Industry and Isolation: A Khazad Story

Shatner

Warlord
Joined
Jan 24, 2008
Messages
114
Location
Austin, Texas
In a recent thread I noticed that the Khazad were not especially well understood or well received among the board's denizens. I found this to be a real pity because the Khazad are easily my favorite civ in FFH. So, I grabbed my beard extensions (I'm not only the president of The Beards Club for Dwarves, I'm also a member), chain mail (dwarven long johns), rune-engraved hip-flask full of swamp whiskey and started digging. STRIKE THE EARTH!


Industry and Isolation: A Khazad Story

The Map: Pangaea, Normal Size, Aggressive AI, Living World, No Tech Trading
The Difficulty: Emperor
The Speed: Normal
The Rivals: 9 civs, all random


"In the beginning thar was Keldon Ki. Well, before Keldon thar was Kilmorph, o' course; Kilmorph's been arround before everyone... except Kael, I guess. So, first there was Kael who made a mod and then... but we're no supposed to know about him; the Stonewardens call that apocryphal knowledge and if they hear ye saying it they'll club ye sure as ye like and make yer family pay a fine.

"Alrright, starting over, in the beginning thar were a lot of 'mportant people whose names starrted with K, and probably some people whose names dint start with K, like Bamburr, who kind o' throws off the alliteration. But Keldon made the dwarves frrom stone and Kilmorph bestowed the breath o' life unto them. Then these dwarves, like Bamburr 'cause he was one of them original dwarves, tunneled out of the dungeon Keldon was in fer rreasons I won't even go into and beget the dwarven rrace. There was a lot of begettin' and unto-ing in those days.

"Anyway, the dwarves thrived and glorified Kilmorph and worked the 'arth and probably beget some morre stuff unto other stuff and All Was Good. Then humans and elves and what-not came along and swindled the dwarves out of everry last craft and ingot they had and laughed the whole way back to their blo'y-stupid villages made out o' wood. So the dwarves told the taller rraces to feck off and decided to live underground like proper dwarves. Then a lot o' bad stuff happened and it got rreal cold and an age passed. Two gods died but one of 'em was put back together and there was this other K-bloke named Kylorin and then it wasnae cold no more and now King Arturus and his buddy Kandros (because someone has to keep the blo'y K thing going) are heading to the surface to found a new settlement and because o' that you most certainly cannae, uh... what was it you asked fer again?"

I was standing in the office of my patriarch, so young my beard wasn't even long enough to reached my pig-tail trousers. "I asked if I could make a small withdraw from the familial mutual fund for the acquisition of rock candy from Lodross Kiln's Confectionery."

"Oh, such talk. Ye'll be a scrribe soon enuff, laddie. Rright. I choose to veto that purchase on the grounds that the whole clan is relocatin' to the surrface and we'll be needin' to reserve the petty cash fer more 'mportant things. You'll eat yer plump helmets like the rest o' the employees [family] and be thankful, ye will."


The sound of footfall awoke me from my reminiscence and I was brought thirty-eight years forward to the present. Kandros Fir entered the office and paused... Listening. He liked to hear the sound of ledgers being balanced and it was said that he could detect an accounting error by auditory clues alone. I, like the rest of the scribes, bent over my work, trying not to attract attention from the CFO. A hand, heavily leaden with rings made of precious metals, was placed on my shoulder and I winced despite my efforts to the contrary. "You! Ye look sturrdy. The orcs have declared warr and me last auditor came back with pieces missin'. Consider this yer promotion. Grab yer ax and come with me."

"Me? Wh...where are we going?"

"To see the King. He's assembled the Board and I need ye to do two things fer me. Firrst, I need ye to take notes. Get yer best chisel and don't bother to grab tablets; those will be provided and we need to hurrrry." Ironically, that last word took Kandros a while to finish on account of all the rhotics.

"What's the second thing you need from me... sir?"

"What? Oh. When I yell 'RRUN!' keep up, for Kilmorph's sake. I can't have all me auditors calling in to work dead, now can I?"


