Inglorious ends to characters or stories

I'm interested in hearing stories where characters meet inglorious deaths or retirements. Unexpected shit like the fighter slipping one day in the sauna and cracking his head open.

Stories where characters avoid inglorious death very narrowly or through GM fiat are fine too.

I'll start us off:

>Party of three, one of which is the DMPC which he uses to prod us along in the right direction. System is DM's crunchy as hell homebrew
>DMPC and another character run into one another while the two of them are exploring an ancient set of ruins. DMPC is drawn there by some force only she can feel, the player is just looking for treasure.
>While they explore they stumble onto a secret door.
>Player charges in, sure the door is hiding treasure, the DMPC tries to scramble after her
>The room their walking into is almost pitch black. Player lucks out and just happens to run down the stairs, but DMPC fails consecutive AGI/PER checks and walks out into open air.
>DMPC's treant familiar succeeds in catching her before she falls, but fails his strength check to actually hold onto her.
>All the treant has accomplished is to flip her upside down
>DMPC lands on her head and cracks it open
>She is immediately put to -5 HP and begins bleeding out
>My character hasn't even been introduced yet

Luckily the party member with her was the resident healer so they managed to stabilize her, but we came very close to doing a hard restart. A while later the DM was doing some stat adjustments and contacted me over Skype

>I think I might have actually rolled too low on that fall damage in the first game. Now that I look back over the stats I'm pretty sure Assa should be dead.

So we only have a campaign right now because the DM fucked up on his addition.

I had a character die because the DM was either lying to me or had some kind of down syndrome. I was being swarmed by rats and I said I would fly up to escape them. He then said the rats jumped up and grabbed me to bite me. So, I asked how that was possible, since they're rats, and he said the ceiling was only ten feet high, and so my legs were only five feet off the ground, and rats can jump five feet. Pretty sure that's bullshit, but he insisted they jumped on me. Then when they knocked me unconscious from biting me, he said I took 5d6 falling damage, because I had flown to the ceiling, which was fifty feet high.

So, after ten minutes of me and all the other players furiously insisting he had said it was ten feet high only a minute before, and that there was no possible way the rats could have reached me in the first place if I was 50' in the air, he had me fall and die. Then his DMPC warriors chopped my body up and sold the parts to his other DMPC wizard.

Man, fuck that guy.

I had something like that happen with a first time DM in college.

We were a motley crew of prisoners/slaves trying to escape from the brig of a pirate ship but the guy had us rolling perception to see inane shit like doors and normal access hatches even though we all had dark vision. We told him to cut it out and he got upset with us.

Eventually one of us found a hatch in the floor and decided to see what was under it.

>You see a ladder leading 30ft down into the bowels of the ship
>Wait what? Aren't we already at the bottom? We were in the brig.
>Well the ship is just that big.
>Well... OK. I guess I go down the ladder.
>It breaks under your weight and you fall thirty feet, roll 2d20 damage.

We promptly told him to fuck off and then he got up and left. I don't think he's tried even playing a game since.

>dnd 3.5, I think
>prologue for level 1 party. We meet in a tavern. 4/5 of us live in that town, the mage knows some extra stuff from the GM and comes in looking for some muscle for a quest
>mage is an uppity as fuck elf, insults the warrior dwarf with 18 str
>dwarf punches the mage in the face, crits
>also rolls highest damage
>mage is insta killed five minutes into the prologue

GM fiat´d it out and let him just be unconscious. We dunked him in the horse fountain (does that have a name in English?) and went on with the campaign.

>pc has a rival
>pc and rival are on different sides of a civil war, have fought each other often
>rival is mad at pc for killing his waifu
>pc's faction attacks rival's faction's mountain base
>pc encounters rival there, rival is injured and using crutches
>pc chucks him off the mountain
Fun times.

Dude, he kills your girlfriend later, too.

