As you might know, I play Dwarf Fortress fairly often.  Tonight I feel like talking about something that happened in a recent game.

One of the things you can do in Dwarf Fortress is dig deeply into the ground and find hidden secrets.  Without spoiling too much (if you want to be spoiled, read about it yourself), these secrets contain both valuable treasures and powerful enemies.  It’s possible to spend a great deal of time preparing your fortress and its warriors for taking on these enemies; eventually you dig down and “crack open” the hidden stuff.  (This was version 40d of DF; those who care will know what that means.)

So, I thought my fortress was ready, but it really wasn’t.  I dug down and released a horde of demons.  As they swarmed up the specially prepared hallway, crossbow-dwarves filled them with bolts.  At the end, champion axe-wielders in full steel plate armor met them in hand-to-hand.

And yet the demons still broke through the lines and started slaughtering civilians.  It was a true mess.  Eventually, however, the last demon fell.

That wasn’t the end of it, though.  Dwarves were sickened by their fellows having been cut down.  Flaming corpses filled the halls with smoke and foul vapors.  Dwarves started going insane from the stress of seeing their family members rotting in the halls.  Some of them even went berserk and killed more dwarves.  I tried to get all the bodies moved into coffins.

Then I ran out of coffins.

I had started a catacombs area with nicely smoothed and engraved rooms holding one coffin each.  When those ran out, I set the masons to make more coffins while the miners hacked more tombs out of the rock.

Eventually the fortress stabilized.  All the bodies either rotted away or were stored in coffins.  The fires went out; food and drink production recovered.  No one else was depressed enough to go insane.

My catacombs have a couple of hallways of exquisite tombs; each room is not that large, but its walls are smoothed and engraved with pictures of dwarven life.

Then there are a couple of hallways with tombs roughly, quickly dug from the rock, a coffin resting in each one.

Then there’s a wide hallway with forty coffins stacked along the sides, each waiting to be moved into its ultimate resting place.

All told there are about eighty full coffins.  The fortress held slightly more than two hundred souls at its peak; it will be years before it recovers, if ever.

If I ever need reminding of the price my mistakes exacted, I just look at the hallway stacked with coffins.  It was not something the designer scripted into the game—it emerged from the choices I made during play.  To me, it’s a single image that encompasses all the tragedy and horror of what happened in this game.

Forty coffins stacked in one hallway.

That is art.