So I had this 4 player group that was rank 7, and wanted to go through the Haarlock campaign on Mara. Up against them were Mr Nonesuch and his creations, 2 RT's with entourage, and a cultist group with an Unbound Daemonhost with some Ascension talents/powers added (still epic though).  I thought I created a fail proof plan where at the very end the PC's would have both keys and a guide, and the doors leading to the portal room was like the doors in Matrix the movie. Where if you use the key, what is behind the door changes, and if you don't have the key then whatever is behind the door is a normal room.  So, pretty much all the bad guys stuck on Mara fighting each other right?  Nope, a key pretty much gets dropped in the Daemonhosts lap.

Second plan was to have the first place the PC's teleport to was a Fortress world under siege, with a half destroyed Demolisher battle tank with the turret still intact able to be used against the Daemonhost when he comes through after the PC's.  Obviously the PC's didn't know this.

So, the PC's are opening doors chased by the Daemonhost (who is playing with them because he's insane and likes the cat and mouse semantics) when they finally get to the teleportation room.  The guide tells them to jump through the portal 1m from the end of the platform (it's invisible), not off the side into the swirling vortex that will obliterate them into atoms.  The Psyker tests this theory by saying to the Assassin "Hey can I barrow your sword, I have an idea?"  "Sure, what do you need it for."  "This…." as he drops it over the ledge.  Funny, until the Ogryn PC gets an idea.  So…. everyone but the Ogryn jumps into the portal, because he says he will be right behind everyone.  Everyone else does, and notices the cannon but obviously they have no way to communicate this besides OOC.

In walks the Daemonhost through the door with the key, and the Ogryn grabs him.  Smiling, the Daemonhost says "Didn't I win last time little brain?"  The ogryn replies "Yep" and jumps over the side into the swirling vortex with the Daemonhost grappled, "Now I win."

Epic…..  And the party waited a good minute too, before someone stated "A very faint breeze blows past the Psyker and those of us near him, and everyone gets the feeling that a hero just died in the service of the Emperor. somewhere in the galaxy."

Got another one but not so epic.  :(  Ran a Shadowrun game (2nd Edition), and to make a short story long, 5 PC's were in an underground abandoned subway station fighting 20 gangers, with 5 already dead due to a large alligator, that chased 3 of the PC's, landing on.  Like I said, short story long.  If you prefer, skill to the end for the climax.

PC's hired to find this arms smuggler guy selling weapons to underground gangs to start turf wars, and one of the PC's is even watching the news about "Large man eating creatures living in Chicago's sewers! reports the city workers of 2 missing waterpump technicians "  2 PC's, having backgrounds in gangs and set up a meet with this dealer through their contacts.  The other 3 PC's decide to slink through the sewers via old decrepit access tunnels that the hacker "acquired."  Off the three amigos go, an Human Hacker (T), Troll Mercenary (Mike), and an Elf Mage (Talin), into the sewers, fighting large rats, mutated creatures, and phantoms of their imagination (because I like keeping the paranoia up when they are shooting at ghosts).  All goes as planned with the 2 ganger type PC's, and they are at the meeting place waiting for heavy weapons backup.

So, the PC's come out of an access tunnel into a main underground walkway that is filled up the PC's heads (the Trolls thighs) of sewage and water.  They finally clamber up a straight away to the gangers hideout when they notice large webbed footprints, blood smears, and the smell of decay and death.  They travel 50 meters farther and come into a T intersection.  Straight ahead is the locked metal door leading overtop of the gangers hideout, while to the left is a bricked up dead end, but what looks to be pieces of orange reflective strips, 2 yellow hard hats, and human, large rat, and other unidentifiable bones all mawed.  And what do the PC's hear behind them?  But a large creature dragging itself from the filth.  Deciding to run down the 100 meter tunnel instead of shooting definitely saved their lives, as the 12 meter long alligator chased after them.  As they got to the end, the hacker did his thing and opened the door with 1 round to spare before the alligator was upon them.  Being somewhat wise at his young age, the Mage casted Ice Sheet, and they all watched as the alligator came sliding out of the tunnel, across the plankway, and over the ledge into the subway terminal below.