He kills all your girlfriends. He's so silly ~

>Gnome brawler
>Steals a manuscript from some cult because he's suspicious of them
>Gets attacked by a ghost that tries to retrieve it
>Gnome overloads his enchanted hand wraps and explodes
>Manuscript is destroyed, ghost is slightly injured and retreats

>playing a Black Company game
>we're not THE Black Company but members of another mercenary company unrelated to Khatovar origin story, we just really liked the setting of the books
>we did some shit in our three years or so long campaign and none of it really matters here
>our Company, which never had more than 30 members so it and was comprised of our own former characters that survived, is ready to pursue to pursue this motherfucker we've had on the run for two seasons
>he ran away to the Plain of Glittering Stone
>we temporarily undo the seals and enter the Plain prepared like we've never been before having called in all possible favors
>we literally die within seconds of entering the Plain
>entire motherfucking Company and campaign gone down the drain

For those not in the know - Plain of Glittering Stone is guarded by living shadows that kill everything and have to be warded away with magic. Problem is, this shit was NOT common knowledge in our world because we barely knew the damn things exist considering there were no Shadowmasters there either.

In retrospective we really should've scouts in first but we were really out of time, and we apparently had really shit for luck because there's a warded road going through the Plain. Except most of it is canonically in ruins and our world was apparently cut off for so long road connecting to its gate was in even worse shape.

Horse trough, if you mean the wooden box with water.

Though I have seen a fountain sculpted like a horse, and I prefer your wording.

Trough? If you were referring to the long bucket horses drink out of.

I've told this story before a few times, but here goes again.

>Party is a number of quasi-commandos in a magical setting.
>Our people have been at war with a race of giants for a while, 40-50 years.
>Were getting our asses kicked, until about 30 years before campaign, when we allied with a tribe of lizardfolk, who started turning the tide.
>Lizards are nasty though, and demand regular human sacrifices to their dragon-god.
>Anyway, we get called in because the giants, despite being on their last legs, have managed to abduct the next sacrifice, and are trying to use it to drive a wedge between us and the lizards
>Go and rescue her.
>Along the way, smash up something that provided magical protection to their last major fortress, so not only do we save the girl, we pretty much win the war
>Huzzah!
>Then, in what might not have been the best decision, we decide not to turn the girl over to the lizardmen, who are still expecting their sacrifice, and the deal our people had with them was good for another 20 years or so.
>Lizards pissed, attack.
>Lots of warring back and forth
>Finally get the upper hand, although several communities in our vale are destroyed in the fighting.


1/2

>Lizards decide to play their trump card, and appeal to that dragon god, who takes the field.
>Burns down 2nd biggest city in area in an afternoon.
>Break off from frontline duty, go on long quest to get a magic sword that was forged, not to kill dragons, but to kill this specific dragon.
>Go after his lair
>Find him not at home
>He comes in eventually (Was burning down our capital, but we didn't know it at the time)
>Gives long speech about how invincible he is and we have no chance, until one of our characters pulls the sword and he immediately tries to flee.
>Collapse the cave lip
>Fight
>Win
>Come back.
>Fight off one last ditch assault by the lizards, who are now furious that we killed their god.
>Half the population thinks we're heroes who saved them from unimaginable horror
>The other half thinks it's our damn fault that the war started, and wants us hanged as traitors
>Factionalism develops, looks like the vale is heading for civil war, and everything we do to try to calm things down makes it worse
>So we just leave
>Head off into an obscure retirement, and hope things get better on their own.
>They don't, but it works out probably better than things would if we were around.

It was one of our better endings with that GM too.

Played a Monk who was the master of taking out armies of goons. Good at tripping, good at opportunity attacks, good at stunning fists.

Got purple wormed.

What does this mean?

That means he got shafted by a giant purple worm that lives in the sand and is really fucking big. It can eat caravans in one bite, or at least one-two camels.

...

So an Alaskan Bull Worm, but purple?

