Obok Meatgod

The infamous Obok Meatgod is a story set in the Adventurer (commonly known as "Adventure" mode) of Dwarf Fortress. This article will augment it so that people who are not players of Dwarf Fortress can understand it - and be horrified by it.

What are Adventure Mode and Dwarf Fortress?

Dwarf Fortress is a game set in a world that is randomly generated from scratch. The landmasses, civilizations, religions, and histories of every world differs radically from every other. Among all this difference, species, including both fantasy ones like goblins, elves, and dwarves, and mundane one like chickens, turkeys, and humans, stay the same, and are governed by "raws" which are part of game files and easily modifiable.

There are three modes in Dwarf Fortress: Dwarf Fortress (Fortress), Adventurer (Adventure), and Legends. Dwarf Fortress requires the player to micromanage seven dwarves embarking on an expedition to construct a successful fortress in the wilderness. Adventurer allows the player to guide an intelligent creature (like a human, elf, dwarf, etc.) around the randomly generated world, taking missions and engaging into combat. Legends is simply viewing the stories of the people and places of the world, which run, even for a medium-sized world, into the hundreds of thousands. In none of the three modes is there a way to "win" the game. Indeed, the unofficial motto of the community is "Losing is fun!"; losing, i.e. the death of all dwarves of a fortress in Fortress mode, or the death of the character in Adventure mode, forces the player to learn from their mistakes in a new game.

Combat in Dwarf Fortress is intricate. The game tracks the degree and extent of injury to every body part. Hence there is no such thing as a simple system of "hit points" and damage cannot be healed simply by resting. Death is permanent.

Part 1

(I originally posted this in "Your Most Epic Moment of Win", but in retrospect this is probably a better place.)

My current adventurer, the dwarf Obok Meatgod, is pretty awesome.

About midway through his adventuring career he found his way to the mythical fortress of Headshoots (yes, that Headshoots) and picked up some adamantine armour and enough adamantine weapons to fill a dwarven backpack.

Of course, he never actually uses those weapons. Adamantine kills things too quickly. He prefers to take his time, get to know his opponent before he kills it. He uses a cheapo copper war hammer he picked up in a human town. It takes him forever to kill anything. But that's okay. That's better. That's terrifying.

He's gotten a bit of a reputation for killing giants, you see. Everywhere he goes, somebody wants him to kill a giant for them. He does it with gusto. They're so big that his little tiny hammer can barely hurt them at all. But please note--the operative word here is "barely".

He once spent a week visiting a cave in which there lived seven giants. Each day, he would come in, track down each of the giants, and beat it to the point of unconsciousness. Since he was using his tiny hammer, 90% of his hits did nothing at all. Of those that did hit, 90% only caused light gray wounds. Each day, he beat each of the giants down by about a full colour-change over their entire body. Their unconsciousness wasn't from organ failure or body explosion or anything, just pain and sustained light bleeding and exhaustion and nausea.

Of course, it being impossible to dish out the wounds perfectly evenly, each of them ended up with a few more broken bones each day. Not too much in any one sitting, but over the course of the week they started to add up. Each time Obok Meatgod fought them, they were just a bit more crippled than before. Slowly, steadily, he battered them into submission.

By the fourth day, the giants turned and ran away whenever he tried to engage them. By the fifth day they didn't run any more, because they all had multiple broken legs. By the sixth day, they were reduced to just flailing weakly with one or two limbs. On the last and final day, none of them lifted a finger against him as Obok Meatgod slowly and purposefully battered through their stupidly thick skulls and grayed out their brains at last.

Maybe it was the spinal injuries talking. Maybe it was the fact that every bone and joint in their bodies were broken to the point of unusableness. But I like to think that maybe--just maybe--Obok Meatgod had beaten them into a state of despair so profound that, when death finally came to them, they welcomed it with open arms.

Part 2

Obok Meatgod has had a few more adventures since then.

Finding no leads on the whereabouts of the legendary warrior HolisticDetective and her artifact armor Trailmachines, Obok Meatgod decided to go ahead with plan "Kill Everything" for now. He decided to start with the elves. Specifically, the Wispy Meadow, a medium-sized elven civilization a few days west of Headshoots.

