Recent highlights of the Dwarf Fortress guys' blog.

[snarp]

Tarn Adams's goal for Dwarf Fortress is apparently to make such a complex simulation that if, many centuries from now, he finds unexpectedly that he has somehow completed it, he will at least never get bored with playing with it. (The New York Times article bears out my theory.) This appears to be working out pretty well for him.

"Demons that impersonate gods have been updated to use identities, finally, so they'll actually put on a little act for you when you go to talk to them. The one I was testing impersonated a death/lust god named Bekat the Adorable Skull. Before it took over the human civilization, it used to live in a cave, and I found a book it wrote about the cave in the castle tower. The demons all have horrible personalities, so it was a mean little book. Zach thought it was being foolish -- I don't suppose its god disguise is a very good one, if it's going to complain about its old living arrangements like that."

"There was a general whose wife was the leader of a civilization. In the year 8, she was kidnapped and turned into a bleak horror. Over the decades, the general became obsessed with his own mortality and sought out the necromancer's tower, becoming a lowly apprentice in return for eternal life. Years later, he wrote a 30 page essay about his horror wife called Victory By The Creature. He also took an apprentice of his own, a former queen of the dwarves, and wrote a touching and concise 282 page biography about her."

"My adventurer fought through around sixty zombies in the tower, killed the necromancer, learned the secrets of life and death, and then raised various limbs (not my own). Then I talked to one of them, and it told me that it was peasant. It was flattered but had no need of my services. I imagine its little fingers were shaped into the form of a mouth and they flapped back and forth while it spoke with a high-pitched voice. I guess there's still work to do."

"There is now a "Report Crime" job, and dwarves that either witness a murder or find a murder victim will try their best to report to the sheriff, at which point you also get a death announcement to let you know that somebody has been murdered (these are the only deaths that don't get announced immediately by people finding the body). Unless they witnessed the sheriff committing a crime, in which case they think twice and don't report it to the sheriff."

"I suppose if the sheriff witnesses the crime (and so has no need to report it), the vampire screwed up and deserves to be caught -- if the sheriff is the vampire, then you screwed up and will need to rethink your assignment."

"Found my first tower-cap bed in a human's bedroom. It had an image of the foundation of a dwarven mountain hall in giant toad bone. An iron scourge made by the goblins made it to the back of the warehouse as well -- it commemorated a skinless demon becoming the law-giver of the goblin civilization."

"Imbo Trussedringed was born in the year 8. At the tender age of 23, he became the high priest of Kas, the god of storms and lightning, in the capital Calmgroove after the first high priest was burned up in dragon fire. A few years later, he got married and over the next many years fathered six children. Aside from a run-in with a troll attacking the city, times were uneventful, until the year 53. Profaning his own temple, Kas cursed him to prowl the night in search of blood. After eight years of fairly unrestrained murder in the capital, he fled in the year 63 to the village of Brimstools, where he bled one person before moving on with settlers to eight different villages, working as a fishery worker or a scout, scores of victims left in his wake.

Finally he arrived in Scarrub in the year 103, having outlived his wife and all of his children. Over the next two decades he killed a dozen people. Villagers began to become suspicious at his lack of aging, but he enticed them with the promise of immortality to join the Sect of Control, a cult he had founded to cover up his misdeeds. This allowed him to last until the year 137, when his agelessness and forty murders made village life untenable. With the support of his followers, he challenged the law-giver Melbe Leaguemuscle to a duel in the capital city, winning easily. People recognized him as the former high priest and were shocked at his 129 years of life, but before it could come to anything he laid down a series of oppressive edicts, and for the next 15 years ruled as a tyrant, having his dinner brought to him from all of the towns and hamlets of the Realm of Names. He only partook every week or two, but by the end, over the century of the curse, seven hundred seventeen people were dead. The dragon only ever got fifty.

In bug news, the zombies in a necromancer's tower became suspicious after the necromancer failed to age and he fled into the hills."