Playing a support cleric, sweet girl the rest of the party considers their little sis or daughter. Have hints at the start of a romance with NPC, tomboy brawler with a goofy grin, party vetted her like a trio of overprotective fathers that heard some thug wanted to date their daughter.

Off on a mission, mountaintop fight against a longtime antagonist who now rides some sort of frog-dragon.
Tongue attack hits my cleric, grapples, she struggles but it pulls her in to bite and gulp.
Sorcerer didn't see it happen from his vantage point, casts Fear trying to scare off the enemy rider, maybe seperate him from dragon.
Dragon fails the save too, flies off with me swallowed. Taking damage every round, can't beat the grapple to escape and only make the check to cast healing every other attempt.
Run out of spells, few HP, fading fast with no way out...

Rest of the party got her a grave marker in the local cemetary.

My fighter nearly got killed by a half-orc in the first session of the current campaign. I'd green text it out, but I'm on mobile right now.

>Playing elderly barbarian ex-cheif
>Wandering the wilds after losing wife and leaving tribe to my son
>Hired to fight frost giants alongside a paladin and a cleric of Kord
>Worship Kord as well because it makes sense
>We go on many adventures
>In the end we get trapped deep underground
>Attacked by driders who wandered into the middle tier caves
>We fight valiantly but my rage wears off
>I get poisoned and the DM rolls max strength damage
>Suddenly rather somewhat feeble
>Cleric cures the poison
>Driders get ray of enfeeblement
>Back down to having childlike strength
>Ditch my shield and some other gear so that I can at least move
>Kill one
>Get poisoned DM rolls max strength damage
>Barbarian who worships the god of strength loses all all muscular power and dies of cardiac atrophy

Ate some green slime off the floor of a dungeon.

In the first or second session of a dnd campaign, our DM ruled that if you put a bag of holding inside a bag of holding, the bags will explode with enough force to decimate an entire city. This would become very important by the last session of our campaign, because everyone had managed to get a bag of holding by that point.

Our characters were walking down a corridor, when suddenly they set off a poisonous gas trap. To escape from the gas, everyone dove into a bag of holding. Unfortunately, we had forgotten to have our characters drop their own bags of holding beforehand. And so, with around six bags of holding inside of a bag of holding, the queen’s castle we were in, along with the rest of her kingdom, was obliterated by massive explosion that could be seen from thousands of miles away. And that's how I experienced my first TPK.

The DM fiated that away so we could continue the campaign

>Black Company
mah nigga

>Play a Spirit Shaman in 3.5 Eberron
>Start as a healer, branch out into dealing minimal damage
>Maximizie my healing ability with feats so I can do it spontaneously and swap out spells for healing spells
>Get a dinosaur mount, waste a wish on fighter proficiencies so I can use a lance, use 3 druid spells and some magic items to deal around an average of 300 damage with every mounted charge
>Fix every terrible decision other group members and I myself have ever made with quick thinking and dedicated research
>Help my group reach level 20 while facing down warforged uprisings, lovecraftian invasions, and githyanki swashbuckling.
>Retire my character with great pride and contentment
>DM pretty much makes us go on into epic levels even though everyone else is tired of the campaign
>Skip a day because I don't feel good
>TPK to a couple CR 11 Iron Golems while I'm gone.

as in actual black company game or did you homebrew something?

>not playing in the apocalyptic landscape that you caused to be as a penance for your idiocy.

Man, that GM had a golden opportunity.

i haven't personally experienced this, but one of my players have
>player makes a four-armed unarmed fighter in GURPS
>in a modern campaign
>while the rest of the group are doing military shit
>dude walks out into the open in a firefight to go chase down a guard tower
>soldiers in the other tower, which he's facing away from, fire a couple of bursts at him with their AKs or whatever it was
>dude takes like 6 bullets in the back
>'do you have any DR'
>'no'
>he fucking dies
>rest of the group abandon his body and level the place with a mortar camp they'd captured nearby
rip

Did you warn him about the fact that melee was useless in the game and he should go for a guy with modern weapons instead?

