Worst Character Fate

[Sinewmire]

I was just pondering upon the horrific and hilariously awful situations we can get ourselves into in RPGs. What's the worst thing to happen to your characters, or characters in your group?

I think the worst I've seen is what happened to our party necromancer.

We'd been doing a chiney descent through a mysterious crystal cavern. Turned out the crystal held wraiths, and between touch attacks and climbing, they TPK'd us.

Our Cleric necromancer, however, had taken a variant that allowed him to be healed by negative energy, and the con drain couldn't kill him (I forget how exactly). As he was wearing plate, he'd tied himself to the rope in order to fight.

So the wraiths could con-drain him essentially forever, whilst he dangled there, semi-conscious, unable to escape and unable to die. As he had a Ring of Sustenance he couldn't starve either. I guess he'll be there until the rope rots and he either dies to falling damage or escapes.

[Delta]

At a fight being held about a gate that led directly to the demonic nether hells, a character once made a very... brave decision to jump onto the back of a flying demon. I asked him like half a dozen times if he was sure, but he was. Safe to say, by the time the demon was destroyed right over the gate, the wizard wasn't in any condition to cast a levitation spell on him anymore, someone tried to throw him a rope but failed, so in the end, he fell right into the gate. In the metaphysics of the setting, that meant the archdemon the gate belongs to gets to put his soul into a "soulmill" like thing where it's going to be ground down, ripped apart and warped for a couple centuries or even millenia until he emerges as a demon. I don't really like to think about it.

[Sinewmire]

the archdemon the gate belongs to gets to put his soul into a "soulmill" like thing where it's going to be ground down, ripped apart and warped for a couple centuries or even millenia until he emerges as a demon. I don't really like to think about it.

Eep, literally fell into hell then? Yeah, ok, that's pretty bad.

[Glorthindel]

I was running a 3.5 Ravenloft adventure where the party spend a period of time trying to escape an island mental asylum run by a vampire variant that feeds on cerebral fluid. Each night the party would be rendered unconscious and be subjected to different "experiments". One of the experiments was that two characters (a slow-but-strong Earth genasi Fighter, and a high-dex Elven Fighter/Rogue) had their minds swapped for a short period (each day the period would last longer, letting them worry that it might become permanent).

Eventually, after several failed attempts, the party broke out the asylum and were fleeing for the islands dock. The dock was located at the bottom of a huge cliff, with a crank-operated lift to carry people and cargo down. The crank needed someone at one of the ends to operate the lift, so the party split in half, one group going down on the lift while the second operated the crank, with the plan for the first group to them operate the crank from below to bring down the second group.

The first group went down, leaving a Wizard and the Elf-in-Genasi-body to operate the crank. As the lift arrived at the ground, a small group of Vampires swooped in to attack the group at the top. Without thinking, the Elf-in-Genasi-body ordered the Wizard (who had feather fall) to jump, and being inclined to swashbuckling maneuvers, and forgetting he was currently in the low-dex body of the Genasi, jumped himself, his plan being to catch hold of the rope holding the lift mid-jump, and sliding down it to the ground. To a chorus of no's and facepalms from the rest of the party, the Elf-in-Genasi-body threw himself off the cliff, missed the lift completely, and splattered himself on the rocks mere feet from the shocked Genasi-in-elf-body.

The Elf character had it easy, he just died. The Genasi however was distraught. With his true body *very* dead (and him witnessing the messy demise from very close proximity), he was now trapped in the body of the Elf permanently. Rule-wise I was quite generous (he no longer had the strength to utilise a couple of his feats, but I ruled that he could keep them in his new form), but the real damage was to his backstory. The Genasi's backstory was his wife had been murdered, and his children sold in to slavery, and he was attempting to find them and secure their freedom. But now, even if he managed this, his children would not recognise him (and his backstory had the children so young when they were taken, that they likely wouldn't even recognise his personality in the different form).

[Jay R]

I once had a 2e thief / wizard who had, through a bizarre set of incidents, become an Earl. His lands included a buried meteor, meaning there were lots of metals to be mined, including the first mithril mine in centuries.

We were in the process of developing mithril weapons.

I had also just learned how to make gunpowder, and on a different continent, had an oil well.

We had developed the world's first steamship, armed with cannon, and were working on rifles. I had a military college, which had generated 4,000 fully trained soldiers. We had started a wizard's school.

...

And the DM moved away.

[Alias Unknown]

I am a sadistic DM, so when a player cannot make to a session they are comatose. So far we've had three characters waste away in comas.

However, the worst one was when the elf monk, who had been given a blessing by an evil god, was absent. I decided to give a hint at the some of the effects of the blessing by having black marks move across his skin which caused the fighter to stab him with a sword tainted with the blood of said god. I panicked and turned the monk into a drider as I had planned that as a potential option. The bard, who had a sword that trapped souls of his victims inside his own, was the one to kill the monk, trapping his soul inside the bard.

I did of course offer the monk's player the option of deus ex machina instead of making a new character.