The gangers and the 2 ganger PC's (I will call Log and Jay) were quite amazed as well, because they were in the middle of haggling over AK-97's and Frag grenade costs when they heard a loud screeching sound of metal and gears happening on the opposite side of the dark poorly lit terminal.  Looking up and behind them they notice a door on the upper plankway open with several figures dashing out it, followed closely by a figure the size of a car come whipping out, crashing through the railing, and plummets 10 meters to it's roaring death onto 5 gangers roasting hotdogs and canned beans over a trashcan fire.

So Log and Jay see this as their sign of heavy weapons back up.  Jay wips out his two lightpistols hidden up his sleeves and shoots the two closest gangers dead, while Log grabs a frag grenade, pulls the pin, and places it back in the pile of other nades with a smile on his face.  They then both proceed to run and jump down into the train tracks.

T, Mike and Talin make an assault down some stairs killing another 3 gangers, only getting slightly injured.  The nades go off killing another 2 gangers, but, oddly enough, not the arms dealer.  T, Mike and Talin make it to the imombile caboos in the center of the map, while Log and Jay are in front of it on the train tracks laying down support fire, killing another ganger.  Needless to say, the arms dealer flees down a side tunnel and so does two other gangers while the 4 remaining try to avenge their fallen friends.  Log, somehow being the smartest one in the group (it shows in a minute) runs after them into the darkness.  The other 4 PC's lay down support fire and kill the 2 fleeing gangers clearing the way for Log to go after the arms dealer solo.

Now for the climax (you people scrolling down thought it would never end huh?).  Initiative at the end goes like this.

Ganger 1:  Realizes he has grenades and throws one into the caboose where T, Mike and Talin are at.

Talin:  Notices the nade enter the caboose, and proceeds to grab it and throw it back out where it came from.

Ganger 2 & 3:  Realize they also have nades, and throw two more into the caboose and also see a nade coming out of the caboose toward them.

Mike:  Is encouraged by Talins blind luck to grab a grenade rolling around in a messy cluttered caboos, and gets the idea to also to grab one, wasting precious seconds to exit the out a door instead, and throws it out of the nearest window which, oddly enough, is right where Jay is at.

T:  Is now so encouraged by both these brave characters endeavors, he also proceeds to find his magical nade.  He finds it but also remembers a past experience where he threw a grenade into a doorway, it bounced off a magical barrier and came right back at him.  So, he hot potatoes the grenade to Mike……?????

Ganger 4:  Is so distracted by all the nades flying into places and back out of them, that he fails to notice….

Jay:  Shoots the 4th ganger dead.  But alas, he never would of thought once of his friends would TPK him by accident.

Turn 2.

Ganger 1 and his nade:  Kills him and Gangers 2 & 3.

Talin:  Notices the hot potato grenade and gets climbs out the nearest door.

Ganger's 2 nade:  Goes off.  Normally, this would of only put a Troll at serious damage, but…. due to Mike also be nade happy and always carrying around 20 frag grenades on a vest, they also go Pop-goes-the-weasel killing him, T, and Talin as he exited the door instantly.

Ganger 3 nade:  Blows up and kills Jay.

And Log continues to run down the tunnel, determined to capture his prey alive and make his friends proud………

 So My little group of 5 PC's have just gotten onto this landing pad, situated hundreds of meters in the air, and they see the guy who corrupted this hive on the other side of the pad, who sees them, and instantly ducks into cover. Failing all their shots at him, the team decides to rush him, quickly running towards them, each followed by a single enforcer that were called as reinforcements. As the party closes in on the corrupter, the enforcers turn on the acolytes, as they were in the corrupters pay. Chaos ensures, everyone pairing off to fight one another, except for my scum wielding a knife bound with a nurgle daemon, who decides it would be a great idea to also attack the corrupter, as well as the guy already fighting him, so he charges to corrupter, who quickly grabs the scum, and proceeds to beat him to minimal health, and throw him off the landing pad, as he is right next to the edge. The scum burns a fate point to survive, and lands on a passing valkyrie a few meters down.

The fight meanwhile is still going on above and my guardsman has had enough of not killing things with his autogun, so he whips out his suspicious looking rifle, aims it, and looses a shot at the leader of the enforcers, who previously to then had been ripping him apart with his custom autogun. The gun flashes, and a bolt of lightning flashes through the enforcer, disintigrating him.

This is where the fight takes a turn for the worse.

The guardsman now takes a willpower test, fails it, and is possessed by the tzeentch daemon inhabiting the gun. The daemon, not wanting the party to achieve its goal of capturing the corrupter for questioning, turns to the corrupter, and shoots him with the lightning gun, before going back into the gun, leaving the guardsman unconcious.

