Every composer who’s still doing this for a living can name a handful of people who, very early on, took a chance on their music when there wasn’t much of a reason to. For me, one of those people is Kruggsmash.
If you don’t know him yet — stop reading this and go meet his work first. I’m serious. The post will still be here when you come back.
Go. I’ll wait.
What Kruggsmash actually does
Kruggsmash is a storyteller who uses Dwarf Fortress — the legendary, almost-two-decades-in-the-making fantasy world generator with veeery niche (not nice, niche) graphics — as the engine for some of the most affecting illustrated fantasy stories you’ll find anywhere on the internet. Dwarves die, dynasties collapse, glaciers get hunted, fortresses fall, friendships form, songs get sung. He draws every character by hand. He narrates everything in that calm, dryly funny, deeply human voice. He makes you care about a dwarf you’ve known for forty seconds.
If you’ve ever loved a long-form fantasy story — Tolkien, Jordan, Sanderson, Erikson, Glen Cook — Kruggsmash’s series scratch the same itch, only the world is being generated and inhabited in real time. There is nothing else quite like it.
How he helped me when nobody knew my name
When I started writing fantasy music professionally, I was a complete unknown. I had a handful of tracks, a few ideas about what I wanted my music to sound like, and very little proof that anyone outside my own head wanted to hear it.
Around that time I was deep in a Dwarf Fortress marathon and completely hooked on Kruggsmash’s videos. So I did the only thing that made sense: I reached out to him on Twitter — a nobody composer messaging one of my favourite storytellers, half-expecting nothing.
He said yes anyway.
That collaboration became Scorchfountain — an album of music for one of his ongoing Dwarf Fortress sagas. I loved being part of it from the very start. Writing the Scorchfountain main theme, then a year later getting to rework it into a darker, fuller version when the story took its own heavier turn (that one’s here) — that wasn’t just a commission. It was the first time my fantasy music was attached to a story that thousands of people were already emotionally invested in. People heard it because they trusted him, and a lot of them stayed because they then found out a composer behind the music existed.
That doesn’t happen without somebody opening the door. He opened the door.
The collaborations didn’t stop
What I love about Kruggsmash is that he keeps making things. Year after year. The fortresses keep falling, the dwarves keep singing, the maps keep being drawn. And every now and then he asks me to come back and write more music for whatever world he’s currently building.
Over the years that’s meant:
- The Scorchfountain album — the original theme and the later “Dark Theme” rework, with all the epicness I could muster.
- New main themes for later sagas like Nökortorad: Hunt for the Glacier’s Eye — a series I still think back on whenever I write something cold and mournful.
- Spearcavern and Northbridge season tracks, eventually folded into my wider library so other storytellers could put them under their own dwarven sagas.
- A more recent experiment: a multi-layered, two-minute track designed to be stacked from peaceful exploration into full combat — and yes, with a sci-fi synth layer hiding in there too, because his stories sometimes go strange places.
Every one of those projects taught me something. The Scorchfountain dark theme taught me how to push an existing melody into a much heavier place without breaking what people loved about it. The Glacier’s Eye theme taught me restraint — there’s a kind of cold music that only works when you stop adding things. The layer-stack experiment forced me to write something that had to work vertically as well as horizontally, like a piece of music designed to be DJ’d live by a Dungeon Master.
Please go support him
If you’re a tabletop GM, a fantasy reader, a worldbuilder, a writer of long things, a composer, a Dwarf Fortress player, or just somebody who likes good stories told well — go subscribe to his channel and, if you can, support him on Patreon. Independent storytellers who work in their own niche format need that kind of long-term support to keep going. He’s the reason a lot of dwarves get to die memorably.
🎥 Subscribe on YouTube — Kruggsmash ❤️ Become a Patron — Kruggsmash
Thank you, Krugg
I owe you one. Probably more than one. Probably more than I’ve ever managed to say out loud. Thank you for trusting my music with your stories back when there was very little reason to, and for letting me keep coming back every time a new fortress needs a theme.
Long may the strike-the-earth keep ringing.
— Ivan