History AndIMustScream / TabletopGames

*** Any Daemon Weapon or a bound Daemon results in this on a EldrichAbomination. The daemon is so crazy that he will attempt to devour it's wielder just so it can get some sort of outside contact, even though such an act would result in the weapon being rendered inert again.

*** In the sourcebook ''Mexico by Night'' there is a character description of one Jaggedy Andy who, as a mortal, insulted Sasha Vykos, the infamous Sabbat Tzimisce. When Andy spit ''it'' in the face, Vykos just simply smudged its hand over the mortals face, crafting bone and flesh over all his facial features. Just as he was about to die, Vykos made one of its thugs Embrace him. Now he wakes up every night without facial features and every night he must open his mouth and eyes with a hammer and chisel, which is a very painful process. To add to the insult he is as good as grounded to the landfill in which he was left, because even poking his ''face'' outside could start an uproar both among Vampires and Mortals. Another thought to go through before messing with the Tzimisce...

** [[ItGotWorse It gets worse]]. One sourcebook mentions that the nightmares tend to involve what put you into torpor in the first place, with kindred starving to torpor stuck in an eternal loop where they hunt a human and never reach them. Go into torpor through violence, or being staked, and god help you because you're going to relive that losing battle until someone finds it in their dead heart to revive you. That is if they don't decide to chow down on you instead, in which case, you'll simply scream inside your immobile body and watch as your saviour devours everything that made you who you are and all your memories, before crumbling into a pile of ash. Your torment isn't ended because it is rather heavily implied that you survive within your devourer's body for the rest of eternity.

** [[ItGotWorse It gets worse]]. One sourcebook mentions that the nightmares tend to involve what put you into torpor in the first place, with kindred starving to torpor stuck in an eternal loop where they hunt a human and never reach them. Go into torpor through violence, or being staked, and god help you because you're going to relive that losing battle until someone finds it in their dead heart to revive you. That is if they don't decide to chow down on you instead, in which case, you'll simply scream inside your immobile body and watch as your saviour devours everything that made you who you are and all your memories, before crumbling into a pile of ash. And even then, your torment isn't ended because it is rather heavily implied that you survive within your devourer's body for the rest of eternity.

** The Tzimisce in ''Vampire: The Masquerade'' do this ''for kicks'' to whoever screws with them, and even a few who don't.

*** It gets more into it when you realise that everything he aspired to accomplish (abolishment of religion and the destruction of Chaos altogether) is being defiled and torn down. ''In his name''. On top of that, the supposed preachers of his word are also the ones possibly conspiring to keep him in the vegetative state, as they're all paranoid as hell and believe that if he is allowed to die and reincarnate, he'll be gone forever and the Imperium will plunge into darkness forever (Inquisitor Lord Karamazov was famous for executing one of the supposed "reincarnations" of the Emperor, much to the chagrin of his collegues).

** Still nothing compared to the Outsider and possibly some Necrons - they were imprisoned before humans ever arose, on the order of some ''60 million years''. And even when awake the Necrons fall into this trope, completely subservient automatons trapped within effectively immortal metal shells. Most Necrons are "fortunately" mindless and probably not aware of their situation, but Necron Lords most definitely are.

*** A similar fate happens to Exarchs. These are warriors who are lost upon their path of war and unable to leave it, becoming instructors to others that want to learn the art as well as leaders in war. Each Exarch, upon death, would merge with their suit rather than their Spirit Stone, so that they may once again join the next generation of warriors when their suit is donned again (they merge spirits with whoever wears the suit). Phoenix lords go through the same thing, except that their personality completely dominates the other souls. Much like the Spirit stones, it's implied that many exarch, and even some phoenix lords, now lay on some forgotten world, their suit lost forever and unable to communicate with anyone.

*** Speaking of Slannesh, there's also his champion, Lucius the Eternal, a complete monster by many people's standards (Even his fellow Chaos Space Marines consider him a monster amongst monsters), who cannot die. To be specific if, by some rare chance you do kill him, if you feel the smallest amount of satsifaction for your deed, you will ever so slowly be transformed into Lucius. And eventually nothing will be left of you, except for a new , throbbing face with an eternal scream fixed onto it on Lucius' armor, and in the 10,000 or so years that he has been killing (And been killed) he has dozens, if not hundreds of those faces covering his armor.