The scum (not the nurgle knife wielding one, a different, God-emperor loving one) fighting about 10 meters away from him is fighting a hulk of a guy, and due to his lack of damage done with his laspistol, he throws his mono-axe at him, and proceeds to roll a 100 to hit, scatter dice rolled due to my liking of natural 100's being really bad, and the axe lands dead on in the chest of the unconcious guardsman, who is 10 meters behind the scum.

After stabbing the hulk of a guy to death with a knife like a sociopath, the scum goes to retrieve his axe, and remembering what he saw the guardsman do with the gun, realizes that this is an unholy weapon, so he proceeds to kill the guardsman for wielding it, or he would have if the guardsman didn't have fate left, who burns it.

The guardsman wakes up in a valkyrie, tied up, just as it's rear doors are closing as it lifts off from the landing pad, and in the few seconds he has left, he slips his bonds, overloads the lightning gun, and jumps out of the valkyrie onto the landing pad meters away, and the last thing he sees before the gun explodes, downing the valkyrie, but not destroying it, is the scum who did this to him, standing at the rear entrance of the valkyrie, screaming 'I will find you and kill you.'

The guardsman proceeds to join up with the big bad end game boss so he can take revenge on the scum.

All in all a good boss fight.

I have no idea what you just said, but it sounds AWESOME! 

That's a memorable fight. 

 I run DH, and one of the missions I had my Acolytes run was to hunt down and capture if possible a rogue psyker (level 6 pyromancer who dabbled in telepathy) and they promptly spent the next four 5-hour sessions tracking down every lead and whisper of the guy I could throw their way. During this time, three of my five acolytes levelled up, including the Psyker, so I was beginning to think the psyker they were hunting wouldn't be much of a challenge for them.

They hunted the guy down, requested a squad of inquisitorial stormtroopers and were rewarded with a kill-squad of 5. The acolytes and the stormtroopers proceeded to clear out a lower-hive hab block, packed to the rafters with cultists and very low level psykers. The mission went with almost no hitches, although the kill-squad fell prey to a cleverly concealed (if I do say so myself) heavy stubber, which also critically wounded one of my two guardsmen. They left him in control of the heavy stubber and proceeded to search the building for the rogue psyker, who turned out to be in the tunnels beneath the block. They cornered him in a collapsed sewer, and he started casting fireballs and firing his auto pistol trying to keep them at bay, until he had a power blackout and they started advancing on him that is. He managed to hold them off without taking any serious damage until his powers returned, at which point my second guardsman decided to charge the psyker.

Now the guy was running flat out, sprinting to close the distance when mr rogue decided to cast flame wall, which promptly erupted from the floor and incinerated the sprinting guardsman. Now everyone else got a bit pissed off and renewed thier assault on the rogue. Emboldened by his kill, the rogue decided to take the offensive and tried to dominate my psyker. One willpower test later and suddenly my acolytes were beset on both sides my magical fire and gunfire!

Now as you can imagine, my psyker wasn't very impressed at having been dominated by a rogue, and in the following turn, after taking control of his body back, he unleashed his favourite power, holocaust. And I think we all know how that ended. (not very well for the rogue XD)

Two of my favourites, which I cannot claim as my own deaths, sadly.

Firstly, Dark Heresy.

My Acolyte Cell received a new recruit; a dumb-as-hell Psyker, who suffered from an insanity which left him imitating the voice and mannerisms of whichever person he last had a meaningful verbal exchange with. His voice was grating and sounded almost hillbilly-like in the rare instances he reverted to his own, frightfully uncouth, voice. Apart from rapidly earning the ire of the the entire cell, including the (at least apparantly) unfazeable Tech-Priest Biologis, utterly professional Moritat Reaper and their dashingly handsome, devil-may-care rakehell of a leader, he had a habit of weakening the veil to get his powers off, which horrified both the players and the aetherscope we had borrowed around the time he joined us.

Anyway, knowing this character would only stay fun for a while and may have to be retired soon anyway for more pressing, real-lifey stuff, he purchased with his starting thrones, wait for it.

…A bandoleer full of grenades, on a Joker-Dark-Knight style ripcord of thick, white string.

"In case I summon a Daemon!" He would say, one time in my character's own voice. Our cell debated the virtues of murdering him and flushing the body out an airlock more than once while he was out of earshot, but our Lord Inquisitor had been a good and trustworthy master to us, and we didn't wish to waste his expensive and volatile resource out of hand.

