Hey guys, so I have this bbeg whose a literal God and can't be killed, there's other ways to stop him but that's not what this is about. I'm trying to think up a fate worse than death scenario https://1921681254.mx/https://100001****/ I can use on a knight NPC the party has fallen for to kinda drive home he's you know... not nice, all I can think of us the usual stuff though like mentally imprison them for 1000 years or something like that, any ideas?
assuming the knight is the classic chivalrous nice-guy, then you could have him lose all sense of right & wrong, becoming the truest neutral. Everything he stood for before becomes meaningless to him now, where once he saw black & white now everything is grey. He ends up turning to drink, because he doesn't see anything good or bad in it. Nothing seems wrong for him to do, so he does nothing. Years later, he is a bloated apathetic wreck in an opium den, trying desperately to feel anything at all, futilely. Every attempt by the party is regarded with emotionless eyes. He feels nothing - the BBEG has taken away everything that made him who he is.
Or, you know, make the BBEG curse him to never harm an evil being. every time he tries, it's like there's a barrier. Like in abraham lincoln; vampire hunter.
Or hurt his family. seeing your beloved turned into a zombie-assassin of the dark lord who then tries to kill you is decidedly worse than death.
Or just go for some of the more physical ones. Blinding him and removing his hands & feet is worse than death. For most knights, paralysing him from the waist down would be a horrifying fate. Turning him into a demon who can only speak infernal might also be an option.
A lot of this hangs on what sort of campaign you're running, and the comfort levels of your players with physical and emotional damage!
I think you'll get more emotional mileage out of this if you 1) prey on something central to the NPC, and 2) keep the fate thematic for the god.
Who is this knight? What's their personality, goals, most loved traits? What could the god do to strip them away? What would happen if the knight's biggest fear came true? What if the thing or person they loved ceased to exist? How can this NPC be broken or corrupted and what would it look like afterward? What if the party had to put them down?
Who is this god? What's his portfolio, motivations, and powers? How does he operate in your setting and what schemes does he have running? How will destroying this NPC play into those schemes? Does he need more lieutenants? Is he looking for a scapegoat to distract from his activities? Is he sending a message to the party? How can this knight's fate sell the dangers and the stakes of the greater campaign setting?
I find thematic evil allows for more of a gut punch, as well as serves as a stronger motivator for the party, than random evil. It helps worldbuild and establishes repeatable patterns the players can fight against/fear. A fate worse than death from a god of secrets may be causing someone to be forgotten by their loved ones. A god of storms may curse someone to be a lightning rod who brings natural disasters to every town she visits. A god of undeath may turn someone immortal, but make them die in agony every sunset only to wake up and relive the nightmare the next day. Stuff that tugs on the heartstrings and feels unjust because it affects innocents is usually a safe bet to make your players get how evil someone is.
Turning him against the party might be a good one, but it's hard to pull off and will cause more outrage than heartbreak. It's a good route nonetheless.
If you want to be very f*cked up, take everything that makes the knight himself and make the party watch powerless. You could make him target of a Time Ravage spell, with a twist.
So, he becomes old and frail, with 30 days to live, BUT the god makes him immortal and every hour, his eyes go cloudy as he relives all his worst sufferings in a string of visions. Wounds appear on his body and close up as the knight screams.
This is a curse and the only way to lift it is to offer the soul of its firstborn child to the god.
He is old and frail, and begs the party to kill him. If they try, the immortality is revealed, as a broken neck snaps back into place or wounds close and his eyes open in surprise.
An everlasting reminder to those who want to oppose him. Endless pain and suffering, that can only be terminated by giving up what you love most to endure things that could be even worse.
It's real, it's scary, and it might be too much: dementia. The character's memory slips in and out, and sometimes they know they have this illness (that may not be as well understood in our world as it is your setting), but can do nothing cheaply, quickly, or easily to remedy it. Restoration magics will work, but only the most experienced clerics will know that what memories they have when cured are all they get. If cured when they're completely blind to the players' identities or their own, the only thing they can do is rehabilitate the NPC, who may not even be willing to be cooperative with these potential 'strangers'. Do the players pursue to the evil god, or do they sit by and wait for that small glimmer of hope and hit the switch with a restoration spell?
Much as I like the idea of them becoming undead or an enemy, the players may feel catharsis in fighting them off. Were I the BBEG, I'd want them to feel completely drained of willpower and reason to fight. The NPC becomes a husk that, sometimes, faces the player characters and shows signs of recognition but ultimately doesn't know them from Adam. The risk that comes with this is that the players - not just their characters - will feel less will to carry on. They're upset and don't want to take the NPC 'round the back of the shed to shoot them.
I wish you luck with whatever you decide to do!
