Join the ranks of the dwarven Kings (or Queens)

[bloodreaper]

I'm hoping to get another Succession game of Dwarf Fortress going, because I had a lot of fun reading and writing the reports of myself and the other player.

This isn't going to happen right away, as the new version of DF is still in an intensive bug-fixing phase. A release stable enough to play a serious game with won't be out until the first of next month, at the earliest.

However, I'd like to get a list of people who would be interested in doing such a thing. There's no commitment at this stage, and you don't need to know if your computer can handle the new, lighter wight DF engine, I just want to know if you would be interested, if by some magic it was possible for you to participate.

But wait! There's more!

I also want some suggestions for the name of the fortress and it's founding expedition.

Both of these entities can be renamed manually at the start of the game, and I want everyone, even people who are just reading the reports, to feel that their voice was heard in the naming process. (WeaselSplatter was a fine city name, but I think we should have taken suggestions.) By default you get random words from your civ's allowed symbols, which can be pretty funny all by itself, but it doesn't work right and presently produces only compound words with no extra titles, which is usually boring, as you can get furnaceblood but not furnaceblood the bane of dignity.

The names have to fit within the following format:

WordWord the Adjective Adjective Word-Word of Word-Word

That is I could name the expedition "BanditFeed", or "The Doomed Adventure", or even "BanditFeed the Sad Doomed fool-mule of Evisceration"(Agashked Okbodmukarcabnuludler Ngilok in the dwarven). Only one hyphenated word is allowed in each name, giving us a maximum of two compound words (i.e. XY the Z of A-B or AX the Z-B of A, but not XY the Z-B of A-C ).

The city name should probably be shorter than that, or be easily shorted, but feel free to go to town with the expedition name suggestions.

For town names, I suggest something evocative of the probably fate of our city. My immediate thoughts turn to things like "Charredbones the Black City of Suffering" or "Charredblack the City of Bones."These could be shortened in journal entries to simply CharredThing or The City of Horriblething.

Going the opposite way, we could call it something like DiamondTowers The Awe-Inspiring City (awe-inspiring is one word). In this case, either we live up to our name, or it becomes a hilarious, ironic monument to the hubris of our dwarves.

For a third option, we could go ninties on the thing and make the most over the top title imaginable.
DiamondAxe the Firey Awe-Inspiriring Evil-Mule of Devils [/i]
is stupid, but in a good way.

There are other ways you could go with this too, of course. Show me the dwarfiest names you can think of.

[solecs]

I would be pretty interested in joining the ranks though i have no good ideas on names at the moment though something about bonecrushing always fits a Dwarf

[Dragyn]

I would definitely be interested.

Possible Fortress Name: Blood-Murk of the Fallen

No suggestion for group name, at the moment.

[bloodreaper]

May 25, 2010 1:13:15 GMT -5 Dragyn said:

I would definitely be interested.

Possible Fortress Name: Blood-Murk of the Fallen

No suggestion for group name, at the moment.

Maybe if we do a swamp or aquifer fortress, that would be good, but I was thinking of a volcano. Lava makes everything better.

Maybe shorter is better. "The Fallen" would be an interesting name for our founders, considering the likely outcome of their expedition.

Heh. Then we could call the fortress The Bones of the Fallen.

[Dragyn]

Heh. I think I like that idea.

The main reason I suggested blood-murk at all is because I know it's possible, since I had a fortress by that name once.

[bloodreaper]

By that token I know bone, hammer and crush are all words, too.

BoneCrush the Fallen Hammer of Doom

Meh. It sounds more like an artifact name than a fortress one.

It's too bad we can't use an "of the" construct, so we could call it BoneCrush the Fortress of the fallen. As is We'd have to settle for BoneCrush the fortress of falling.

This is because dwarven extended nouns don't actually contain prepositions or articles i.e. Bonecrush the Fall of Falling translates to Osodôm Umid Umid.

Would it be better to call a fort BoneCrush (Osodôm) or BoneCrushers(Osodangrir)?

Verb tense rarely makes any difference either so Crushed will translate the same as Crush, in our fancy dwarven scripts. Likewise Crusher and Crushers isn't differentiated by a suffix; we only have word roots really.

A word that would really work well, for it's versatility is Fortune. It could mean wealth, or good luck, or the same thing as Doom.

For some reason it returns two roots for Fortune, akam and osram. I don't know what the distinction is, so we'd just use whichever I think sounds more fitting with the rest of the the title.

[solecs]

Ya know Bonecrush the Doom of fallen Hammer has a nice ring to it tho it sounds more like a game title than a fortress but the Idea is great if only we knew how to make that decision huh

it could make for interesting dialog but for some reason I think Bonecrush the Fortune of Fortresses sounds bretty good but I guess it depends on how the game turns out before we can really decide on the real name otherwise we go with the Missnamed Village of Dwarfdom ok not really it just sounds funny but could be very entertaining if you think about it

[bloodreaper]

Fallen hammer is actually pretty good, since it has a double meaning that can imply either victory or defeat, hence, our band would be The Fallen Hammer or The Fallen Hammers.

