So. I caught a couple of giant cave spiders in cage traps. Fuckin' sweet. I couldn't wait to play with these dudes.

I put them in a cage which I would pop open to greet invading armies, which was quite a bit of fun, although their longevity in those encounters was limited. It was also sometimes a hassle to recapture them when they did survive. When their numbers dwindled to 2, I decided to set up a little shop to make giant cave spider silk, so all my dwarves could have super fancy clothes.

I wasn't real clear on the details of how to set this type of farm up, although I knew the general idea. I decided to train one of the spiders and have it friendly, and leave the other one as an enemy, in case it turned out to be useful to have it shooting webs at one of my fortress dwarves. It went okay. I had a moment of very bad fright when I was flipping through the fortress and suddenly realized there was a giant cave spider walking down the dorm area's fucking hallway like he belonged there. Once I recovered a bit, I learned that it was the tame one, and I watched him all the way through as he navigated purposefully through my fortress, not causing a single problem or upsetting even a single dwarf, and arrived at the animal training area, which I guess had been his destination. What the fuck man. You gotta tell me if you're going to do stuff like that. His trainer arrived shortly after and they got to work, calm as a millpond.

Anyway, after quite a few failed experiments, I set up what was going to be the spider silk generation area: There was a little platform for the spider to be on, and then an 8-foot chasm, and then on the other side of the chasm was going to go a goblin. Behind the goblin were some fortifications through which the silk could shoot, and on the other side of that was the silk collection room. Flawless.

I selected a captured goblin, took his clothes and weapons away, and placed him naked on the goblin platform. I selected a goblin priest, assuming that this would give me a pretty wimpy goblin for this purpose, and he'd be a terrified spiderweb recipient and it would all go smoothly.

I don't know what kind of things go on in goblin seminaries, but apparently they're pretty hardcore. Everything went smoothly until I released the naked goblin, at which point he leapt across the chasm, grabbed onto the spider and started wildly assaulting him with bare hands and teeth, they fell together down into the chasm, and then the goblin killed the spider. What the fuck. Then the goblin died of his injuries, both of their corpses resting together at the bottom of the trench. Like lovers at Pompeii.

Welp. That was the end of the giant cave spiders. I actually never did anything else with the room, since it had no conceivable other purpose, and so the two corpses are still down there. I hope they reconciled in the afterlife and figured out that I had been the real enemy. Anyway, I set up a massive room down in the cavern-adjacent part of the fortress, managed to entice some normal-sized spiders into it, and did the whole runaround required to keep the cats out of there and harvest some regular spider silk from it from time to time, until I finally said you know what, fuck this, my dwarves can wear pigtail cloth; it is fine.

Since I had literally hundreds of mostly unwanted random creatures in cages for various reasons, I at one point decided to make an effort to make a setup that would pop them out of the cage via a distant lever to greet invading armies. This was, in the end, a totally useless endeavor. The logical place for the cages was inside the water trap, where anything unwelcome was marked for death anyway, and it was a huge hassle every time to set it up, and there was in general no useful effect in any capacity except to add some additional steps before everything drowned. It was sometimes entertaining, of course, which probably is why I kept doing it.

(I also, for some ridiculous reason, became convinced at one point that I could use bugbats in pop-open cages to induce invading armies into chasing the bugbats around up on surface level, so I could manipulate them into going where I wanted them to be. This was incredibly time-consuming to set up, and never worked, not even a little bit, even though I tried it several times. All it did was spread more bugbats around and introduce them in new places. For some reason, though, I kept being convinced that it would work and kept trying. I think by then I was self-deluded by the half-mad desire to make worthwhile the massive sunk costs that had been invested, against my will, into the goddamned bugbats, back before the point I finally decided to exterminate them once and for all.)

So as I said, it was a complete waste of time. There was, however, one of these surprise cage-openings that had an interesting product.

I had captured some kind of powerful enchantress and her assistants, all guilty of some offense against my fortress, and left them in cages for quite some time before deciding that they would make a good pop-out-and-greet-the-goblins squad. I installed them, and when the time came, I popped them out to share a hallway with a forgotten beast, a giant spider, some random cavern riffraff, and a small band of attacking goblins, just to see what would happen.

The result was fairly spectacular. A big magical fog popped into place, and it was like a fight in a Looney Tunes cartoon, all obscured with blood and chunks and spiderwebs arcing out of it periodically, and occasional glimpses of something incredibly unpleasant happening to everything inside. After a short time, the dust cleared, and the only thing that still remained that was any version of alive was:

Four zombies, aligned as friendly to the fortress.

