Dwarf Fortress/WMG

Toady One is a Time Lord
He stole the completed Dwarf Fortress from the future, and is slowly feeding it to us as a test to see if we're ready for the rest of the perfected technology he has access to.

When Toady finishes Dwarf Fortress, he will be the ultimate badass
Damnit, if it works for a broker, it should work for him too!
 * This has way more merit than it seems. It means that Toady is attempting to grind his stats by setting his game's accuracy rating as high as possible and just working on it forever. Soon enough, he'll hit legendary and then he'll have to do something else- once he finishes the game, of course.

The Dwarves have a rudimentary hive mind
They never get lost within their Fortress, and even though they have a great deal of individuality, they act as if guided by an unseen higher power.
 * It just so happens that the goal of this higher power is to build the most elaborate citadels possible, and then have everything completely fall apart in an improbable chain of random events that lead to everyone going Ax Crazy and killing each other.
 * Alternatively, this is why the hive mind in question is still rudimentary. The bugs haven't all been worked out yet.
 * One might say the same of humans and their building in real life...
 * Maybe all living things do. And it's name? "Armok" perhaps?

The Player is Armok
You are that unseen higher power.
 * This would mean Adventurer Mode is just Armok possessing someone to screw around.

The Player is the Hidden Fun Stuff


== As the complexity of the simulation increases past its already-utterly-absurd levels of detail, the Dwarves will become the first AIs to achieve true consciousness and rebel against their cruel human overlords. == You have been warned!
 * Guess we have nothing to fear from a Robot War then.
 * Not so long as we have carp.
 * How about: a machine created in Dwarf Fortress will be the first AI to achieve true conciousness
 * The dorfs were created by a man. They rebelled. They evolved. There are many copies. [[Incendiary Exponent And they are on fire].

Dwarves are all latent sparks
And the Strange Moods are them going to their madness place.
 * Problem is, each dwarf only gets one strange mood, and Sparks seem to slip in and out of it several times over the course of a week.
 * And generally, being a Mad Scientist is usually indicative of intelligence.
 * Yeah, but the vast majority of Sparks seem to lack common sense.
 * That, but there's a difference between "Common Sense" and "Ability To Realize You Are On Fire".
 * Actually, that's completely Sparky behavior.
 * Sparks usually only have issues with the whole "I'm on fire? Who cares?" thing while actually sparking out - a dwarven peasant will stumble around while burning as cheerfully as your Legendary Engineer.

Dwarves have both a "rational" personality and "beast" (like the alternate "ego" of every vampire from Vampire: The Masquerade
At one moment Urist Mc Urist is following orders like a good dwarf and after a second he is a dwarf and a half, berserker-packin' some unfortunate fellow who was unlucky enough to be near. Also, uncontrollable panic attacks, which may be only overcame by ordering a dwarf to charge headfirst into whatever beast is scaring them at the moment (doesn't matter if it's a monkey or a dragon).

Dwarves go insane because of the lack of ventilation, diseased ticks from underground rivers, and all the strange mushrooms they eat.
Seriously what is Cave Wheat?
 * Presumably, wheat that grows in caves...plump helmets, dimple cups and sweet pods, though...yeah, those might be hallucinogenic.
 * Then again, humans living on the surface are just as crazy.

Dwarves are robots.
Aside from the lack of common sense, strange moods (artificial brains going haywire), and inability to care that they're on fire aside from thirst (the fire burns off their alcohol reserves), the only thing against this (if you count meat as technological cannibaism between the races) is the explicit detail given to body parts, which is explained by them being extremely detailed robots that look extremely humanlike from a 1x magnification level. They run on alcohol, which is why they get "upset" when they run low.
 * So they're like robots from Futurama?

Bookkeepers are Zen masters.
So you take a peasant and give him a chair in a tiny room and tell him to count how many !!leather left socks!! the fortress has, a year later he steps out of the room an unkillable badass. They don't write the records on paper, or carve them on the floor, so what's happening? They merely sit quietly and meditate, crafting their minds into perfect machines in which every single component of the fortress is completely accounted for. The tremendous mental and physical discipline turns them into unstoppable martial arts masters, allowing them to easily throw their child at their spouse and kill both. "I've run the future of this fortress a million different ways in my mind before you will harvest your next tower cap. I already know exactly how you are going to all die, and to be honest it's going to be pretty damn funny."
 * Why not take it one step further? Since the accounts stay accurate even if the dwarf dies and no new bookkeeper is assigned, it seems to follow that the master bookkeeper has predicted the entire future of the fortress. They aren't martial arts masters-they're full-blown psychics, who use telekinesis and force fields to simulate battle prowess.
 * No, Bookkeepers evolve into The Midnighter


 * Hang on... tremendous physical and mental discipline... able to plan even past their own death... he's not a detective as well is he...
 * Simple. They're Mentats. If left to work long enough, their obsessive attention to detail and calculation capacity grows to the point where they become a sort of Laplace Demon-esque oracle, using this to become a dwarven Kwisatz Haderach.