I really like this idea, because the theme is versatile, but there's a problem with it.

"Fallen" isn't listed as an "adjective,' but as a "past participle," which means that we can't name the fortress Osodôm Osram UmidNil (Bonecrush the Fortune of Fallen Hammers).

We can use ùnil, which is "Hammerers." To a veteran DF player, this is pretty much an equivalent to "Fallen Hammer" in depth, mood and meaning. This has a little extra joke in that the Hammerer position is currently in limbo; it has been removed from the game and may not return in a recognizable form. Grim.

If nobody objects I think that the Umidnil should strike the earth, to found the settlement of Osodôm Osram únil, i.e. the Fallen Hammers should found BoneCrush the Fortune of Hammerers.

What sort of location would you like to see conquered? For the sake of the CPUs it should be fairly small, so we can't expect too much in one location, but I'll try to get 2+ biomes into a 2X2 or 3X3 area. I would like a source of flowing water, but I know that fluid dynamics can harsh a processor quickly, so I would prefer a small stream to a river, and no waterfall.

Do you want to see a fort on a live volcano, no matter what? Or a fort in a land with no trees? Tunnel through an aquifir? A barren tundra that freezes you to death? A place so evil the wildlife are undead, skeletal animals?

Try not to ask for anything that will result in a really short campaign, or require a lot of reclaim expeditions (teams sent to replace the inhabitants, after they all die).

[Dragyn]

You were the one who wanted lava, though I am not opposed.

About all I'd want from it for sure is proper stone from which to carve the fortress. I'd like to see wood, too, so we don't have to import.

[bloodreaper]

Timber to burn/carve, and a mountain to carve into a castle are givens. How else are we to provoke the wrath of the elves?

Technically, if you dig deep enough, you should be able to find lava anywhere now, but I want easy access. That's negotiable, unless others really want it also.

Gypsum (for making cast plaster) is a new resource that we might want to play with, but it can be imported fairly cheaply, so it isn't a big deal.

On a side note, a new release came out today. Among the bugs fixed was 0000179: Wounded baby spams "cancels clean self: too insane."

If they just fix the bug where military dwarves refuse to ever return to civilian life, I think we'll be ready to start in the new 31.XX series, with all the cool toys. Really, this thread is mostly to kill time and get organized, while we wait for the bugfix patches that follow a major release to slow down.

EDIT: Oh, and being rained on no longer causes instant death, which should mean that it's possible for fish to survive world-gen.

[Dragyn]

Y'know, Blood, we can't see the Mantis thing unless we sign-in. Just sayin'.

Alas, poor fish. Killed by the rain.

[bloodreaper]

IT had to do with seasonal temperature extremes, so apparently the oceans were boiling every summer.

Like I said, with the new version out, there are a lot of patches being released, to fix various crashes and weird bugs, so we'll want to wait a couple of weeks for things to become more stable.

I think maybe the story for our fort should be that the initial team are ex-hammers, looking for a new life, now that the hammerer position is disabled. Bloodthirsty enforces of law and order, now unable to exact their gruesome vengeance on the guilty.

It goes with the name that we're considering, and it would be fun for me, to write the first year's log.

Also, do we want to nickname dwarves after rulers upon retirement, so we have deaths that are specifically worth noting? Otherwise, we could just give out names for whatever reason, or to people who can't play, but want to be involved. There's lot of things that can be done with nicknames, and I wanted to see if we want to all do it in a similar fashion.

[bloodreaper]

Nobody has anything to say to the naming thing, huh?

I guess we'll just wing that then.

It looks like this week's next patch should be newbie friendly enough to get started.

Sadly, last week's patch fixes some major bugs, but doesn't fix existing saves that are already gliched. Looks like waiting was the right move, even if it does seem to have dampened enthusiasm somewhat.

[solecs]

I think naming them after retirement sounds good helps keep track of the timeline and adds a little humor plus I still need the game

[bloodreaper]

I've got a copy of the latest DF release, and am now testing it to see if it's stable enough to be a learning build for a new player. The bugfix list seems to address most of the most glaring problems, but I think there are a couple of weird bugs in the military, yet.

Some of the bugs plaguing the newly rebuilt military have been knocked down, but several seem to remain in the training and squad assignment systems. People are having a hard time getting dwarves to stop training once they start, and a harder time getting dwarves to leave the military when they fire them. Mostly it seems to boil down to repeatedly un/designating the barracks structure, until the dwarf realizes he's not supposed to be there. Defending the fortress is already harder, due to some difficulty raising balance tweaks, and I wouldn't want to see somebody get stressed out by this particular bug.

On the upside, it looks like effected save files will be able to be repaired when the bug is fixed, so maybe we shouldn't wait. I'll comment further after I've run a couple of years on the fast machine, to see what crops up.

So to confirm: when you finish your year, you get to rename a dwarf after your journal persona. Is that good for everyone?