I have no idea how this happened. Nothing that went into the melee had been friendly to the fortress, and none of it was zombies. I'm still to this day not clear on the basics of zombies, to be honest. Were they going to stay friendly? If I turned them loose on an army, would they do anything? Would they maybe turn that invasion into a hundred zombies, all friendly? Or not friendly anymore? Or would that zombie army start out friendly, but then one day turn against my now outnumbered dwarves in a mass, and form a horrifyingly vivid Shakespearean end to the entire fortress?

I had no idea the answers to these questions, and to be honest I still don't. All I knew is that they were zombies, they were friendly, and they were endearingly energetic, sometimes running around pointlessly at tremendous speed inside the water trap in random directions. I have, however, learned to be deeply paranoid about letting anything weird interact with my fortress in any way until I understand it.

I put them in a kind of separated channel / escape tunnel, spending quite a long time attempting (with eventual success) to wash them up and into it with long slow gouts of flood-water, and then locked them in, unsure of what to do with them. I left them there for quite a while, more or less forgotten, while they capered around happily and from time to time freaked me out a little when I saw them and remembered they existed.

As an experiment, I decided to allow one dwarf into the water trap, shut the door, and let one zombie out from captivity, and let them interact with each other, and just see what happened. The answer was: Nothing. Nothing at all. The dwarf wandered aimlessly, the zombie capered around and ignored him, and all was fine.

I genuinely considered just letting them run around in the fortress and be mascots, and actually left the one in the water trap to let him run around freely, sharing the space with fortress dwarves whenever they had business inside the trap, and it went fine. But I could never relax about it. I decided that that insistent voice of caution was there for a reason. I honestly don't remember for sure, but I think I found a way to kill them.

Poor little guys. I really did feel bad about being so suspicious of them; they hadn't shown even a single sign of hostility, and something about their madly pointless sprinting around really was kind of cute. But the other shoe waiting to drop was just too glaringly telegraphed.

I have never seen even a single zombie movie where it turns out at the end it was all a misunderstanding and the zombies just wanted to be friends.

This is the story of one fort, in which I had to completely rebuild the military mostly from scratch three different times. With all parts it is a little long, but it didn't seem to work to separate the pieces. Apologies and hope you enjoy.

Part One: Oops

The first military was unremarkable, not yet well equipped or trained, but I have to say, they came through when it counted.

It was still a young fortress, when one day I saw a lone dwarf accompanied by like 2 skeletons marching purposefully towards the main entrance. Idly wondering if this was related to my mistreatment of the weirdos, I thought about firing up the whole process of getting everyone inside, slamming the gates, and routing him into the long hallway of watery doom. But it was literally one guy. I decided, what the hell, what's the worst that could happen. I simply told my military to go out and kill him, so nobody would have to stop what they were doing.

The fact that it's being written up as a story should tell you whether this proved to be a good idea or not.

They met him right inside the main entrance to the fort, and the first soldier he engaged with suddenly flew back down the entire length of a hallway, exploded into little superscript "2"s and miscellaneous chunks when he hit the far wall, and fell to the floor stone dead. The dude with his retinue began walking into my fortress like the Terminator, effortlessly dismantling anyone who came to meet him, reanimating miscellaneous body parts or organic objects to fight alongside him as he went. It was a fuckin catastrophe. After a moment of panic and despair, watching helplessly as he wandered inexorably through the main hallway and for some reason into the temple section, I decided that just having everyone mob up and attack him what whatever they had to hand was the best I could come up with.

Surprisingly enough, it worked, and they killed him. It sure was a fuckin wake up call for the fortress though. Most of my military was killed or crippled¹, along with quite a few civilian dwarves, and the blood and chunks that decorated the pathway he had taken took quite a while to clean up. I eventually had to tear down a big part of the temple area and rebuild it to get rid of the bloodstains.

Part Two: The Maniac

The fortress, its innocence now well forgotten, survived, and over time rebuilt and thrived. As my metalworking operation got underway for real, and the population grew, I started kitting out multiple squads in iron and steel, and producing high quality weapons. They got capable. I started sending them on expeditionary trips, so they wouldn't get bored or lazy. They weren't really needed that often for defense, since the water trap was perfectly capable to deal with any invasions that arrived.

