When you're frightened to die, and you're holding on. You see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.

The true answer of course is a death that does not involve the most glorious of creatures the Drop Bear. (Like ya'll didn't see that coming)

I'd have to go with those bugs in Australia that eat you from the inside out as second worst.

The worst thing about a quiet ignominious death from old age is that it can be avoided easily. With Leonization and Formula Pacts and some desperate invasive things that would probably drive you insane, anyone with a few connections or a little bit of money could avoid it. Dying that way is, thus, an ultimate failure. When your children love you enough to stay at your death bed but don't love you enough to steal multiple millions of nuyen worth of genetic rejuvenation equipment to make you young again, what does that say about you as a parent?

eh, depends on your personal outlook. if humanity excels at anything, it's rationalization and self-delusion. even when you're dying--maybe especially when you're dying, given the amount of psychological stress that sort of thing is bound to put on a person--i think many people are (and would be) able to pull the comfortable "my family loves me" wool over their own eyes. though it's certainly true that lots of other people would sink into desperation and sick anger, accusing their families of actively killing them by not getting them Leonization treatments.

Honestly though, how many people have the kind of pull, skills, or cash required for Leonazation. No idea about those pacts you're talking about. Also with the general apathy of the sixth world how many nondisfunctional family units are there? So it might be the childeren talking some pleasure even if it is subconcious of watching their parents die.

Hm... Dying on a reality TV show is pretty bad. The humiliation is so multi tierd for a runner.

And dear god. I grew up around eucalyptus, this drop bear thing is making me afraid to visit my parents.
Which brings me to another terrible death, for those of you who read Digger:

Vampiric Squash

I completely forgot about those little guys, but yeah, they would certainly be pretty high on my list of ways not to go.

The worst way to die in Shadowrun is...

Well, let's face it, chummers, death is death, but there's worse ways to check out than others.

For this reason, cranial bombs should not be thought of merely as a means to coerce others into doing your bidding.


So, let's say you've been captured. You know they're going to torture you. Maybe they're Azzies out for blood (magic), maybe they're Red Samurai out to get the dirt on your team. Maybe they're go-gangers who want to cut on someone, maybe they're horrors best left undescribed. Maybe you pissed off the Yakuza and accused them of having no honor, publicly?

However it goes down, you're fragged. You're not going to be un-fragged, not even if you sold out anyone and everyone from your team to your little old grannie in Hoboken. Depending on who it is, you MIGHT buy yourself a clean, swift death by selling out your friends, but frag that, right, chummers?

That's why you want an area bomb! You send the message (or, assuming you're unconcious, the preprogrammed set of trigger conditions is met), and boom! Not only do you buy it in style, but with any luck, and a quick prayer to the God of Ballistics, the some or all of the six fraggers who're cluster-fucked around you buy it, too! Create your OWN honor guard to planet hell, frag your headware memory, and leave your team a chance to finish the Run all at once!

And hey, it beats being tortured or sacrificed, omae.

Wow, Shadowdragon really puts some new life in kamikaze

when i started reading this thread i wondered who would make a post about old age...

hey, one runner in my games died in a bug hive. Woke up with a strange feeling that something was alive inside him.

Not nice.

Cheers,

The more I think about it, I have got to say that aging is bad for runners in general. How many times do we hear about runners getting old having not enough to retire. Whether they didn't have the skills, luck, or cutzpah to hit that last big score. Or they didn't have a good savings plan or whatever. They are slowing down and they know it. Jobs are getting more dangerous for less payment than in past because they have lost their edge. Eventually they get unknowingly hired to be that distraction for the run on the corporate facility or some equal screwjob for peanuts, because they can't get out of the shadows.

Alternately being retired and called back for one last run, and in your dying breath realizing how screwed you were and what you lost.

Another horrible way to go. Really experienced shadowrunner (physical adept), years of career, long bragsheet, quite some nuyen, great plans for the future, datasteal inside a japanacorp building, the runners had already gotten the goods and were looking for an exit.

hacker- "Dude! We can't go that way, there is a nude japanese guy meditating behind the waterfall in the rock garden, he might be dangerous, we better look for another way out "
adept- "Don't be a chicken, man. Wait here, I'll take him." ...

Shadowrun: do not die of overconfidence.

Cheers!

Max

ps. the hacker escaped.