Khazad was two cities in one. Resting on a hill surrounded by grasslands, adjacent to an inland sea and bordered on one side by a river, the fortifications of the upper city were visible from miles away. The outer city was ran by the Fir clan and the Fir clan was ran by Kandros... my boss with the excess of "rrrr"s. Below the surface, untouched by the sun and safe from the vertigo-inducing sky was the inner city. Nestled below the ground but above the Umber, the inner city contained the palace of Arturus Thorne, the self-exiled king. AND the famed dwarven vaults, the lifeblood of the dwarves, the same legendary structures which seemed to attract every greenskin and uppity barbarian on Erebus that could brandish something blunt and hefty. All that took place below the ground was governed by the king. It's good to be king.


38 years after Khazad had been founded, Jonas of the Clan of Embers had decided we didn't need all our gold... or internal organs, and declared war. Kandros wanted to repel the initial wave and then perform a hostile take-over of Clan assets. Arturus vetoed his plan, submitting instead that we take a more conservative strategy and let the greenskins spend themselves on our walls.

"And then what, me king?"

"And then, Kandrros, we preparre fer the next fool-hardy invaderr to try and steal our wealth. The surface doesnae want us and we donnae want it. It is not our place to expand, it is our place to endurre."


The whole of Erebus turned but the dwarves remained stationary. Over the following years numerous tribes of the surface came prowling around our lands, some even being so bold as to request an opening of borders. The King would have none of this; the lands of the Khazad were to be forever closed to the taller sorts. The King even had this message carved into the hills along our borders. Unfortunately, neither the Clan nor Hippus could read.


The Clan and the horselords came and smashed themselves senseless on the walls of Khazak. Some industrious laborers had even taken to etching lines outside the palisade, marking how close the invaders made it before having their limbs deducted by the auditors. All this was to facilitate the numerous betting pools held among the garrison (Rule of Acquisition #13, Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing for Money). The surface had blossomed with empires; elves and orcs and humans all claimed swaths of land in the name of their people. The other races just didn't seem to understand that even though the dwarves only had one city, it was just the tip of a much larger kingdom buried in the Umber and that they should STOP INVADING US ALL THE BLOODY TIME! Maybe their hearts were incapable of pumping enough blood all the way up their freakishly tall bodies to their brains, resulting in them being so suicidally stupid. Either way, there was brisk trade in outer Khazak made of burning the clubs of our enemies into charcoal and shipping that to the smiths in inner Khazak. The tide of enemies ebbed and flowed but the dwarves endured, hoarding their riches deep underground and building the walls around Khazak ever thicker.


"Do ye feel that, auditorr?"

"Feel what, Mr. Kandros, sir?"

"The vaults're full. Overflowin', in fact. The stonewardens have rreconnected with our go'ess and now herr blessings fill our cofferrs. Don't ye just feel morre alive?"

"Well, yes sir but I thought that was because of those pithy motivational posters you had pinned up around the office. I'm rather fond of the one with the auditors pouring burning pitch through the murder holes on some orcs and says 'Work harder or we'll all die horribly!'"

"It isnnae the posters, lad, that have put that sprring in yer step. It's the vaults. We were animated frrom the very stone by Kilmorph herself. However, each generation o' dwarves that've passed have been furrther and furrther rremoved from her divinity. We used to all be Bamburrs but over time we became nearly as dense as those grreenies charging ourr walls with cudgels. However, the vaults contain wealth, lad, and wealth is the blessings o' our go'ess manifested in the verry 'arth. With enough o' it stockpiled it balances the divine deficit we've been rrunnin' fer centuries."

"So, by filling the vaults we've all become super-dwarves? Like Bambur!?" I asked enthusiastically, thinking of the Bambur action figures (With Real Smithing Action!) that I still keep on my mantle.

"Close enough, laddie. With the vaults like they arre, we're betterr, fasterr and strongerr than any daft punk ye care to name. But here's the best part... it's stopped workin'! We'rre piling ever more swag into the vaults but we're no getting more out o' it!"

