Approx. Reading Time: 3 minutes.

The Age of Myth is upon us. The sands of time brush the land, shaping and easing as they pass it by. The halls of the living lay founded on the dead, and the world, ever-changing, comes at last to rest on a band of dwarves.

I’ve had a hell of a fun (and frustrating!) time playing Dwarf Fortress, a real-time strategy game that has captured the hearts of a growing clique of gamers since the mid-2000s. Minecraft’s development team lists Dwarf Fortress as a driving influence, and Blizzard has referenced DF in both World of Warcraft and Starcraft II; it even features in NYC’s Museum of Modern Art. From a writer’s perspective, Dwarf Fortress is also a treasure trove of insights into the art of worldbuilding.

Losing is Fun! How Dwarf Fortress Builds Worlds

The game’s creators, Zach and Tarn Adams, placed a great deal of thought into DF’s mechanics. Each new map is procedurally-generated (made randomly by the program), however, a dense list of structures, landscapes, and living things are used to populate it, with each object represented by an ASCII symbol. Check out the list of Dwarf Fortress creatures below—from dwarves to werebeasts:

dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Creature

Every creature, referred to as a “figure” in-game, exists through the lens of three distinct game modes:

• Dwarf Fortress Mode
• Adventurer Mode
• Legends Mode

Dwarf Fortress

In Dwarf Fortress mode, you oversee a group of seven dwarves who must build lodgings before the winter arrives. While you execute commands and watch your folk go about their days, you learn that you can mine out nearby mountains to create a fortress in the stone. From there, the day-to-day work sees their construction sprawl out from the ante-chamber, delving further and further down through the earth. You come to better understand your dwarves—their roles, their personalities, their strengths, and their weaknesses.

As time goes on, the fortress ages and eventually meets with tragedy. Whether immediate or drawn out, the end always comes—and your dwarves always die, leaving their once bustling halls empty.

Adventurer Mode

In Adventurer Mode, you take on the role of a dwarvish explorer, receiving quests from NPCs like you would with any other fantasy adventure game and using the same ASCII-styled map system to move around—but here, Dwarf Fortress breaks the mould. Using the power of the game’s procedural world generation, your dwarf can tell his or her own stories, write poetry, and even visit the old, abandoned ruins of your fortresses!

Legends Mode

If the first two modes let players dive into the here-and-now of their crafted worlds, then Legends Mode presents the most enthralling historical overview they could ask for. Remember how I mentioned that Dwarf Fortress is procedurally generated? Part of this revolves around the creation of “figures”, each of which interacts with the world in a variety of ways. Legends Mode in fact keeps track of each of these interactions, resulting in a tome-like compilation of the lives and events of every living thing in the world that you crated.

As a writer, I can’t help but fall in love with the charm of such a game mode. Here, for example, take a look at this—it’s the life of Erar Imikmonang Aran, a bronze colossus that fought with dwarf and necromancer alike, eventually stuck down near Windwaden.

Community-Driven Narratives

Dwarf Fortress has fans, too. They’re a quirky bunch, to be sure, but thanks to it, the stories they tell never fail to catch the eye. Check out some of the fun community tales below:

• www.bit.ly/kruggsmash-yt
• www.bit.ly/nookrium-yt
• www.bitl.y/merchantslipped-yt

In fact, I’ve had almost as much fun reading others’ dwarvish tales as I’ve had with my own. Tales of viruses that swept through fortresses, visiting troupes of demons, massive invasions by foreign hordes of goblins, humans, and wicked dwarves—hell, even beer-drenched cats convulsing in piles of vomit (no, seriously).

The story of drunk cats:

• www.bit.ly/drunk-cats-df

Digital Fantasy

Here’s a neat segue: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales adds depth to the world of Middle Earth through a layer of legends from the First to the Third Age—for instance, in the story of Mîm, readers learn of the petty dwarves, a smaller race of dwarves who were hunted in the forests of the First Age by elves. While some may disagree with me, I’d consider Dwarf Fortress to mirror the layered style of story-telling with remarkable efficiency, turning the game into a kind of digital sibling for Tolkien’s mythology through its use of tech-driven “mythopoeia” (myth-making).

In other words, I think that Dwarf Fortress extends the particular style of narrative that Tolkien used in his Middle Earth works, into the modern medium of technology.

And I’ll be damned if that isn’t something worth striking the Earth about!

Get Dwarf Fortress Here (It’s Free!)

• www.bay12games.com/dwarves