Permanent Injury
Whoa there, Gunslinger! I know you’re desperate to find a party, but it’s not worth invoking the permanent injury rules over! What permanent injury rules, you ask? Well there’s your first clue about how popular they are.
I don’t want to get into the weeds by addressing any particular subsystem here. That’s because, regardless of the associated penalties, the larger issue is player psychology. When permanent injuries are on the table, there are two basic ways things can go.
- Good Ending: He cuts off my hand? Like Skywalker at the end of Empire? Badass!
- Bad Ending: Thanks for making my guy unplayable. Jerk.
Those two reactions have a lot to do with campaign style. If you’re running a grim and gritty game with high lethality, and if you communicate that to your players, then everything is groovy. Same deal if you make healing magic accessible, or otherwise turn crippling injuries into not-so-crippling injuries (e.g. It’s a lot easier for a wizard to fight on one-handed than a greatsword fighter). But if it’s all been rainbows and sunshine and abstract hp damage, and then you suddenly spring dismemberment on the party, you’re a lot more likely to wind up with Bad Ending reactions.
My own experience with permanent injury has been limited. In particular, I’m thinking about a DM pal of mine who tried to find a middle ground, passing out superficial scars to PCs whenever they got crit. I always admired that impulse to make combat matter, but without mechanical teeth, it struck me as a waste of time (and sexy bard faces). Getting your leg crushed or your eye gouged out ought to come paired with a mechanical penalty. That just “feels” right in a visceral way. But if you want that kind of blood and gore in your game, you’ve got to make sure your players are on board and mentally prepared. Of course, a friendly NPC with access to regenerate helps too.
Question of the day then! Have you ever encountered permanent injury in your games? Was it a “time to retire my character” moment, or was it an interesting challenge to overcome? Sound off with your tales of horrible disfigurement down in the comments!
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In the tomb of annhilation, there is a fountain that can either, make you mute for a day, give you like 20 temp hp, change your gender, or deal on average 44 necrotic damage, woth necrotic instant killing if it brings you to 0. The dm allowed the gender change to also reset any lost limbs, but since people missing limbs tend not to be that healthy anyway, that 1/4 chance of necrotic damage was a death sentence. Regardless, we ended up using it 3 times to heal lost limbs, and luckily no one died, but man that was risky. Other then that, we’ve never had any serious risk of losing limbs, with us only having that in tomb of annhilation because its supposed to be dangerous.
Wait nvm, just remembered that the first guy to use it had to use it a second time, and that use killed him. I guess it makes sense that a 1 in 4 chance of death killed one of us after 4 uses.
Yo… What’s ripping off all those limbs!?
I forget for 2 of then, but for the other 2, people fell into a trap leading to a dimension where there were 2 levers, one would instantly transport them back, the other would suck them into a sphere of annhilation. Bith times, players decided to pull both at once, and the dm decided that meant they lived, but had a limb ripped off.
Spoiler: The sphere of annihilation puzzle that requires a missing limb to reopen the magically locked trap doors is what’s ripping off all those limbs.
I had two forms of permanent injuries, both with me knowing the risks beforehand so only the type of maiming was a surprise, not the fact it happened.
The first was with my goblin barbarian in a Pathfinder game. We all got to play evil races and we’re generally just screwing around before it eventually got to a semi-serious fight against these eldritch horrors who we had to fight mostly because they were indiscriminately attacking everyone. Now, funny thing about playing an all evil party, we were pretty chummy since we all had lose moral codes and made it pretty clear that we’re just rampaging together out of convenience. So anyways I’m doing my feral gnashes thing biting bad guys because that’s what I do when my drow rogue flank buddy ended up getting sucked into this world death portal thing and somehow failed his reflex save. Normally there’s nothing anyone could do about that but thanks to being able to bite stuff to grapple, I actually had free hands to try and grab my friend while sticking to the larger and currently unaffected monster dude not getting sucked into a portal. However the GM made it very clear that this portal would not close without something going in, so I made two split second decision: first was to save my rogue buddy, and the second was to gnaw my arm off and toss it into the hole. I had a second attack by then so I could technically do it, and I certainly had the damage to do so. I lost my limb and proceeded to bleed out 2d6 each turn, but we eventually managed to defeat the enemies and I managed to not bleed to death, however we lacked the ability to regrow my arm.