[LeMooseImperium]

I recently ran Tomb of Annhiliation on the DC 15 death save "meat grinder mode." Forget getting dropped into the literal Hells - try dying to a random encounter and having to watch the DM burn your character sheet that you spent hours and hours on.

[Quertus]

Well, let's see. I had one character trapped for all eternity inside a magic mirror. Oh, wait, immortality was his goal, so that was a win. Never mind.

Oh, I know - I had a character sent to ravenloft. Um, wait - they actually had water and trees and forests there. My character considered it paradise, and was baffled by others' desire to leave. (You really come from a place better than this? You're not just pulling my leg, right?)

Hmmm... My character got kicked out of ravenloft? Is that really the worst fate I've got?

[SimonMoon6]

In a multiversal campaign, one PC's wife died. However, one of the universes he could travel to was a 1st edition D&D world, with the added qualifier that resurrection type spells were incredibly rare. He did learn that a certain artifact was rumored to have the ability to raise the dead. Keep in mind, this was 1st edition, where artifacts had powers and curses that were decided by the DM. So, this PC began a quest for this artifact, which was the Rod of Seven Parts (again, this was BEFORE the Rod's specific powers were set in stone). He began gathering the pieces (not always in the right order) and after adding one particular part to the rod, he fell afoul of one of the Rod's curses: his sex was changed and he became female.

Now, of course, that's not really THAT bad a fate, except that the whole point was to resurrect his WIFE, who would not be that happy to be married to another woman.

And remember, this was first edition. The effects of artifacts could not be removed, except that a particularly powerful deity MIGHT be able to undo an artifact's effects, but you were never going to be able to get help from a deity.

Boy, did that player ever complain.

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Okay, that technically wasn't the end of the story. In another (high-tech) universe, he was able to get a male clone of his now female body made, and then he had his brain transferred over to the male body. However, the brain surgeon failed one of his die rolls (dropped the brain on the floor?) and so the PC ended up with a few points of intelligence lost, but he didn't care, just so long as he was male again.

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The actual end of this particular PC was as follows:

Each of the PCs (not players, but PCs) was given a chance to create their own universe. This particular PC had created a universe where a Wish spell existed, but was very difficult to cast. If you tried and failed to cast it, you would lose a little piece of your soul (which would also make casting the spell more difficult in future attempts).

Meanwhile, in real life, the player had a girlfriend who was rather annoyed that his character was married to a woman who wasn't her. (Also, the players were playing themselves, so it was a weird overlap in that he was playing an idealized version of himself who was married to someone else.) So, with pressure from his girlfriend, he decided to abandon this character, but he didn't just have him retire or anything. He had him cast that Wish spell over and over, until his very soul was destroyed by reckless attempts to use magic beyond his control.

[Zazax]

I once ran an Epic level 3.5 game (before you ask, yes, I am insane) where the primary antagonist was a demigod who had found and abused a loophole in the Grand Cosmic Rules to allow him permanent residence on the Prime Material. Then he, in secret, set out to destroy the entire multiverse except for the Prime. It's a long story.

The game culminated with the PCs facing off against him and his followers in his own private demiplane, where he was carrying out the needed ritual away from the prying eyes of the rest of the multiverse. Said ritual actually went off and started working before the PCs were able to interrupt it. They were able to save all the major Planes, but smaller ones (like the demiplane they were currently standing in) became unstable and started tearing themselves apart. As the rest of the PCs fled the collapsing demiplane, one PC, the group's melee guy, stopped and turned back to the still-living demigod. They'd roughed him up but still hadn't found a way to permanently put him down (because Demigod), but this player had an idea.

Now, this player had a Greataxe that behaved pretty much identically to Mjolnir in Marvel; it would come back to him if he threw it (which he did often), he could pull it towards him from a distance, etc. However, he discarded his axe, charged the demigod, grappled him, and pinned him down as the demiplane collapsed around them. The other players recovered his axe as they escaped, and then the demiplane popped like a bubble, the PC and demigod still inside as it did so.

All attempts to scry or otherwise magically communicate with and/or locate the PC failed, as did all attempts to resurrect him. The campaign ended at the end of that session, after some epilogue, and the players never did find out what happened to him. At the very least, the demigod never returned. Said PC was immortalized with a grand monument, and while the other players initially wanted to include his axe in the monument, they found they couldn't because, every now and then, the axe would start thrashing about as if called, but confused as to where to go...

[Grim Portent]

Splattered liberally across the landscape by an orbital strike.

Or maybe the guy who got set on fire while carrying several dozen kilos of explosives. Both were pretty messy.

[Braininthejar2]

One of DM's parties discovered that one of the players tried to screw them over for a chance at divine power. They ended up ganging up on the traitor and appealing to the most powerful NPC in the campaign to help them find a punishment.

He took the guy, polymorphed him into a mantis, and left him in a meadow with a mantis female - after investing enough power in the both of them to effectively give them divine rank 0.