* ''{{Exalted}}'', like ''WraithTheOblivion'', has soulforging as a common practice in the Underworld. Hell, it goes past "common" -- soulsteel is considered one of the [[ElementalCrafting five magical materials]], and the Deathlords are all too willing to make their undead subjects into arms and armor for their Abyssal soldiers.
** Made worse in that soulsteel was around before there was an Underworld. [[spoiler:Autochthon, the great maker, had an entire race he made that pissed him off so much that he melted their entire civilization into slag and removed all references to them, and THEN took their souls and forged them into soulsteel inside his body.]]

** The Neverborn, who are simply too powerful to die, are locked in an eternal hellish nightmare from which there is no obvious escape. This is how they can be sympathetic despite their plan (insofar as they are sane enough to have one) being the complete obliteration of everything that exists - because this is quite possibly the only way for them to finally escape.

* In ''MonstersAndOtherChildishThings'', the empty skin of a person an Excruciator has literally hollowed out into a LivingBodysuit is explicitly mentioned to be still live and conscious. No, the game doesn't even ''hint'' that there's any way to restore a person from this.

* ''DungeonsAndDragons'' has, as noted above, the Imprisonment spell, which entombs the subject for an indefinite amount of time somewhere "far beneath the surface of the earth".
** Used in the cartoon by Venger against another wizard who had ticked him off.
** Thankfully, ''Imprisonment'' first puts the subject into temporal stasis, so they aren't conscious of the time spent underground.
*** However, in ''BaldursGate'' this doesn't seem to be the case as the player is threatened with this spell (and the emphasis of ''suffering'') by a [[KnightTemplar Harper]], and one could free a Drow Mage who went ''insane'' from the spell.

** Imprisonment is still around in 4th edition too. Thankfully, it's now a level 29 Ritual that takes an hour to cast. While it does put the target into suspended animation, they have no memories of what happened while they were Imprisoned and you do have to set at least one specific condition that will cause them to be freed automatically; it doesn't say that said condition has to be ''fair'' (or even '''possible''') and it can only be undone otherwise if a person can first find the demiplane in which it traps them (which means they need to be at least level 29 themselves). Otherwise, they'll be trapped '''forever'''.
** And now Druids, Shamans and Wardens can get on the act with the lower-leveled but otherwise fundamentally the same [[http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4ex/20090925 Primal Prison]]. This ritual has the added choice bonus that it's the caster who chooses whether or not the subject ages, and whether the victim is aware of what's happening or not.

* Both the old and new ''Vampire'' games (''[[TabletopGame/VampireTheMasquerade Masquerade]]'' and ''[[VampireTheRequiem Requiem]]'') had a variation on this. When Vampires are staked or starve for long enough, rather than dying, they are sent into torpor, a kind of stasis. This is far from mercy, as vampires in this state experience time more or less in realtime, but suffer terrifying nightmares. And considering that very few kindred would willingly starve themselves into this kind of state, this probably means that said vampire is trapped somewhere, meaning that this state can go on indefinitely. No wonder a great many ancient vampires (and possibly the antediluvians and Caine in the original series) have been driven utterly insane when revived.

*** In the sourcebook ''Mexico by Night'' there is a character description of one Jaggedy Andy who, as a mortal, insulted Sasha Vykos, the infamous Sabbat Tzimisce. When Andy spit ''it'' in the face, Vykos just simply smudged its hand over the mortals face, crafting bone and flesh over all his facial features. Just as he was about to die, Vykos made one of its thugs Embrace him. Now he wakes up every night without facial features and every night he must open his mouth and eyes with a hammer and chisel, which is a very painful process. To add to the insult he is as good as grounded to the landfill in which he was left, because even poking his ''face'' outside could start an outroar bot among Vampires and Mortals. Another thought to go through before messing with the Tzimisce...
** Similarly, the Hierarchy in ''WraithTheOblivion'' does this to whoever causes too much trouble. Their ghostly corpus is "soulforged," boiled down and rendered into a permanent shape, be it a sword, a coin, or an ashtray. However, official word as of the 2nd edition is that Soulforging destroys the consciousness of the ghost being soulforged.

** In ''MageTheAwakening'', if an Abyssal entity doesn't simply kill you in horrible fashion or corrupt the next seven generations of your family to its service, it will likely inflict this upon you. Abyssal creatures are less than pleasant.
* This trope nicely sums up''{{Warhammer 40000}}'' universe. And then there are hundreds of orders of magnitude nadirs that really stand out...

