Dwarf Fortress Archives

I just put up the latest entry into the Journals of Ästekkud (“Hello and Goodbye”). As I was writing it I realized that it was kinda dark. I imagine it would seem especially dark to those readers out there who might not be familiar with Dwarf Fortress, which can be a very dark game indeed. Perhaps I should add a warning to this site about the potential for graphic content? Not sure.

While I can assure you that I do intend to try to ‘lighten things up’ a bit, I actually can’t make any promises. You see, I’m attempting to tell the story, not just of a dwarf or two, but of the founding of a fortress as a whole. And the fortress is likely to outlive many of the dwarves that settle there. That means that, if I tell the story of the fortress from the perspective of a dwarf, the only possible outcome for the dwarf is eventual death.

You can get a sense of this if you read J. R. R. Tolkien’s book “The Silmarillion.” Because Tolkien is telling the history of his world over such a vast span of time, everyone dies (except certain immortal beings). Due to the “nature of the times” in the world of Middle Earth, most of the characters meet a fairly violent end. That’s just life. Well…no, it isn’t. It’s death, but you know what I mean.

So yeah, I’ll do what I can to ‘brighten things up’ a bit, but due to the nature of this type of story, and also the fact that the story is partly random without a known ending, I can’t actually promise that. Hopefully you will be able to still enjoy it. I know I am enjoying it, so perhaps some of that can rub off on both my readers.

Welcome. If you’ve ever visited this site before, chances are that you’ll be expecting me to be blogging about some aspect of my life, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. The part you would not be wrong about would be that the game “Dwarf Fortress” has been one of my favorite games for almost 20 years (as of this post), so you could think of it as an “aspect” of my life.

However, unlike past iterations of this website where I documented actual events, my intentions currently are to write fictitious stories based on events that occur within this procedurally generated, rouge-like game. Most of these stories will be written from the perspective of a dwarf within the world of the game. For the most part, I intend to let the game’s events transpire as-is, without player intervention (i.e. I am not going to be reloading the game if something bad fun happens).

What does that mean? Well, basically it means you probably don’t want to get too attached to any particular character. The motto of this game is “Losing is fun,” after all. It also means that I, quite literally, have no idea where the stories are going to go or what may transpire. While I will be inventing quite a bit for the sake of the narrative, you would be shocked (if you are not familiar with Dwarf Fortress) at how much of the story is NOT made up.

So, yeah, this will be a significant departure from what has appeared here in the past. I have just been feeling the need to be a bit more creative these days and this was one way I thought of to do that. I hope you enjoy what is posted here, and I really hope I enjoy it as well. 🙂