The drow I saved wasn’t grateful at all, no surprise there, but he paid it forward one day when my goblin did finally ended up biting more than he could chew and got zapped to death by a blue dragon. Turns out he had been saving a breath of life on his gloves of healing for me, and about four turns later when they managed to kill the dragon he helped me back to life no questions asked. Said that we were even now.
Second time we were playing a level 10 one shot with crazy crit tables, also Pathfinder, and wanting to take the most out of it I created a crit fishing build that would let me get 15-20 crits and five attacks a turn, and I was butchering everything with my kukri. However o got absolutely wrecked by a crit train, three nat twenties from three different enemies, and one had rolled a critical wound where he sliced my tongue off somehow. You do y quite realize how annoying it is to be unable to speak at all to your party members. Fortunately we did have someone with regenerate at the time, but they ran out of spel slots, but we had it all sorted after the next rest. Twas most annoying.
Once upon a time I read Stephen King’s “The Stand,” and so thought it would be fun to roll up a mute character for a one-shot. That lasted for about half a session before I went looking for an in-game way to fix my “interesting character quirk.” Turns out that talking helps when your game world is created primarily through talking.
I played a mute character once – they were a caster, and the GM basically let them have free Silent Spell for everything. I went heavier on my description of their actions, which often included kicking people in the shins when annoyed.
Good on ya for making it work. I’m too much of a diva not participate in conversation though. 😛
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is my staple go-to to DM, and ads the flagbearer for grim and gritty, permanent injuries is a staple.
It works, mainly because they are rare (sprains, broken bones, and dislocations are decidedly more common, with the more serious dismemberment meaning you probably avoided character death by one or two points of damage, so you should feel damn lucky), and secondly, because the games Fate point mechanic (you get a very limited number at the start of the campaign, gaining more only at major milestones, and can spend one permanently at any time to completely negate a result) allows you to decide whether the loss is something you can roll with (and save a point for a truly bad one further down the road), or whether it is character breaking, so you want to negate it (and remove one of your limited chances to negate a hit that might kill the character in the future.
And on a personal level, I once had a character sufferdismemberment in a d6 Star Wars campaign. We may have been a bit reckless in camping in the wild without someone on watch, and we were woken up by my Smuggler/Pilot dangling by his soon-to-be-missing arm from the jaws of a Rancor. Given the setting, I went straight for the cybernetic route (with a concealed pistol built-in naturally), and had a great time, with it being instrumental on us escaping imprisonment from Storm Troopers on one occasion (a classic Stormtrropers-are-bad, heroic escape moment where I gunned three down while my arms were tied behind my back!)
I’m in a Mordheim campaign at the moment. It’s certainly not the same buy-in as an RPG, but I do know something of the terror of a GW permanent injury table.
Never dismemberment, but I did do a “Cinematic Injury” Complication system for Mutants and Masterminds for a game. A character could gain a Hero point from taking a temporary “injury” Complication for the rest of the Session. The Complication had its own penalties, of course. Turned out to be okay and one of my players used it a lot, cause his luck with die rolls is horrid.
But the time I’ve seen it go back was Anima: Beyond Fantasy. I’ve mentioned it a few times now. A “Critical” in Anima is a wound that deals half of your current Hp. This prompts a hardiness roll vs a DC and the difference on this check is compared to a table to determine how severe the Critical is. If the difference is over 50, it’s a severe wound that will give you penalties for days and you must determine a hit location. Well, I was running the game I mentioned earlier (“We trained our own BBEG?!”) and the Big Bad had just teleported into a room and declared her intent to take over the world. One of the NPCs, a dwarf King known for hating said BBEG, took offense and before the players could react, charged. So I rolled the attack for BBEG’s bodyguards. The roll exploded and the King ended up taking a lot of damage, which was a Critical. Then, he flubbed the hardiness check with a 2. OKay, so we need a location. Roll location. Head. Text for a failure level of 75+ “The limb is destroyed or horribly mangled. if it is the Head or the Heart on a normal human, they are dead.” So, batted the dwarven King’s head off like a Pinata in front of my players. Super fitting and impressive, not actually planned. >.> He had so much dialog.
I like the idea of “Cinematic Injury” quite a bit! You get that interesting Jon McClane thing going without having to retire your dude for the effect.
I was happy with it. And it was super needed in Mutants and Masterminds, where players heal a hit after ten minutes of rest without any powers. You take a few complications, and now you get that slightly more realistic feel without making combat more dangerous by making people unable to heal.
If my group ever gets back to our M&M game I’ll put a bug in the GM’s ear. 🙂
My ratfolk wizard started with a permanent injury as part of his backstory – he’s missing one of his eyeballs (it got blasted by a spellbook warding spell – and prompted him to change his career from scavenger to wizard – and made him a bit insane). Mechanically, this makes him permanently dazzled and he has no depth perception, so it’s not unplayable.
I imagine there’s a lot of squinting afoot.
Weirdly, a “disadvantage system” seems like a whole different animal to a permanent injury system to me. Even if they both produce the same mechanical effect, there’s a world of difference in player experience.
Notice that your bad depth perception / -1 to hit dude was a wizard rather than a ranger. That’s a choice you made at character gen. Imagine if you’d been asked to make that choice after you’d already sunk 6 levels into ranger.
Well, gunslinger already has a poncho, he just needs a mechanical/augmented arm, a moustache, a badass voice actor/DM narrator, and it’s high noon time.
Yeah! And if you got him a portal gun and a prosthetic everything, he’d be P-body (or possibly ATLAS).
Hmm, that makes me think, what kind of voice does he have? Samwise Gamgee?
Morty.
Dear Lord, that makes perfect sense. He even has synergy with alchemist, who provides him with alchemical ammo as part of their abusive relationship.
“Alright urp Gunslinger, here are some dragon breath rounds. They’ll blow a mofo up!”
“Oh geez Alchemist, don’t those , won’t those make the gun misfire more?
“What are you, a goddamn Brownie? What are the odds of that happening? Like one in… Eighteen? Never gonna happen. Now shut up and shoot that ogre already.”
I’m pretty sure it would be copyright infringement if I used this dialogue verbatim. Don’t get me wrong: I’m tempted as hell, but I probably shouldn’t.
There is also the pleasant surprise of finding out a permanent injury is not so permanent.
Due to a series of bad decisions and unfortunate rolls, my psyker in a Dark Heresy campaign was disemboweled by a daemon (that he accidentally summoned), during the final boss fight. Thanks to a long overdue stroke of luck, he managed to stabilize until his teammates finished off the boss, and get him on life support.
Luckily, he happened to specialize in biokinesis – a school that laughs in the face of permanent injury and augmetics… and happened to have just enough XP to get the Regeneration power.
One moment he was a comatose vegetable in the medbay, the next he casually walked into the debriefing in the inquisitor’s quarters, in perfect health and all like “Hey guys. What did I miss?” The stunned silence was the best payoff. Space wizards FTW.
“I just willed myself to get a new kidney.” –> The rare case when ‘thoughts and prayers’ really does work.
“Thoughts and Prayers” would make a great fantasy buddy cop series about a Psychic and a Cleric.
I pitched it to Laurel as our next character pairing. She was on board until I told her the name of our detective agency.
“NO!”
Girl does not like puns.
I feel like ive mentioned this story before, but in one of the last sessions of my very first campaign, I was playing as a Paladin, and had a special sword that was extra effective against Drow and Undead (and especially Undead Drow) which was basically the only thing keeping us alive against a really nasty boss fight. However, the dice turned against me, and I failed my save against a Flesh to Stone spell, which petrified me with the sword in hand. The sword, however, was not stoned, so my party, in desperation, broke off my freaking hand to take my sword, and when I finally got un-petrified, I was still missing that darn hand. We had managed to kill the boss, but subsequently got captured by the Drow, who wanted to sacrifice me to Lolth to summon an avatar. Needless to say, missing that hand made it significantly harder to use sword and shield, and i’m pretty sure my Ring of Free Action was destroyed too.
Let this be a lesson to you: Always carry sovereign glue.
As I’ve said before, I’m of the stance that sewing combined with a healing spell can re-attach freshly severed limbs
DM: (Lizardfolk’s name) has the tip of his tail cut off.
Me: It’ll grow back right?
Lizard player: Googles the type of Lizard his character is based on Nope.
Me: I have a healer’s kit. The book is vague on what it includes, could it contain a needle and thread?
DM: Yeah, allright, you can sew the tail back on with a Dexterity (Medicine) check.
Me: Hands off to the Lizard to sew themselves since my Dexterity is hot garbage.
DM: Performing surgery on yourself requires a Constitution save to grit through the pain and not have disadvantage on the surgery.
Did you do anything to buff the regenerate spell as compensation?
The Regenerate spell already covers a lot more ground. In addition to its’ non-con heal over time effect, it can recover long-lost limbs, even if the limb is no longer present. Lost an eye decades ago in your tragic backstory? Regenerate has you covered. Lost your finger a minute ago and wanna do some quick needle-work? Cure Wounds has you covered. I generally leave it in the threshold of “If modern medical science can save the limb you don’t need Regenerate to save it.”
That said, I assume Regenerate also doesn’t discriminate, so all your sexy scars are gone too. As are any tattoos which are basically colorful scars.
I was once in a pathfinder game playing a soulknife (with the Gifted Blade and Nimble Blade archetypes) and encountered a badass psionic abberation with a hunger for brains, I think pathfinder calls them phrenic scourges for legal product identity reasons, but we all know what these really are. Anyways this cerebral flayer had a plasma glaive and and with three nat 20’s (and succeeding to make the miss chance roll) chopped off one of my limbs, and I just laughed, because I could with very little effort just reshape my mindblade into a prosthetic limb until I had it restored.
It was funny because, my AC was so high that the only way the enemy could hit was on a Nat 20, so the only way to crit was to have 2 nat 20’s, but I also had a 1/round ability to force an enemy reroll (which I used on the first nat 20). So ultimately, the dice were in the enemy’s favor, and I still was no worse for the wear.
If I were a monster, I wouldn’t strike for the extremities. I would strike for more equitable working conditions.
I have two stories that comes to mind when I think of permanent injuries, the One That Happened and the One That Didn’t.
The One That Happened was in pathfinder. The players got into a fight with a gang boss called The Wolf from one of the PC’s backstory (after she had been blackmailed into being under his thumb for some time), and during the fight he used a hero point to tear out the eye of said PC.
It was E8 so regenerate wasn’t an option but I let the player decide out of character whether it was something that could be cured with a ritual by one of their allies or if it was permanent.
The player decided to go with the later and got a specially made magical eye that worked like the magic item Deathwatch Eyes, and walked around with a cool glowing red eye, until she got a new body from a reincarnate spell later.
The One That Didn’t was in Exalted 2E, I had this Lintha pirate try to cut one of the players hands off in a fight using the seldomly invoked crippling attack rules. Mostly it was to make it have some degree of danger even as they didn’t have any chance of actually killing any of the players.
Predictably it failed after the player invoked some of their defensive powers but he got a bit nervous.
The reason I remember it through is how long after the player talked about how screwed he’d have been if it had happened. Now if it just didn’t work with his mental image of the character and thereby would have killed his desire to play him that would have been fair enough.
But it wasn’t, he kept talking about how it would have rendered him useless and make him incapable of doing anything, despite the fact that he didn’t do anything in the entire multiyear campaign that would even have gotten a penalty from it. Some of the other characters in that group would have taken actual penalties from losing their hands, but not this one.
However no matter how many times this was pointed out to him he never ever internalized it.
When it comes to permanent injuries, “Bad Ending” mindset is tough for some players to break out of. I suspect it’s also part of the reason the OSR crowd likes to talk about indestructible players and non-threatening threats in latter-day dungeon crawls.
Whenever I “Kill” a player I do what I stole from FATE, I “enter negotiations” in which I make a deal such as a permanent injury or being captured, and in return they are left at 0 hp. If they want to lose the character that’s fine, but this way lets me keep all of my plot intact without fear of a random crit.
In Exalted, I took one of my players eyes because a ninja murdered them. He got another one, in fact it’s a demonic artifact a la mad eye moody eye. One of my favorite moments with a constant affect on the character, wouldn’t have happened without some grim derp.
I really should read FATE rather than playing it. That mess never came up in our Firefly game, but I love the concept. It’s basically what I do anyway…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-worth-of-a-life
…But I love that there’s a spelled-out system for it.
I generally don’t do permanent injury in my games but there is one exception. I run an Iron Gods game so occasionally the party will find cybernetic limbs and implants as treasure, and everyone is pretty onboard with becoming cyborgs but they can’t really justify their characters chopping off their own limbs, even if it means getting a sweet robot arm. So the compromise is that dismembering and otherwise crippling injuries are just suspiciously more common than in any other setting.
So far the gunslinger has lost their eyes to blindness/deafness and replaced them with cybernetic eyes, and the paladin has had one of her legs amputated and replaced with a robotic leg with implanted holster from Robocop built into it.
lol. That is a one dramatic reversal!
Player: “This is total bullshit!”
GM: “What’s wrong?”
Player: “Nothing’s ripping off my limbs!”
GM: “Oh geeze. I’m sorry. I’ll try to incorporate that into the game moving forward.”
In a fallout campaign, I had both my legs shot off by a giant scorpion tank, our npc doctor managed to reattach them fairly quickly. Later against another fight, I had another leg blown off. The darn things just wouldn’t stay on it seemed.
The other player had his hand shot off an event he caused because he thought it would be rad to have a mechanical arm but we reattached it and we called him silly for wanting to not simply reattach it.
Later in a different campaign set in space, he insisted that his character start with a mechanical arm. I then had my character tease him for a dramatically dangerous arm that would probably explode and we all laughed at him for not just cloning a fresh arm.
I dunno, man. Mechanical arms are pretty dang sci-fi:
https://www.boredpanda.com/prosthetic-arm-tattoo-artist-jc-sheitan-tenet-jl-gonzal/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
That’s a sweet aesthetic IMHO.
Some years ago during a Rogue Trader game i rolled a Forge-world as the birthplace of my Explorator, meanwhile the then new girl of the group in her first game of RT rolled the same for her Arch-Militant. To be a good player with someone who was in her first game with that system, i give her some tips about game and roleplay. We ended with the approach of having our pc have different visions about growing-up in a Forge-world. My Explorator will see it as a wonder of engiseering and as a model of societal and planetary order, Her Arch-Militant would see it as technological nightmare with squabbling Magos doing whatever they want with the population, that her pc older brother got turned into a servitor because a Magos needed a paper weight didn’t make wonders for her opinion of her birthplace. During the game itself there was a healthy dose of roleplay conflict between her pc and mine. One of the more argued topics were Cybernetics and their use. The ships’s Arch-Militant saw the Cybernetics and the whole The-Flesh-is-Weak thing as propaganda and misguided carnage of bodies, my Explorator meanwhile replicated with a very sound “HERESY!!!”. All of this later become a little problem when an Ork attack left her pc a little short of wounds and with more Permanent injuries than Alex J. Murphy. My pc suggest the use of Cybernetics to heal and, why not, improve her. This lead us to a out of game argument about the situation, she says that would be her character greatest nightmare, that her pc hate Cybernetics and chopping parts of people to stuff metal instead. My response to that is to hand her a sheet with the improvements of the cybernetic parts to her pc. Her reaction was something like:
Her: Screw my character believes, lets do this!!!
DM: But what about your pc hating Cybernetics?
Her: I will just roleplay her horror, depression and how she come in terms whit her new self. By the way, can you stuff a Baleful Eye on her? Best-craftsmanship please?
Me: Can i try. In any case while your pc is out we can go on adventure to get some materials.
Her: Good, i will roll stats for that chick that serves under me Arch to go with you guys.
All in all, the Permanent Injury experience was bad ending for the PC, good ending for the player. Give her and the group good hooks for roleplay, adventures and fond memories. Good thing for the group as a whole 🙂
I’ve ran into several permanent injuries, DM’ing and as a player. The time it happened to me personally I was playing a range-focused artificer. Big Bad Knight Guy charged right up to me. I desperately tried to block with my bracers, but the crit-chart we were using at the time dictated that he cut off my pinky finger. This did permanent Dex drain damage that could only be reversed with Regenerate or a similar effect. Let’s just say we were not at a level where that would be feasible. I had nine fingers for multiple levels, and I was actually pretty okay with it. I played my character more cautious, having learned from past mistakes, and it was fun!
As DM, a particularly lethal War-razor attack from a certain Magnimarian cult left the party rogue without an ear. She never bothered to heal it, and actually just wore her hair different to cover it. She just plain owned it for the rest of the campaign, and I was impressed. Come to think of it, that exact same player in a different campaign ended up going deaf for multiple levels. She and one of the other players learned sign language so she would have a translator. It was pretty awesome.
Ultimately, our group goes into things knowing that anything can and will happen, and learn to just roll with it.
Also, If you keep up with Pathfinder and Drop Dead Studios, you might have heard of Spheres of Power/Spheres of Might. One of the “spheres” they introduced semi-recently was the Tech Sphere. The “Anatomical Structure” talent allows you to have additional arms or legs. If you are missing one of those limbs, you can replace it with the mechanical one instead. Since you can pick up a Sphere talent with a feat, replacing a missing limb becomes relatively easy, with a few caveats of course.
Well, now I just want to see Street Samurai and Gunslinger hunting down the Head of Vecna to use it for… augmentation.
I like playing Starfinder sometimes, because “Oh no, you can lose an arm of a certain type of critical hit goes the wrong way” turns into an excuse to get an awesome cyber arm, or biomod arm, or necro arm.
I’ve also played a Pathfinder character once who had no obvious visible injuries, but needed a crutch to walk because of a thing she’d been born with. The GM had us roll initiative to see what order we arrived at the initial meetup tavern and she was lucky enough to show up first. Meaning she was sitting down and nobody noticed her handicap until the hellknights busted in, we realized we were about to be on team “Run Away” in a chase scene, and she grabbed her crutch. Pretty sure I managed to make the rest of the table go “Oh no…” all at the same time!
(Fortunately for Illi Longshadow and her allies: an obscure bit of text in Adventures Armory 2 notes that someone who is very practiced at using a crutch can move as quickly as any other character with its assistance. Nobody ever had to carry her, she just had to occupy one of her hands with the thing.)
In my games I tend to run things on the deadly side. I like the idea that adventuring should be dangerous. However, I also tend to be very narrative heavy. As you can imagine, narrative can get… Strained, when every five sessions there’s a completely new party without the original motivations to follow the plot train.
To solve this, I always let anyone who would die choose not to. I came up with a nice set of injuries to roll a d12 on when people choose to “live, but with consequences”. They were penalties, and many would reduce stats, combat or roleplay efficiency, and usually came with a physical descriptor of the injury causing the minus.
This worked pretty well for a few reasons; one, no one ever suffered perms-death from small fights. I found the times players chose to let a character go for good were only during epic set pieces or boss fights. In addition, we got to experience the Berserk style of watching a badass mercenary walk into town with only one good eye and a sweet metal hand. Not many rpgs have that kind of feeling, and it’s good to have once in a while.
Did you see the other comment about “entering negotiations” in FATE? Seems like a great way to codify the “choose not to die” thing.
I should also mention that chart was class-specific. About six injuries were generic, and the rest depended on the class. I only made charts for the classes that were currently being played, but as you said it solves the problem of a specific injury completely nerfing your build.
If you’ve still got those charts handy I’d love to take a look!
Yup had a drow character gouge out their own eyes as part of a bad deal with a green hag. Two levels later that character got even better eyes from an angel that makes her immune to the blind condition.
How’d those two blind levels work out? Were you about to contribute?
I was the DM in this situation, and they totally contributed since the drow character was a priestess of light.
We had one campaign set in a pseudo-Victorian, Jules-Verne-and-Mary-Shelly world of airships and weird science and Frankenstein-style forays into Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Though we were using Pathfinder rules, the only “magic” was alchemy, which in-world was considered not magic at all but a perfectly legitimate (and rapidly-advancing) science. I played a classic mad-doctor type who kept the party alive, and functioning at peak efficiency, with a wide array of neon-colored, bubbling alchemical serums, delivered through distressingly large needles.
Except that it gradually became evident, in-universe and out, that performance-enhancing alchemy was dangerous, ravaging both mind and body over the long term, and highly addictive. Ordinary healing serums were safe enough, but buff infusions, and ESPECIALLY mutagens — such as the intellect-boosting cognatogen which Doktor Krauss used daily — were playing with fire.
The good Doktor went from being regarded by his companions as a miracle worker to a stubborn, morally blind addict and drug-dealer who insisted on alchemy as the solution to every problem. Most of the PCs cut back their dependence on the most powerful alchemical buffs, the few who had NEVER used them looked smug and gave Krauss meaningful looks, and we tried with varying degrees of success to salvage mutagen-addled NPC friends. (Poor James.)
And Krauss himself just recalculated the trajectory of his personal spiral toward hell. He had a project to finish that meant more to him than life itself, and he would ration those cognatogens to the microgram to assure that his mind kept functioning just long enough to see it to completion.
I suppose I could have been annoyed with the GM for “changing the rules” on us mid-campaign, especially since it added a serious downside to many of my character’s abilities. For this campaign, though, it was so damned flavorful that no one minded. Neuroalchemy WAS a new and rapidly advancing field, and like Marie Curie and gamma rays, in made sense that a cutting-edge researcher might get burned by his own discoveries. And the setting was dark enough, with a pervading creepy sense that something was deeply WRONG with this world, that it would have seemed out of place for alchemy to be a happy, shiny, zero-consequence boon to humanity.
Neither Krauss (in world) or myself (out of world) would have done things differently if we had known the dangers…so the GM made the right call in letting us learn the hard way.
What kind of shadowrunner refuses to work with “The unaugmented”? Mages, Shamans, and Adepts are incredibly useful allies.
So, personal experience as a GM: I consider this topic a charged land mine.
I had a setting in which magic had extra punch. It caused ALL magic to have additional, charged effects that were temporary. So early on, a character cast a healing spell. I checked my table, and the healing magic healed 50% more and granted the target toughened skin, granting them a modicum of Natural Armor Rating (this is PFRPG, not DnD). I described this as the characters skin becoming tough and leathery, like a rhinos.
But I had failed to consider that 1) the character was a princess and 2) the princess character was a direct conduit into the player’s personal fantasy. They were -LIVID-, campaign cratered, lessons learned.
So far it hasn’t come up in our Pathfinder game. The closest we’ve come? My barbarian’s taken a few nasty hits. One put her out (until a burst of Breath of Life) and ever since she’s had a hoarser voice and a scar on her neck. She also took a Disintegwate spell to the face, failed the save (but survived), and ended up with a bit of scarring and hair issues. I think enough downtime’s passed that she can get it back tho.
Then again, we also got roasted badly by a dragon and bits of our sorceror are showing that shouldn’t …
“You’ve returned from the land of death. The experience haunts you.”
“Like I have nightmares? PTSD? There’s a shock of white in my hair?”
“Naw. You sound like one of Marge Simpson’s sisters.”
I lost a limb due to some minor DM shenanegans due to a ghost that needed my hand to release a sealed god and was willing to possess me and cut off my own arm to do it.
As a rogue, this caused some minor issues with being able to use a bow, but fortunately as a cleric multi I still had something to fall back on until I could get to a blacksmith to get a prosthetic made.
My first iteration was an interesting hook shape, a bit like a fireplace poker, that I could lock the bow into and still be able to fire arrows, and/or lock the shield to in order to still have a means of defense. The main drawback was that while I could wear bracers, I couldn’t wear gauntlets, and I could only attune/use magical rings and bracelets that were on the other hand.
He also let me train up a homebrew spell (https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/136750-phantom-limb) based on the arcane trickster’s mage hand. Still not able to wear rings/bracelets on that hand, but it allowed us to not have to constantly remember articulation difficulties on a case-by-case basis.
Eventually, I found a tentacle rod and had that adapted to replace the hook. Let me tell you, it was fun as heck when an unassuming old lady suddenly has her gloved hand burst apart with a mass of writhing tentacles to grab you.