If you are curious about Dwarf Fortress and want to understand the attraction without necessarily grinding through learning how to play the game, I highly recommend watching some of the play throughs on Youtube by Kruggsmash: https://www.youtube.com/user/kruggsmash/playlists
He is currently illustrating his adventures and it is nothing short of amazing. It's hard to know where to suggest starting, but basically he began his current story telling and illustration technique in Steelclutches Part 2. That's actually adventure mode, though, so it might not be the best place to start. The current series, Monster Killer, is stand-alone so you could probably start there.
Thanks for sharing, I just watched Monsterkiller episode 1 and it was hilarious and really entertaining.
I'm a bit lost as to what many of the sprites are, and I'm still unclear on many of the game's mechanics, but hopefully things become clearer over time.
I've been playing the game for several years and that still describes me :-). Although, he uses a custom font -- normally it would be only characters in codepage 473. He's modified it so that some of the items in the game look closer to what you might expect. Quite a lot of people like his font for the game, but personally I prefer to have just normal characters.
He is currently illustrating his adventures and it is nothing short of amazing. It's hard to know where to suggest starting, but basically he began his current story telling and illustration technique in Steelclutches Part 2. That's actually adventure mode, though, so it might not be the best place to start. The current series, Monster Killer, is stand-alone so you could probably start there.
However, one particular special episode it worth watching, which is the first Holiday special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiy8zCvD_1U&t=3s