Lets Play / Drunk Fortress

"There seems to be a minor issue with lava containment."

The siege is broken! We are victorious!!!!! Also, the exterior of the fortress continues to burn.

— Jervill, drunken player

Bobnova: Historically, the choice falls to the First Drunk. I'm good either way.
Kamin: This is the truth. Whether or not First Drunk is swayed by popular opinion, well... THIS IS NOT A DWARFBLASTED DEMOCRACY! ONE DRUNK TO RULE THEM ALL!
Th4DwArfY1: One drunk to find them.
Naryar: One drunk to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Scruffy: Seven bottles for the drunk lords in their halls of stone
Naryar: Three bottles for the sober-kings under the sky
Scruffy: Nine for the dorfed players doomed to die
Kamin: One for the Sloshed Lord on his Besotten Throne
Scruffy: In the land of Drunk Fort where the forts fall

Dwarf Fortress is often lauded as one of the most complicated games of all time. The interface is opaque, the learning curve a cliff. It's hard enough for experienced players to keep their forts safe and secure on the best of days.

So, what happens when a bunch of players play a succession fort while completely inebriated?

Drunk Fortress is a Dwarf Fortress succession game in which each player takes a turn playing while totally plastered. It's run on a "First Drunk First Serve" basis, in which whoever is consuming alcohol at the moment is the next player. As can be expected from such playing conditions, the fortress quickly became a labyrinthine mess of half-finished projects and forgotten passages, with magma leaking into the fort from every direction and hosting at least three tantrum spirals. And it is glorious.

See the madness here. Action starts on page 7.

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"Drunk Fortress" provides examples of:

• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: The whole point, really.
• Alien Geometry:
  Shoruke: Also, did nobody notice that at one point all the rocks seem to be negative hundreds of thousands of spaces away from the crafting rooms?!?
  Taupe: Yeah I was like "who dropped all the crafting materials on the fucking sun?"
• Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: When the fortress was overrun by Forgotten Beasts, this was the result. 58 unarmed dwarves beating up a Glob of Water and assorted monsters. 8 survivors.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Most of the... more creative contraptions designed by the drunk overseers.
  Random_Dragon: (to Bobnova) You've just invented the dwarven combination refrigerator/self-destruct device.
• Bar Brawl: Shows up, but only for the same reasons as it does in normal Dwarf Fortress: namely, Dwarves sometimes start fights when they get depressed, and this being Dwarf Fortress, there's a lot to get depressed about.
• Binge Montage: The format of Drunk Fortress basically enforces that every turn is one of these. The thread as a whole is, in turn, a montage of Binge Montages...
• Brain Bleach: When you're drunk and dealing with clouds of gangrene, it's a good idea to have more alcohol handy to wash the mental images away.
• Brick Joke: At the end of Ruhn's Turn he mentions flipping a wagon with a bridge, but not seeing anything land. Later at the start of Scruffy's Turn the wagon lands, to Scruffy's utter bewilderment.
• Captain Obvious: The drunk players to their Dwarves, sometimes. Or to the forum in general when posting turns.
  Moony the Human: Sorry, I don't drink.
  Bogwedgle: No Dwarf are ye!
  Random_Dragon: Of course he isn't a Dwarf, it says exactly that in his username.
• Chaos Architecture: Drunk people trying to design 3D buildings and make drunk Dwarves build them. Things get a bit confusing at times.
• Comedic Sociopathy: A side-effect of mixing stupid dwarves and drunken players.
• Country Matters: Random Dragon managed to misspell "count" in both his turns.
• Cute Monster Girl: After the tavern update to Dwarf Fortress allowing foreign mercenaries, scholars, and bards to take up residence, came "Drunk Fortress: Exotic Goblin Pole-Dame edition" when a female Goblin entertainer with proficiency with polearms moved in. Her brief popularity was somewhere between Team Pet and Mascot.
• Death World: Forgotten Beasts, magma, freezing water, cave-ins, infinite demons, Goblins, badgers and keas... what ISN'T trying to kill the poor shumuck Dwarves who immigrate?
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  Random_Dragon: I'm gonna eat whoever dorfed me as random_reptile.
• Does Not Like Spam: Clover Magic doesn't drink beer due to an extremely bad experience it.
• Doomed Hometown: Every fort is doomed to die and everyone knows it.
• Double Entendre:
  Naryar: Also more seriously, that removal of the giant penis was a dick move. Seriously, Scruffy took so much on himself to erect it.
  Shoruke: Was funny reading how much trouble you guys were having erecting that cock in the volcano, but you fucked your way through it, I guess.
• Drinking Game: While Drunk Fortress itself does not strictly count, since one is only required to "be drunk" to play, one of the (oft-forgotten) rules is that players can make a rule for the next player to follow (assuming they are not too drunk to remember it). Creating a drinking game is a popular "rule".
• Drunk on Milk: A recurring question that comes up is, "can minors qualify to play with sleeping pills/ other drugs / lack of sleep"? The answer is no, because the community doesn't want minors doing anything risky to their health just for our amusement.
• Epic Fail: The fortresses! A particularly spectacular example was the source of the page image. Now, magma leaks are pretty common in succession games, but this particular one was leaking into the fort on three separate levels. Magma, unlike water, does not naturally flow up levels.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Just like in regular Dwarf Fortress, except you can add the rules of the game and the previous players to the list, as well.
  Taupe: The seasons are easy to tell with this new fort. I ask myself "are people dying from mass-drowning, or mass-refreeze?"
• Failure Is the Only Option: The only logical outcome, achieved as early as Year 3. And it just keeps happening.
  Jervill: Guys, we have destroyed 13 fortresses and two entire worlds.
• Failure Montage: Dwarves aren't smart, people are drunk, things break in rapid succession. It happens.
• Foreboding Architecture: You know you're in for a ‼fun‼ time when you load up a save, look at your own fortress, and see disjointed chaos.
• Four Is Death: Every four in-game years, Wrex takes over the fort and consequently fails at keeping the fort alive. This has henceforth been called a "wrexed year".
  "I hope it dosen't become a tradition that fortresses blow up when I take control."
  • The sober explanation is that it's not specifically Wrex, it's just that most dwarves' sanity can only take 3 years of terrible fort management before they snap and start throwing tantrums or running around naked.
• Gag Penis: After Shoruke went to the Japanese Penis Festival and tried to Brain Bleach the day away by playing Drunk Fortress, the next several forts were filled with constructions in the shape of a dick.
  Naryar: ...and my giant, vertical, erected wooden penis still stands.
  Th4DwArfY1: You should probably see a doctor, then.
• I Need A Drink: While the game is played while already drunk, most player's reactions to seeing the state of the fort is to knock back another one.
• In-Joke: "Shoruke is legion."
  Th4DwArfY1: According to the poll, there is more than one Shoruke. Hence, Shoruke is either Pathos^note A troll known in Bay 12 forums for memetically huge amounts of ban evasion and sockpuppetry or the Many Faced God.
  Shoruke?: That indeed seems to be the case, for I too, am Shoruke.
• Interface Screw: Some of the players use texture packs. Some don't. This leads to some rather odd-looking walls in the screenshots.
  Shoruke: I think someone saved this game with a texture pack, because the walls are screaming at me.

  "ääääääääääääääääääääääää"

  "ȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃȃ"

  "èèèèèèèèèèèèèèèèèèèèèèèè"

