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What the fuck is this shit?
Have you been living in a cave on Mars? Everyone knows what this is.
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Who is "everyone"?
There's a permanent exhibit dedicated to it in the freaking MoMA!
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Humor me.
All right, all right. Dwarf Fortress is the perpetually-unfinished magnum opus of brothers Tarn and Zach Adams, who are famous for being completely insane (in a good way). Dwarf Fortress is a Roguelike in the same way that the Iliad is a poem. DF starts with the core tenants of a Roguelike and takes them to illogical extremes. For example: Roguelikes are known for their procedural level generation and replayability. DF generates everything prodedurally, from the gods to the terrain to the entire history of the world. There are procedurally generated monsters, artifacts, cities, armies, kings, diseases and much, much more. If you get a quest to kill a dragon, it's because a dragon has actually been bothering the people asking you to do it. In fact, you might just be able to recruit someone personally slighted by said dragon, looking for revenge!
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Sounds cool! So what's the story? How do you beat the game? Who is the big-bad?
You haven't been listening, have you? There isn't one. Since everything is generated, there's no overarching story. You can be whoever and do whatever. If you want to spend your time hunting dragons, you can do that. If you want to become a vampire necromancer with an army of undead, go for it. If you want to be the mayor of some random hamlet, you can do that, too.
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So, how long have you been playing this game?
I've been playing for about 6 years and have hundreds of hours in it.
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Wow! You must be pretty good, then.
Nope. I have no idea what I'm doing. This is pretty much a blind run.
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Huh? 
See, Dwarf Fortress is really 2 games - a stupidly complicated city builder / resource management game / murder simulator and an equally complicated Roguelike. I've been playing the former for years and years, but have practically zero experience with the latter. This means that you get to see the unusual combination of someone who knows the underlying mechanics of the game really, really well, but has no practical experience in actually playing!
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Damn right. Now, let's get to it. We can't actually just jump in and play; like I said, the game has to generate a world for us to play in. So let's just click that "Create New World!" button and get started.
Dwarf Fortress is famous for its game-breaking and many times hilarious bugs. It's just part of the charm.
Here's where you choose your parameters for the world. I could have selected the advanced parameters option from the main menu for a ridiculous amount of options, but I'm just going to leave everything on default for now.
Stuff's happening! First the game creates the landscape.
Then it simulates 250 years (by default) of history. You can start with a longer history, but the amount of things it has to keep track of can bring even the fastest computer to its knees (and take hours, if it doesn't just crash the game). Dwarf Fortress is also famous for being hilariously resource-intensive.
I got up to take a piss and get a beer, and came back to this. From here, we can look around the world the game generated for us and choose to save or discard it. "The Windy Land" looks good enough for me, so let's save it.
We're booted to the main menu, with an option to actually start playing. That will have to wait until next time, however! 