A favorite, cribbed guiltlessly from Ghost in the Shell:SAC, is the cyberlimb hard hack whereby that nasty troll killing machine punches himself to death with his own hand.

This is more efficient and roughly twice as amusing if he has spurs too.

Cutter/Juicer/Boiler nanites. They either cut your internal organs to shreds (efficiently, but slow enough to really, really hurt), or boil your blood. Imagine having a heart attack, two imploding lungs, kidney failure, acute appendicitis, a couple of hernias, twisted intestines, kidney-stones, and massive hemmoraghing and then condense all that pain into about a minute and multiply it by a few factors.

But the thing that has always just creeped me right out in Shadowrun is the Sea Leech. A giant, fast-swimming monstrosity of tentacles, suckers and mouths. Not only the pain and distress of being trapped underwater and drowning, but having your blood and organs sucked out of you and eaten alive.

Actually I think it'd be worst if the nanities are almost undetectable giving you all sorts of bizarre House-esque diseases that mysteriously clear up but leave you with a lower quality of life after ever "bout of sickness". Having them all at once would be bad, having them over the course of 10 years would be worse.

Also, since this hasn't migrated from another thread:

Being shot to death by ballistic soda cans from an agent driven mobile vending machine.

Also, this is derivative of what we've previously mentioned but it's still a pretty awful image.
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20080224.html

Death by Schlock is generally fairly quick and painless, especially if he has to compress and digest you fast enough to make an expediant exit via your shower drain.

As for those nanites and shit - again, this is why you may want your own cranial bomb.

Well you might not suffer much but there would be just enough time to realize "Oh god, I'm being eaten, really quickly"

All hail the cranial bomb.

Or the anti-matter aguilettes

Becoming livestock in a Vampire's larder/herd.

Choking to death eating cake as you celebrate one of those career-defining runs.

Deleted like Capt. Chaos.

The worse way to die in the Sixth World would be to be the choosen of Chante's Horror (Mispelled), no matter how many times you kill yourself you just keep getting better while everyone that you care for is slaughtered in the worse ways possible.

A rogue roto-rooter would be a gruesome and painful death I'm sure. Someone tweaks the programing on an automated one, and some poor soul is going to have a bad day. Teaches them for eatting tex-mex.

Bleeeh..
Indeed, after going through an EMT class my classmates all agreed on the following life guidelines:

1. I will not die on the shitter
2. I will not die in a double wide
3. I will not be horribly obese at the time of my death as it seems to summon the first two scenarios.

This was in Oregon, what did the TT do with all those double wides?

I always felt the worst way to die in Shadowrun was being a host for an insect spirit. Not the 'eggs inside you' version, but the 'your soul is either consumed or, if you're lucky, kicked right out' version. Shedim are similarly nasty.

As far as painful, that's easy. That's having one box away from death/unconsciousness and hearing the chittering of devil rats growing closer.

In a PC vein, one of my infamous moments was having a run-of-the-mill street samurai load up on combat drugs to the point where he could hold his own versus insect spirits. This combat drug came out of Kage, so probably wasn't quite as balanced as it should have been, but I recall it boosting this sammy's will up to a level where he could rain some death with firearms (back in 2nd ed). And when all was said and done, and the team had triumphed, Maddog smiled and simply fell over dead when the after-effects caught up with him. The GM was beside himself, he was so shocked. I think having your brain and nervous system overload is a gruesome way to go, especially when you knew it was coming and that death was preferable to a worse death involving you and your teammates.

I'd think that dying of a combat drug overdose after slaying all of one's enemies in an epic heroic encounter would be a good way to die sure to win one a place in Sto-Vo-Kor

That's the kind of death they sing operas about.

On Kronos. On Earth, it's the kind of shit that gets you a small memorial in Shadowland/Jackpoint, and a huge guest-book of people in awe of your exploits.

I think dying of a combat drug overdose before killing all of ones enemies would be a terrible death.

Borrowing from another thread I think the worst way to die is beaten to death by vending machines with the runner's arm trapped inside a pantsu vending machine.

I can't think of a single good death involving pantsu...

"We never would have busted this bunraku parlor if these girls hadn't tried to climb out of the fifteenth story window. Too bad their makeshift rope broke halfway down. Tragic really. What's it made out of anyway?"

*Distraught parent*
"So you're saying my son wasn't just a whore... he died clinging to girls underwear?!"
"Er... Yes."