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Zero is the most important number in D&D: Session Zero sets the boundaries and the tone; Rule Zero dictates the Dungeon Master (DM) is the final arbiter; and Zero D&D is better than Bad D&D.
"Let us speak plainly now, and in earnest, for words mean little without the weight of conviction."
Turning him is a good one, and you can do it by turning him into a monster; a vampire who tries to deny who he is, and hides it from the party but then the party keep discovering blood-drained bodies wherever they go, and eventually work it out. You could also curse him to be a werewolf and ensure he's filled with a ravenous hunger and uncontrollable changes. But make him a lot stronger than your standard werewolf.
Alternatively you could have him twisted and changed into a devil of some kind, or maybe a star spawn seer. That's probably more basic and less fun than the vampire, as the vampire lets him slowly decay over time.
He could be driven insane, and gain a desire to burn down everything around him. Possibly have him regain moments of lucidity, but 23 hours a day he just wants to burn things.
Or maybe... he can't die. But his wounds cannot be healed. He feels the pain of them all the time, as fresh as the moment they were taken. If he reaches 0 hit points, he remains alive on 1 hit point but the paid drives him made and he can think of nothing else. That's a pretty dark one. Maybe let him recover hit points after he eats humanoid flesh.
There's a lot of mind games, and they don't have to be inspired by real life things either.
To add to the already concerning list we're forming:
Take away all his memories since he was 6. Like, the guy is now his 6 year old self in an adult body. He's scared, and wants to know where his mum is. Bonus points if you make him carry a keepsake of his deceased mother around, which he makes the players aware of - "If I die, please take this to my sister, it's the only picture we have of our dear departed mother". Cut to later and the BBEG, who has sucked out all of his life since 6 and escaped, and the knight is asking the party where his mum is. Make him helpless and lost, that will really leave the party fumbling - do they look after him? deliver him to his sister? try to have him cured? Chase down the BBEG?
Any attempt to make him help them results in him crying and wailing that he wants his mummy. They are left with a helpless orphaned infant to look after.
Another option would be to magically age him. A knight in your prime? Bam, not any more, now you're ancient. all those years you wanted to spend with your family? Not any more.
Send him forward in time. This can work if you've planned a long haul of a campaign, and make him quitre old to start with. Planning to retire to spend his last years with his wife on the farm, then bam, teleported straight to her funeral. Not greatly visual for the players though, unless they are dragged along with him - he'd just disappear!
having the NPC return as a Death Knight through some dastardly manipulation by your BBEG on his side seems like a terrible fate for a friendly Knight NPC... would also give some incentive for the group to try and find a way for the Knight NPC's redemption conversely If you'd think your BBEG would be heinously demeaning of the NPC have their boneless skin sewn into BBEG's war banner, coat or court train
“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
I like the "turn them into a bad guy lieutenant" approach. If you wanna add a little extra bite, you can always kill them and then bring them back as an evil undead minion like a vampire or a revenant.
The time ravage idea is neat. An interesting twist would be if it acted like the weeping angels from Doctor Who, and instead of aging the character, it just sent them back in time sufficient to have them die within 30 days, so that they'd already have lived their life.
Kill them, then bring them back as heartless undead.
Building on to this, make them aware of what's happened to them, but helpless to stop it. Essentially, they're a prisoner in their own undead body.
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All stars fade. Some stars forever fall. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Homebrew (Mostly Outdated):Magic Items,Monsters,Spells,Subclasses ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
Kill them, then bring them back as heartless undead.
Building on to this, make them aware of what's happened to them, but helpless to stop it. Essentially, they're a prisoner in their own undead body.
True, but that would give the NPC more of a chance to break free (or be broken free by the PCs).
Ah, but what if they become a recurring character? Cursed to not only serve the BBEG, but every time they are stopped by the party, they rise as a Revenant.
Taking inspiration from what are possibly the most traumatic zombies in a game (half life headcrab zombies), have him able to plead and scream and beg the party to leave. Each encounter he becomes more angry at them, until he clearly hates them, and blames them, the revenant aspects of his body taking over his mind. Eventually, he hunts them down willingly, becoming a much more dangerous threat than when he was resisting.
Since it's a literal god, casting "Feeblemind" shouldn't be too much trouble for them.
It's cruel, but if the party is going against a god, they should have the spells necessary to reverse it (or pretty much anything short of their soul being destroyed, their corpse atomized, and their name being erased from history.),
Give them an overpowering, debilitating phobia of something innocuous and incredibly common, such as dirt or grass. Or, better yet, just make them all out paranoid. I'd use Angeline Fowl's nervous breakdown as inspiration, then build from there to flavor it towards the gods abilities.
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I used to portray Krathian, Q'ilbrith, Jim, Tara, Turin, Nathan, Tench, Finn, Alvin, and other characters in various taverns.