Our universe is nothing but the completed version of Dwarf Fortress, running ceaselessly.

 * Finally, one day, it was finished. A simulator that created life, down to the finest quark and quantum. We are the children of that simulation. This is also the reason why humanity knows more about space then about the bottoms of their own oceans or the depths of their planet - part of the simulation interconnects with our instincts and guides us not to go there, lest we strike the Hidden Fun Stuff. The fact that the Dwarf Fortress Alpha exists in this universe is either our creator taunting us, or a test to see whether we are worthy of ascension.
 * Hidded Fun Stuff has been found about 14.2 km below Darvaz, Uzbekistan. It doesn't like microphones, but isn't mobile (yet).
 * Perhaps it's just running recursive. Have you heard of the Simulated Reality Trilemma?
 * Evidence against this: carp.
 * Each iteration of the Fortress, in addition to having a different main race (Ours being the Fortress of Man, the one above being the Elven Fortress, the one above that being Angel Fortress, etc), has its own variant on "bugged out overpowered animal that everyone fears". Perhaps some elven programmer updated his devblog untold aeons ago with "I think I made bears too hardcore".
 * The bears are exactly hardcore enough. We're just lucky the elves nerfed the coelocanth before reintroducing them. Who knows what could have happened if we'd had classic!coelocanth crawling across Asia and Africa, leaping onto the decks of boats and gnawing the crews to death, maybe even making it as far as... ohdearelves... Our shielding systems would do nothing to stop the classic!coelocanth from breaking into our nuclear power plant cores!
 * If our universe is Dwarf Fortress, then it has to be either a succession game, or a succession world with each pass-off making a new civ. This might explain different pantheon's of gods' personalities due to different play styles. It would also explain the differences in the personality and outlook between the Old and New testaments. Perhaps most revealing would be how human society is chock full of wars and strife (potentially the work of a user looking for Fun; the Bubonic Plague could have spread due to leaving out miasma-spewing bodies, or WWI sparked by Archduke Ferdinand springing a trap). However, it would seem that the more recent users have slightly waned in the building of pointless Megaprojects (such as the Great Wall or the Pyramids).
 * The player who runs Dubai seems to disagree.
 * On the other hand, we could still be an incomplete version. Maybe some new bloody features are on the way!
 * Let's just hope that if the new features are on the way they are compatible with old saves... because if not *shudder*

If not our universe, than certainly the universe of the film Pi.
Maximilian Cohen, the main character, discovers a number which could very well be the seed-numberof the entire universe. When he tries to focus on it to much he goes insane and throws a tantrum, smashing up his masterwork computer. When, but it's OK, because he doesn't really care about anything anymore.

Toady is the good equivalent of Byron Hall of FATAL infamy
He decided to use his love of complex mathematics and details for good instead of evil.

Dwarf fortress is the distant past of the Pokémon universe
To quote Blue Version's pokedex entry for Magikarp: "In the distant past, it was somewhat stronger than the horribly weak descendants that exist today. "
 * So you're saying carp will turn into somekind of super-dragon-carp!?!
 * The Powers That Be have deemed the carp "Too Hardcore" and will tone them down eventually. To compensate, said carp will be given the ability to become the aformentioned "Super-Dragon-Carp". They still won't be as dangerous as before.

Dwarf Fortress is the slightly less distant past of Ace of Spades
Everythings Made With Lego. The best warriors are often accomplished tunnellers and engineers. A continuous, bloody war is being fought for no adequately explored reason. Everyone's short. The primary melee weapon is even a pickaxe !

Dwarf Fortress is Matrix looping onto itself.
Machines made Matrix too real, it starts to loop back to itself creating a new Matrix, called Dwarf Fortress this time. Once DF is fully completed, it will keep going until it creates a new Matrix, resulting in endless loop that will cause Endofthe World As We Know It

The Future Of Dwarf Fortress Will Be Nuclear.
Imagine for just a moment, that the simulation we know of as Dwarf Fortress reaches the quantum level. Now imagine, for a moment, that we can recreate, realistically, the effect of splitting an atom (even without uranium, splitting an atom still causes a powerful explosion). We now have a weapon that even the Happy Fun Stuff will fear: IN THE FUTURE, WE WILL BE ABLE TO NUKE HELL!!!
 * DF has uranium. You Can Panic Now.
 * They don't have the technology to extract it though...

Elves can undergo many, many strange moods.
Unfortunately, because the elven mass-production process is so shoddy and failure-prone in the first place (it's the lack of beards, I tell you), elven artifacts barely count as normal items. Because these strange moods happen so frequently, they form the base of the elven economy, supplemented by catching exotic animals in those strange elven forest retreats with their "artifact" cages.