They excelled. Several members gained legendary skills, I got some artifact weapons and some non-artifacts that had made a name for themselves, among them a lead mace wielded by the leader that had killed several important adversaries. I started trying to get steel for every piece of every set of armor. As I did that I was engaged with quite effectively subjugating the surrounding area, which was fun.

One day, when flicking through my troops checking up on things, I happened to see that one of them was 18 years old, with skills like the result of hacking the save file or something. Legendary, legendary, legendary, legendary, and so on. Well, that's a little surprising. I looked a little closer, and it hit me.

THIS IS THE FUCKIN LITTLE GIRL

The girl from the weirdos. She'd grown up in the fortress alone, and apparently she had found her calling. She still dreamed of bathing the world in chaos. Her psychological profile, already disquieting at the start, had become the stuff of nightmares. I read further.

The former mayor had been her father. I'd killed him in the water trap, and she remembered. She remembered his body slowly rotting away in there, forgotten, as I distractedly tried to sort out some drainage problems. She remembered some other traumatic experiences. Not summarized in bright red in bullet point form was her day-to-day experience of growing up orphaned in the fortress after I'd removed the only allies she'd ever known, but I know the game models friendships and family bonds, of which she at that point would most likely have had none.

Anyway, she had started to love fighting. Like, really love it. Her eyes blazed with pain and anger, and the only thing in the world that supplied her with joy, or gave expression to anything still alive inside her, was to kill.

What the fuck then. Still a child, her abilities at war were already beyond extraordinary. I checked her gear, made sure she had steel everything and a nice warhammer which was her weapon of choice, and customized her job title to "Hammer Maniac." I thought about having her lead a squad, and thought better of it, but decided that overall, if killing goblins was what made her happy then she could have a solid place in my fortress for as long as she still wanted one.

She got her fill of her preferred emotional outlet and then some. I have to say, though, that if you are looking for a happy or fulfilling ending to this story than you are reading about the wrong game. As mentioned before, my military at the time was more or less always either going to or coming back from mauling some poor outpost or settlement, and inducing them to send me conscripts or wagonloads of low quality booty. And so, it was inevitable that them returning from one of these would overlap with a goblin siege.

The timing and positioning was impeccably terrible. My entire military, the young maniac included, came back one dwarf at a time and immediately into the jaws of the entire goblin army. I attempted to shut the entrances and open up a faraway gate, to route them in a different direction and around the danger, but I only had one chance and sort of messed it up and bottom line, it didn't work.

I watched as, one by one, my soldiers encountered solitarily the entire weight of the goblin army, which devoured them like a sparrow eating a series of crumbs. Several of them were extraordinary fighters, who went into martial trances and cut deep swathes of dead goblins before they were overwhelmed from all sides, but it didn't make a difference. The little hammer wielder went into a trance as well, cutting a deep pathway of bodies like a lawnmower going through tall grass, but eventually was overwhelmed and died like all the rest. I never got a chance to find out what she was growing into.

This started a yearslong period of simply shutting all the gates and hiding in the fortress. I disliked doing it but it was literally all I could do. With about a hundred goblins outside the walls at all times, I explored the caverns, did extensive construction, set up some automated systems for necessary goods, and tinkered with the fortress. My population during this time was permanently fixed, and literally every single dwarf with the physical or mental configuration for fighting was a corpse outside my walls with the goblins stomping around on top of what used to be them. I thought about trying to build a tower for shooting down on the goblins, or otherwise trying to fight them without an army, but in the end I couldn't arrive at anything realistic and simply had to wait for years until they at last got bored and went away. Which, eventually, they did.

Part Three: Bears

In the aftermath of my long hermitage, migrant caravans for some reason never came back. I still don't know what that's about. I wasn't especially vulnerable to attack, thanks to the big water trap and an abundance of caution, but my military now was a pitiful thing built up from all the dwarves that had been rejected from multiple rounds of selections for military #2, and newcomers to replenish their numbers were nonexistent.

However. Once, out of idle curiosity, I had purchased some grizzly bears from an elf caravan. I can highly recommend this decision. If you ever see some bears, get the bears. Get the fucking bears. Black bears aren't good for much, but if you see grizzlies, pay any price.

The grizzly bears hung out, in a big room I made for them, and slowly their numbers accumulated, and out of curiosity I trained some of them for war, and as my Mighty Ducks military was getting slowly to be experienced and halfway capable, I started allocating two bears to each soldier.

Let me tell you, if you ever want to win your battles, this is a wonderful way to do it.