"And that's... good?"

"Aye, 'cause beforre long the King'll have to rrecognize that one city cannae do the Go'ess justice. To sit on the wealth of Kilmorph and not invest it would be Sloth and no dwarf worrth his ax or hammerr could allow that; it's against the verry corre of Kilmorph's teachings. Marrk me words, laddie: the dwarves will have a bigger slice o' the surrface before it's overr orr I'll shave me beard and work fer frree."


Years passed. Lucien fought for the Doviello and died. Rantine did the same for the clan. The mad lord Perpentach was dispatched by someone or maybe he simply strolled by a mirror and declared war. Both Decius of the Calabim and Tasanke of Hippus had done the first sensible thing since the ice melted and began glorifying the Goddess. By the year 157, Halowell was founded at the other end of the inland sea on a proud hill surrounded by forests... and orc corpses (it turns out the orcs don't respond well to dwarven diplomacy, i.e. axes and a low center of gravity). A tunnel through the Umber and the blessings of the Stonewardens connected Halowell to the King's vault, allowing them to be energized through the boon of our goddess. The king insisted that the palisades of Halowell be built before the market that Kandros so desperately wanted. During that time I sought out safer professions than auditing for Kandros... like elephant taming and carp fishing.


There was a growing tension between Arturus and Kandros. With the founding of Halowell, the balance of power had begun to shift away from the underground (Arturus) and towards the wealth of the surface (Kandros). After all, it was the farms of the surface that kept everyone fed and nicely inebriated. It was the towns and markets of the surface that had filled the vaults to their brim. However, the King controlled the vaults so the King had the final say at all board meetings. The scuttlebutt was that the two had been close friends before the move to the surface but, once there, the two had very different ideas of how to go about making it safe for the dwarven people. Arturus saw the surface as hostile and inhospitable; populated only by those who would undo the labor of the dwarves (I guess he had played "Against the Wall"). Kandros saw the surface as an opportunity for the dwarves; new markets to expand into, new resources to add to the eternal cycle of dwarven commerce. Unfortunately for Kandros, Arturus was the God King of our primary city and it was his edict that we conserve, preserve and worship the Goddess. Whatever Kandros wanted, he'd have to bide his time... which he did by putting me to organizing his notes concerning his latest project: Operation Magna Carta.


The following seventy five years were ones of prosperity. The Tablets of Bambur were uncovered, ushering in a new era of devotion, honest labor and adorable motivational posters (The face of an orc smiling widely, showing more teeth than seems anatomically possible with the caption "Rule of Acquisition #48 - The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife"). Not long afterwards, Bambur himself (swoon) departed the Umber to assist his descendants in reclaiming a portion of the surface. I even got him to sign and enchant my ax; I wasn't able to bring myself to wash it for a month, despite all the orc blood. Riyold was founded in 196 on our western-most border, near rich gold and metal deposits, adjacent to lands formerly swarming with Clan warriors (Orcs: buy one mook get one horde free!). The Clan agreed to an end to our century-long hostilities; either because repeated blows to the head had knocked some sense into them or they learned to read and saw the messages we'd cut into the hills. When Tasanke, in a surprising upset, capitulated to Decius the Literally Blood Thirsty, the world was suddenly plunged into utter and complete peace. It was almost too much for our pessimistic King to bear. Fortunately, in the year 226, a surprise attack from Jonas resulted in the capture of Riyold and the slaughter of six veteran squads of auditors. That put Arturus back into comfortable territory.


For the first time since the thawing of the ice, the dwarves had been forced to give ground. The mountain had been budged. The children of the Goddess had been displaced by the savage worshipers of the Fellowship of Leaves. Overnight it seemed that Down had become Up, Black had become White and beards had become unfashionable! The King called an emergency Board meeting and there I heard hard questions being asked. Decisions were made that I, as Board stenographer, could only chisel onto the King's letterhead with shaking hands and a prayer to the Goddess on my lips. It would seem that the dwarves had been pushed, not only out of Riyold, but across The Line. The dwarves were going to war with the Clan for the final time; it was beards versus spikes and there would be no mercy.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------​


If you want to play your own version of Industry and Isolation(tm), follow these rules:

1) You can not found your second city until you have at least 1,000 gold. Remember to fully charge your dwarves before playing with them.

