#RPGaDAY - Day 13: Most Memorable Character Death

Sadly, this claim was only partly true

Mort - aka Mortal Wombat - was my first Changeling: the Lost live character, a big, chunky brawler and self-taught political agitator (although the fact that most politics happened on the interwebs and I had made the character illiterate somewhat limited that side) who had been turned into a wombat to work an inexplicable haematite mine (working theory was that it was not actually producing iron, but just something which served a similar narrative function, which would have meant that the child-beast miners were working a rich seam of irony - in fairy land. He had grown up there, married, seen his wife turned into a pit prop and killed, and then made a club out of her body to beat her abusers to death with.

As my first kit-heavy live character (my first was a perfectly normal psychologist), I went a little overboard, and both his club and his shield (a folding shovel) probably counted as offensive weapons under the terms of the act.

He was around for about a year and a bit, and then got murdered as part of political shenanigans which he had no real stake in apart from having the wrong friends.

What makes this death memorable - apart from the fact that I don't have that many terminal characters, with the exception of the Rose Crescent TPK - was the reaction. The Lost game was part of the national Isles of Darkness chronicle, and I heard from people in Scotland who were sad that Mort was dead, where I hadn't even realised that they might have heard of him. When I later ST'd the same game, I took a straw poll of people's greatest regrets and it turned out that the guy who ordered the hit on Mort's friend was sorry that Mort got caught in the crossfire.

It turns out that your effect on a game is more than the mechanical sum of your actions.

Tomorrow, Day 14 brings you a wild-card topic, as I have never bought anything at a con, having never really been to a con to speak of. If there's anything in particular you'd like to see me write or speak on, drop me a comment. I've got nothing for 'best con game' either (apart from a few amusing variants on the Nigerian scam), so I need at least two topics.

Meantime, check the hashtag for more RPGaDAY.