A squad of ten mediocre dwarves and twenty well-trained grizzly bears is, as far as I can tell, indestructible to any normal military threat. I was not able to simply click on whatever city I wanted and have them go over and fuck it up. But, almost. And with a sloppy modicum of planning, my grizzly cavalry started going out and fucking up the landscape far more effectively than the legendary earlier squads had been able to.

The only fly in the ointment was having to marshal every single bear to accompany every expeditionary force, when a single stuck bear somewhere in the fortress was enough to delay the adventure indefinitely, until six months later I realized they should have gotten back, and after some searching found the single outlier that was trapped behind a door or something with everyone waiting until he arrived before they could get started. I never arrived at a sure way to prevent this.

But other than that they excelled. They laid waste to the landscape. I started being able to demand additional dwarves, from my defeated places, which helped the population. I swear that at one point I saw a bear become administrator of one of my holdings. I think that is impossible. I think I was just mixing up names or something. But I swear that is what I thought I saw.

So this is the current state of my fortress's military, with a quite large room full of bears ready to go to any city or fuck up any comers. There was also a hilarious incident where a diplomat got into a punch-up with some members of the fortress, and when blows started coming back his way, he ran for safety and took a wrong turn, and entered the bears room. Oops. He was never seen again by anyone, which doubtless upset whatever civilization he came from.

Whatever man. It was his fault. If he didn't want to become pieces, he shouldn't have punched that guy and then went where all the bears are.

Bottom line: Get some bears. Bears are where it's at.

¹ I slightly misremembered in an earlier story. Incident #1 was what crippled the hero dwarf who later became the main cook and had a third career as a crutch-wielder. From the debacle that happened to the second military, there were no survivors, none at all.

I don't know how I managed it, but somehow when I was constructing a staircase, I left a big hole in the floor that opened up into the top of a cavern, and didn't notice. The only real impact was that from time to time a bugbat would fly up and wander in, and I would find a loose bugbat mucking around in the lower levels of my fortress.

They were down in the wild and wooly cavern-adjacent part of the fort, with the metal shop and animal cages, and they didn't even seem hostile, but I still didn't want them pestering my dwarves. I set up some cage traps, and by the time I'd figured out what the staircase issue was and fixed the hole, I had a bunch of bugbats in cages.

So, what's good to do when you have some stuff on hand you're not familiar with? Start playing with it and see what it can do. I set up a room for the bugbats, started taming and training them, and learned that apparently what they can do is fuck, because in very short order I had an absolute shitload of bugbats.

A little while after that, I had more than that. Way too many. If I had had sense, I would have just opened another hole into the cavern for them and let them rejoin their natural habitat at this point, but I guess I felt responsible for them or something, because I kept training and breeding them long after it had become clear that (a) they were useless, and (b) I had more of them than I could ever conceivably need for any purpose, even if they had had a purpose. I started slaughtering them, trying to get a handle on things. All that happened then was they got loose. They would escape when some dwarf that was hauling them for slaughter would get distracted, or one would leave the room when the door opened to take out another. They started fucking and making unsupervised pups out in the main fortress. Bugbat pups became a frequent feature of my halls and stairwells.

Things were busy and they were slippery and numerous, and it was hard to make time for the level of attention it would have taken to really address the issue, and they were pretty much harmless, so they stayed as unwelcome but tolerated guests. But over time they became a menace. One of them had an altercation with one of the fortress dogs and injured him, which pissed me off. And then, there was an incident when the poor bastard who was assigned to train the goddamned things had some sort of bad interaction with one of them, and tried to abandon his task and leave the bugbat room, but the room was so stuffed full with upper and lower case "b"s that he couldn't manage to push his way through them to the door, and I thought through the screen I could feel his rising panic as he realized how badly outnumbered he was, and that some of them were barely trained, half wild, and that the tenor of the room had changed and he was totally alone, and tried to control his terror as he struggled harder and harder to reach the door through the crush, before they all fell on him at once.

I decided to kill them all. It took -- no joke -- many years between the firm decision, to when it actually came true. The issue was that there were so many that it was impossible to give an order that would apply to all of them, which could be carried out in full before they had made more pups and created a population to which the order didn't apply. It was tedious and difficult to almost a mind-numbing level to even find them all, or issue any order on all of them, never mind the time involved in actually carrying it out, or the new ones that would arrive in the meantime. I built two butcher shops and assigned multiple dwarves to full time bugbat-killing duty, severely annoyed that my labor force was having to make this a full-on fortress priority instead of some more productive thing they could have been working on, but the time for taking the bugbat issue lightly had come to an end.

