Starting up a new world in Dwarf Fortress, and a one of the places it showed me was a human civilization know as 'The Girlish Kingdom' - I was curious what was happening there, so opened up Legends viewer to check:
Human civilization, Past World, etc etc, someone made themself law-giver by force, yeah that sounds about usual...
Wait, the doctor and the cup-bearer?
So that's curious - let's look into some of these people.
Mogast has the usual backstory; married and divorced a necromancer before becoming law-giver, eventually settles down with someone else and then has to resist getting recruited by his ex for plots and schemes.
So what about our necromancer?
Looks like she found someone after the divorce too, and didn't start worrying about her mortality until years later. Found a death god to worship, learned the secrets of life and death, and then was constantly rebuffed in her scheming.
But back to the Girlish Kingdom... what about our bleak zombie cup-bearer, if the necromancer wasn't a doctor yet? Well, it looks like (thanks to a quirk of the Legends viewer) they weren't a zombie yet either. They were a simple mercenary who became a functionary, served for a number of years before they got caught embezzling, and then died in prison.
Then, after 40 years in a tomb, they were brought back from the dead, and the 'bleak zombie' title retroactively applied.
Later, we find that the chief chef also had a similar transformation. Later in life, she found a lover and took up halberd-throwing at the annual festivals. Eventually she, too, succumbs to the lure of lucre and gets caught embezzling.
Once she gets out of prison, she finds religion and becomes a monk. After dying of old age, she also gets raised as a bleak zombie.
So apart from the embezzlement and the (upcoming) zombie problem, what's happening in the Girlish Kingdom? Mostly festivals - there's a months-long spring event called The Festival of Blowing. This happens every year from 48 onwards, featuring sporting contests, poetry and music, processions and ceremonies. Sounds like a fun time!
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Before I finish up with Rushsly, I'd like to do something a little different and dig through Legends mode for a bit to see the ancient history of our world, Daarunbay Detevay, the Dimensions of Portent. I know it might seem kind of like a pacing killer to pull back right before the end, but I'm going to want to get into my next fortress after Rushsly right away, and this stuff will be relevant far beyond the peaceful retirement (or total destruction) of Rushsly.
Along with the in-game Legends mode, I'll be using Legends Browser 2 to navigate the fucking 4gb XML file that Dwarf Fortress spat out at me when I asked it to export all the legends information. Obviously, we're not going to go over everything, that just physically isn't possible. But trying to wrap up all these little events into a brief(-ish) history of the world interests me, so that's what we're going to do, and there's no better place to start than at the beginning of time.
Well, Dwarf Fortress does put some events before the calendar starts, just to make sure that you can have stuff like forgotten beasts and titans who aren't literal babies if you try to start the game at too early of a year. But as you can see, among the myriad births of many civilizations, there's us!!! The Comedy of Sweating, first led by Otsu Trailedspurted. And there's the very first kobblefort before any others: Landsswallow!
Otsu's accomplishments are... well, few. She fell for another girl right after setting out to Landsswallow - a stockkeeper named Dicr, and their relationship had a bump or two, but by the time they died, they seem to have patched it up. We can't even know how old she was when she died, due to so much of her life taking place before the recording of time, but we can learn about what killed her!
One of the first known forgotten beasts - Gronane Kupaanugos - Divedmenace the Evil Moistness - lmao - a great one-eyed chicken with a poisonous bite. The kobbles of Landsswallow were not hardy like the ones of Rushsly; one has to wonder if they ever even learned steelworking in their limited time on earth. The record of Divedmenace's life shows it facing almost no resistance, besides just two warriors who came to confront it.
It has been dormant since the year 80, but in addition to its fifty-four notable kills, it did away with sixty-three creatures. What happened to Landsswallow?
170 years after its tragic destruction, just around the time that Rushsly started, a few outcasts settled in its long-abandoned ruins. But let's go back to the early days.
If Landsswallow was the only fortress, we would have never been kobbles, and thus never have settled our kobblefort. There were two more, Plantershred and Phlegmsunders. How long did those last?
