I love that psychic powers are still “allowed” in science fiction. They’re an acceptable part of the aesthetic. Like you can’t have magic, but you can have brain magic, because it’s more Science.
At the time when a lot of classic scifi was written, the pseudo-scientific, academic veneer surrounding psychics had yet to be tarnished. There were university-backed research labs conducting “research” into psychic phenomena. The military and CIA were actively investigating how psychic powers could be used to fight the commies. The CIA even circulated an internal memo condemning James Randi’s efforts at debunking psychics and accusing him of “gross distortions”. Of course, it was all bullshit, but to scifi writers of the 50s, 60s and 70s, “in the future, scientists will discover psychic powers” seemed like as plausible a hypothesis as, like, faster-than-light space travel. And as a result, psychic powers have been grandfathered in to more recent scifi.
It’s a colony sim in a somewhat standard fantasy setting, with the twist that nearly everything is procedurally generated in unnecessary detail. Town names? Procedural. Instruments? Procedural. The history of the world you’re in? Procedural. Ancient horrors sealed deep below the world? Procedural. The gods themselves? Procedural. Your job is to help your horde of alcoholics survive whatever meticulously simulated nonsense the game decides to throw at you. It ranges from pretty standard, like invading armies, to fantastical, like vampires you have to solve criminal cases to catch, to deranged, like that time I dug up a demon made of fire that was effectively invincible in combat because everything’s pathfinding was too messed up by the smoke it gave off to fight back. For a general idea of how strange it can get, read Boatmurdered, an old written Let’s Play still beloved by the community.
So the Developers are Playing God playing god
In addition, virtually everything is simulated, which has led to some hilarious bugs in the past. To get a good idea of the level of detail, the tears in a dwarve’s eyes are tracked, and can be theoretically spread onto other things (though granted im not sure if it has been tested, hard to get them off the eyes i imagine), these ‘other things’ (any part of any creature/object in the game) would then be stained with those tears, which is itself tracked, and those tears will remain there until removed.
Wasn’t there also the issue with cats just turning up dead in someone’s tavern, and then it turned out that when a dwarf decided to do something while in the middle of drinking, they would just toss their alcohol on the floor, and then cats would walk through the tavern and get the alcohol on their paws, and so when they later groomed themselves, they would technically ingest the alcohol and immediately die of alcohol poisoning?
Unforeseen Consequences, The Game
A classic way for a new player’s fortress to fall is by failing to make new clothes. After a couple years the old clothes start to rot off the dwarves bodies and then the sight of naked children causes a huge negative mood spike for the whole fortress. This causes what is called a “tantrum spiral” fortresses rarely recover from a tantrum spiral.
Once I had a vampire problem. Vampires are hard to find, but you’ll know when you have one due to the dead dwarves with bite marks that show up. Eventually I found out what happened: the very first vampire had fallen down a well and died thus tainting the fort’s water supply with vampire blood. So the entire fortress was vampires. They fed on incoming migrants with the new members of the fort living or dying based on whether they drank from the well before one of the other vampires got to them.
Dwarf Fortress is a game where things just sorta happen.
when I was a kid I read a sci-fi story where some researcher discovers that all crocodiles since prehistory have had the same congenital heart defect, so they set about curing it. when they do, suddenly their research specimen starts getting stronger and healthier and growing rapidly and developing new appendages, and it turns out all crocodilians were actually stunted sickly forms of dragons. that story really stuck with me because it’s basically an expression of the “what if I went to the doctor and they discovered I was deficient in one special vitamin and then I took a pill and all my problems and ailments vanished immediately” fantasy.
unrelated, I started taking daily antihistamines this month for the first time in my life,
