Killed the first PC in my campaign yesterday. I feel slightly guilty about it, but not to bad. Wondering what you alls opinion is. Thrall was a mystic adept who sought to much power and payed the ultimate price.

The PCs were investigating deep in the New York City subway system for an Ares strike team who had gone missing. Deep underground they began to encounter hybrid insect spirits (roaches), who appeared to be the remnants of the Ares team (carrying their comlinks). Proceeding on they encountered Julia, a strange femme-fatal who was living in a converted subway car fairly deep under the city. Understandably creped out by the vivacious (yet very friendly) woman living deep underground in a dangerous setting, most of the PCs decided to avoid interaction with her. Thrall specifically avoided her, nervous about the mild background count in the area (aspect toward her). Though two other PCs did accept her hospitality and found her to be a good host who even performed some healing on one of them.

Proceeding on they encountered a badly wounded female survivor from the Ares team. Lacking the ability to do much more than stabilize her wounds they decided to return her to Julia's place. Julia accepted the Ares runner into her care though in a manner that somewhat disturbed them ('I accept this life which you have offered me.') However they decided to press on and complete the mission.

Long story short they pressed on and found the insect hive and the shaman behind it. Though not without some further delays and interruptions. Close to the end of the climatic battle where the runners are struggling against fairly formidable opposition, Maio arrives and helps turn the tide with some fairly formidable unarmed combat against one of the true-form spirits. This is unusual both in that the records do not note Maio in being that good in unarmed combat (she was the teams medic), and even with magical assistance she should have been laid up for a while (in my campaign healing is a more time consuming process). In any case they head out, Maio trailing with a few of the insect spirts as 'prisoner.' She drops them off at Julia's place, and leads thier return to the surface.

At this point the Thrall was fairly badly wounded and had (unknown to him at the time) acquired a Staph infection (see my rules for new diseases). So the return to the daylight where they were greeted by the sun and armed Ares guards. After a rather lengthy debriefing the runners got their payment (and a hefty bonus) as a heavily armed Ares Firewatch Team headed back into the tunnels. The debriefing went fairly smoothly until Ares discovered the Shaman's journal which Thrall had picked up. Maio manages to deflect the attention away from this and the runners battered and bruised (Thrall especially) headed into some much needed downtime.

At this point the Thrall starts to suffer the effects of his Staph infection. A quick trip to the Street Doc lets him learn that there is little conventional medicine can do for this infection, though he can stitch up his other wounds. Thrall declines and (inexplicably) decides to head back to Julia for treatment. The other runners are not sure this is a good idea, but most of them are not big fans of Thrall (in fact two were planning on killing him), so don't argue against it. The groups rigger (who was on the best terms with Julia) reluctantly decides to escort the badly injured Thrall back to her place.

A few complications later they arrive, and are surprised to see that Maio is again there with her. Some brief negotiations later Julia and Maio agree to treat Thrall for a nominal fee. The infection is rather serious by this point so Maio and Julia begin treatment immediately while the groups rigger heads back up to the surface. This is also odd as their records indicate that Julia had no magical talent. In case the treatment proceeds without a hitch. A couple days later Thrall is as right as rain. Julia and Maio are polite to him, and indicate if he ever needs any other treatment they are happy to provide.

Thrall instead requests that they 'show him the way to their power.' Maio and Julia are a little taken back by this, and attempt to polite decline his request. 'You know not what you ask.' Thrall is persistent, saying that no cost is to great and that he is willing to risk anything to gain some of their power. Common sense check is a failure, so I say nothing. Julia again warns him that the cost is likely to be 'MUCH greater than he expects,' but Thrall persists. So they perform the ceremony, not until the climax does Thrall realize that Julia and Maio are actually good merge Mantis spirits, and tries to escape. However he is unsuccessful and becomes host to an insect spirt himself.

So what do you think? To harsh?

don't mantis usually eat their males ? O.o

So why not let the player continue playing the character and have him continue running with the team.