…But you can guess who summoned a Daemon no more than a couple of sessions later, right?

Throne bless that crazy bastard, when a Daemon of The Feathered Deceiver plunged out of a nearby wall, he crash-tackled it and pulled the ripcord. The GM didn't make him roll damage for all those frag grenades, he just explained that when the initial pall of smoke cleared and our ears stopped ringing and bleeding, we could see that all that was left of our insane and potentially soul-forefiting burden was a greasy smear on the floor and the smell of burnt blood and ozone.

We light a candle for him in the Shrine of the Martyred Dead, aboard the Lamp of Reason, the starship upon which we are billeted, every Candlemas, in memory of his commitment to "friendship" and duty.

Secondly, Deathwatch.

Our Kill-Team is heavily engaged and dug in during a multi-team raid on the Chaos-blighted world of Sammech, the primary Forge World and a major strongpoint against the Imperial Crusaders. The fighting is intense, two Kill-teams have gone silent on other lines and the advanced party was yet to destroy the objective deep below.

Dark Skitarii march against us in ranks, we share foxholes with the corpses of a pack of Raptors we had just desperately repelled, our Apothecary running frantically between badly wounded brothers, having sedated the near-comatose form of Lucius the Eternal after desperately crying out warnings to his brothers not to kill the Arch-Traitor under pain of eternal damnation (that situation was resolved by our Tactical Marine Squad Leader, having lost his helmet to a head crit, scooping it back up and beating Lucius savagely across the head with it until he passed out from massive fatigue and critical damage).

You'd think it couldn't get any worse, we certainly hadn't faced a major figure from 40K lore before or since, and probably overtaxed our fluid recyclers when we realised who it was. But, of course, it did get worse. A Warhound Titan comes striding over the horizon, as if our morbid optimism that things could not possibly deteriorate from here had summoned it. So our Librarian, a Space Wolf of no small amount of courage or reckless zeal, fires up his jump pack and proceeds to fly (not jump in amongst the enemy, fly) directly towards the Titan at full speed, still almost half a kilometre away.

You can guess where this is going.

Our insane Librarian disappears beneath the dual impacts of a Turbo Laser volley the next round, his Storm Shield, perhaps the source of his wild confidence, stops neither of the blasts. Since he had fate points to burn, he survived.





…Well, half of him did, anyway.

Azraiel said:

Esdras said:

By chance, you both aren't in the same group are you? 

Hahaha, yes it seems that way! I confess I was sold on posting in this thread after only a couple of entries. Still, always interesting to read two different accounts of the same story, I think.

At least that's what I'm saying, and I'm sticking to it. >_>

So..

The space station is on fire AND ventilating AND there is a voice warning of an imminent reactor explosion. My players are being chased by a mob of bile scum mutants but they all reach the Arvus Lighter in time.

All except the guardsman who turn around to "get even" and fire of his heavy stubber. The arbites leader slams the hatch shut and leaves him behind. I declare his character dead but he's still got a FP to burn so I let him wake up in a small escape pod with a dead NPC and rats eating his legs. 

He attacks the rats with his heavy stubber…

Recently, my long-time favourite character died. It was definitely a memorable death, although I am hesitant to call it the best one I've had so far. The character in question was an Untouchable assassin who had a relic of the Dark Age of Technology - an intact artifical intelligence which he developed a friendship with. After gaining a few corruption points which damaged the artificial intelligence, I opted to burn all of my fate points as part of a deal with my game master in order to purify my character and have the chance to reboot that artifical intelligence through role-playing and some tech-heresy. It made a lot of sense in character to do it; as it was my character's only real friend. A few missions lately, after barely surviving a few times by the skin of my teeth, the game master game to the decision to kill off my character since he had botched a few rolls to continue on with my character, despite the lack of fate points. So, the death-mission started…

We were on our way to our next mission and while making a stop in a warp route, we were raided. My character went outside in a void-suit and fought off those trying to board the ship. At this stage, an emergency warp jump began by the captain… with my character unable to make it back through the air lock. Being outside the ship, my character was exposed to a direct view of the warp - being pulled behind the ship after hooking his grappling hook to part of the ship to remain secure - like a water skiier behind a boat. While not exactly clear on what was going to happen to my character (the Untouchable and the Profane states a protection from warp energies) - the artificial intelligence that was attached to my character was not. Surviving the warp jump and trying to get back into the ship, my character was highly changed - having become a shambling corpse animated by the corrupted artificial intelligence's systems. Confused, I attempted to get help only to be met with increasing attacks before a priest came and used holy powers to slay me (once again an oddity considering the Untouchable and the Profane) - but it's hard to say what truly happened in terms of the dynamics of it since I'm not the game master.