Hey guys, so I have this bbeg whose a literal God and can't be killed, there's other ways to stop him but that's not what this is about. I'm trying to think up a fate worse than death scenario https://1921681254.mx/ https://100001****/ I can use on a knight NPC the party has fallen for to kinda drive home he's you know... not nice, all I can think of us the usual stuff though like mentally imprison them for 1000 years or something like that, any ideas?
Rather than imprison, change their point of view to be against the party.
Yeah, twist their heart against the party.
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How dark are we going here?
assuming the knight is the classic chivalrous nice-guy, then you could have him lose all sense of right & wrong, becoming the truest neutral. Everything he stood for before becomes meaningless to him now, where once he saw black & white now everything is grey. He ends up turning to drink, because he doesn't see anything good or bad in it. Nothing seems wrong for him to do, so he does nothing. Years later, he is a bloated apathetic wreck in an opium den, trying desperately to feel anything at all, futilely. Every attempt by the party is regarded with emotionless eyes. He feels nothing - the BBEG has taken away everything that made him who he is.
Or, you know, make the BBEG curse him to never harm an evil being. every time he tries, it's like there's a barrier. Like in abraham lincoln; vampire hunter.
Or hurt his family. seeing your beloved turned into a zombie-assassin of the dark lord who then tries to kill you is decidedly worse than death.
Or just go for some of the more physical ones. Blinding him and removing his hands & feet is worse than death. For most knights, paralysing him from the waist down would be a horrifying fate. Turning him into a demon who can only speak infernal might also be an option.
A lot of this hangs on what sort of campaign you're running, and the comfort levels of your players with physical and emotional damage!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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I think you'll get more emotional mileage out of this if you 1) prey on something central to the NPC, and 2) keep the fate thematic for the god.
Who is this knight? What's their personality, goals, most loved traits? What could the god do to strip them away? What would happen if the knight's biggest fear came true? What if the thing or person they loved ceased to exist? How can this NPC be broken or corrupted and what would it look like afterward? What if the party had to put them down?
Who is this god? What's his portfolio, motivations, and powers? How does he operate in your setting and what schemes does he have running? How will destroying this NPC play into those schemes? Does he need more lieutenants? Is he looking for a scapegoat to distract from his activities? Is he sending a message to the party? How can this knight's fate sell the dangers and the stakes of the greater campaign setting?
I find thematic evil allows for more of a gut punch, as well as serves as a stronger motivator for the party, than random evil. It helps worldbuild and establishes repeatable patterns the players can fight against/fear. A fate worse than death from a god of secrets may be causing someone to be forgotten by their loved ones. A god of storms may curse someone to be a lightning rod who brings natural disasters to every town she visits. A god of undeath may turn someone immortal, but make them die in agony every sunset only to wake up and relive the nightmare the next day. Stuff that tugs on the heartstrings and feels unjust because it affects innocents is usually a safe bet to make your players get how evil someone is.
Turning him against the party might be a good one, but it's hard to pull off and will cause more outrage than heartbreak. It's a good route nonetheless.
If you want to be very f*cked up, take everything that makes the knight himself and make the party watch powerless. You could make him target of a Time Ravage spell, with a twist.
So, he becomes old and frail, with 30 days to live, BUT the god makes him immortal and every hour, his eyes go cloudy as he relives all his worst sufferings in a string of visions. Wounds appear on his body and close up as the knight screams.
This is a curse and the only way to lift it is to offer the soul of its firstborn child to the god.
He is old and frail, and begs the party to kill him. If they try, the immortality is revealed, as a broken neck snaps back into place or wounds close and his eyes open in surprise.
An everlasting reminder to those who want to oppose him. Endless pain and suffering, that can only be terminated by giving up what you love most to endure things that could be even worse.
It's real, it's scary, and it might be too much: dementia. The character's memory slips in and out, and sometimes they know they have this illness (that may not be as well understood in our world as it is your setting), but can do nothing cheaply, quickly, or easily to remedy it. Restoration magics will work, but only the most experienced clerics will know that what memories they have when cured are all they get. If cured when they're completely blind to the players' identities or their own, the only thing they can do is rehabilitate the NPC, who may not even be willing to be cooperative with these potential 'strangers'. Do the players pursue to the evil god, or do they sit by and wait for that small glimmer of hope and hit the switch with a restoration spell?
Much as I like the idea of them becoming undead or an enemy, the players may feel catharsis in fighting them off. Were I the BBEG, I'd want them to feel completely drained of willpower and reason to fight. The NPC becomes a husk that, sometimes, faces the player characters and shows signs of recognition but ultimately doesn't know them from Adam. The risk that comes with this is that the players - not just their characters - will feel less will to carry on. They're upset and don't want to take the NPC 'round the back of the shed to shoot them.
I wish you luck with whatever you decide to do!
