Utterly Mad

I figured it out. The bogeymen were mostly on the ground. What I didn't notice was that one of them will always be clinging to your feet, 1 z-level below you, at all times and can attack you from there. Don't know why I didn't spot it before. As for indoors, you are correct. I found that building a pillar and attaching a floor to one side of the pillar so that it acts as a roof is enough to drive off the bogeymen. Just step under the single tile roof and they "poof" back into the blackness from which they came. As long as the place you enter has the "indoors" tag, they cant come at you. You don't even need a floor under your feet.

Another observation, the various ambush/raiding parties that usually fall upon an adventurer as they travel have a habit of congregating around the edge of a player made camp site. Seriously. They just hit the edge and then refuse to get any closer, I assume, because there movement is determined on the overland map. The thing is, animal and night creature ambushes dont congregate. They just walk on up to the works, look around, and if they cant find you, they fuck off to bother someone else.

I managed to kill off half of a large group of accumulated bandits by luring them away one at a time and strangling them to death. I noticed right away that most of them were armed with books and musical instruments. Even though they had all the appearance of a traveling band of entertainers, they were still very aggressive. My strangling spree ended when a crossbowman I grabbed got a lucky shot through my iron breastplate.

That was another thing, a lot of the bandits that had pooled on the border of my camp were armed with instruments.

Gelding blows. Fairly common it seems, so I spent a happy few hours sack tapping elves at a forest retreat. Also managed to geld an elephant man living among them and ran away while it was unconscious. No elves where killed on this vicious assault on their testicles, they would usually pass out from pain, and if they didn't I'd just choke them out and leave them.

You never realize just how lacking vanilla adventure mode is until you accidentally play it without adventurecraft.
Human outside is the only available adventurer? Well ok. Hm, nakedness. This does not feel safe. *kill deer* Ok, now to make... Oh, I forgot to install adventure craft...

After 6 or 7 years of in game time, I have retired Vesselfountains. It has a military of around 60 fairly skilled fighters, most of whom are mercenaries, led by very skilled or not skilled at all dwarves all trained via conventional (non-danger room) means. It sports a library featuring a pair of imprisoned necromancers to poke at and ask dumb questions of. An in with 4 floors housing what is probably the cause of my low FPS: and ungodly number of poets and bards. The chapel is entirely non-denominational, and I never bothered to get real ones built. The main entrance is guarded by a magma crab turret that causes a majority of civilian losses during invasions, a line of cage/weapon traps, and a vomit covered retracting green glass bridge suspended over the mouth of a volcano. Under the fort (inside) is a functioning obsidian caster (because why not) and (outside) a man made lake. Our main exports were lead childrens toys and obsidian figurines of animals. Also, giant vultures. I had about 6 tame vultures and had butchered the semi-wild ones. I was trying to get giant anoles, giant leopard geckos, horned owls, and ibex going too.

The FPS became impossible before I could finish, even with DFhack fastdwarf I couldn't keep going. I used DF hack to finish the lake off and then I pulled my special lever. The lever that would stop everything and preserve vessel fountains forever. The dog switch. Mere seconds after activating this most potent of game ending levers, the cage it was hooked up to burst, unleashing a flood of around three hundred war dogs taking my FPS from 6 to 3, down to 0 to 0. Time stopped. I hit escape and retired the fort. Good bye vessel fountains, I will return when some of those lazy ass poets have left. (gonna found a new fort to draw dwarves/poets out of vesselfountains and then reclaim it.

By the way, in this world that vesselfountains exists in. All of the dwarven civs have no access to iron. I've been getting iron from melted down human anvils. Somehow the dwarves have steel though. My military is equipped mostly with copper/bronze armor and there are a few steel weapons lying around and in use.

Another side note, you can order/buy mugs made from bone and gems but you can't make them yourself.

Do animal person venoms actually have any effect in adventure mode? In both vanilla and adventure craft I've tried biting people/animal and then waiting around/avoiding them but the venom never seems to kick in.

Genned a new world and didn't realize until I went to play it that I had genned a world in which ALL races had been supplanted by kobolds. The small map is dotted with kobold forest retreats, kobold villages, a kobold dark fortress, and kobold hillocks/fortresses. The history was genned until 125, but the legends records stop at the year 47. The kobolds didn't conquer the world so much as they simply came to reside in places and then outbred the residents. In adventure mode, only outsiders are available for every race, and animal people are completely unavailable. The last recorded historical event was from the year 47 (as I said) was a dragon overthrowing the last dwarven civilization. Cannot seem to find a single being of any other race, but apparently there are still dwarves somewhere, though on embark it says that the civ is "dead or dying."

I accept your challenge dwarf fortress.