Wow, that story is REALLY lolcat worthy. If it weren't for my dignity, I'd be posting a big picture of a dejected cat with a cone around its head right now. I mean, really, would it have killed him to try doing some you know, legwork before courting strange powers? I play Awakened almost exclusively, and if there's anything I've learned over the years it's that when someone(thing?) in Shadowrun only wants you for your body, it's likely not going to be nearly as much fun as it sounds.

The way you described it, it wasn't harsh at all. He played his character, and essentially died in-character for what his character wanted.

You didn't suddenly drop a cow on him from orbit, or give him an impossible scenario, or have a sniper blow his head off without warning, etc. or any other ways characters were killed by GM's for stupid reasons.

Better this way than one of the others killing him.

I'm going to agree with the others here. That was a perfectly in-character death due to lack of player foresight/intelligence. You gave him ample opportunities to back out, and he chose to push forward nonetheless. Youse makes your choices and youse takes your chances. He lost that gamble, and he'll need to just be more wary in the future.

At least he died having sex?

"Death by Snu-Snu!" (and then having his head eaten...)

i think he pretty much got what he asked for. i mean, who goes on a bug hunt, sees a hot chick, and doesn't think "mantid"?

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised.

'What did the others die of?'
'Broken pelvises.'

Futurama jokes aside...

Maybe not know it was a mantis off hand, but something being off should have been obvious, I mean, heck, he went and asked -because- he knew something was off. It is the standard 'goes to a dark god/demon, asks for power, offers anything, doesn't end up liking what ends up getting taken.' Besides, the character is still technically alive

Agreed. Even if you don't know anything about the history of insect spirits in SR lore, that's still no excuse for just marching in with little information and literally asking for it. Repeat after me newbies: the "Free" in Free Spirit in no way reflects the price of any services rendered.

I was figuring you were going to have killed the whole team as I read this... Does anyone have assessing?

Okay, so let's say your team is on a hike through a former Russian war zone. They enter a huge field where no villagers dare to tread. There's a half dozen vehicles, all blown out from the bottom up. The adept trips, and when he stands up to see what happened, finds a large, metal, round disk labeled in crimson-colored Russian letters.

Well, no big deal so far, but let's say your adept starts jumping on it. For no good reason. The rest of the team, never very fond of the adept, mostly backs way the heck up. The adept doesn't notice. But... nothing happens.

Does your adept move on? Of course not. He spends an edge point to make a spectacular jump check. Only then does the rusty old land mine go off.

Do you feel bad for the player then? How could you?

Your situation is the same, except the mine says "bug spirit" instead of "land mine."

I think......Ares should storm in, whack the two hoe's and discover Thrall. They discover that he is freshly possessed and capture him. Taking him back to base they peform all kinds of tests on him including anal probes, during which time Thrall is in utter agony mentally.

After Ares performs all kinds of tests on him to test new weapons and tactics on hybrids they finally decide to try and help him. They exercise the spirit out of him and let him go with alot of wounds to heal from and all the mental anguish that comes from being tortured and experimented on.

When he finally heals up he discovers that his magic rating has been lowered by whatever maybe just 1 or 2. Later once he gets back to his old magic level he will discover that he feels like he has alot more potential and even discovers a new power(gets +1 initiate grade and a new power). His magic does not go up to his new maximum but its now available to be baught as normal.

Maybe his team has to rescue him from the Ares medical facility doing the experiement on him. Maybe one of the bug chicks survived long enough to send a message to them about what happened.

I would just use the situation as a way to go forward not end it.

Only problem with all of that is it doesn't sound like the rest of the runner team would be too fond of the idea of breaking into Ares just to rescue him; heck, they appear to be working for Ares, actually, and I'd see no reason to break up that chummy (and profitable!) relationship over a teammate some of them were considering killing themselves.

well, he died in a fair manner. I do feel sad when a PC dies, but at least it makes the threats in your game more believable.