2) Once you hit overflowing Vaults you can never drop below it. Don't bring them back down from their high. It's a bad trip, man, and you don't want to see it.

3) All cities must be built on hills. The novelty of being taller than their enemies has not worn off for the dwarves. Bonus points if you build palisades and walls BEFORE you build your market and temple.

4) Never open borders with others, never trade resources, never accept vassals. The dwarves, like the cheese, stand alone.

5) Losing is Fun! If at first you don't succeed, research Construction sooner.

6) There is NO rule six!


I tried this once before as Arturus and couldn't pull it off; by the time I was ready to build my second city, Doviello came a knockin' and they spoke very persuasively with their stacks of doomination (doom + domination). I've found the going with Kandros substantially easier.

At this point in the game (turn 228) the leaderboard is as follows:
Decius of Calabim: 1188
Amelchier (with Holy City of FoL): 938
Jonas: 789
Kandros: 409
Sabathiel: 377
Tasanke: 342
Dain: 240
 
Fantastic as always. :)

Khazad are one of my favorite civs as well. They appeal to my slow builder style, and their mechanic if properly played can steamroll anything. I'll have to try your handicaps though, they should make the game more interesting.
 
Briliant as always :)
 
*Fires Gauss Flayer into the air in jubilation.*
HE'S BACK! Can't believe it took me this long to notice! Something about your tone brings Boatmurdered to mind, though. Let's hope that doesn't prove to be prophetic...
Wait, no, that would be hilarious. Let's hope it does.
 
played a game recently as Khazad. Loved them

Adding in the Master Buildings, and artisans workshops in Fall Further, with the Overflowing Vaults and Dwarven Smithy, I was getting utterly insane production bonuses.

The Master crafted equipment that you can get from master buildings in FF, also just feels so... dwarven. It enhances their flavour even farther, if you can sacrifice a bit of gold to outfit your troops. They also have a unique equipment promo, Heavy Plate, allowing their melee units to have +1 defence.

And dwarven druids are ridiculously powerful.

I absolubtly must go play khazad now. And I shall attempt to do it with these handicaps.
 
The Clan beat me to RoK ;-;

But I worldbuildered myself the holycity. I try not to cheat, but something like that is hours of playing down the drain if someone else beats me to my desired religion.

The limitation of not founding a second city before 1000 gold is really hard.
 
There's going to be more to the story right? Kinda a cliffhanger right there :D
 
There's going to be more to the story right? Kinda a cliffhanger right there :D

Yeah, there's at least one more chunk coming. I just have to translate my tiny, tiny notes into a narrative that is suitably dwarven (souse belligerence MEETS salesman MEETS small-man complex). Also, I'm waiting on another shipment of bold, italic and underline tags, since I seem to be going through a lot of those.
 
Wow,

You're an amazing writer... Your internetish, computerish style of writing is very creative, very innovative and that is something very hard to accomplish.

Congratulations and keep them coming!

P.S.: My guess is that you don't write just as a hobby. Am I right?
 
Your writing (especially on the bannor, and any bannor references in the Kuriotate campaign) leaves me laughing hysterically with tears streaming down my eyes

I have no idea what the rest of the people in my dormitory think of such laughter, as the only sound similar is a gaggle of gossiping cheerleaders.
 