He rolled into the first forest retreat with murder in his heart and adamantine in his hands (even his copper hammer was a one-hit KO against the fragile elves, so there was no reason not to kill in style). The retreat was emptied in a matter of minutes, nothing now but a heap of burning corpses and organs. The only survivors were a handful of scouts who had been away during his attack. Seeing that there was nothing left of their home, they fled into the forest, hoping to find safety in the next retreat over. Obok Meatgod let them go.

Purely so he could follow them to their new homes and start the massacre anew, of course.

Five elven cities he sacked in this way. At the sixth and greatest, however, he was met with stiffer resistance. Many archers stood in a line and fired their bows at him, and he was forced to retreat, wounded.

Obok Meatgod decided to gather some allies for his next assault. For this, he went to the nearby elven civilization of The Sacrificial Seas. They were going to be his next target, but that didn't concern Obok Meatgod. The Seas had always been at peace with the Meadow, and so starting a war between the two sides could only cause the death of more elves in the end. So he went, and he gathered a number of elven warriors in Hornnourish, which was a nearby forest retreat of the Sacrificial Seas. As he gathered his recruits, he discovered that a dwarven caravan had stopped by to trade. He therefore recruited not only all the elven warriors, but also all the dwarven soldiers that were guarding the caravan.

They then returned to the Wispy Meadow and slaughtered the last of the elves. Obok Meatgod himself personally slew eighty elves that day, out of a total of 357. 357 elf-kills, that is. His total of everything is much larger--I'll tell you exactly how many later.

Anyway, after he destroyed that civilization he decided he was bored of killing elves for the moment. Now was a good time for a vacation.

In his travels, Obok Meatgod had come to hear of a land known as The Fields of Disappearing. It supposedly lay far to the northwest, an island hidden in an immense, evil lake concealed somewhere in the mountain range known as the Deep Wall. This was a land untouched by civilized eyes, a land believed by many to be nothing more than a myth. Obok Meatgod, however, knew better.

And so he and his warriors trekked north and west, almost to the ends of the earth. They pierced the secrets of the Curious Mire and the dangers of the Plain of Cats. Further and further north they went, through the forgotten valleys of the Violet Hills and the twisting Whiskered Forest. And there, they came upon a river.

Twenty squares wide it was, and deep, and filled with all manner of ferocious fish. None of Obok's comrades could swim. "Alas," they cried, "for in our searching we have finally met our match." And they named the river thus, The Match of Searching, and they asked Obok Meatgod to turn back lest they be lost forever far from home. But Obok Meatgod only put his finger in the water, and tasted it, and smiled. For the water of the river tasted of death and rot, though the lands around them were not. The source of such a river could only have been an evil lake far in the mountains.

So they turned and followed the river east. And after many days they came to the top, and they gazed out across the Blueness of Blame. And they saw therein the Fields of Disappearing, and at its heart a great pillar of rock: a single just stone that held back the evil of the lake from the lands within.

Then they descended into the fields across a narrow isthmus, and did battle with many strange beasts, tigers that walked like men and women that flew like birds. And after more days they came to the Just Stone, and Obok Meatgod bade them climb with him. The mountain was steeper than any they had ever seen, rising two z-levels for every one across, but their leader bounded up with wild abandon. Halfway up they found a deep chasm from which all manner of cruel beasts were emerging, and so they stopped to do battle. All except Obok Meatgod, who continued until he had reached the very summit.

When he arrived, he sat a moment and enjoyed the view. Then he drew from his pack the skull of a great demon, and laid it on the ground.

Now, I should tell you something about this demon: Obok Meatgod was not the one who had slain it. As the story goes, before he destroyed the Wispy Meadow he had sacked some goblin cities as a warmup. He had hoped to find the demon Asno Sinfires the Lies of Menacing and claim his head as a trophy, and to that end he came eventually to the dark fortress known as Stealchanneled. He watched the goblins go about their business for a while from a cliff overlooking the fortress, but seeing no demon he instead leapt from the cliff onto the top of the tower, crushing a goblin child in his fall, then laying about him with his hammer.

And as he fought, he began to hear the sounds of battle elsewhere in the fortress. It seemed that a great force of troglodytes and ratmen had emerged from a nearby chasm and were fighting the fortress's defenders elsewhere. He could hear the roars of a demon as it crushed troglodytes under its claws, but he saw nothing. So Obok Meatgod fought on with even greater vigor, goblins fleeing before him, trying to find the source of the noise.

