They Deserved It
by Roger E. Moore
Since the glory days long ago when I first learned to play the AD&DŽ game, I've seen a lot of would-be heroe(some of them mine) get bumped off in very peculiar and dramatic ways, like the luckless sorceress who was caught by three beholder eyes at once and was death-rayed, turned to stone, and disintegrated before the rest of the party could even scream, "Shut the door!" But this is really a hero's death, the kind of gosh-darn-it-all kind of thing you come to expect when you wander into an old ruined evil wizard's tower unannounced, which this party had done.
And there was the paladin who went on a solo adventure into the first level of one DM's dungeon(not mine), where he was immediately confronted by 10-100 stirges and a carrion crawler wearing a scarab of insanity, which caused the paladin to fall into a 60' pit trap full of spikes with green slime on the bottom. I am not making this up, though I wish I were. No one held this disaster against the player, since we all knew he had been gaming with a notorious killer DM who once had a dragon breath fire a quarter of a mile long and cause 500 hp damage(save for half damage). Still, we all secretly thought the paladin's player should have enough sense to game with someone else, so maybe it was a tiny little bit his own fault.
No, what this article is about are those really embarrassing, boneheaded ways in which player characters croak, events that live in gaming legends that you don't ever want to hear about again because it was your fighter who shouted a battle cry and jumped off the dock in full plate armor to swim out to the pirate ship, which caused the pirates and the other PCs in your group to stop fighting and look over the side ofthe ship in astonishment at the dwindling trail of air bubbles your character left behind as he sank and drowned. It was your lawful-good cleric who tried to summon Zeus - who wasn't even your cleric's deity - to cast a raise dead spell on a deceased party member - a lawful evil assassin, at that - and who then tried to summon Demogorgon to distract the angry Zeus, resulting in your cleric's being turned into a cockroach and stepped on. It was your thief who... ah, but you get the point.
Let's do a countdown of the 10 worst possible ways (in my humble opinion) in which your character could have his block knocked off. (Isn't it amazing how many euphemisms there are for the term "die?")
10. Killed by the treasure after the adventure is over
I regret to say that one of my characters was part of a group of adventurers that was completely destroyed by the treasure they gained during a dangerous adventure that everyone managed to survive. My centaur got the cursed spear of berzerking, which resulted in his immediate demise at the hands of the rest of the party - nothing personal, of course. Another characterdrank a poisoned potion, thinking it might be useful, and the wizard activated the brazier of sleep smoke, which had the expected consequences. I do not remember how the other two members of the group died; I think one of them tried to attack the fire elemental while it was turning the wizard into crunchy toast, or else he opened the flask of curses. No matter. We were saved from total humiliation only by the knowledge that everyone was killed by the treasure, so we weren't so inclined to torment one another about it as we were simply amazed by it.
9. Killed even before the adventure has really started
I am mortified once more to report that this happened to one of my characters, a 1st-level wizard with two hit points, who was struck by the very first goblin arrow fired at the party not one minute after we arrived at the old mansion we were going to explore. Everyone thought this was quite amusing and laughed and laughed about it until their own characters entered the mansion and ran right into the lich. The DM thought that part was pretty funny, and I confess that I did, too.
8. Killed 14 times in succession by enraged fellow party members who lined up and used a rod of ressurection on the victim so that each party member could claim to have killed the character, after the player has attempted for the third time in a row to slay the party for no particular reason
In his favor, the player said his PC was an anti-paladin and was supposed to do things like this, but it was, after all, the third time this player had brought in an anti-paladin and had tried to kill the entire party. Following the above action, the other players asked the anti-paladin's player never to bring another one of his anti-paladin characters to the game again as long as he lived.
7. Killed at long range by enraged fellow party members who merely noted that the approaching victim was wearing black plate armor
One of the halflings in the group used a sling to hit the correctly identified anti-paladin with a huge boulder polymorphed into a pebble, which turned back into a huge boulder again once it made contact with the dispel magic field put out by the unlucky and stupid anti-paladin's unholy sword. "Tat's okay," said his player, "my guy's got a ring of regeneration on!" "That's okay with us, too," said the party leader, after learning from the Dungeon Master that the squashed anti-paladin could not escape from beneath the boulder for at least 10,000 years. He wasn't dead, but it wouldn't matter for long.
6. Killed after deliberately interrupting a hill giant who was taking a shower in a waterfall
I should add that the character in question here was a fearless halfling fighter wearing plate mail, which reduced his movement rate to a waddle. This halfling also insisted on yelling insults at the giant at close range even as the rest of the group was making a panicked retreat. The giant took care of the problem in one melee round. The rest of the party later slew the hill giant with concentrated missile fire, then went looking for the remains of the halfling. "Can we raise him from the dead?" one player asked. "He looks like a large can of tomato paste that's been run over by a tractor trailer," I replied. "Forget it," said the group, and left him there.
5. Killed as the result of kiling a frog
I have to explain that the character here was a 1st-level wizard who cast a find familiar spell and got a frog, which he didn't want. He kiled the frog with a magic missile and promptly died from the mental backlash. Apparently, the player failed to read the part of the spell description about the wizard taking damage if the familiar died.
4. Killed by deliberately crashing one spacecraft into another spacecraft in the belief that a head-on collision at 40 kilometers per second would result only in minor injuries
This wasn't in the AD&D game, of course, but I ran a SF game in which this actually happened and I felt I had to include it here somewhere. There's not much you can say about this, except that basic physics should be mandatory in high school.
3. Killed after jumping into a 100' deep pit while trying to drink a potion of levitation that was for some reason left attached to the character's belt
This happened while a large and very high-level character group was exploring the infamous Tomb of Horrors(from the venerable AD&D module of that name). The character would have been just another statistic given the huge casualtied inflicted on the group, what with things like an 18th-level monk being squashed a millimeter thick by a juggernaut and a 20th-level cleric being vaporized by a cursed crown, but the player had clearly said that his wizard was going to jump first, then take the flask from his belt, open it, and drink it. He repeated this twice. "Well... okay," said the DM - me - and that was that.
2. Killed by a flumph
I cannot, under any circumstances, think of a more horribly embarrassing death than being killed by a monster elected in the early 1980's as the Most Stupid and Useless Fantasy Monster Ever Invented. It was, interestingly, the only lawful-good monster in the "Fiend Folio" tome, and it was the only critter that filled no ecological niche at all, and had no reason to exist. Having a PC killed by one is a mark of shame no player can erase, no matter how many tarrasqes he kills later on. Luckily, few flumphs have ever been used in an adventure, probably because of the sheer humiliation brought by merely being associated with said adventure. Above all, I would never, ever, EVER want one of my characters to be killed by one. I would be forced by shame to turn in my Player's Handbook and take up golf. And I HATE golf. You know, come to think of it, there might be a worse way to die than being killed by a flumph.
1. Being killed by a garlic bread golem.
This looks like something only a pathologically degenerate DM would dream up and use against an innocent party, but in my own defense I will say that though I did put a garlic bread golem in my adventure and tried very hard but unsuccessfully to kill someone with it, at least I was not the person who created the monster, which I found in an old collection of bad monsters from the 70's. Maybe it was just as well that no players were killed by the golem, since they were all in the US Army, with access to things like battle tanks. And after all, people can only take so much humiliation.
Then, too, I was the DM who sent one group of adventurers to an alternate universe where the party's point man tripped and fell into Winnie the Pooh's heffalump trap ("Piglet, look! I've caught something!"), but alas, no one died here either, which would have been great, though the players did discuss some unpleasant aspects of my own demise in some very serious tones. There is a moral here. Perhaps I should take up golf.