Life is hard for a dwarf. It’s supposed to be; that’s what we were made for. We were created when a man of legendary skill, industriousness and patience was granted a boon by the Goddess of Honest Labor. What did you expect?!? We work twelve hour shifts, use a chisel as a writing implement and you may not know this but it takes a lot of work to maintain a wardrobe composed entirely of chainmail (oil it too little and it rusts, oil it too much and you become a fire hazard). For all the invasions we suffer, the whole of Erebus seems to think we use gold bullion as a building material and that we sleep on pillows made of spun silver, stuffed with platinum-dipped gemstones that are themselves stuffed with smaller, more valuable gemstones. If we have less than a hundred loads of precious metal (per capita) tucked away then the entire civilization suffers migraines and mood swings.


The point is that we dwarves, like the stone from which we were originally hewn, are slow to gain momentum. A set back like Riyold could mark a terminal loss for our nation and our very survival. If we didn’t respond to the Clan decisively then we’d have only a tomb of our own carving, the Umber, to retreat to. It was for this reason that the King moved to make Kandros the Supreme Manager of Khazad Auditors LLC and increase their operational budget by over 65%.

With all eyes upon him, Kandros stood up, cleared his throat and respectfully denied the motion.

...

HE DID WHAT?!

...

Kandros pulled out the sixty tablet document I’d been working on for so long (Operation Magna Carta) and set up a Powder Point Presentation*.

*Take a sheet of glass suspended over a clean burning flame. Cover it with pulverized glass and lay an etched tablet atop it. The tablet leaves an imprint in the powder which then projects the engraved characters as shadows onto the ceiling over your head. All this may seem impractical until you consider having to carve a copy of a sixty-tablet document for each of the twelve board members. Oh, and don’t sneeze or you’ll coat those nearby in glass shards; that rarely helps.


Operation Magna Carta outlined a new form of governance in which local clan chiefs would lease farms, mines or even entire cities from the primary owner (technically Kilmorph but the King was the arbiter of her dwarven estate). This would allow for local profit maximization while undercutting management overhead. With this considerable revenue stream, the surplus could be used to hire sub-contractors to rapidly (though expensively) mobilize the dwarven military. To a lay-person this would all seem like a business meeting just like any other: civil, perfunctory, boring. To a scribe, to a DWARF, this was Arturus hiring Kandros for the position of “Savior of the Dwarven People”, asking him to set his own salary and Kandros replying “How much ye got?” It was audacious. It was unprecedented. It violated untold centuries of established business practices. After a silence so long that even the masonry began to feel awkward, the king spoke.

“Kandros, if ye can recapturre Rriyold in time to save me people then I’ll sign this, ye son-of-a-mobius witch. Howeverr, the next time the walls arround one of our cities falls, I’ll be brreakin’ all sixty pages o’ this document overr yer head, ya ken? Don’t be gamblin’ with the lives and ways o’ me people if ye no are sure ye can win. MEETING ADJORNED ‘TIL AFTERR WE’RE NO ALL DEAD!”


Following the end of the meeting, Kandros pulled me away from the ceremonial post-meeting keg tap. “I need ye to contact the Angus, head of the McGyver clan and...”

“Angus ‘Bailing Wire’ McGyver!? I thought he had been captured by the Hippus.”

“Aye, he had been, laddie. They took his ax, his tools, an assortment o’ twenty-three other weapons off o’ him (including TWO cabers) and clapped him in irons. However, those daft bonnies dinnae think to take his tweezerrs. Using those and a piece o’ horrse hair he picked the lock, used manure and a gunny sack to make a crrude but effective camouflage, avoided theirr patrrols fer thrree days, beat two scouts to death with their own saddle bags and made it back to Khazak in time fer the monthly McGyver clan staff meetin’. We’ll be needin’ him and his lads if we’re to take the fight to the grreenies, we will. Also, contact Bamburr and have him, Angus and you meet me outside the Minerrs Guild Headquarters. Now go like yer beards on firre; thars dwarves a-dyin’ in the West waitin’ on ye.”

...​

Kandros stood before a wheeled wood-and-metal behemoth; the whole thing looked like the Seesaw of the Apocalypse. Some ingenious miner had had the idea that you could use some of the same counterweight mechanisms employed to haul rocks out of mine shafts to instead lob heavy rocks at something really far away. He’d originally planned on using it to “keep those trees from gettin’ uppity” but a few military-minded dwarves had seen uses for it other than oppressing the local flora.