  "ïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïï"
• In Their Own Image: Several players have "signed" their name as a digging zone, or made an office in the shape of their own name... Standard Succession Game stuff.
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: Most of the disasters in the fort are summed up as such. The reason for the new embark having an Evil biome was pretty much this.
  Clover Magic: Uh....it's a trainwreck, guys. Not gonna lie. I apparently lost my mind sometime while playing.
• Kill It with Fire: As with normal Dwarf Fortress, lava is an enticing strategem. It also goes wrong even more often than in normal Dwarf Fortress.
• Late to the Tragedy: Ifeno was, oddly enough, late to his own tragedy. He got so drunk he couldn't remember playing, and had to compare his save with the previous one after the fact to piece together what happened during his turn.
• Level Ate: Taupe constructed a building in the shape of a giant 3D taco. There was talk of filling it with garnierite furniture and magma as spicy taco salad filling, but the fort died before it could happen. Also the magma pump stack got flooded with both magma and water during construction.
• Malevolent Architecture: Both intentionally and unintentionally.
  Scruffy: Finally someone is going to use that depot for its intended purpose. Burning elves.
• Me's a Crowd: Nicknaming the dorfs is standard practice in Dwarf Fortress, more so in community games, but when drunk you get things like Kamins # 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 77, and 88.
  • Several polls held in the thread had more than one vote for "I am Shoruke".
• Myopic Architecture: Entire fortresses are hard to design on the best of days, but when drunk, it can be hard to remember (for example) which rocks make magma-resistant mechanisms, and which don't.
  Hey guuys so i was finishing my drink tirght there and i need a floodgate here to contrain magma, graphite is magma-safe right ? ^note It's not
• Never Gets Drunk: Several people have noted the copious amounts of alcohol that Clover Magic drank while still remaining, if not perfectly fine, still capable of playing Dwarf Fortress.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Due to the nature of Contagions in Dwarf Fortress.
  Shoruke: is our fort infestred with VAMPRIE WERELEPHATNS ^note They were actually Vampire Were-elephant Dwarves.
• No OSHA Compliance: The whole fortress was designed by a bunch of drunks. Most notably, a magma cannon accidentally flooded the fortress with magma.
• No True Scotsman: A common (light-hearted) insult to be thrown around is "this place looks like it was designed by someone sober".
• Oh, Crap!: After abandoning and reclaiming the fortress, Shoruke found out the hard way that the Forgotten Beast they'd walled into a side room wasn't gone, but rather waiting in ambush (and therefore invisible until the moment it started wrecking things again).
• Our Werewolves Are Different: There have been infestations of Weregeckos, Werehogs, and Vampire Wereelephants.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  Vyro: Fuck. Me/ Sideways.
• Recursive Translation: Shoruke, while living in Japan, did an entire turn in Japanese, then ran the whole thing through Google Translate before posting it. Bearing in mind that he was drunk and doesn't speak very great Japanese at the best of times...
  Shoruke: I don't know what I said to cause Google Translate to say "baboon baboon".
  Yoink: I don't know, I'm tired but I think this turn made more sense than the usual ones in a language I sometimes understand.
  • Naryar did one in French as well.
  Naryar: how do I lizard werewolf
  • And then Scruffy did one partly in Finnish.
• Succession Game
• Schmuck Bait: The occasional self-destruct lever labelled "do not touch".
  • In a meta way, this trope is, itself, Shmuck Bait. Someone tries to set up an unlabelled doomsday lever, only to accidentally flood the fortress with magma while setting it up because they're drunk...
  • Posters consider the forts themselves to be bait for the migrants. Seriously, who decides to move to a fort managed by a succession of people all drunk out of their skulls?
• Shout-Out: To Lord of the Rings. The page quote is an adaptation of the poem about the Rings of Power. Just with the amount of booze everyone tosses back.
• Tantrum Throwing: Happens (in-game) even more frequently than in a regular fortress, due to shoddy management.
• Terrible Interviewees Montage: Occasionally played with when someone new to Drunk Fortress shows up.
  Havarous: If I am trusted enough to do so, I would like to put myself forward for the position of overseer. You will see on my CV that I am well schooled on burning to death in magma and tunnelling two fellas into the earth to survive the oncoming rampage of fiery death.
  Shoruke: ...You're hired. When can you start?
  Bobnova: Doubly hired. Start now.
• Under the Sea: Scruffy started a fort atop a lake. No points for guessing what happened to the fort...
  sign: Welcome to the city of DRUNKFORT VENICE, Land of "That worked about as well as you'd expect"
  • Another fort was started atop a frozen lake. Guess what happened to the fort when summer hit and the ice all melted instantaneously? ^note The actual fortress was fine, but all but two of the Dwarves were standing on the lake. They fell into the water, cracked their heads on the ground, and drowned. Bonus chaos points for having a volcano under the ice.
• The Unintelligible: Play logs usually degenerate into this as drunken players fail to type properly.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Dwarves can learn to put up with a lot of crap.
  Vyro: ok now here’s a hint, it’s a subtle one: THERES A FUCKING CROCODILE MADE OF FIRE AND ITS RIGHT INFRONT OF YOU ASSHOLES.
• What Did I Do Last Night?: On a meta level; most players are left quite bewildered after recuperating from their turns and posting up the logs for the thread.
  Clover Magic: Looking at this sober...what was I doing.
  • Of particular note is Wrex's wholesale disaster of a first turn, wrought from slamming back shots of an approximation of ryncol.

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