And that's that, dead character. Still not entirely sure how I feel about it, as I would have liked to know that my character was going to die ahead of him so I could at least work with the game master to come up with an appropriate death, but it was definitely one of the more memorable character deaths.

Meridien said:

Sentence correction: *the game master decided to kill off my character

It's a long, complicated story but I think the best character death I've had so far is in Dark Heresy, though I've seen some great ones in Deathwatch as well.

Our newly minted Inquisitor killed himself when he realized that he'd been lured into a Tzeenchian plot to fight his old master. They were unwitting champions of a chaos power and if one of them died by the other's hand, the daemon would be released.  The only way he could be sure to rob the daemon of victory was killing himself. Or at least that was his ultimate conclusion.  No pun intended.

It was heartbreaking to see the realization dawn on my player's face, but he never hesitated.  He was a true servant of the God-emperor.

My first Dark Heresy group reached rank 6-7 and I decided to send them after Arkades Thrum, a notorious pyrokine who had recently evaded then incinerated an Inquisitorial Stormtrooper assault squad. They spent three sessions hunting him and his leads down, systematically interrogating his contacts before handing them over for official Inquisition interrogation. Eventually they hunted him down to an agri-world where he had been hiding with a den of Psyker sympathisers, which was a bad idea… 

Now my group despise psykers after their own psyker turned on them in an earlier mission and they basically reduced him to component atoms by venting him from an airlock into the engine wash of a passing cargo ship. So when they found out thier target was hiding and who were involved, so they called in and requested reinforcements and re-equipping but aid was unavailable so they re-equipped at a local PDF garrison. Now my assassin, 2 guardsmen, an arbitrator, a tech preist and my cleric all exited the PDF armoury with the best equipment they could get thier grubby mitts upon. So they borrow a PDF chimera, ram straight through the shop acting as a front for the psyker hiding business, instantly flattening three of the sympathisers to a fine goo and alerting the rest of the mostly subterranean compound to thier presence. After another session of fighting through the building and clearing it out, they made thier way to sub basement C-3. Having seen the power a psyker can wield, especially at close range, they slowly progressed through the cavernous sub-basement only to find Thrum trying in vain to start a Valkyrie. Nothing they have is anywhere near powerful enough to scratch the Valkyrie, and the acolytes began panicking until the tech-preist happily notes that the Valkyrie is completely unable to even begin takeoff procedures as a vital part of the engine is laying on a work bench just feet from the access hatch. Emboldened by this development, the acolytes began to shout to Thrum that they have him surrounded and he should give up quickly, to which he replies something along the lines of "faff off!". 

Taking this as a personal insult, the younger and more impetuous of my guardsman howls a war cry, charges at the Valkyrie and runs slap bang into… A 9 foot tall, 16 foot wide Wall of Fire, instantly atomising him, all his gear, and a good chunk of the evidence they gathered while clearing the compound they were in. The rest of my Acolytes obviously didn't take this well and proceeded to lay a whole wagon of whup-ass on this guy, and let's just say, they made him wish the Inquisition would hurry up and rescue him from the acolytes!

(sorry for poor storytelling, I ran a 7 3/4 hour session yesterday and am currently half way through a 9 hour work shift :/

One of my favourite NPC death's so far has to be when the groups Guardsman character (Deadhead) was trying to sneakinto a warehouse.  He disguised himself as an electro-Technomat (read electrician) and had a security guard show him around after the Techpriest caused a blackout in the whole area.

So the Guardsmen finds a way into the warehouse through a side door but needs to get rid of the security guard.  He grabs the secruity guard in a headlong and stabs him through the eye with a screwdriver.  The Guardsman had a SB of 5 and crushing Blow and he rolled a series of 10's for damage.  The critical result effectively said that the blow removed the top of the security guards head….with a screw driver!.

The other PCs hear a strange commotion over the vox feed which results in this covnersation

Tech Priest: What's your status Deadhead?

Guardsman: I'm in the warehouse

Tech priest: What about the security guard?

Guardsman: He's uh…screwed.