“This... is the trebuchet, named afterr it’s inventorr, Treb Bucket.” Kandros motioned to a dwarf who had wandered to the edge of the courtyard and was using his pick to uproot a particularly insidious looking sapling. “A... Anyway, this is the weapon that will ensurre dwarven supremacy on the battlefield. We’ve already begun full prroduction of them herre in Khazak. Angus, I’ll need you and yer lads to keep these thingies and theirr crrews safe all the way to Brraduk the Burrning and back. Bamburr, aside from kickin’ arse like ye norrmally do, I’ll need ye to put yer legend’ry skill to worrk keepin’ these things functional on what should be a long and blo’y slog thrrough Clan terrrritory. And you”, he said pointing at me, “are to keep receipts fer all the expenses incurrrrred and rrememberr what I told ye about rrunning.” I guess I’ll pack my travel ledgers and field abacus...


Most auditors suffer attrition when accounting the enemy; we call this occurrence “fixed expenses”. Weapons get damaged, armor gets sticky from fluids recently liberated from the enemy’s insides and hip flasks start to empty after repeated engagements. The McGyvers are renowned for their lateral thinking and are capable of keeping themselves at full combat readiness without resupplying or stopping for down-time. While their field brewed swamp whiskey leaves a bit to be desired, it will keep sobriety (as well as most small mammals and a variety of insects) safely at bay.


By the year 231, after five years of Clan occupation, Riyold was recaptured. This was the first field test of the trebuchet and it worked fantastically. Treb was having a hard time staying focused (we were besieging the town from a forested field) until I told him to visualize the orcs as a particularly nefarious copse of pine trees; that dwarf can hit a conifer right in the tap-root at 500 yards. Shortly after Riyold received its new garrison, we received four more trebuchets and began our long, long, loooong and arduous slog westward to the every-lit beacon of barbarism: Braduk the Burning.


Serodh: Razed. Shazak: Razed. Pain: Razed. Hezickul: bombarded, looted and razed twice just for good measure. We were excited that we might be able capture Renegade Hill but it turned out it wasn’t actually founded ON A HILL. Dwarves can’t live on flat land!?! We need walls, slopes and a good line of sight to keep our enemies from doing anything that a well placed volley of sling stones can’t solve. After a six year siege (at this point our trebuchets were only held together by duct tape and the abject terror Bambur inspired in machines) the slowest moving genocide EVER (likened by one dwarf to a molasses tsunami... strange fellow, that one) concluded with the razing of Braduk the Burning. Of course, razing the city built around the Eternal Flame of the Diety of Fire counter-intuitively involved putting out a lot blazes rather than the traditional Pillage+Burn maneuver. We received orders that we were to return to Riyold before re-deployment; the Umber city of Gal-Dur struck a vein of iron so rich that we have been tapping it exclusively, rather than bothering with the piddly surface deposits of the metal.


True to his word, Arturus had ceded considerable authority and the Khazad were a very, very wealthy aristocracy. The McDuck clan had actually taken to piling their lucre into a pool to swim in it and a number of nobles from the Umber had decided to come to the surface and inform everyone that their rooms were too small. Worship of the Goddess, formerly a central tenet of dwarven society, was being supplanted with the more “applied exhaltation” of Kilmorph via profit mongering; the kids are calling it Consumption. The occasional fundamentalist stonewarden would shout about Mammon supplanting Kilmorph and that the razing of the orcs was propelling us all towards armageddon, but they couldn’t stop market forces any more than they could stop an avalanche (you had to be a druid to do that and no one had seen those guys since Mulcarn decided Erebus looked good in white). Like it or not, the dwarves were on the move, changing the surface of Erebus (while hollowing out the interior) and being changed in the process.


More to come later. Until then, stay dwarfy.
 
I really look forward to the next instalment. Your stories are always really funny (especially the writing style)
 
Top Bottom