Plantershred, a hillocks that kept livestock and apparently ran quite a decent tavern which let in ratfolk and gnolls, made it a good 32 years before being destroyed by a single hill titan, a great humanoid made of coral with massive mandibles called Yssyushu Rocktufts. Their sacrifice was not in vain - the beast never fully recovered, and just two years later was defeated by another kobble. Also, I don't know where else to put this, but I really like how one guy tried to settle in the ruins of Plantershred and just got fucked up by a bronze colossus, not even the same hill titan, just some other overpowered bastard showed up to ruin his day.
But what of Phlegmsunders? Well, this might be exciting after those last two: Phlegmsunders still exists! Well, almost.
Though it survived agonizingly close to our own time, it was unfortunately taken over by a group of ratfolk necromancers, The Doomed Muds. Actually, 237 was a great year for the ratfolk, and thus a terrible one for us.
That's five entire settlements that were taken over by The Doomed Muds, all too recently, and thus explaining the modern hostilities between ratfolk and kobblekind - the wounds of war have barely even started to scab. The strangest thing about The Doomed Muds is that they are not even ruled by a ratfolk: their first leader was a Stella Elf named Tarus Orangerelief, and once she was captured and sealed away by a different group of ratfolk, ones who weren't quite as keen on necromancy, the position was changed over to a human necromancer, Ismir Glistenedclustered. And while evil is always evil, it's not always banal - the story of Tarus is an interesting one.
Once a humble soap maker, her first love was a nine-year affair, and her second was ten - this only seems to make sense, as her lifestyle seemed quite nomadic. In the midst of it, a strange vanity overtook her: one that made her feel she could not age, could not die, that it would not be acceptable. So she trained under a necromancer, changed her name, moved away and became a butcher - possibly so that she would have an ample stock of corpses to practice with - and took on her own apprentices, along with a third husband. She even wrote a book at one point to try and spread the necromantic arts!
Two years after she penned it, she began the string of vicious attacks that would greatly damage The Comedy of Sweating and kick off what came to be known as "The Fell War" - which continues to this very day. Speaking of wars...
Our first lasted 55 years, against a splinter group of kobble necromancers. Our second was the aforementioned Fell War, which continues to this day against the ratfolk necromancers. There was one war that lasted only a year and was in fact made up of only a single battle against the humans, with 86 casualties: The Squeezing War.
Just a few months after, they accepted a peace offering from the kobbles, but it only lasted 11 years before tensions flared up again. And as of just a couple years ago, we have been embroiled in The Conflict of Wars against a ratfolk civilization known as The Nightmare of Tunneling. They have been around as long as us, and changed warlords 21 times in that length. The current one, who menaces us now, is named Vakeek Malignreason.
Once a humble planter in a peaceful hillocks, at least when she was not out raiding and pillaging, Vakeek was standard-order rank-and-file cannon fodder, with something of a talent for bonding with her comrades. But as far back as 78 years ago, after already putting literal hundreds of battles beneath her, she began dreaming of taking an artifact for herself: The Conflagration of Sport, an iron spear made by a lapine 71 years before she made up her mind on it. Knowing how long it might take, she became obsessed with immortality in order to make sure she could not be stopped from her goal even by death.
For a time, she was even enslaved by a group of gnolls known as The Ace Seductions, and made to work as a butcher before apparently earning the privilege of working as a poet, authoring three poems before escaping to become a scout back with her kin, The Nightmare of Tunneling, taking a husband and finally settling in the NoT hillocks Shockedhate after blowing her cover as a necromancer once more in Plaguejuices. For twelve years after that, though she was nominally a "gelder" at home, all she did was fight. Joining and eventually leading assaults, sometimes upon the same place over and over until the ratfolk could finally take it, she was finally crowned warlord in 241 and settled in the fortress of Towermaligned. Her life since then has been nothing but battle and training, and no doubt she has some hand in the many ratfolk attacks Rushsly must weather, along with the many other Comedy of Sweating outposts, towns and fortresses. The martial nature of Rushsly is no outlier to the world, especially not The Hill of Scars where all these warring factions live, but is simply a reaction to it; an extension of it.