Heck, lots of PCs have died on me, and everybody kept playing happily after the initial mourning period, usually after a PC dies the game gets better, better characters come up as replacements. Darwinian but fun.

Cheers,

Max

Still, I say that it would be fun if he were to rejoin the team, still played by the player, and next time one of the team is injured take the injured character to that subway car healer, repeat until they're all bugs or someone figures it out, preferably with the invested team members tracking the poorly armed still-metahuman team members through a funhouse while grinning maniacally and referring to themselves in the third person.

Thanks for all the replies. The players isn't really mad about his death, but I feel a little guilty about it. One of my weaknesses as a GM is my reluctance to let the chips fall where they may in situations like these.

I would think it would take all of about 5 seconds for a security mage to notice the bug merge as soon as she walks back into the building, but that is just me (And I don't know the rules on it so well)

IIRC, the merges have some masking, but not enough that they would want to walk into a room full of firewatch mages....

I'd suspect she'd suddenly retire....

Then again, Frank has pointed out that the reason why Ares is so effective fighting bugs is that they are willing to work with cooperative bugs.

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Note the verse about the spider...

He chose his path, and you let him walk it with ample warning. That's not something to worry about, that's something to look for in a GM. If he complains, shoot him.

I respect the decision tha kill him off, but it's such an awesome plot hook, I don't see how you can throw it away, I wouldn't waste it.

An encounter with something as fucked up as a bug spirit, let alone a species of bug spirit that kill their own kind, is such a great way to really punish this character. Death seems like a weak way. You're obviously a creative guy and I'd love to see some crazy flaws and situations for the team to get into.

The point about Mantis spirits is that there are no queens - every female mantis can reproduce...
And of course, there is no point to feed on non-bug-spirit males, so as long as the rest of the runners dont' seek the 'way to power'....

Of course, being a Mystic Adept and not having Killing Hands/Banishing is tough luck...

Yeah, my adepts are nearly guaranteed to come out of chargen with a bound monowhip labeled "In Case of Spirit Rampage".

You could have the player play the merge as the merge, not as the original character. It's a MUCH more powerful character IIRC.

My style is generally to not let a character's death ruin a good story, so I feel where you're coming from. That's why I really like the Escape Certain Death rule, since I don't have to pull any punches but I don't have to worry about a beloved character really dying, either.

In this case, however...wow. The character had fair warning all-around, there were no unlucky rolls causing the death, just pure poor decisions, and he's not even upset about it. Neither is anyone else in the group! Nobody liked that character anyway.

If the player didn't want the character to die he could burn a point of edge, and plenty of people have suggested ways that could happen, such as Ares busting in at the last minute and disrupting it; whatever. The point is if the player wanted to Escape Certain Death he could, but he doesn't seem to care, so you shouldn't either.

Meanwhile, it sounds like you run a pretty fun game.

I think you were 100% in line with the genre.

Shadowrun isn't as grim as RTG's Cyberpunk, but it is definitely a place where things go bump in the night.

The fringes of known magic are definitely the darkest parts of that night, with the scariest things bumping.

I think the fact that the friendly NPCs repeatedly warned the PC off should have been enough of a hint.

Two things. One, he didn't Hand of God it? I mean, that's what HoG is for. (If you use HoG. I wasn't wild about it when it was introduced in the Comp, and even though I have mellowed in my old age I'm still about 50-50 on it.) Two, even if:

I also thought on the thrall pun. However, in this case I vote for finality. Besides, I had something similar happening in one game ages ago. One of the characters was killed by insect spirits due to another character stupidity.



The group was appalled. Hank ended up a bug and came to torment the runners after the Hive was obliterated and the Queen dead. Eventually the runners iced it. He died a horrible death, but nobody complained and everybody approved my -in their words- "impartial and fair" handling of the situation. They surely would not have liked Hank's player to roleplay an augmented half-insect half sorcerer killing machine. I believe Thrall's character would become something like that in the hands of this "I want power no matter what" player. Needless to say, Shotwise didn't end up Double Exposure happily either, his partners didn't really like the way he had handled the watch that night and left him to rot when the going got really tough. He endured medical experimentation and cyberware removal later on.