As with so many things, the end came a little anticlimactically. I morosely went to pore over the list of bugbats and re-designate the new pups for slaughter as I had done so, so many times before, and found no bugbats. I found myself like a prisoner who's been set free, disoriented and blinking in the sun. What do you mean, no bugbats? My dwarves can get back to work now? No rotting bugbat corpses in the butcher shop because someone was too busy to take care of it in time? No lower case "b"s blocking the door I need to close? What the fuck do you mean there aren't any bugbats?

It didn't even make me happy. I think I was still too irritated about the whole debacle to even reassign their keepers to any other duties right away. I simply didn't want to deal with it. No bugbats. Great. Thanks. Wonderful. Can I go now?

So. It was in the early hungry days of my fortress, when the military is half a dozen guys with wood crossbows who can't shoot, when everything is big mining and grand plans and challenges of lacking basic infrastructure, and no unpleasant memories walled off forever in some secret corner of the fort. That, and realizing there's some shit you're out of now, that you forgot to worry about. Great days.

So in those heady times, the arrival of migrants is something to be celebrated, back when it's vital work force and before it turns into "Jesus Christ where am I gonna put you guys." So when a little band turned up I was happy to have them. They were a little family, I think 3-4 adult dwarves and one little girl, and they were all weird.

I have never before, or since, encountered a dwarf that on their personality sheet "dreams of bathing the world in chaos." No creating a great work of art, no raising a happy family, just chaos. Another one dreamed of ruling the world. They also, some of them, had incredibly impressive stats in some unusual areas. Well... dwarfs are odd. Whatever. Here's your tools, you're a carpenter now, make some bookcases, I hope you won't be a problem.

I cannot remember if they did anything alarming before the incident, or if the general unease I felt about them was just because of the chaos thing, but I definitely had a feeling of unease about them. And then, out of nowhere, there was combat.

What the fuck. Why is there combat? I paused, began flipping around, and was met with a confusion at the entrance to the fort, and eventually pieced it together: A hunter had killed a monkey, and was bringing it back to the fort to turn into monkey roast, when one of these fuckin guys brought the monkey back to life. The reanimated monkey corpse then bit the hunter, which had made him alarmed and unhappy, and the mere fact that it was back alive again was horrifying several bystanders.

Once I figured it out, re-killing the monkey was easy enough, but after that point the new guys were solidly on the shit list. I tried to evict them from the fort, which for some reason didn't work, and lacking the mental bandwidth to put proper attention to it I just put one of those little mental I-don't-like-this asterisks on their names and hoped they wouldn't do anything else weird.

Then, their little leader got himself elected mayor.

Fuck this. This guy has to die. I don't know what their plans are but they are not aligned with success for my fortress.

I had learned by this point that the obvious solution, just taking any weapons away from him and putting him in a room with a bunch of axe guys and hitting "K", was likely to lead to strife in the future, especially if he was mayor. But. I had a brand new water trap. It was a massive cylindrical tank, about 120 feet in diameter and several stories high, with a long corridor winding around its circumference, and a big gate that could click open and connect full tank A to enemy laden hallway B, and other gates that could slam shut at both ends. This thing stayed as the main defensive feature of my fortress for decades, and rarely let me down, but at this point it was absolutely brand new, and untested.

Well, guess what your new role is, monkey guy.

I put a desk and chair at the midpoint of the hallway, and told the new mayor that that was his office now. In pretty short order, he went and sat down, eager to get to some work I guess.

Soon after he sat down, the gates, far far away at each end of the long hallway, slammed shut. He would have heard an eerie, total silence for a while, in the empty closed off hallway, and then in the distance a rumble like a distant train, but getting louder...

The remainder of the band I was able to evict or kill. I hesitated when I got to the little girl. She, too, dreamed of bathing the world in chaos. But she also was 9 years old, and she clearly hadn't done anything. I decided to simply let her be to make her way in the fortress. I have to admit I was a little bit curious what if anything the chaos thing would turn into.

This was the close of the first chapter of my fort. It was the beginnings of decent infrastructure and effective defensive works, and the end of innocence and hopeful plans unmarred by DF's chaotic reality. I do not know if anything bad would have happened if I had let the little necromancer run my city, but I had a pretty good guess and no interest in finding out if it was accurate.