The Fall of Guzilingiz – Dwarf Fortress

There’s supposed to be a diacritic or something on one of those vowels in Guzilingiz, but who can be bothered with such things.

I started another fortress in Dwarf Fortress. Guess what? If you guessed “werelizards destroyed the whole fortress again” you’d be exactly right.

This was my fifth Fortress game. The fourth one was fairly ordinary, a learning experience about the nature of caverns and monster hunters, but mainly how to block off stairwells once you’ve accidentally dug them through expansive caverns, exposing your fortress to giant cave spiders that are quite difficult to kill.

Guzilingiz started off fairly well, building into the side of a sort of crater. But not long after getting on their feet, a huge wave of migrants came into the fortress, increasing the population from 11 to 36 in moments. A short time later, the full moon arrived, and we learned that one of those migrants was, in fact, a werelizard. A survivor of my very own Bekarlogem, as it turned out.

Fast forward three months and there were only four dwarves left, three of which had also been converted to werelizards.

I thought I had them contained. I locked up every possible werelizard after the first attack, and was working on trying to get them all together into a big prison cell. Two were locked in a room behind the meeting hall. Then, two days before the full moon, they broke down the door of their room, and I couldn’t replace it fast enough. The expedition leader managed to kill one before dying, but the remaining werelizard-a woman who had actually killed her own child during the last full moon-rampaged through the crowded meeting hall, killing 10 dwarves and injuring 10 others before turning back into a normal dwarf and scurrying away.

The surviving dwarves then hunted her down and killed the poor ex-werelizard woman in a gruesome display of mob justice.

At that point I felt the fortress was beyond salvaging, so I just watched to see how many would die during the next full moon. Five of the ten wounded dwarves turned into werelizards and killed all but one dwarf, who somehow remained sleeping in his room through the carnage.

After I retired Guzilingiz, I looked up the sneaky werelizard migrant who started it all-the Gem Setter Ablel Ozleb-in Legends. (Dwarf Fortress keeps a massive searchable database of every person, place, or thing in its game world.) He actually came from my previously retired, werelizard-infested fortress Bekarlogem!

So the lesson here, I guess, is don’t make your doors out of chalk. I just assumed one stone was as good as any other. (The wiki says chalk is just as good as granite, though.) Mostly, though, watch out for werelizards. They are no joke. Now I definitely know why I fear the night!

Related

• The Fall of Bekarlogem – Dwarf Fortress
• Building vs. Simulation – Dwarf Fortress
• My Brief Dwarf Fortress Time