Zero is the most important number in D&D: Session Zero sets the boundaries and the tone; Rule Zero dictates the Dungeon Master (DM) is the final arbiter; and Zero D&D is better than Bad D&D.
"Let us speak plainly now, and in earnest, for words mean little without the weight of conviction."
- The Assemblage of Houses, World of Warcraft
Turning him is a good one, and you can do it by turning him into a monster; a vampire who tries to deny who he is, and hides it from the party but then the party keep discovering blood-drained bodies wherever they go, and eventually work it out. You could also curse him to be a werewolf and ensure he's filled with a ravenous hunger and uncontrollable changes. But make him a lot stronger than your standard werewolf.
Alternatively you could have him twisted and changed into a devil of some kind, or maybe a star spawn seer. That's probably more basic and less fun than the vampire, as the vampire lets him slowly decay over time.
He could be driven insane, and gain a desire to burn down everything around him. Possibly have him regain moments of lucidity, but 23 hours a day he just wants to burn things.
Or maybe... he can't die. But his wounds cannot be healed. He feels the pain of them all the time, as fresh as the moment they were taken. If he reaches 0 hit points, he remains alive on 1 hit point but the paid drives him made and he can think of nothing else. That's a pretty dark one. Maybe let him recover hit points after he eats humanoid flesh.
There's a lot of mind games, and they don't have to be inspired by real life things either.
To add to the already concerning list we're forming:
Take away all his memories since he was 6. Like, the guy is now his 6 year old self in an adult body. He's scared, and wants to know where his mum is. Bonus points if you make him carry a keepsake of his deceased mother around, which he makes the players aware of - "If I die, please take this to my sister, it's the only picture we have of our dear departed mother". Cut to later and the BBEG, who has sucked out all of his life since 6 and escaped, and the knight is asking the party where his mum is. Make him helpless and lost, that will really leave the party fumbling - do they look after him? deliver him to his sister? try to have him cured? Chase down the BBEG?
Any attempt to make him help them results in him crying and wailing that he wants his mummy. They are left with a helpless orphaned infant to look after.
Another option would be to magically age him. A knight in your prime? Bam, not any more, now you're ancient. all those years you wanted to spend with your family? Not any more.
Send him forward in time. This can work if you've planned a long haul of a campaign, and make him quitre old to start with. Planning to retire to spend his last years with his wife on the farm, then bam, teleported straight to her funeral. Not greatly visual for the players though, unless they are dragged along with him - he'd just disappear!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
having the NPC return as a Death Knight through some dastardly manipulation by your BBEG on his side seems like a terrible fate for a friendly Knight NPC... would also give some incentive for the group to try and find a way for the Knight NPC's redemption
conversely
If you'd think your BBEG would be heinously demeaning of the NPC have their boneless skin sewn into BBEG's war banner, coat or court train
“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
I like the "turn them into a bad guy lieutenant" approach. If you wanna add a little extra bite, you can always kill them and then bring them back as an evil undead minion like a vampire or a revenant.
The time ravage idea is neat. An interesting twist would be if it acted like the weeping angels from Doctor Who, and instead of aging the character, it just sent them back in time sufficient to have them die within 30 days, so that they'd already have lived their life.
Technically it is still killing the NPC, but also worse: Hellfire Weapon
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Kill them, then bring them back as heartless undead.
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HERE.Building on to this, make them aware of what's happened to them, but helpless to stop it. Essentially, they're a prisoner in their own undead body.
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall.
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If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
True, but that would give the NPC more of a chance to break free (or be broken free by the PCs).
Ah, but what if they become a recurring character? Cursed to not only serve the BBEG, but every time they are stopped by the party, they rise as a Revenant.
Taking inspiration from what are possibly the most traumatic zombies in a game (half life headcrab zombies), have him able to plead and scream and beg the party to leave. Each encounter he becomes more angry at them, until he clearly hates them, and blames them, the revenant aspects of his body taking over his mind. Eventually, he hunts them down willingly, becoming a much more dangerous threat than when he was resisting.
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
Since it's a literal god, casting "Feeblemind" shouldn't be too much trouble for them.
It's cruel, but if the party is going against a god, they should have the spells necessary to reverse it (or pretty much anything short of their soul being destroyed, their corpse atomized, and their name being erased from history.),
Give them an overpowering, debilitating phobia of something innocuous and incredibly common, such as dirt or grass. Or, better yet, just make them all out paranoid. I'd use Angeline Fowl's nervous breakdown as inspiration, then build from there to flavor it towards the gods abilities.
Hi, I am not a chest. I deny with 100% certainty that I am a chest. I can neither confirm nor deny what I am beyond that.
I used to portray Krathian, Q'ilbrith, Jim, Tara, Turin, Nathan, Tench, Finn, Alvin, and other characters in various taverns.
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