Let's play "Elven Fortress", DF RPG

[PainRack]

Let's play dwarf fortress again..... but with a twist. Instead of a game simulator, YOU, are to enter the role as an RPG player!


Raldishmab wants you, dwarves!The death of mayor Urdim Kilrudtomus should remind us that our new home is in danger. Flight will not lead us to safety. Only arms will. IF we are strong, we will be safe! For our children, we must fight! With or without the elves, we shall prevail. And our new home, our new hope, shall endure.

How to play
A new military squad has been created in Raldishmab. Formerly defended by hunters, the fort now needs warriors! You can get to choose any of these dwarves to roleplay
Kumil Mamgozkubuk
Kivish Izeguzol(Male)
Ber Koganas(Female)
Cog Luritcatten(Male)
Ineth Ramdastot(male)
Ducim Arakoltar(male)
Doren Adiloshur(Female)
Zan Shetbedhadil(female)

Some of these dwarves have military skills, other have "good" attributes.
Each turn is approximately one season, although special events may change this. Every season, you would be asked to choose a course of action. It could be "go for training", "participate in arena games", "socialise with other dwarves". Other options would include participating in quests that may come up, such as fighting and killing a beast, hunting down 5 Emperor Penguins and the like.

Partipation in posts would be "ingame speech" or actions..

What do you get? Well, rewards. A tracked economy of sorts, rewarding you in cash. earn enough cash, and buy yourself better weapons and armour. Upgrade your bedroom! Place a new statue of yourself, to be placed in the Trade Depot to intimidate traders!
Even basic fighting earns you cash, each strike gives you 5 dwarfbucks even if it was parried/deflected, each stroke that wounds/cut enemy cuts you ten, each strike that breaks bones/amputate/damages organs earn you 15 and killing blows earns you twenty.
Cost of items would be measured in terms of game costs, although certain "priveledges" would need to be bought for.(5x5 bedroom or etc).
Well crafted posts in term of content, reacting to the game story and etc may earn you rewards from the GM.

Sample post
It is Spring, 558. Raldishmab is expecting the elven tributary convoy to arrive any moment now.
Will you
a: Train in barracks
b: Socialise with dwarves.
c: Station at the gate to defend the incoming convoy
d: patrol the wilderness

Kumil grumbled into his beard. Dumb elves with their dumb convoy....A voice in his heart shouted:"Ingrish just brewed up a spanking new batch of Longland beer and Dwarven Ale.... Ooh, if I could just go and grab a drink of that" However, the voice of duty whispered back:"Faith Kumil. duty. Honour. Pride. Defend the gates...."


Rewards would not just be finanicial. Aim to become a squad commander. Train fellow dwarves. Set up a military schedule for yourself/your squad.
Most of all, let's have fun:D

RPG
So, essentially, I track your decisions and rewards and input them into the game. The game tracks your dice rolls and skills, RNG and even random events. Together, both of us craft a story. Now, I will try to make it so that it becomes as RPG like as possible, but the game may decides to let your skull be blasted apart or you falling down a deep chasm or frozen in ice..... Nothing much I can do except to save scum, which might interfere with other people stories/rewards.

Of course, since we're crafting a story here, I would also try to throw curveballs at you. Live fire training against that goblin? OMG, he smuggled in a weapon! HELP!?!?!?!An "accidental" flooding or so that cuts you off from the cavern access..... You never know.

Last bit is about "class" so as to speak.
You get to choose what class you're going to start off as, a xbow dwarf or a meelee dwarf.
Xbow dwarves are armed with a wooden xbow with ammunition of 100 bolts or so..... frankly, I'm quite lousy in keeping my dwarves up to date with ammo. I always prefer to use bone to decorate doors.....
The other thing is.. xbow dwarves "promise" to have a huge advantage over meelee dwarves if I play to keep them alive(fire from behind fortifications and etc). So, I'm going to have to balance it out somehow... No idea how yet, we just roll as we go.

Meelee dwarves are armed initially with wooden training weapons. You get to upgrade to a wooden weapon as soon as you complete a tour of duty.(well, in reality, as soon as the damn elves come in two turns to sell me wooden weapons.)
For mace/hammer dwarves, you don't get a weapon, period, until you complete a specific quest(think Shaman from WOW). P.S, don't try it until you get some training in.

You're all equipped initially with a leather helm and padded cloth armour and a leather shield.

Once you play the game proper, if you want to dual weild, dual class, go ahead:D The game "does" allow for xbow dwarves to fire and then use meelee weapons in combat, well, if the dwarve choose to close and attack them. I haven't done the !!science!! to see what happens if the gobbos close on dwarves unexpectably... I don't see any real problems so far although other players on the forum advise against dual weilding.

So, that's about it. The next few posts would be detailing the overall history and environment of the game, as well as the fort history and story so far. I probably start game quests next week, although if I hit a high enough response and I'm free from work, I kick things off early.

[PainRack]

The Secretive Armor founded Raldishmab,"silver rampart" a fort built by the civilisation "The Fortunate Doors" Akamtum. It is currently a town of 103 dwarves, with a large animal population of 64 creatures. The bulk of this are chickens, interspersed with a small flock of sheep, goats,llama and alapaca. A horse and cow provide new sources of milk for cheese.