This reminded me of one from years ago.

>Playing sci-fi homebrew. Borderlands levels of silliness
>I am basically playing futuristic heavy, paired with a combat medic. We're defending an ammo manufacturing plant. The other two players are aligned with the mercs assaulting our position. A psionic commando and a robotics expert.
>Some time into the assault the merc players can tell that the attack really is not going their way.
>Engie wants to defect, maybe the guys in the plant haven't noticed them and they'll hire them on
>Commando is being Edgy McSrspants and straight up threatens to shoot Engie in the face for 'turning traitor.'
>Commando forgets that Engie always has robots
>Engie biffs Commando out of the tree with a small surveillance drone
>Commando fails his check to land properly and falls on his back
>Gets curbstomped by a small walker bot
>This continues until Commando dies

He basically got biffed to death by reconnaissance robots. It was pretty sad.

>DM doesn't want to kick the player out after the very first game so he fiats that we're able to save Commando's brain in a jar. Engie feels kinda shit about it and me and the medic don't real give a fuck so whatever.
>First thing Commando does when we find a new town is attack a merchant with his mind powers.
>collectivesigh.jpeg
>Merchant offers us $2,000 for the jar that's giving him a migraine
>Party agrees
>Merchant puts a .50 through the brain and we go on our merry way.

Your DM has a vore fetish, your character was killed off for his magical realm

yes, multiple times
he was pretty dead set on being punchy

Then you did good in killing him off.

Stupidity begets stupidity after all.

Huh, I always thought dragons were immune to fear.

Maybe it was the frog half that failed.

Nah frogs are notoriously for unswaying bravery and chivalrous deeds. They even have a folk song so popular and endearing human children know it by heart about a hero long ago who let a scorpion 3 times his size ride on his own back knowing full well the detriment to his health it would have just so the scorpion wouldn't drown when it was preventable.

... I don't think that's what the story is about.

Don't be a bigot, its crude.

GM didn't need to fiat anything, dwarf warrior cant do lethal damage with fists at level 1 in 3.5.

That is a pretty funny start to a campaign.

>Don't be a bigot, its crude.
Maximum kek

The GM was into exploding dice. You rolled highest damage, you got to keep rolling. Or maybe the dwarf had some feat or the mage was particularly flimsy. But the guy got killed, we laughed too much not to remember that clearly.

The whole campaign kinda went like that.

The next day we all left the town and got attacked by an owlbear that instantly crushed half of our party, then kept dropping them to negatives while I tried to stabilize everyone with magic berries and the dwarf tried to keep it away. I don´t remember well how it ended, but I think the GM had to say that we fought good enough to scare it away because we just couldn´t go on.

We later got into a cave with rat people who had some magic staff the mage wanted. Mage and dwarf wanted to exterminate them, while the ranger and I (druid) wanted to just get the damn thing and leave them alone. There´s a confrontation. First I casted the iron heating spell to make the warrior let his weapon go, but I timed it wrong and instead it just did more damage when he attacked the ranger. Then I casted stone to mud on top of them thinking it´d be enough to trap and maybe suffocate them, but GM let them shoot us magic missiles that took us down.

The campaign split form here on, we trying to hunt and kill the mage and dwarf. But they had a fuckload of money from plot reasons and hired a bunch of mercenaries.

Eventually they fortified themselves in a ruined castle we had previously cleared of orcs. We wanted to sneak in and steal the staff. Rogue (also with us, but kinda irrelevant 99% of the time) scouted, cilmbed the wall and saw no one. She gave us the sign and we started to climb the wall too. Then suddenly the hirelings showed up and started attacking us from the top. Ranger got killed when one of then dropped a big stone on him.

Now that I think of it, pretty much everything we did in that campaign was a massive disaster.