You might not know Kruggsmash. If so, you’re missing out, and you should fix that. Here’s his stuff:
🎥 Kruggsmash on YouTube · ❤️ Kruggsmash on Patreon
Go watch a video or two. I’ll wait.
Who is Kruggsmash?
He’s a storyteller who plays Dwarf Fortress, that legend of a game with veeery niche (not nice, niche) graphics, and turns it into amazing illustrated stories. Dwarves live, dwarves die (a lot of them die), fortresses rise and fall. And somehow he makes you care about a dwarf you met two minutes ago. He draws everything by hand and narrates it all himself. It’s wonderful stuff. A totally recommended piece of art.
How he helped me early on
When I started writing fantasy music seriously, almost nobody knew my music. A few tracks, some ideas, and not much proof anyone wanted to hear them.
Around that time I was playing a lot of Dwarf Fortress. Completely hooked by the game. I found Kruggsmash on YouTube, loved what he was doing, and offered to write music for his stories.
And he said yes.
That became Scorchfountain, an album for one of his Dwarf Fortress sagas. I loved it from the start. I wrote the main theme, and about a year later I came back and made a darker, heavier version of it once the story took a grimmer turn (that one’s here). It wasn’t just a job to me. It was the first time my music went out with a story thousands of people already cared about. They heard it because they trusted him. And some of them stuck around once they found out there was a composer back there too.
That doesn’t happen unless someone opens the door for you. He opened the door.
And he kept coming back
The thing I love about Krugg is that he just keeps making stuff. Year after year. And every now and then he comes back and asks me to score whatever world he’s building next:
- Scorchfountain. The original theme and the later Dark Theme version, with all the epicness I could muster.
- New themes for sagas like Nökortorad: Hunt for the Glacier’s Eye. I still think about that one whenever I need something cold and mournful.
- Spearcavern and Northbridge season tracks, which later went into my library so other storytellers could use them too.
- And a weird fun one: a layered two-minute track you can build up from quiet exploration into full combat. (There’s even a sneaky sci-fi synth layer in there. His stories go to strange places sometimes.)
Every one of those taught me something. The dark theme taught me how to take a melody people already love and push it somewhere heavier without ruining it. Glacier’s Eye taught me restraint. Sometimes the cold only works when you stop adding things.
Go support him
If you’re a GM, a fantasy reader, a worldbuilder, a fellow composer, a Dwarf Fortress player, or just someone who likes a good story, go subscribe. And if you can spare it, back him on Patreon. People making niche stuff like this need that support to keep going. He’s the reason a lot of dwarves got to die memorably.
🎥 Subscribe on YouTube · ❤️ Become a Patron
Thank you, Krugg
I owe you one. Probably more than one. Thanks for trusting my music with your stories back when there wasn’t much reason to, and for letting me keep coming back every time a new fortress needs a theme.
I hope you all check him out. You’ll have a blast.