Salamandastron

Saturday morning found me wandering around in the Dwarf Fortress workshop on Steam with my stone mug of coffee, as I am wont to do, because as much as I love unwieldy complexity it’s wonderful to watch the DF community soothe each others wounds with some C# and the correct amount of time on their hands. I won’t ruin your life with the details, but you can typically find things here that help with some of the quirkier components of fortress admin life, and hurt your chances of ever becoming warlord within the vast expanse of the DF subreddit. Purists have never really had a thing for corner cutters, and that has perhaps not been this true since the inner chambers of post-Reformation Catholicism. Non-canonical cynicism abounds.

This time through, though, I stumbled on something that felt like the video game marketplace version of seeing the same cat twice in The Matrix: a Salamandastron mod.

Before my social life is ended forever by the magistrates, let me explain.

As a quick note: if you’re not familiar with what a mod is, it’s just a modification that a 3rd party group or individual person makes using an API provided by the developer. Essentially, it lets you make changes you’d like to see in the game and then offer it as a (usually) free add-on to other players.

Salamandastron is the 8th book in Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, one of the realest YA Fantasy series of all time. As a kid, these books became an obsession of mine when I was in the midst of Genghis Khan-ing the steppes of my local library and its summer book challenge’s talent pool of regional challengers. It’d be fair to say that my demolition of all parties involved and volumes in stock was complete. I’ve rarely begged for anything in my life more than I did for them to get the series installments they were missing, but the local reps for Big Library shut me down in a truly Southern way by saying they’d make a note to hold them for me next time they were available and then never doing it.

Redwall is a legendary series to me for its culinary writing alone. Brian Jacques slapped ass at describing feasts, and the food freakdowns that took place both at the semi-central Redwall Abbey and the outlying centers of narrative action made me want to be an English Medieval badger more than anything on the Earth. And burrowed about a third of the way into the series, Salamandastron stood as perhaps the shiniest example of the series’ other major strong suit: Cozy Siege Fiction.

No one does comfortable chaos better than Brian Jacques, and I cannot recommend this series enough if you haven’t read any of it. I found a list on the publisher site of every book in the series which I’ll include in the button below, and the site has links to a number of retailers carrying it so you can get your freak on. If you’re looking for something cohesive and non-threatening for the beach this year then you are in fucking luck. I also suspect that my love for Dwarf Fortress runs back through a well-maintained and overly ornate badger tunnel to the fortress of Salamandastron. There’s something strangely toasty and pleasing about a scenario where the enemies are (mostly) only outside and you and the homies are inside with plenty of blankets and snacks. And as corny as it may sound, it would be nice if real life were always like that.

* Website Header art by @saltmalkin