



Demons of Slate... Pretty much the opposite of steam monsters. Slow but utterly indestructible. They spit some sort of extract. The most Istro could do was fracture body parts which didn't really seem to bother them in the slightest. I wonder if dragon zombies would be able to kill them.



Sadly Istro's adventures in hell came to an end when steam monsters repeatedly charged him and knocked him, not into the glowing pits but over a cliff that was 2-3 Z levels high... I didn't expect it to be but:



Somehow he managed to land both feet-first AND head-first at the same time and die Oh well, hell was getting a bit boring anyway and there didn't seem to be much to see there (or a way to get back out for that matter.)

[mostly_harmless]

Ok, so that is done then! :D

The random rooms held the workshops, btw., which did not seem to have made it to adventure mode yet.

mh

[NobleHelium]

and was charged down by some sort of giant flying dinosaur

Well charging is just clearly imbalanced in this combat system... things can charge at you, supposedly miss, collide into you anyway and knock you down... which reduces your speed to about a third and also makes you easier to hit.

I was also very confused by the "misses you and then collides with you" that always seems to happen with charges, but then I figured it out. What actually happens is that the charger attempts to attack the chargee right before the collision, and generally misses the attack. So that's the "misses you" message. Then the charge connects and the collision happens.

[NobleHelium]

Also, none of the hell demons could be necroed?