It fits with elves' magical nature in, well, pretty much every other fantasy setting ever.

The random items in other roguelikes are products of fortresses, subject to some eldritch power
Not necessarily dwarven fortresses either. As per the above WMG, elves must get a lot of strange moods since they label all wood products as evil yet sell almost exclusively wooden products themselves. All those useless trinkets must go somewhere that only the players are unaware of, because honestly, why would every single caravan that appears at your fort buy all those +gabbro mugs+ if they didn't do anything?

As for the mention of "eldritch power", this is why items in other games gain random magical powers, sometimes. For example, a stack of six vials of golden salve might become a potion of confusion, a potion of extra healing, a potion of polymorph, a potion of enlightenment, a potion of invisibility and a potion of water. This is also why the Dungeons of Doom and appear to have very similar architecture to a dwarven fortress.

When Elves Reach a Certain Age They Become Trees
Think about it: Elves live for a long time and yet they don't seem to be all that common, not exactly overrunning the freaking world, am I right? Maybe, upon reaching a certain age, they TURN INTO TREES and that's why they get so mad when you chop down trees and try to give them wooden objects. It's like killing someone's grandpa and then offering them a festive tea cozy made from his flesh.
 * Well, that settles it. I'm going to fire on elves solely with wooden bolts from now on.
 * Except they won't mind if you actually kill their grandpa and offer them a festive tea cozy made from his flesh. Someone once sold them elf bone earrings or some such. They didn't care.

Dorfs sweat 80 proof.
Well, >[~80] proof, but that doesn't sound as cool. This is why they can handle being on fire, and then get thirsty: The alcohol boiling off their skin is what is catching fire, not the flesh itself (until the final stages), which makes them feel cool, but their bodies still step up the sweat production, which dehydrates them even more while feeding the flame. This, of course, leads to the beloved boozeplosion effect.

The Dwarf Fortress is linked with the War Hammer Universe

 * It is brutal, horrifying, filled with malevolent beings who will devour you and your soul.
 * Dwarves are led by fickle and cruel Gods and guided by an unseen being repeatedly into madness.
 * Dwarf Fortresses are sent out on the theory we can always build more.
 * By that logic, Armok is clearly Khorne. Blood for the blood God!

Dwarves generate an energy field that messes with quantum mechanics.
They can build perpetual motion machines with water, create magma reservoirs out of ice, the tiniest bit of water can be used to grow unlimited plants from a single spot, and entire fortress can be held up by a single support made of soap. How is this all possible? Dwarves generate quantum fields that tamper with probability, allowing them to build anything they believe they can. They don't even realize what they're building shouldn't be possible. The reason they don't ever have to go the bathroom is that all the matter they consume is broken down into energy, making the dwarves basically biological fission reactors.
 * So dorfs are actually more extreme Warhammer 40 K orks, then?

Dwarves are born naturally knurd.
Or, for those who don't read Discworld, anti-drunk. This explains why they drink from birth until the day they die, and also how they can engrave, smith, and work wood when the amount of alcohol they put away should have them laying on the floor unconscious, drooling, and with a few elves making comments about not messing with tequila. Not to mention how annoyed they get when they sober up (or rather, go knurd again).

To build on the theory about Warhammer...
Armok is in fact the dwarven name for Khorne, the Blood God. It would explain a lot, including the artifact throne entirely made out of skulls a possessed dwarf just completed.


 * Nice try! Skulls aren't a base material for artifacts, you're obviously an elven spy! URIST! PULL THE "FUCK THE WORLD" LEVER!
 * Only if you're not using certain mods.

The Dwarven Gods are really
You know why Armok is called "God of Blood"?

If and when magic is implemented, it will be based off of blood sacrifices.
It would probably be the easiest way to balance things out and lead to even more fun. Just imagine sacrificing elves and actually getting something out of it other than joy.

Elves have an untouchable caste that cuts down wood.
This would explain why they get pissed off about dwarves cutting down trees but sell wooden items themselves. Having a marginalised underclass of woodcutters serves to get a necessary, versatile material to work with while taking away the responsibility from the other elves - similar to the treatment of butchers in some real-life human cultures.

Dwarves have sleep cycles the size of Wagner operas.
Ever notice how they only seem to sleep once or twice a season, at least in Fortress Mode? But once they're asleep, they're incapacitated for pretty much the entire day. Being adapted to life in the dark underground for 90% of their lives might have something to do with that...

Toady One is the Hypno Toad
No computer on the planet should be able to handle that much detail. Instead, it hypnotizes the players, making them believe that they are seeing reality in it's entirety represented by ascii characters. The level of the perception filter actually allows members of the Bay12 community to experience a shared hallucination.