What does all this mean? Well, nothing, really, but nothing "means" anything. All of this is just a series of random "events" generated by a computer with no real rhyme or reason besides a certain pre-programmed internal logic to what can and can't happen. Without someone to interpret it, it is literally just garbage data, and it has taken me the much better part of the evening just to scry even this little bit of meaning from the four gigabytes of literally just words that were generated so that I could play a funny little computer game.
But when you do play that funny little computer game you get to imbue the garbage data with meaning. Our pattern-seeking human brains find narratives and extract stories from the endless spaghetti of code. We learn things that were never actually taught and understand things that never actually made any sense because that's what we like to do. Life is also a bunch of random shit happening with no real consistent logic to it besides certain rules we know as "physics" or "causality" that are so iron-clad they may as well be computer code too. In our time alive we can only ever really be one person, or well, only ever inhabit one body, and so the easiest way to pull out strands of meaning from the swirling ramen broth of the universe is by focusing on characters.
We can try to see things through Alsrta Moltenend's eyes, a vagrant who had the job of caravan voice randomly thrust upon her as a matter of convenience, whose only real material contribution to the world was a nice wooden bin, whose eldest son was killed by a were-beaver, who tried to have a random kobble put to death for not making anvils or necklaces or whatever for her fast enough.
We could look at it with the perspective of Zhasrca Foldcounselled, an otherwise completely unremarkable miner besides the fact that he is one of the only Yekal worshippers in Rushsly.
After all, his life just might be about to get vastly more interesting.
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When you zoom out and look at it like this, it's not really an anomaly. Like, it's fucked up, but it's barely even a footnote.
In the grand history of The Nightmare of Tunneling, which is thousands and thousands of lines long, Blackfaint is two of them. It started and then it ended. The Land of Nails is a cruel place where life moves fast from beginning to end. The Hill of Scars just happens to be one exceedingly fast-paced part of it. I haven't really provided many good visual aids, so here's an image of the Daarunbay Detevay in its entirety which took me way too long to make.
The whole world! The Land of Nails is the western continent, the Land of Dividing is the eastern one. Where's The Hill of Scars in all of this, you might ask?
"Circled" in red is The Hill of Scars. Over on the left in blue, Rushsly. And on the right in puke green, Blackfaint. All the history of The Nightmare of Tunneling, of The Comedy of Sweating, has been constrained to this little western chunk of the continent. We have barely scratched the surface of the surface, even with our deepest dives into the history of kobbles and ratfolk. There's like 10 other major civilized species inhabiting the world, some of them not even on this continent that we've only known a little 1/10th swatch of. For instance, did you know there's fucking crab people?
There's crab people, baby. Well, that's an oversimplification. They're Decapoda, which is an umbrella term that includes lobsters, shrimp, and all kinds of crabs. The Axe of Glaciers live on the edges of the world, where it's cold: all the way up northwest on the glacial Island of Fate, and another decapodian civilization named The Paddle of Furs lives far to the southeast, among The Hills of Dividing and the terrifying Glacier of Corrupting at the end of The Land of Dividing - some even living out on the great ice floes in the arctic ocean. The harsh conditions come natural to such hardy peoples - after all, even the humble shrimp among them can heal well enough to regrow lost limbs.
There may very well be lobsters among us older than the very concept of counting years. And hell, there's one among The Axe of Glaciers who's as old as the calendar. The first King of Decapodia: Kuteci Peaceletters.
