' Wrote:That's the old version of... Zangband...

Quote:This fort was a large, elaborate one I had spent a lot of time planning out. I carefully built gigantic warehouses, and soon the place was bustling with almost 200 dwarves. It was build snuggled up to a magma tube, so I could easily smelt, forge, and throw garbage in it without having to mess about with channels or anything.

Anyway. I had just gotten a gigantic influx of booze from a 7-wagon dwarven caravan, bursting my stocks to the seams regardless of my expansive stockpiles. I barely managed to cram everything in there, booze everywhere. Dwarves were happy. All my nobles were satisfied, the elves kept bringing ****ing cloth over and over. It was a good fort.

And then there was a cat. He came later to be known as 'Deduk Syrupcharms' by his owner, the head miner, whom the cat had adopted. This cat followed him along into the deepest tunnels, prancing along chasing fire snakes near the magma pipe and generally doing catlike things while the miner did his exploratory deep-shaft mining looking for metals.

Well, near the magma pipe itself are the small creatures known as fire imps, which swim around in it, usually sticking to themselves. As he was mining out some gems around the magma pipe's surface, a fire snake (one of the minor irritating pests that wander around near the magma pipes) popped out near him and his faithful cat Syrupcharms snagged it in its mouth and ran off with it.

Well, it turns out that fire snake corpses can, from time to time, light things on fire due to the fact that fire snakes exude heat. The cat wandered around back into the fortress, corpse dangling from its mouth, when it dropped it for no apparent reason right in the food stockpile. Perhaps it was going to snack on it later. The barrel that the snake landed on promptly burst into flame as highly flammable wooden barrels tend to do. This wouldn't be -too- big a problem itself, as I could have walled it off, or maybe just hauled away everything around it. But no.

The cat stood there for a few seconds and burst into flames. It proceeded to zoom around the fortress at top speed, trailing billowing smoke and igniting everything it touched on fire, including dwarves, dwarven clothing, barrels, and everything that would burn. The booze barrels in particular were hard-hit, as Syrupcharms fled straight through the entire food stockpile, lighting it all ablaze.

Turns out, too, that booze likes to explode when it's on fire.

The initial blast killed 9 dwarves. The resulting fires throughout the fortress killed another 47. Several of them, maybe mistaking magma for water, jumped into the magma tube to put out the flames. The rest of the 130 or so dwarves died out slowly, most of them going berserk or insane with rage at their friends all dying, and then pummeling other dwarves to death, which made more dwarves unhappy, and so on and so on.

The last survivor of the fort was the miner, who was just coming up from his mining duties to find the flaming corpse of Syrupcharms smoldering on the shaft staircase, presumably as the cat was coming back down to visit him again, while the rest of the fortress burned down around them.

' Wrote:From a friend of mine:
I've been poking at this with no success. I have the attention span of a gnat though.

' Wrote:HAHAHAHAAH! That's fantastic.
Fire is always an issue it seems.
My buddy told me about this time he had just started a fortress, had yet to even dig into the mountainside... So he's about to get down to business when he realizes his fisherdwarf has wandered off to a nearby magma flow, and just happened to piss off the fireimps... Who proceeded to throw fireballs at the dwarf, which caught the surrounding grass afire... Which proceeded to burn faster and faster, heading towards the dwarfs. Who were desperately trying to dig into the mountain. But it didn't matter because all of his equipment was burned to ash. Apparently it's happened on no less than 3 occasions. Lol..