I’ve died a few times over the years, from such simple things as
walking down into a sewer with a shoulder light on (Aliens Style) to highlight
my head for the inevitable headshot, to being absorbed by a nano-plague and
dissipated to the four winds by an engineered nanite construction, but most of
these didn’t have the same impact on me as a late eighties game of Runequest.
There were three PC’s in the party, all of us having generated our
characters fairly (or so I’d thought at the time, I had no way of knowing that
the GM had a budding bromance with one of the other players), so I’d got my
woodcutter, a simple man of simple origins, with the axe he used in his day job
and a leather tunic borrowed from the blacksmiths in his village. The second
player was an apprentice wizard with a few minor spells, and the third player
was a noble born wizard who happened to be a were-dragon…
No prizes for guessing which one was the budding bromance…
But it could have been worse, the game started and we found that an
army of Broo (remember those? Random
agents of destruction, not known for their forwards planning) had been raiding
up and down the land and we needed to go put a stop to it.
All three of us…
Not one to let the odds cause us any issue, we loaded up, got all our
gear (didn’t take long, we didn’t have any), didn’t mount up (didn’t have
horses), and started investigating what had been going on in the surrounding
villages. Reports were that they were
marauding up and down the coastal ranges, and the last village that had been
hit was just down from where we were staying, so off we went to the last
village where the broo had been sighted.
We needed have bothered looking too hard, the broo had set up camp and
were just starting to cook the villagers, they’d also come prepared, knowing
that sooner or later they’d encounter some sort of resistance, they’d brought
along something for protection in the form of a huge Minotaur…
Now, as the designated fighter in the group, it was down to me to
engage the minotaur while the wizards prepared spells to even the fight.
Closed to combat distance, rolled initiative, lost it by a mile, the
minotaur stepped up to the plate, wound up for the strike…
And rolled 26 for damage…
In the head…
And in the quiet words of Harry Kalas… (SFW)
So there’s me, characterless and watching the rest of the combat
unfold, which consisted of the Minotaur going 2 and 0 with the apprentice
Wizard, and then turning its attention to the noble, who went pale, went scaly,
and then proceeded to drop the claw, claw, Breath Weapon smackdown upon the
assembled bad guys. I and the apprentice
retired to the front room to generate new characters while the GM went raving
on about how well his crush had done in the fight. Sitting in the front room while the nascent
bromance developed in the other room, the thing that struck both of us was not
that we’d been killed, but that it’d been a one shot wipeout in both cases. Enough damage had been caused in both cases
that had the cleave feat been invented at the time, the minotaur would have
gone through any number of adventuring parties without any real problems,
something that had never occurred in any other game that we’d played. The only
thing that stood a chance against it was the Dragon in the rear. This in particular is why I remember it, not
because of the sheer unfairness of the whole thing, I’ve had bad GM’s before,
of a certainty I’ll have them again, but I’d never before been killed to make
someone else feel awesome, and to this day it stands out as the only time I was
actively annoyed at the GM by the end of the session.
Cheerfully enough however, when I and the apprentice returned to the
other room, the were-dragon had got upset about the fact that we’d been wiped
out and had to spend another hour making characters and
had spent the entire hour berating the GM for being an all round Biatch and crap GM…
So all’s well that ends well…
