Gnotra was based on this panel from Brian Wood's comic, Northlanders vol. 1: Sven The Returned.
We had our first player-character death in our Viking-themed D&D saga last night. No death saves. No dramatic final statements. Instead, the whole final fight was a dramatic statement on the character’s behalf. The character, a 7th-level Avenger, fought an on-level Elite Brute monster — a Half-Orc Scarthane with the Avenger character template applied — who once worshipped the same primal god but had been twisted to the service of the evil Witch-Queen… and came within 17 hit points of victory. Alas, a last-minute critical hit dealt enough damage to slay our hero outright.
The fight ranged all over the edge of an active volcano created by the Witch-Queen. (She uses volcanoes to create islands for her goblins and orcs to inhabit throughout the realm of Northsea.) The PC Avenger’s allies had successfully started the process of quenching the volcano (long story, but it involved feeding a potent magical artifact to the volcano) while the two Avengers battled savagely over the fate of their god. Finally, after battling to and for along a spar of rock above the roiling lava, our hero, called Gnotra, stepped up onto a wicked altar at the very edge of stony spar — an altar dedicated both to the ancient god of the Avengers and to the arcane power of the Witch-Queen.
There he was beheaded by the evil Avenger.
It was sad and excellent and a fitting mark to the end of our time in the heroic tier of play. For the next session we fast-forward many years to the surviving characters’ entrance to the epic tier — where we will find a new story provoked by the arrival of a 21st-level replacement character for Gnotra. (His barbarian brother perhaps?)
Sometimes the dice give us this kind of dramatic turn. This, though, was a combination of dramatic choices made by the PC — who insisted on battling this foe virtually alone — and some dramatically timed signals from the dice. All told, I don’t think Gnotra could’ve hoped for a more dramatic time and place to meet his end.
What about you?
Any recent experiences with PC death in your campaigns?
Gnotra dead at the edge of the volcano, atop a simple altar.
I’m going to post another D&D-centric question brought up by this session next week, so if you play in this campaign, hold off on other discussions of the encounter until then, please.
The only time I’ve killed a PC in 4E is via crit. Weird that your dramatic kill came as a result of a crit, too. I mean, not “weird” weird, because crits are lots of damage, but, you know.
A few months ago in the Savage Worlds game I’m running a player had his character enter a room and awake some skeletons because of his Curious Hindrance. The first skeleton rolled an insane crit and choked the PC to death – first round, first action. It was shocking and wholly unexpected. While the PC was killed by his own Hindrance and one would think of it as a fitting end, it was really anticlimactic. We all really liked that PC, too.
A few rounds later, the remaining members of the party attacked a mage and a few henchman. I rolled another huge crit with one of the mage’s spells and killed another PC – an orc fighter. This was a bit less of a loss, the PC was a bland burly fighter. It served as an exclamation point to the conflict and the mage was able to escape.
This mage became the main villain of the game as a result of the fight and has been the focal point of the campaign for months now.
That’s the stuff, isn’t it? That moment of frisson when game (skill, chance) and story (dramatic structure, emotional resonance) collide perfectly.
It’s funny, the past couple weeks my gaming has been all about the HALO: REACH beta, and they’ve got that game tuned so well that it’s fairly common to have the dramatic structure experience (albeit minus the emotional resonance for the most part) in MP matches. You start out strong, you have some reversals and minor victories, sometimes there’s that point near the end where it seems all is lost, and then you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Or you lose tragically. In a close match, both outcomes can be pretty memorable and satisfying.
I’d never argue that even a great MP match has the same quality as a detailed game/story payoff that’s been building for weeks or months. But I think the ability to get that quick hit of dramatic structure maybe three or four times in an hour is a significant factor in making Halo MP — and good MP games in general — so addictive.
My only 4E death was at the hands of a player. A wizard low on hit points and targetting himself with an area spell to hit the guys either side of him, forgetting about the oppotunity attacks. We turned it into a big plot point as they resurrected him and that wasn’t supposed to be something people could do in my campaign.
Most recently in Mage, one of my group was replaced with a Greed Spirit, possessed another player and had her shoot her own face. That didn’t put her down but it jolted the Greed Spirit out of her body so she travelled to another player, grabbed the gun and had another go, this time more successfully. He blew the other player’s brains out and we were all in stunned silence. This guy’s normally so quiet and friendly, but he took on the ‘evil doppelganger’ role so much better, and so much nastier, than I thought possible.
The mind-bogglingly good-natured guys in my Monday night game die off all the time, and bless them for never being too pissed off about it. Part of it is the nature of the group. We play lots of games that I’ve never run before, because I need to get up to speed on some particular system for a gig, and as a result, I don’t have an organized sense of where the limits of mortality are just yet. In the last year, I’ve TPK’ed them at D&D, Trail of Cthulhu, and (I think) Unknown Armies. Last night’s Trail of Cthulhu game only involved one fatality.