Hello and welcome to my fortress of Newmonsters
- the home of all my monster making experiments. A week ago, I thought that becoming a mad
scientist seemed fun, and a fortress where I turned dwarves into vampires and werecreatures
seemed like a great idea - but as you’ll see sometimes things don’t go according
to plan even if you stick it out for a decade. I got the idea for the fortress while reading
about vampires on the dwarf fortress wiki. I knew that toppling a deity’s statue could
get you cursed from my adventure to become a vampire, and I had heard that it was possible
for dwarves in fortress mode to suffer the same fate if they happened to throw a tantrum
around the wrong statue. And so when I saw the outdated technique for
creating vampires on the vampire wiki page I wanted to try my hand at updating it - only
for dwarves this time. I figured it would be as simple as finding
some angry dwarves who were already more prone to tantruming than others, locking them away
in a room filled with statues of the deity they worship, only giving them the bare minimum
of food and drink, and then waiting for them to crack under the pressure and topple a statue. After establishing Newmonsters as a place
for dwarves to come and work, I began building my first ill-fated dwarf-to-monster conversion
chamber. It was set in a pillar up above the surface
and had 4 rooms to lock people in. Each of those rooms came with 2 additional
side rooms that would be used as food and drink stockpiles. The rooms also had access to a central hallway,
though the conversion candidates would be blocked off from accessing it by a bridge
while the conversion chamber was in operation. Inside each of the rooms I envisioned statues
of whatever deity each candidate worshipped arranged along a wall ready to be toppled
at a moment's notice. With all the essentials theoretically covered
I also had one killer feature for this conversion chamber design: a roof made of bars that would
expose each of the candidates to rain, snow, and sunlight so they would accumulate negative
thoughts quicker. Unfortunately, I scrapped this design before
ever picking out candidates and giving it a proper run because there was no way to replenish
the food or drink supplies, the bridges could be destroyed in a tantrum, and in the process
of building it I had already come up with what I thought was a better and more effective
design. That better design called for 4 5x5 rooms,
each positioned above water at the center tile so that instead of booze I could build
a well in each room and the candidates would be forced to drink water. It also called for a second layer above the
rooms that would give access to each of the rooms through a hatch, which could be used
to deliver extra food if the candidates were running low or dead bodies if they seemed
too happy. Once the rooms, the access hatches, and the
wells were in place it was time to pick out candidates who seemed easily annoyed. I spent an hour or two waiting for migrant
waves and checking each new dwarf for potential personality defects, but in the end I decided
that even if I killed the candidates I picked instead of inciting a tantrum there would
just be more bodies for the corpse stockpiles that could be found in each room, so there
was no harm in starting before I had the perfect dwarves. Ultimately I ended up with Cerol who easily
developed hatreds, Ustuth who was easily stressed, and Id & Urvad who had the misfortune of being
peasants and nearby. Cerol worshipped the god of minerals, Ustuth
worshipped the goddess of death, Urvad worshipped the goddess of jewels, and Id worshipped a
hoary marmot, so 6 statues of each of those deities were commissioned and I just prayed
that they would be vindictive should one of their statues be toppled. Once the statues and plump helmet barrels
were placed in each of the rooms it was time to send each candidate to the last room they
would ever see if they didn’t make me happy and piss off a god. For a while I was annoyed because the fine
statues each of them had in their room were lifting the mood a little too much but I soon
found that that happiness could be dampened with the timely delivery of a dead body. This playful back and forth went on for a
while with my dwarves refusing to be sad and with me dropping dead bodies on them, but
eventually that status quo was broken by an olm that climbed into Urvad’s chamber and
knocked him down the well and into the water where he died. While a couple seasons of bad memories weren’t
a lot to replace, I still didn’t want to start from square 1, so I picked someone who
was already sad, Obok, and sent her to take Urvad’s place. With the conversion chamber once again filled
I turned my attention to a siege on the surface that produced 5 new bodies that I could dump
on the candidates. But while I horrified them with the bodies
of what could have been their long lost cousins, the fortress had its first tantrum - and it
was outside the conversion chamber. Dishmab the weaponsmith was not having a good
time, which meant he was perfect. I opened up the south room and swapped Id
for Dishmab because Id was having fun in the room and I couldn’t have that and then I
