10 Astounding Tales Which Exemplify Dwarf Fortress' Insanity

10. Demonic Incursions - False Gods

While Dwarf Fortress is more famous for allowing players to found a fledgling bastion in the middle of the wilderness, the game's adventure mode has its own fair share of mad moments. Featuring all the towering beasties which take entire armies to slay, it can be even more dangerous than trying to run a settlement, and that's before you get to the threats which can disguise themselves as other beings. One particularly infamous instance involved a player stumbling upon a long lost fortress by the name of Tuftmatches, abandoned for the local wildlife to reclaim yet not entirely uninhabited. Deep within its bowls the player discovered a rather unique NPC, namely the god Talde. While open to conversation and surrounded by various tomes of knowledge from the past seven-hundred years or so, the god was hardly willing to leave his ruined home and the adventurer eventually departed without having accomplished much. Just as he was setting out for the gates however, the player received a message that "The deity is caught in a burst of grey slate boiling demon extract!" Understandably suspicious of Talde's supposed divinity, the player opted to look through a few of the tomes he had pillaged on his way out. Piecing together information from on to the next, the player was eventually able to piece together the being's true identity - Abesp Frothygalls the Gnarled Drool of Ghosts, a demon of suicide, disease, death and blight! Old even when that world was young, it had somehow crept its way inside a fortress and set itself up as a benign god. Interestingly, this is not an unique occurrence. Whereas this would be a scripted or extremely unique event in any other game, this can happen in just about any generated world with demons taking over cities, emerging from street vendors or even manipulating the populations of entire continents at a whim. What would be some titanic, world shattering event for any other title is merely Tuesday for the average dwarf. Having demons disguise themselves as the form of others can also lead to some particularly interesting results when genius collides with the increasingly obtuse AI: