Respectful Remembrance
Poor Bard. Dude’s just trying to work his day job. There he is providing light ambiance at some m’lord’s estate, when all of a sudden splorch-gurgle-slump. How he manages to constantly find himself roped into The Heroes’ murderhoboing I’ll never understand. But then again, it does make for an interesting study in contrasts.
When the reaper rears his head, there seem to be two courses of action. You can either make that fallen PC the lynchpin of an ongoing narrative (“I swear that I shall see you avenged!”), or you can opt for a The Gamers approach.
For my money, the key difference lies in timing. If death comes calling in the early levels, there’s still plenty of time to bring in a new guy. If you happen to croak in the first combat of the first dungeon, it’s worth a laugh and a quick reroll. But by the same token, a perma-death near the endgame is cause for much weeping and gnashing of teeth. That’s a character with history, and we’ve had plenty of time to fall in love with ’em. Their death likely deserves a little gravitas.
If you happen to be in the middle of a campaign, however, then it’s time to plot and plan with your surviving party-mates. That’s what happened last time I was obliged to bow out of a campaign.
It was an Old World of Darkness game, and I was alpha of an oddball pack of werewolves. After a bit of colluding with the GM, my pre-planned death scene went exactly as I’d hoped. I had the chance to pull my successor in close, whisper a few last words, and treat him to a parting quest hook.
You see, that whole campaign my guy had followed the Simba storyline. His father had been murdered by a treacherous lieutenant, and my poor heir apparent had to escape after he’d been framed.
“One day, Gaia willing, I’ll return and reclaim my birthright.”
Or at least, that’s what I claimed. In reality my guy had murdered the shit out of his father, seeking to claim the throne ahead of schedule. Thanks to bit of GM hand-waving, I got to give my successor all the gory details with a spirit vision. And let me tell ya: Nothing makes for a more dramatic funeral than the sudden revelation that the dearly departed was a right bastard. Or that you’ve inherited his enemies.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever seen a dead PC’s legacy carried on in a campaign? Do you have any special rites or rituals to commemorate the fallen? Or do you take a more pragmatic loot-the-body-and-hire-a-replacement approach? Tell us all about your own funeral rites and PC memorial services down in the comments!
GEEKY GREETING CARDS For a limited time only this holiday this season, we’re bringing back our dice ornament X-mas cards over on Laurel’s Etsy store. We’re also rocking our ever-popular d20 Class prints, now updated to include designs for the Artificer, Warlock, and GM. So come one come all! Whether their alignment is Naughty or Nice, give a geek in your life a happy holiday.
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
Oh nohh! They have killed Fargrim, my twin brother!!1!
I, Targrim, shall avenge you. (shakes fist at cloud)
This is such a trope that KAMB! has a specific rule penalizing players who do it. If Bargle has just died, naming your next character Bargle Jr, Bargle the Second, or any variation thereof gives you a kobold horrible death check.
Have you ever actually done this?
and here’s the reference
https://youtu.be/3atFxtIjYnU
currently I play a character Miniri
I thought about naming her replacement brother Maxiri (same role as supporting devine caster, but entirely different buld)
Just after Gary Gygax died, as the tributes were pouring in, I remember someone remarking, “But in a few minutes we’ll meet his brother, Barry Bybax.”
I’d thought it was from the Onion’s man-in-the-street blurbs, but a google search fails me…
Good tribute, lol.
Quick! behind the pile of dead bards!
Huh, thought your link to The Gamers would have been to the “pile of dead bards” in Dorkness Rising
I am a man of many surprises.
Why mourn the fallen? Rise them up 😀
Friends always help each other to put themselves back standing on their feet 🙂
Necromancers, the friendliest class 😛
If you can’t you don’t let your friend sacrifice go waste when you got spare parts to use 🙂
Or if the become back as the restless undeath it’s your duty as friend to help them make peace with their death and transcend to the beyond so you can make dibs on the now not-haunted equipment 🙂
That is what means to be a friend 😛
I know, I know… Resurrection, reincarnation, and necromancy are all alternatives to death. But we’re talking about true “my guys is permanently dead” moments here. Different kettle of fish.
As i said:”If you can’t you don’t let your friend sacrifice go waste when you got spare parts to use ”
I call dibs on his spleen 😛
My reading comprehension skills are total crap the night before a con.
Wish us luck at Momocon Winterfest! We just did setup, and the floor opens at 10:00 am tomorrow.
Hope that everything has gone well. Enjoy it and be safe 😀
Also take some rest before, after and during the con 🙂
Life insurance FTW! With our premium plan, even being disintegrated and thrown into a void of nothingness is no problem, and we’ll even throw in a free upload and augmentations for your new soul and body!
XD
Life insurance necromancer is a good character concept 😀
I have, to this day, (knock on wood) been the lucky bastard whose PCs have never died. I have the magical power of being INCREDIBLY unlucky, except when PC death is on the line, at which point I will roll 20s all combat long- or at least, at the exact time I need to roll them to not die.
However, this also works in reverse. I can’t roll for shit if my players might die, and they will crit repeatedly.
So your characters are basically like Rincewind?
Let us hope that your eventual first death goes better than Laurel’s:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/white-haired-witch
Ah yes, the scythe. One of my players went an entire campaign mainweaponing a scythe and only rolled that magical 20 once in the entire campaign. And it was against the second-to-final boss, killing them instantly with a 604 damage crit.
I’ve been pretty lucky. Only 2 deaths. The first death was my first ever TTRPG character Lini. She died at level 2. (I learned what an AoO was that day.) The second death was Mick the boar. He got killed by a dragon. The warforged that became a god brought him back for me.
No one else has died yet though there have been some close calls. (Which reminds me, still got to get Tamarie a Swarmsbane Clasp.) I got better at building characters to not die and knowing when to run away from a fight.
Swarmbane clasp is so sad! It’s a great idea that you finally afford just as you’re out-leveling swarms.
To be fair, the swarmbane clasp will ALWAYS have a use in making you not die horribly to rotgrubs, since it gives its resistance to their CON damage. If you don’t have a swarmbane clasp, rot grub swarms can kill basically any pc. Fortitude save VS con damage that repeats every round, the gift that keeps on giving.
Fortunately, since my group uses downtime material rules, I can get the item for basically only 30% of the total. I just gotta remember to get it made. Plus, Tamarie’s a monk so the clasp would be helpful for her to fight.
My Bard died two sessions and immediately got tagged out for his Bardbarian sister who inherited both his quest and a boatload of trauma over the death of her twin brother.
She was not particularly happy to have learned they just sort of buried the dude randomly by some tree and legged it. But she wasn’t happy about a lot of things at that point, so eh?
In the Starfinder game I run one of my players, a S.R.O. Soldier who also happened to be a member of the Free Captains and was a space pirate, was planning to exit the campaign. He also was our DM for D&D and that was coming out of haitus soon. I wanted him to have a good sendoff.
So, having already tied some Cosmic Horror into my campaign, an Outer God gave him nightmares. Something had blocked out his memory of his early past/creation and it was revealed his line of robots was mind controlled and enchanted to believe they were eliminating hostiles while in reality they were killing Civilians. Big Sad. Worse, one of said civilian alien priestesses asked the wrong god (an Outer God) for help, and it unfortunately answered. the Priestess became an Pyschic Abomination from the stars that we learn has been hounding our poor Robot Space Pirate with dark visions, and he was ready to kick its ass.
Not only did he have to wade through twisted elder thing robot zombies of his own kind with the party but also got the killing blow against the monstrous psychic space anemone in a Cthulu-style underground coastal temple, and did so with a can of gasoline and a frag grenade armed to a wireless detonator.
That wasn’t the end of the action though as an earthquake struck the cavern and the party had to make some hasty skill checks to get out of there
[pt 2, accidentally pressed enter early]
proceeded to fail the final one, and he lost his legs heroically diving and saving another party member from some well-timed falling rocks. The party however dug themselves out and miraculously surrvived, and the robot pirate had no legs. Cue his boss, an infamous Pirate Lord, swoop in trying to find his wayward crewmember. He thanked the PCs for keeping his trusty robot crewmember safe and gave them free passage in Free Captain territory. One player has exited and now the remaining PCs have new story hooks to pursue with pirates in the Diaspora!
I recently stumbled onto the Unearthed Arcana race Revenant, which seems like an excellent middle ground between “new character” and “resurrection”.
https://media.dnd.wizards.com/upload/articles/UA%20Gothic%20Characters.pdf
Only for Humans and Dragonborn officially, but probably not too hard to use those as a template for other races.
Lets you keep a character whose story isn’t done yet around, while at the same time almost guaranteeing that their story will end, because once their purpose is complete they keel over and become immune to resurrective magic.
Edit: Oh, and you can also use it in place of a Tiefling subrace, which is cool.
I remember one time that three PCs died at once (because the DM didn’t read the adventure carefully enough to realize that the high-level monster in the closet of a low-level dungeon was magically bound inside that closet, even if someone opened the door). After a couple rounds of combat, it was obvious we were gonna lose.
So the party cleric told the rest of us to fall back while he held the beast off, sacrificing himself for his friends. The party barbarian owed the cleric too much to let him do something like that alone, so he joined in his last glorious fight.
And then the gunslinger, whose gun had broken (and buying a new one would be super expensive), also stayed behind.
We remembered the cleric fondly, referencing him fairly often. We remembered the gunslinger lightly, ribbing its player for that choice. The barbarian was somewhere in the middle, only remembered either as the cleric’s companion or the second reasonable sacrifice before the gunslinger.
Around the middle point of my WoD Orpheus campaign, one PC made a noble sacrifice and was commemorated by the party. Minor spoilers for the campaign.
He was a former firefighter who’s projector abilities were triggered by being burned half-to-death in a job gone wrong, now he could only feel something close to his normal life by being cryogenically frozen and existing as a pseudo-ghost.
At this point, the Spectres/evil ghosts have constructed a gateway between our world and theirs inside an extremely haunted apartment building, made extra cursed by using normal ghosts as the meat/building material for their ‘Hive’. When the party fought their way into the portal room, they realised that gateway couldn’t be destroyed by damaging the this side of the connection.
Our Firefighter PC had the best armour and weaponry (the ghostly copies of his old firefighting suit and axe), he had the best odds of surviving whatever hordes were on the otherside and so volunteered to close the portal.
The last they saw of him was his axe head being sheered off by a Reaper (top tier Spectre)’s blade before he crossed to the other side. But after far too long, the portal finally closed. His body was brought out of cyrogenic stasis but it was flatlined, the connection to his soul severed.
A huge statue was built in his honour in front of the crew’s base of operation. His axe held aloft as their eternal, silent guardian.
Said statue was also briefly possessed by another PC to fight a Reaper which only added to his legacy and we all thought was pretty damn cool.
Well, that is not much of a problem in Pendragon. Most of the meta-plot is actually based on revenge and clans fighting each other. Uther, and later Arthur want to revenge the death of their brother and father respectively. And then the Saxons do the same from Hengist and Horsa on down. And there is the feud between Lancelot and his ilk, and Gawain and his.
Also, as Pendragon is a generational game, quite a few characters will be sons, brothers, uncles, nephews, cousins, husbands, wifes, daughters, aunts, nieces, and cousins of previous characters. Quite a lot will also be out to avenge the killing of their former character. And, as most early characters will be killed, either at the Battle of St. Albans, or be poisoned at the feast afterwards, that gives quite an incentive for revenge.
Also also, a famous parent/ancestor with lots of glory, will give your new character a leg up in society, either by being recognized (and expecting to live up to the fame of the previous one) or by having a better manor or position, and thus better armour, horses and other equipment.
One PC in my Orpheus campaign had a statue dedicated to them, after they sacrificed themselves to close a gateway between the living world and the Underworld, from the other side.
We had a few party deaths, but his stood out amongst the group and was the only one to receive some IC “dues to the dead”.
Our party tends to bury/cremate the body without looting of (not including plot items or consumables), assuming we’re at the stage where we can’t simply revive them, or they’ve chosen to reroll on purpose.
This prevents the replacement character from needing to loot the dead for their ‘own’ gear, or from things getting unbalanced with the rest of the party having a huge amount of magic items to nab/sell from the dead character.
In response to Colin’s Xmas comic ideas, have some Christmas-themed adventures, courtesy of pathfinder rules:
Gremlins have infested the Christmas Elves Toy Workshop! Their auras of bad luck and accident-inflicting magics are causing the normally OSHA-compliant industrial machinery to go haywire and cause grievous injuries, acting not unlike a trap-filled dungeon.
The party, following an encounter with a Krampus and its Regression ability, has to continue adventuring the rest of the day as youthful kiddie versions of themselves. Notably, they retain most of their powers – kitty Magus is as deadly/adorable as ever.
Magus has yet to learn her lesson on not licking creatures, this time an ice elemental, frost queen or ice giant. This joke can be re-used for the other handbook as well.
Quest Giver, being suitably equipped with facial hair, is put in the role of a fantasy version of a ‘mall Santa’ – offering quests to all the good PCs.
Druid and Eldritch Archer have differing opinions on how certain Christmas traditions, rituals and tributes to appease the bloodthirsty spirits of winter are meant to be performed.
These are all great.
Oh shit! I’m afraid you’re too late. I posted the Holiday comic poll over on Patreon on the 16th. I’ll note these down though and claim to have come up with completely original ideas in 2022. 😛
Hah. Had the somewhat odd instance of a PC carrying on their *own* legacy after being missing (presumed dead) for around five centuries during a timeskip between campaigns (the DM had offered the option of keeping our characters from the previous campaign if we wanted).
Nothing an antisocial, reclusive wizard with little use for people likes better than getting to the capital and finding himself staring at a three story statue of himself :p
He did manage to adapt, eventually, but several important people very nearly got set on fire after being unexpectedly friendly.