Am I the only one baffled by the fact that a Staph infection apparently was only curable by mantis spirits in 2070? Where are the antibiotics, the nanomed antibioltics? The bear shamen with curative spells?

What the heck man? Is this some sort of cockroach staph bugspirit infection?

Sure, with O-Cells, he wouldn't even got infected. But, in fact, he went to the nearest known magic healer.

That was not the problem...

I agree Rotbart: What he really wanted was not healing. He got.

Cheers,

Max

From his initial post, though, it sounds like they got sent in after an Ares strike team, and the Firewatch team is what went down to clean up the bugs after they got back.

Well kzt, do keep in mind that these guys aren't terribly experienced yet and have a knack for getting in over their heads. I mean, after all, this IS the same group that has Bubba the troll archer on it as well. Besides, anyone have a brain fart once in a while. Why, the other night I was thinking about Frank's game and I suddenly remembered my character has a few points in "Astral Theory" as a knowledge skill. Which, you know, could be sort of handy considering you asked my mage point blank what he thought the astral anomaly we were looking at could be . Anyway, here's hoping this group gets a li'l savvier before they stumble into a run against an MCT thaumaturgical research facility or something.

Actually if you look at nano-tech prices, the stuff is kinda cheap. I mean even maxing out the most expensive stuff your barely going to cap 20k. I can't imagine healing nanos being that terriably expensive. *edit* cheap in comparison to alot of cyber and bioware.

Personally I don't think of 5k as generous, but I'm not going to open that can of worms here as there is already an entier thread on the subject.

As I've already said (I think, don't remember ) the character got what was coming to him.

Yes. He's dead. Now move on and make his death meaningful for everybody. Besides, "thrall" IS too good a pun to pass up.

Cheers,

Max

I'm joining the chorus here: On the scale of "yes, this is time for a PC death" to "WTF, that was uncalled for!", this is squarely on the "yes" end of the scale.
Sometimes when people test the limits, what they really need and want, is to find a limit.
If you had done anything else, the player might become unable to take the game as anything but Toon, and started jumping onto landmines, off buildings, flipping the bird at Loftwyr, etc.

My GM encourages us to occasionally run an alternate character, so we have one established in case our main PC happens to become unplayable, eg by death.

I'd go so far as to say that you were too nice. Mantis spirits might be less malevolent than other insect spirits, but they are NOT your friend.

For comparison, we had two casualties in my last Shadowrun game. Our payload screwed us, and because she was our primary contact to Johnson after extraction, found a clever way to split the team in half before sending a Yak strike team after us.

My character was double-tapped in the back of the head after foolishly saying "Get behind me!" to the payload. I never even had a hope of soaking the amount of damage she did. Our sam died shortly thereafter because she needed fire support I was no longer able to provide.

We were much more careful than your casualty was, had far less of a chance of survival, and we as players absolutely loved every second of it.

Shadowrunners are expendable assets, so a high mortality rate is expected.

I admit, this guy with the bug spirit did have it coming. Yes, legwork is important. Yes, please do be careful. And i also have a picture of a dejected cat with a cone on it's head in my mind.

Ive seen characters die in dumb ways as well in campaigns(one famous one was posted awhile back in the other forum). Truly amazing and we still laugh at it.

In the above post...im guessing the lesson is; ''Never let an extraction target with a gun behind you''. Though i admit, id be a BIT upset if a character made one mistake(after doing alot of proper legwork, it might not be considered a mistake at the time), and ended up getting two rounds in the back of the skull for it. We all like different games, and we tend to prefer those ''middleground, a bit more forgiving, but not necessarily cakewalk'' games.

When we preform extractions, this is why we make sure they are rendered fairly helpless as we remove them(of course, with a good cover story of how we are protecting them and they shouldn't be involved with the fighting.)