Ignoring the rest, that could make for an entertaining scene. One male pickpocket adept, one female unarmed combat adept wearing a skirt, hilarity ensues, followed by blood.

I ahve to agree with Hyz :) as a player the worst possible way to die would be of old age. who goes around and brags that thier character lived to the ripe old age of 70 or what ever. But everyone ahs a story about how great it was when blah blah ate my face or injected me with eggs that riped apart my torso. :) Give me an exciting death over old age any day :)

[img]http://www.photomann.com/japan/machines/bizarrex.jpg[/img]

Shadowrunner found dead with his hand up a pantsu vending machine

Spindle a famous face from Dantes, the shadowrunners’ choice of night clubs, was found dead last morning with his hand stuck in a pantsu vending machine. The victim was found with holding change in one hand and clutching a genuine still moist high-school girl pantsu package in the other. Witnesses claim that a troll who fled the scene cornered the victim in the compromising position and beat him to death with a club. While Lone Star has categorized this as another example of hate crime, the rest of his Shadowrun team has declined comment.

Trying to rip off Zurich Orbital, getting blown off the station into a decaying orbit with the amount of oxygen left in your tanks and time before reentry sharing the same vague deadline. Suffocating and/or burning up on reentry at 25000 mph.

Those are all awesome deaths. A bad one is thinking "there might be more Devil Rats in that access tunnel -- I'd better cast Fireball to make sure", deciding for some reason to overcast, and then dying from the drain.

Critical glitch on the surgery while upgrading your datajack to alpha.

Fire secondary effect while carrying ex/ex ammo.

Failing consecutive Survival tests while Alienated.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/12/1232206

Getting your vital organs hacked by some street punk, that just blows.

Hope you didn't spring for the cyber genitals too...

This is one I heard about here in the real world.

A zoo veterinarian was treating a sick elephant with constipation and gave it a bunch of laxatives. Later, he was walking around behind the elephant when it farted so hard that it knocked him down to the ground, where he hit his head on a rock and fell unconscious. The laxatives finally kicked in and the man drowned in an elephant sized pile of manure.

For the 6th world style, drowning in a pile of dragon or juggernaut manure would have to be a crappy way to go.

chummer-enema

Getting jumped by a devil rat while in astral space.
Deciding that casting a 2D Manaball centered on the mage would be a good solution.
And then botching both damage resistance and drain.

Getting back to your body after a long astral jaunt, only to find that the shedim who took it went on a killing spree and is just now being burned to death.

Being trapped by a mage who specializes in physical illusion spells and shapechanging and really likes tentacle anime.

Being engulfed by an elemental and guarded at the same time, so you're drowning in whichever element, but not dying.

Getting sold to a Bunraku parlor where you get the personafix soft, but the memory blocker doesn't work.

Falling off a couch in SR3 and glitching on resisting 1D damage.

Being turned into a jarhead and watching as your body is chopped up and shipped out for spare parts, or watching a shedim and a ghoul fighting over your corpse. Then watching as the ghoul notices that nice juicy brain sitting over there in the jar.

Being the sacrifice in a blood spirit summoning ritual. After all, death is only the beginning of the torment for a blood spirit. As a bonus, you are bound to follow the commands of the jerk that killed you.

Checking something out on an astral projection trip and getting your soul ripped apart by some great dragon spirit who is ticked off as he flies by.

Having someone use a cyberzombie ritual to bind your soul into your lifeless corpse.

Stealing a slice of the GM's pizza...


btw: Would a 0.1 essence brain really look that juicy to a ghoul? Or is it more like a rice wafer to him?

i dunno, if the drugs keep your body moving and killing your enemies after your brain liquifies and runs out your ears

but by that stage we gots da magic drugs

I think that it's pretty safe to say that the astral plain is generally going to win for "worst way to die". Getting eaten, burned, etc is bad. Getting your SOUL burned, eaten, etc is probably much much worse.

I wonder if there are astral diseases? Not quiet possession but you return from the astral with some minor nasty that slowly leaches away your essence...

Astral Ebola? Well, now we have something to worry about.

Or worse yet, astral HIV You get it and even watcher spirits are kicking the snot out of you.

There's one mentioned in the disease chapter in Augmentation.
Chronic aura deficiancy syndrome or something.

Haha, you loiter in the astral enough and you become a CAD?