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Succession games, challenges and fortress stories

A fortress generates stories whether you want it to or not. Some players go further, sharing a fortress between friends or tying their own hands to see what happens.

Almost every Dwarf Fortress player eventually finds themselves describing a game to someone else: the miner who dug into the river, the noble who demanded a crystal throne during a famine, the cat that outlived three generations of owners. The game produces narrative the way a river produces silt. Over the years, players developed a few ways of leaning into that, and they are worth knowing about even if you only ever play alone.

The succession game

A succession game is a fortress passed from hand to hand. One player starts the fortress and plays a fixed stretch of in-game time, usually a single year. They then save, hand the file to the next player on the list, and write up what happened during their turn. The next player inherits everything: the half-finished tower, the flooded storeroom, the baron's grudges and whatever unwise project the previous overseer started and did not finish.

What makes the format work is that nobody fully controls the story. Each player has their own style and their own ideas about what the fortress needs. One builds walls; the next tears them down for a grand hall; the third inherits a fortress with no walls and a goblin army at the gate. The write-ups become a shared chronicle, often with a running cast of dwarves whom readers come to know by name.

The format grew popular on forums, and a few succession games became legends of their own. The official wiki keeps a page on Boatmurdered, the best-known succession game of all, for anyone who wants to read the most famous example rather than a summary of it. Many players have run their own since, among friends or in public threads, and the official wiki uses the name "bloodline" games for long-running shared fortresses.

Running one with friends

If you want to try it, a few simple rules help. Agree on the length of each turn and stick to it. Agree on whether mods or tools are allowed. Decide in advance whether players may deliberately sabotage the fortress (some groups love this; others do not). Keep write-ups honest, including the mistakes, because the mistakes are what people want to read. And accept that the fortress will fall at some point, probably during someone else's turn.

Self-imposed challenges

Once the basics are comfortable, many players find that a standard fortress is too easy, or at least too familiar. The answer is to add rules. The game does not enforce them; you simply agree with yourself not to do certain things, and see how the fortress copes. A few classic kinds:

Everything above ground: No digging into the mountain for living space. Every room, wall and workshop is built on the surface from materials you gather. Dwarves are underground creatures by nature, so this turns the whole game inside out.
No farming: The fortress must feed itself from gathering, fishing, hunting and trade. It forces you to think about food as a supply problem rather than a solved one.
Water world: Settle somewhere dominated by water, or build most of the fortress beneath or around it. This is a test of how well you understand pressure, pumps and floodgates, which are explained on the water page.
The hostile site: Embark in the most dangerous region the world offers and try to last a year. It is a crash course in defence.
The pacifist: No military at all; every threat must be handled with architecture, traps or diplomacy.
One material: Everything built from a single kind of stone or metal, which forces unusual trade and mining decisions.

Challenges share something with the great building projects covered on the megaprojects page: they are goals players set for themselves in a game that sets none. Neither is about winning. Both are about seeing what the systems do under pressure.

Why the stories are so good

The reason these games read so well is structural. The game is not telling a story; it is simulating people and places closely enough that stories fall out of the interactions. A dwarf's personality, their friends, their possessions, the material of the door they slammed, the weather, the monster in the caverns: all of it runs at once. Wikipedia's article on emergent gameplay describes exactly this kind of complexity growing from the interaction of relatively simple mechanics. When the result is a disaster, the community's instinct is to laugh and write it down, which is the attitude behind losing is fun.

Writing up your own fortress

You do not need a group to keep a chronicle. Many players keep a simple journal for each fortress, a few lines per season, and find that it changes how they play. Writing things down makes you notice them: the friendship between two masons, the hunter who never comes back empty-handed, the child who keeps befriending dangerous animals. It also gives each fortress a shape, so that when it ends you have something to look back on.

A few tips for a good write-up. Name the dwarves you care about and follow them. Record decisions as well as events, including the reasoning behind the bad ones. Note the small absurdities, because they are the parts readers remember. The game also keeps its own history of the world, which you can read afterwards; the world and legends page explains how it records the deeds of your dwarves alongside everyone else's.

If you share a fortress story publicly, the usual good manners apply. Credit other people's ideas and fortresses when you build on them, ask before using someone else's write-up, and remember that half the fun for readers is discovering what happens next, so do not spoil a long saga in its first post.