realized I needed Dishmab in the goddess of death room in the north instead of the hoary
marmot room and so I swapped him with Ustuth who worshipped both marmots and death, and
somewhere along the way Obok died in her well just like Urvad had in the east room. Only solid, sturdy, Cerol had stuck it out
and persisted in the west room through all that chaos, though she seemed far less hateful
than her personality description had made out. Dishmab already seemed to be on edge by the
time I captured him but I just felt like there was something I could do to guarantee that
he would have another tantrum. And so I found his relatives in the fortress,
expelled them, had them killed, and then dropped their bodies into his cell. Is that messed up? Definitely. Did it work? Not at all. It turned out that in his stressed out state
he didn’t really feel anything seeing the dead bodies of his nieces and nephews, and
even aside from that he had already toppled a statue between the time I killed them and
the time I dropped them into his room. While the toppled statue was good, the lack
of reaction from the goddess of death had me questioning how it all worked. After briefly considering the idea that the
goddess of death was merciful I eventually realized that I had gotten all twisted around
and had thought the art of the statue was the important part instead of the room the
statue was in. This meant I had to make all the rooms temples
to their respective deities, which was easy and made the fact that I had missed it all
the more annoying. Once I had corrected that I went back to watching
the rooms and waiting for something to happen. Months turned to seasons and seasons turned
to years as I watched the rooms and only saw death - Cerol’s death to a cave fish person,
Mafol’s death to a cave fish person, and then finally Stukos (who was introduced to
the north room partway through all that dying) and Dishmab both got killed by a cave crocodile. With Stukos’s internal rage and Dishmab’s
history of being the only one to topple a statue they were my last real shot at getting
someone cursed using this setup, and once they were gone I knew that I would need to
come up with a third design - one that would combine easy access to stressful things like
the dead bodies in the second design with the locked off and safe from cave crocodile
feel of the first design. The third conversion chamber was made up of
a main temple room at the center, filled with a checkerboard of statues. To the west was the food stockpile that would
keep the people I trapped alive. To the north and south were fortifications,
followed by a bridge, followed by more fortifications, followed by a room where I put a couple of
captured enemies so that every time I lowered the bridge the temple-goers I had trapped
inside the chamber would start freaking out about being caught in combat which would hopefully
stress them out until they cracked. Once I locked off the chamber I immediately
got to work forcing each dwarf inside to face their own mortality, which had them running
into the food stockpile and then back to the temple over and over again. I did this a couple times before deciding
that I would just leave it running for a little while until one of the dwarves in the chamber
died so that I could hit the remaining dwarves with the double misery of running for their
lives while their friend decayed in the corner. That seemed to really bum people out, but
not enough to make them do something. I had ghosts toppling statues down in the
second conversion chamber, kids throwing tantrums without disturbing the peace, and a widespread
food problem that was leading to the death of everyone not in the chamber - but still
I persisted with my task - cycling the bridge on and off as I felt the dwarves in the chamber
could use it. Eventually the population outside the chamber
grew thin enough that I was nervous the bridge would get stuck open with nobody alive to
close it and so I closed it myself one final time and left the dwarves in the temple to
stew on what they had experienced. Nearly 2 years of in-game time and 4 hours
of my own personal time passed without a single toppling incident. You would think that with the statues packed
that close to one another, one would simply need to trip on a shoelace to get cursed with
vampirism but apparently that’s not the case. And to make matters worse, as I looked through
the thoughts of the dwarves that remained in the conversion chamber - the traumas that
I had put them through, designed specifically to tear them down to rock bottom so they would
become monsters of themselves, had made them into better people. No longer were they so quick to form hateful
opinions, get angry, or ignore the people around them. I had missed my shot to curse Dishmab by not
making his room a temple earlier and now I had improved my dwarves by stressing them
out. I guess sometimes things don’t go according
to plan, but not often do they go completely against it. At least I didn’t do anything I regret like
murdering a dwarves’ family just to stress him out. Thank you for watching, an extra thank you
to those of you who support me on patreon, and I’ll see you next time!