Finally, after much slaughter he caught sight of the demon across a broad field. Their eyes met. Obok Meatgod moved to engage, but at that moment there was a great burst of flame from the demon and when it cleared, all that remained was a smoldering corpse.

In short: a demon chose to commit suicide rather than face Obok Meatgod in open battle.

And now here was Obok Meatgod, standing over the demon's skull on the summit of the Just Stone. Now, working quickly, he drew many other things from his pack. He anointed the skull with the fat of a giant desert scorpion, with the vomit of many elves, and with a chunk of his own flesh. He topped it all off with a live fire snake.

He looked down at his comrades as they fought with the beasts of the chasm. At the evil lake that surrounded them. At the wide trackless land filled with monsters, which no man had seen before and which none would see again. And finally, at the mountain peak on which he stood, now no longer a Just Stone holding back the evil from its land, but only a rock like any other.

He smiled.

Then he descended the mountain, dove into a river, and disappeared from sight.

Part 3 (The Incident)

Oh wow, this old thing. Er... the story did continue on for a bit, but that was a long time ago and I've forgotten most of the details. I'll just mention some of the highlights.

After desecrating the Just Stone and abandoning my comrades there, I swam down the river for quite a while. It turns out that if you're a good swimmer, rivers are basically XP farms. The fish come in big schools, and the shape of the river means that they can only run in one direction. If you're a faster swimmer then they are, all you have to do is keep swimming toward them and they'll die in droves as they flee before you. The best part is that as they flee, they'll often run into another school, which will join them in their flight and provide you with a never-ending buffet of things to kill.

So yeah, I killed every single creature in the river between the Blueness of Blame and the point at which the river flowed off the map. I reached Legendary in every weapon.

After that I went monster hunting for a bit and killed some megabeasts. In one cave, I was walking down a staircase when I suddenly received a message about a giant being struck down. At the bottom of the stairs, I discovered the giant's corpse. Yes, I killed a giant by accident. With a copper hammer. That's why I went hunting megabeasts. I remember killing a hydra with only a handful of cockroaches. By the time I was done, half of the screen was covered with hydra vomit.

I went back to the Sacrificial Seas, the elven civilization that had furnished so many useful recruits. I retired there for a while. I then used my status as a member of their civilization to start a series of loyalty cascades that eventually consumed them all.

Before I went on to the next civilization, I stopped off at another goblin dark fortress to pick up some more recruits. Kids, of course. I rescued a bunch of kids--thirteen, I think? The maximum I could support--then killed everybody else, including all the kids I didn't take with me. Lot of kids at that fortress. I also killed a demon, in a fair fight this time, which was nice.

I took my thirteen kids out into the wilderness for training. I'd wander around until we ran into a pack of wolves. I'd stand back and let the kids do the fighting, not stepping in unless one of them was about to be torn to pieces. When the wolves were dead I'd pack up, and the kids that could still walk came with. I lost five kids out there--left them sobbing over broken legs in a pile of dead wolves--but I only saw one of them die. He was unusual in that he died without suffering a single wound. No, what killed him was dodging. Dodging away from a wolf, into a stagnant pool. I had the other kids stand around the pool and watch him as he thrashed about and called out to us. Not until he had drowned and sunk to the bottom did I give the sign to move on.

The eight remaining I took with me to the next elven civilization. We killed a lot of elves. The kids died too, one by one, while the survivors grew ever more skilled. The more forest retreats we sacked, the more their numbers dwindled. By the time we slew the last elf, there were only two kids left.

This was a problem. I'd hoped there would only be one.

The solution was simple. I chose one of them at random and beat him to death with a demon's skull.

Then I turned to the last one, who was now hammering ineffectually on me with her little fists. She was a fighter, that girl. I don't remember her name. Something starting with an A, I think? Something pretty. I wish I could remember her name.

One by one, I grabbed her clothes and tore them away. Then I saved and quit.

I went into the raws and added some new body parts to our respective races. Some organs, attached to the lower body. You can probably guess which ones. I added [LIMB] and [GRASP] to mine, and [JOINT] and [EMBEDDED] to hers. I started the game back up.

I grabbed her right leg with my left leg. Her left leg with my right. Her lower body with my new organ.

I locked her organ with my own. Then I broke it.

Then I started gouging.

After she had bled to death, I sat there for a while. Then I saved, quit, and deleted the save folder. I emptied my recycle bin.

I don't really play Adventure Mode any more.