However, the most honorable way of ending a fortress's life is not filled to the brim with wealth, but in an orgy of violence and bloodshed with tantruming dwarves killing each other and imploding your civilization. Considering the fate of LPs in the past, it is a safe bet as to which fate Headshoots is going to end up succumbing to, especially given the fact that we have elected to settle in an area chock-full of undead.
—Introduction
Headshoots was a Succession Game Let's Play of Dwarf Fortress, conducted by the goons at Something Awful. Like any good Dwarf Fortress LP, it didn't take long to go pretty much completely insane.
The whole thing, plus some bonus art, can be read here.
Note that this thread was from 2009 and some of the humor of the time has not necessarily aged particularly well.
A complete audio adaption can be found here.
Headshoots provides examples of the following tropes:
- And Then John Was a Zombie: Literally, Holistic Detective and Nemo2342 become undead and slaughter every living thing in the fortress.
- Back from the Dead: On his second turn, OrangeSoda plays as the decapitated corpse of his previous dwarf who has returned to salvage Headshoots.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: One of the players, Lucidphoole, got bored by the lack of action in their turn and started talking about picking a fight with either the demons or the humans. The fortress was promptly attacked by a dragon and then some miners broke through into a demon pit, after which a human army turned up to lay siege to the place. Things spiraled from there, with dwarves going mad left and right and killing each other and themselves. The next player was forced to wall the few sane dwarves off in an undamaged section of the fortress to stop the whole place from collapsing.
- Bizarrchitecture: The "Room Outside Space". Seemingly a perfectly ordinary room, except that players were somehow unable to find it unless there was a dwarf inside to zoom to. The last dwarf standing survived by hiding in this room.
- Civil War: During Lucidphoole's turn, Headshoots is briefly riven by a rebellion triggered by a group of disenchanted dwarves. He restores order via beatings and prison sentences.
- Cult of Personality: Alius declares Holistic Detective to be a Goddess and sets out to endarken the forts inhabitants. She's executed for this by an adventuring Hammerer in one of the Appendices, and comes back from the dead to wreak vengeance on the inhabitants in the finalè.
- Dirty Commies: Ur Getting Fatter is an unabashed pinko commie scumbag, openly happy about nobles rotting in the street and willing to let a pumpdwarf with the misfortune to be named "Royale" go unburied as well until he learned poor Royale's real profession.
- Dug Too Deep: As is common in Dwarf Fortress, the dwarves break into a pit of demons while mining adamantine. They become a recurring plague on Headshoots and ultimately corrupt Holistic Detective and Nemo2342, turning them into the monsters that wiped the place out.
- Good Bad Bugs: Invoked. There apparently wasn't a cap on dwarves' skill levels. When a player checked out Holistic and Nemo's stats in an external editor, their highest skills were 77 and 86, respectively... where 15 is "Legendary." Their physical stats were over four times the maximum level displayed in-game.
- Improbable Weapon User: Holistic Detective got into the habit of bashing things to death with a backpack.
- In Love with Your Carnage: After watching Holistic Detective slaughter a goblin warband, The Good Proffessor considers asking her out on a date.
- Meaningful Name:
- "Headshoots" became meaningful after one of the founding member LCQC was blasted in the face by the fire imp Landslantern. The event was retroactively considered the fortress' namesake.
- Invoked with "Trailmachines the Fellowship of Right", an in-universe speech being written to serve as the artifact's inspiration and namesake.
- Mordor: The location of Headshoots is a barren wasteland filled with The Undead.
- One-Man Army: Holistic Detective single-handedly butchered a dragon. Without being harmed. Nemo was roughly as powerful, and in fact had a higher killcount.
- Pointless Doomsday Device: WEAPON, whose first activation set half the fortress on fire. Later upgraded to TRIBUTEWEAPON with even more catastrophic results: Imagine a fire sprinkler system using magma raining all over the map. There was an attempt at a freezing-water-based one, WEAPON ICE FUCK, which was abandoned once the player discovered the climate was too warm for it to work properly.
The various succession players seemed to enjoy making these devices and "forgetting" to tell anyone about them. This, of course, is half the fun. - The Scrappy: In-Universe, Smuggens, to the point that The Good Professor made his job title "annoying cuntsmith."
- Shout-Out: The intro is an obvious shout out to Fallout:''War... war never changes.The Hame of Severity waged war to gather slaves and wealth. The Blowing Cactus built an empire from its lust for gold and territory. Sazir Searchdikes shaped a battered Sword of Owning into an economic superpower.But war never changes.In the first century war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired, only this time the spoils of war were also its weapons: adamantine and magma. For these resources the Doom of Flags would invade the Boat of Society, the Sword of Owning would annex the Mute Continent, and the Blanketed Nations would dissolve into quarreling, bickering nation-states bent on controlling the last remaining resources in the Realms of Enchanting. In 27 the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, most of the world was reduced to cinders, and from the ashes of geothermal devastation a new civilization would struggle to arise.A few were able to reach the relative safety of the large dwarven mountain halls. My family was part of that group that entered Palmlanterns. Imprisoned safely behind a large drawbridge under a mountain of stone, a generation has lived without knowledge of the outside world.Life in Palmlanterns is about to change...''—Introduction
- Stealth Sequel: To Boatmurdered. It's been some time since the end of Boatmurdered, and other Kingdoms have taken up Boatmurdered's attempts to use magma to kill besieging enemies. All this did was reduce the world to a war-scarred hellhole where only the undead and devils can carve out a livelihood. Palmlanterns, one of the last settlements, sends out an expedition party to Headshoots, which is heavily implied to be the aftermath of Boatmurdered, and Sankis is namedropped. Her ghost now sometimes takes control of other Dwarves, including a Mad Queen named after her who demands that Headshoots become the new capitol of Palmlanterns.
