Tarn Adams was in the carpeted spare bedroom that serves as his work space, trying to avert an apocalyptic outbreak of vampire dwarves. It was a chilly afternoon in Silverdale, Wash. The brothers — both heavyset, with close-cropped brown hair and sweetly sheepish demeanors — were conversing, as they do every day, about Dwarf Fortress, the computer game they began devising in Its various versions have been downloaded in the neighborhood of a million times, although the number of players who have persisted past an initial attempt is doubtless much smaller. As with popular simulation games like the Sims series, in which players control households, or the Facebook fad FarmVille, where they tend crops, players in Dwarf Fortress are responsible for the cultivation and management of a virtual ecosystem — in this case, a colony of dwarves trying to build a thriving fortress in a randomly generated world. Unlike those games, though, Dwarf Fortress unfolds as a series of staggeringly elaborate challenges and devastating setbacks that lead, no matter how well one plays, to eventual ruin.

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Hippo Eats Dwarf is the title of a news article which claims that a dwarf was accidentally eaten by a hippopotamus. The urban legend has been circulating via the internet since the mids. The story goes that a freak accident occurred at a circus during an act involving a dwarf bouncing on a trampoline. The dwarf jumped sideways off the trampoline just at the moment a hippopotamus began to yawn.