* In ''MonstersAndOtherChildishThings'', the empty skin of a person an Excruciator has literally hollowed out into a LivingBodysuit is explicitly mentioned to be still live and conscious. No, the game doesn't even ''hint'' that there's any way to restore a person from this.

* In ''MonstersAndOtherChildishThings'', the empty skin of a person an Excruciator has literally hollowed out into a LivingBodysuit is explicitly mentioned to be still live and conscious, but under the complete control of the Excruciator. No, the game doesn't even ''hint'' that there's any way to restore a person from this.

* In Burning Empires, [[PuppeteerParasite infection by a Vaylen]] is treated much the same way as character permadeath because the infected character is irreversibly rendered unable to control its own body, effectively comatose, ''even'' when there's no worm driving it around.

* The ''{{Warhammer 40000}}'' short story ''Into the Maelstrom'' has a traitor SpaceMarine imprisoned in a Dreadnaught battle suit, normally an honor, but never released, so he is doomed to live forever in a small metal box, with no limbs. This is in fact the fate of ''all'' Space Marines encased in Dreadnaught armour, with the occasional mindless rampage, but it isn't always this trope (and is a good example of how a different attitude can affect the outcome). Regular Space Marines, both those encased and their brethren, consider it an honour as they can fight the Emperor's enemies even after death, albeit with slowly degrading mental faculties. Chaos Marines however, being {{Sense Freak}}s taken to the literal utter screaming extreme, consider it to be the worst punishment imaginable, as even while battling they can't feel [[AxeCrazy the joy of slaughter]] and while inactive their brethren have to ''chain them to a wall'' to prevent the completely bugfuck insane Marine (even by Chaos standards) from breaking loose and killing everyone.

** ''ChangelingTheLost'' does this to all changelings -- your player character is someone who, by whatever scraps of luck, managed to somehow ''escape''. And you have no idea if maybe, just maybe, you were actually ''let go''. You may have been the pot in which a twining, bloodsucking rose was grown, your Keeper gently watering you with arcane acids and admiring the beauty of the flowers growing out from the slits in your lungs. You may have been twisted to have the body of a hound and the mind of a man, then the body of a man and the mind of a hound, over and over and back and forth until you couldn't tell which was which. You may have had to spend a hundred years walking along the razor edges a network of swords, suspended high above a valley of crackling flames or gnashing rocks. The True Fae have such a wide variety of ways to "play" with humans...

* Both the old and new ''Vampire'' games (''[[VampireTheMasquerade Masquerade]]'' and ''[[VampireTheRequiem Requiem]]'') had a variation on this. When Vampires are staked or starve for long enough, rather than dying, they are sent into torpor, a kind of stasis. This is far from mercy, as vampires in this state experience time more or less in realtime, but suffer terrifying nightmares. And considering that very few kindred would willingly starve themselves into this kind of state, this probably means that said vampire is trapped somewhere, meaning that this state can go on indefinitely. No wonder a great many ancient vampires (and possibly the antediluvians and Caine in the original series) have been driven utterly insane when revived.

** ''Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor'' also details the continuation of consciousness whilst suspended in a stasis field, though the consciousness is locked in whatever feeling was being felt at the submersion in the stasis field. Naturally this discovery is then used by the Inquisition to torture individuals for great lengths of time while effectively halting the decay of their bodies.

** Speaking of Slannesh, there's also his champion, Lucius the Eternal, a complete monster by many people's standards (Even his fellow Chaos Space Marines consider him a monster amongst monsters), who cannot die. To be specific if, by some rare chance you do kill him, if you feel the smallest amount of satsifaction for your deed, you will ever so slowly be transformed into Lucius. And eventually nothing will be left of you, except for a new , throbbing face with an eternal scream fixed onto it on Lucius' armor, and in the 10,000 or so years that he has been killing (And been killed) he has dozens, if not hundreds of those faces covering his armor.

* Ravi, a planeswalker in the [[MagicTheGathering world of Ulgrotha]], was desperate to end a huge war. She did so by ringing the Apocalypse Chime, which wiped out the whole battlefield of its warring parties, and put herself in a magic coffin designed by her mentor to avoid the destruction. Unfortunately, she didn't ascertain how to get OUT. [[spoiler:She was eventually found by Baron Sengir, becoming the "delightfully" mad Grandmother Sengir.]]