Update #3
After a year of waiting for the dwarves to poke their little heads out of their hole the undead must've gotten bored, because they decided to just wander off. Fortunate for them because they barely missed the grand opening of the new trap hall:the dwarves weren't too happy about all their hard work going to waste, but this gives us time to make the traps even better when they inevitably return with even more troops.
Before they left a human pikeman showed up, but put up much worse of a fight than that merchant did last season. He went and got himself suffocated by a giant jumping spider before even meeting our friends.
Now that we have the surface again I had the dwarves quickly build a drawbridge in front of the door so we would be safe from building destroyers such as werebeasts and the like, reclaiming the entrance we had started so long ago. We can finally begin building a mountainhome suitable for a dwarf.
we currently have an elven maceman and a human swordsman visiting our tavern, hopefully they like the place enough to stick around and help out.
The Bad News
Because there always has to be bad news. Unfortunately its been 2 years and we haven't seen a single soul attempt to migrate here. The dwarves are beginning to believe that they may be the last of their civilization, and the site they came from: Chrysoprasereconnoiters has fallen to the milk opals of glossAll we have left is an elven forest, where our queen resides.
We may have to shut our selves off from the world and become a generational fort, trying to recoup enough population the natural way to re-emerge to the surface and take back some sites. Unfortunately this takes time (decades, if not centuries).
We could also try and attract as many outsiders here as possible, and try and get them to join our cause against the necromancers, which raises some concerns. Anyone could just show up, be it werebeasts, vampires, intelligent undead, actual necromancers, general troublemakers, and thieves looking to steal our things. this could easily lead to the fort falling apart from the inside.
This is a pretty tough spot to be in, as we dont seem to be getting help from our civilization. but at least the elves seem to be doing ok, maybe we will get an elven trader show up with some animals we can use to replace the ones that were killed last year.
Ok, so a few things:
1. When choosing the embark for this I probably should have focused less on the possible story and more on whether or not the fort would be good. This is legitimately the worst off I've seen a fort in it's first year lmao.
2. Question to you guys, how attached to this fort are you guys and do you want me to start over in a new world - since I dont much like this tileset and the mods that it came with anyway, try and spit in the face of these necromancers and make a fortress despite the odds, or just give up on this idea altogether, since it seems like only a few people are actively participating anyway.
3. If we do go the route of the generational fort, updates will slow down by quite a bit, since children take quite a while to grow up. Alternatively we can try and just build a cool fort, then leave the dwarves to it and move on from this whole thing, assuming they would live there until their population rises. In which case I'd be focusing less on story and more on how the fort should be designed.