There's something very interesting about his reign, besides the "suddenly getting deposed in a coup" part. Yes, obviously, it's the "throwing competition" part. Obviously, losing 10 years in a row is one thing - but in the very first one at Bronzeskies, the seat of AoG, he actually won that one. The fact that he put the competition to rest until right at the end of his reign is just... interesting. Did he keep trying it again thinking he'd recapture the glory of his youth? Been there. Did his desperate attempts turn everyone against him? Been there. I don't throw controllers or anything because them shits cost like $60 for a good one but I haven't been able to enjoy fighting games for over 3 years because lately when I lose I get so fucking mad I punch my desk. Part of my ego is inextricably linked with the idea that "I have to be good at games." If I hop on an FPS and get headshotted over and over I have to just turn that shit off. I physically cannot handle "getting dominated" because I have so few avenues for success in my life that I have latched on to "yeah, I'm good at Sniper in Team Fortress 2" as one of my last pathetic desperate reaches for validation. I don't know what's wrong with me. I try to not be like this. I'm reading The Inner Game of Tennis but it hasn't really helped me yet. I can't play Street Fighter 6 off my friend's Steam family-share library because if I get put in the corner and don't tech the throw twice in a row I just have to turn the fucking game off, I alt-f4 out of it immediately, I can't stomach failure and victory only even feels like a reprieve from loss. I realize this is so much more pathetic than just being bad at games. In fact a guy who's bad at games and a good sport about it is probably the best thing you can be, because whenever anyone says "wow you're bad at this" you can just be like "Yeah I was too busy going outside and having sex and stuff." But I haven't been!! I've been here, sitting at my fucking desk, playing video games!! I should at least get Fortnite wins and not just in those first few games after you haven't played in a while where the whole lobby is bots, I mean I should be able to out-snipe any zoomer in the world with my 20 years of Counter-Strike experience or at least I fucking tell myself that, even though I've never fucking practiced the game or its particular flavor of sniping, or when I have it's just for like 5 flaccid minutes of not challenging myself because my ego is too fragile to actually let me!! I mean I'll tell you up and down the fucking block that battle royales are a literal cancer that caused "good map design" to be amputated from the modern multiplayer first-person-shooter genre and that actually is true but you'd never know it because I'm such a fucking bitch who fucking cries over never winning in Apex Legends even though I like Titanfall 2 way better but I can't fucking play that either because I get too fucking mad and competitive and hard on myself to enjoy it unless I'm playing absolutely perfectly!! Like what the fuck!?!? I'm 30 years old!! If I went back to my 10-year-old self and said "this is what you grow up to be, little guy" he would start downing shots of bleach right there on the spot!!! But I don't know how to change!!! My ego, my wavering sense of self completely dominates me and prevents me from enjoying my life and my so-called passions!! And it really feels like there's no way to fix it short of just tripping on so much acid I completely forget my current personality!! Even then what if it just comes back!!
The one who deposed Kuteci and reigns to this day is the former baroness, Scucutk Raspboats, whose true goal is to create a great work of art. Throughout her life, she has written eleven pieces of literature, but she only bothered to name six of them: Errors In the Keep, her first. The Journey Into Scucutk Raspboats, her third. The Truth About the Decapod fourth, The Wizard'S Guide to Creation sixth, Discourse on Pagesnarling (named for her barony) eighth, and After Genius tenth. Her last book, untitled, was writen in 163, and just 5 years later she would seize the throne in Bronzeskies and thus the throne of all decapodia, aided by Rerrr Crazyletter, the baroness of Gorgelearned, and Rerrr's daughter Cecichi Springchannels, duchess of Diamondtangled.
Legends Browser 2 seems to not like how many mods I've got running, but it doesn't look like we're missing too much. Besides their positions of significance in The Axe of Glaciers, they are mostly unremarkable women - all unlucky in love, but who isn't?
Why does any of this matter? Because it's clear Scucutk cannot write her true masterpiece from where she sits. Caravans are sent out all the time in search of a better location for a true grand library, one where she might finally create the artifact that has eluded her for all her life. Because I've never actually played a cold-weather biome, and it sounds both fun and more manageable than whatever the fuck Blackfaint ended up being. Because playing as lobsters and crabs sounds really funny
So at the northwestern tip of the world, we'll try it again. Unlike in other video games, it's very fun to lose in the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress, I've talked at length about that already. So why don't we try to make the greatest library Of All Time in possible the least hospitable environment Of All Time?
