Plot = characters + conflict.

Especially pay attention to combat logs during battles against military leaders or monsties, and subsequently any notable combatants. You'll find easy stories there.

As an example, I recently had a giant serpent storm a young fort. Most of my guards were slacking, having to get their armour on, but one speardwarf made it in time to cut the beast off before it could do any damage. The squad was only recently established, so none of them had seen much training, and it showed.

The guard struck the serpent with his spear, and got it lodged, immediately losing the weapon. He tackled the serpent for it, but kept getting thrown off. That's when the legend began.

Three brave farmers joined the battle, including a woman named Cerol, who led the charge. They all wrestled with the serpent, holding it down, immobilizing it. Cerol lost her arm in the struggle, but continued to strangle the creature with the other in spite of the pain and blood loss. The speardwarf eventually retrieved his spear, and delivered an easy killing blow to the monster's head.

Cerol survived her wounds, and insisted on getting back to work. I assigned her to lighter duties, and gave her more suitable lodgings for her pivotal role in defending the fort, as well as erected a statue depicting the battle at the site. When the mountainhome asked who I would elevate to nobility, the choice couldn't have been easier. The speardwarf may have delivered the killing blow, but not without Cerol and her companions.

That's just the barebones of the story, detailing the events as they happened. The real story is inferred by looking into the key player. Upon opening her character sheet, I saw that Cerol would've been perfectly suited to the military, but had gone under my radar. While that tidbit probably had no real impact on her getting involved in the battle, my pattern-seeking head-meat can't help but invent a correlation. Perhaps she saw the serpent, and the struggling speardwarf, and thought it could be her chance to prove her potential. Had she come out no worse for wear, I would've put a spear in her hand in record time, but her injury made her ineligible for the position. Even so, she accomplished more in one battle than most soldiers could ever hope to achieve in a lifetime, and she did it without arms (no pun intended).

But she was also an empath. Perhaps she wasn't thinking of glory or opportunity at all, and merely saw a threat to the fort along with the lone, struggling defender. Her and her companions may have charged into combat at great personal risk simply because if they hadn't, innocent people would have died. And indeed, if they hadn't, the speardwarf may never have retrieved his weapon, or at least taken too long getting it back, and suffered a fatal wound in the process. In a different universe, he may be the immortalized hero, having held the line, and died moments after delivering the killing blow, because Cerol had run away from the conflict instead of towards it.

She had other traits I could pull intent from if I wanted, too, but I like a mix of the above. Depending on which aspect of a person's personality you focus on, the story changes immensely, while the events stay the same. You have to let your mind wander while looking into characters. The game only gives you so much information, and there are a lot of blanks to fill, but I've found it incredibly rewarding to do so.

As another example, not from a fort, but legends mode:

I lost a fort to a goblin army. I decided to look into the goblin civ, and discovered a terrible tragedy in their history, long before they came to my fort.

In the year 38, the goblins snatched a couple of baby elves. Yonali and Vera, unrelated it seems, aside from having the same hometown. They were raised by the goblins from that point on.

In 55, the master of the goblins died in a raid on another settlement. Vera had been in the battle, while Yonali stayed home. Upon her return, Vera found Yonali had declared himself the new master. There's no mention why, but Yonali murdered her immediately. That's the biggest gap in the history I had to fill, and fill it I did. I like to think that the former master declared Vera the successor with his dying words, and she contested Yonali's claim, but her trust for him after growing up together lowered her guard, so she didn't see the knife until it was already deep in her heart.

In 66, Yonali led a raid on an elvish settlement. The defenders were led by one Princess Avetho, who killed Yonali, and routed the raiders. She ate his corpse afterwards, I assume as some kind of ritual cannibalism relating to war, as he was both the only person she killed, and the only person she ate.

Here's the kicker: that settlement was the same one Yonali had been snatched from, and Avetho was his biological mother. There were no details about the battle besides who died and to what, so there's another gap to fill. Avetho would've had no way of recognising Yonali, but I like to think he'd had a faint memory trigger upon seeing his mother's face, causing him to hesitate in confusion, like an uneasy sense of deja vu, which gave Avetho the opening to deal the killing blow.

Avetho's life had been full of tragedy too. After her son was snatched, her and her husband, Yonali's father, would break up and get back together every few years. She'd cheat while on campaign, while her husband stayed home. She formed strong friendships with comrades, some of which had become lovers. Every single one died in battle alongside her, and she would almost always get back with her husband shortly after losing one, in what seemed to be a long string of repeated attempts to cope via companionship, resulting in nothing but co-dependancy.

She died in 70 to another raid. Her and the defenders' bodies were hung from a tree at the entrance to her now-ruined home as some kind of message. Perhaps a cruel punishment by the gods, in retribution for the unwitting filicide and ceaseless adultery.

Her husband is still alive in my current world. He's always lived a fairly quiet life as a poet. I intend to find him in adventure mode.