#rpgaday Day Thirteen

Most Memorable Character Death

Here’s the truth: spending twenty years out of your life playing superhero games to the near-exclusion of everything else kind of limits your opportunities for memorable or spectacular character deaths.  It’s just not part of the genre; at least not the way I play.  

Fortunately, the last couple of years of heavy D&D stuff gave me Einar.

I created Einar for a Pathfinder “Dawn of the Temple of Elemental Evil” game.  He was a dwarven barbarian (berserker) who showed up in Hommlet with a big axe over his shoulder and a sign around his neck reading “I hef bin sobre fer X days” with the a number chalked in on a daily basis.  He also had a small wooden mallet which he utilized should someone take him up on his offer to hit them in the head for a copper piece ("Excuse me sir! Hit on de head fer a copper?").

In battle, Einar was a monster and I played him as someone utterly lacking in any understanding whatsoever of his limitations and mortality.  Early on in his career, I made a mistake of raging before he got within range of an ogre.  The hit he took on AC ended up getting him nailed hard enough to knock him out and the immediate loss of rage HP nearly finished him off.  Thing is, Einar told it differently: as far as he recalled, he charged in, everything went black, and when he woke up, the ogres were dead, so clearly the blank spot in his memory was from his rage.

Sadly, that encounter was foreshadowing.  Some levels later, Einar and his companions returned to the Inn of the Welcome Wench only to find some new and unpleasant strangers had set up shop.  One of them turned out to be a werewolf (I think. Some sort of big lycanthrope) wielding a +3 Great Axe.  Einar, already wounded, tried to disengage to protect one of his friends.  The big were critted on his Opportunity Attack.  It was enough to knock Einar out, and the resulting loss of…well, you can guess the rest.  This time, the loss was too much and down he went.

Such was the lot of Einar.  He died as he lived: angry, on the floor of a tavern.

(I could have had him raised, but it seemed the perfect way for his story to end.  As it was, I replaced him by an utterly bland Cavalier named Bors who wasn’t nearly as much fun.  But I'm not sure anyone would have been fun after Einar.)