Fortunate Doors dwarves speak in a British accent. However, dwarves who had interacted with the semi-extinct dwarven civilisation of the Pointy Iron are known to speak in a Scottish accent, forming a significant contingent in this dwarven outpost.

As an invisible, subclass within the Fortunate Doors, dwarves were mostly employed as traders and caravan guards. Facing starvation routinely, dwarves had garnered an expert knowledge of herbal lore, rivalling the elves. Indeed, their brew, including the Guiness knockoff of the Pointy Iron Bugmen brew is famous for its life sustaining qualities, superior even to the elven lambas or human cram.
A small dwarven workforce labour as apprentices undcer superior smith masters, churning out the steel, iron and other metal tools a civilisation need. Deaths, the lack of resources and infrastructure has shrunk this force to almost nothing, leaving behind mostly apprentices who had been forced to learn other labours so as to survive.

Similarly, dwarves had learnt much from the elves, mastering the art of butchery, tanning and hunting. While they fail to master the elven expertise in archery, they make up for it in cunning and sheer bloodthirstiness. A small labourforce labour as servants to elves, picking up the skills of farming.

Dwarves are generally stoic creatures, used to hardship. Human traders are known to lubricate mercantile activities with large amount of cheap rotgut and sewer gruot, enduring the loosen lips, drunken acts and hours of grumbling/complaining so as to get better bargains. Despite the years, dwarves are not subserviant and has been known to be stubborn to the point of death.

Their numbers are few, and reproduction low due to their ethics. This has led to peculiar philosophies and habits towards their fate.

As a government, the Silver Rampart is communal. Their dwarves live in close, cramped conditions, surrounded by noise and traffic. They are used to such environments, indeed, they celebrate the relatively larger, open spaces of the fort compared to the mountain homes. They have a strange fear of large, open spaces and turn depressive, this is particularly true of those adventourous enough to have explored the abandoned mountain homes.

At the moment, they are in peace with the humans and elves. The Silver Rampart is expected to pay large amount of tribute to the Mythical Jaws in return for "peace". Elven bands routinely raid the mountainhall, the Galley of Distinction, bought off with tribute. The counter-raids against the Glitter of Rapidity has ceased due to lack of manpower.

As a group, the Silver Rampart was formed to exploit new food resources and trading links with the humans. Starving queens had sent off "surplus" labour to form a outpost, funneling food back to the mountainhome. The vulnerable trading link with the humans was often ambushed by goblins, a seaport was thus sought, avoiding the landbound goblins. The genius of building a seaport in a glacial ocean spoke volumes of dwarven ingeunity.

[PainRack]

No one interested? if not, there isn't much point in me crafting the backstory for the civilisations involved...

[Zaune]

You might do better on the Bay 12 forums, to be honest. I don't think there's enough of a Dwarf Fortress fanbase here.

Oh, and how the hell did you get to over a hundred dwarves and still have a tolerable FPS rate? I know my main gaming rig is some way behind the curve but I can't get to a population of sixty before it slows to a crawl.

[PainRack]

The latest variant stabilised the game a lot. Even with the FPS killer of bees and large animal populations, its still quite manageable. Well, same old caveat of temperature, flow and etc still applies but yeah. It takes my com up to 200 dwarves with a corressponding large animal population before it slows down to nearly zero.

I will also note that pasture means its much easier to coral up animals, including cats. Pasture your cats in your food piles and well, you don't NEED those cats anywhere else:D

as for the bay12 forums, I'm not THAT good a player to manage anything more than 2-3 dwarves in this scenario:D

I also uploaded the save for my world because well, you see, the funny thing about this world is, its run by elves. There are no dwarves existing in the history other than that uploaded by my first abandoned fort.There are two dwarven civilisations, one is extinct, populated by one dog, the other has several hundred elves inside. Apparently, some elves defected over to the dwarves during a war over plants... and eventually, the dwarves all died out. The elves were then in turn conquered by their parent civilisation although we remained a seprate civilisation, that has been engaged in a war with them for over 500 years. The image of Taciticus from Discworld just pops to mind when this happens:D

Send our bravest warrior to kill those pesky dwarves, who seduced our kind... Ok, you ate the elf queen? Eewww....... You get to conquer them. Oops, what do you mean she attacking us>?!?!?!

[Zaune]

Yeah... definitely time to retire the Pentium 4 then. I'd been holding off on that for a while because DF doesn't support multi-threading, but I should have suspected something when my Intel Atom-based netbook was getting comparable performance...

And I seem to get that scenario quite a bit, but that's probably because of a crude workaround for a bug with custom reactions that came up when I was arming everyone with black-powder firearms.

[PainRack]

Really? I do get civs with elves in them or even conquered elven civilisation, it just the first time that I got entirely no dwarves in the game whatsoever. And the elf dwarf was fighting the elf elf, got conquered by the elf elf and then somehow kept fighting the elf elf.

[The Yosemite Bear]

I thought DF Elves were all "Humanitarians"?

[Zaune]

As far as I can tell, they practice ritual cannibalism of their slain foes but they're vegetarian the rest of the time.

[Purple]

I want to play? Is this still on?