crosspost from /tg/
So I was doing pretty well with my fort. Made it through the first few seasons, had a good amount of immigrants, had a decent stock of beer and plump helmets for the winter, a good farming operation going on with some floodgates bringing water in from one of the underground caves, and some nice exploratory tunnels going downward, in search of magma. I'm in the middle of digging out a room on the lowest level to build forges in, and suddenly I get a string of interrupted messages from my farm room. A pair of cave crocodiles managed to get up one of my exploratory shafts, and were headed up - straight for my main hall and dining area.
I scrambled with the military controls for what felt like 30 minutes trying to figure out how to order my squad to attack the crocodiles. By then, they'd managed to kill three dwarves, one of which was a legendary woodcrafter, and every dog and cat in the fort. Once the dwarves got into battle, they dispatched one quickly, and then spent the next ten minutes throwing the other one up and down the main hall. By the end of the fight all of them were skilled wrestlers, at least.
As soon as the second cave crocodile went down, I get an alert that a pair of Blind Cave Ogres have broken down the doors I built leading to the caves - I send my military down, but not before they kill two civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I sent my military down to take care of them, but unfortunately, only one of them was armed with anything more than a training weapon - the resulting battle didn't go well. They let one ogre by, and he managed to charge through the main hall, smash all the workshops, stumble into the sleeping quarters and went, one by one, from bed to bed, smashing the sleeping dwarves to death. Downstairs, my squad of training axe wielding dwarves are still struggling with the one ogre, when two more rush in with a pack of troglodytes behind them. More civilians in the area die, and two of my six person military are dropped.
Right now, there's one ogre left in my fort, and all but five of my dwarves are dead. The two remaining members of my military are legendary wrestlers, fighters, strikers, axedwarves, and shieldwarves. They're also tantruming.
A salute, Postentranced. If nothing else, you ended in the manliest way possible.