Any examples for this must be taken from published Dungeons & Dragons material, not your personal experiences in a game.
- The Running the Realms book included with the AD&D Forgotten Realms box set had an introduction from Ed Greenwood, in which he shared some of his experiences with the setting. One in particular stands out:A young lady whose name I never knew at GEN CON® Game Fair IX, announcing that her low-level paladin would try to rescue someone from 46 orcs—an attack that meant her character's certain death. Tears gleamed in her eyes as she said quietly, "My duty is clear. Farewell, my friends—it's good to have shared such glorious adventures with you."
- A sad little story from the old 3rd Edition Manual of the Planes book. In the Region of Dreams is a permanent Dreamscape called Anavaree, consisting of a playground atop a hill within a beautiful meadow. Its inhabitants are Ana, a little girl who is always playing, and Grumpy, an enormous bronze dragon who normally sleeps encircling the hill, unless something should threaten Ana. In truth, Ana is the dream self of a grown woman, the sole survivor of a colony ship that crashed on some desolate world, and while her stasis pod is keeping her alive, she suffered brain damage and mentally regressed to childhood. She is wholly ignorant of the situation and has been happily playing in her dreamscape for years. The dragon knows the truth, but what exactly is he going to do about it?
- The Duergar are sociopathic slavers, but when you figure out how they got that way you can't help but feel some sympathy for them. The duergar were originally a dwarven clan who started obsessing over digging deeper. The obsession gripped every member of the clan, to the point where they abandoned their temples and left the exhausted to die. The clan's stronghold was built atop a mind flayer colony, who now used their psychich powers to force the duergar into subservience. After generations of suffering and torment at the illithids' hands, Laduguer finally freed his people and led them to the surface... Where they found the dwarvish clans had turned their backs on them. The other dwarves had come to check on the Duergar stronghold, and found them empty. Worse, the temples to Moradin were abandoned. Moradin's priests had concluded that the Duergar had turned their backs on the god, and that their enslavement by the mind flayers was thus their own fault. Is there any wonder they hate Moradin?
- Fizban's Treasury of Dragons rewrites a lot of the Draconic creation myth, including rewriting the gem dragon god Sardior as the first creation of Bahamut and Tiamat, who was unintentionally killed by Tiamat. The book includes footnotes from Fizban, who is actually Bahamut in Krynnish aspect.Fizban: Sometimes the evening sun catches a topaz dragon just right, and I forget whom I'm talking to, thinking it's my dear Sardior, returned to me at last.
- The original Mystra. She was basically drafted into the role of goddess of magic as what's implied to be a young girl, immediately forced to deal with the aftermath of Mystryl's death and Karsus's Folly, had to constantly defend arguably the most sought-after portfolio in the Faerûnian pantheon for well over one and a half thousand years, and was then striped of her power, thrown to Toril, and imprisoned and tortured by Bane, all of which is implied to have heavily degraded her mental health. Is it any wonder she snapped at Helm? In her final moments, she even wept tears of anger and frustration, before screaming in horror so loud that every realm could hear her.
- The Fifth Edition module Tyranny of Dragons has a few elements turn out to be big wastes of time, either for the players or for the Cult of the Dragon.
- The wyrmspeaker Varram has lost the white dragon mask, so he travels to the Tomb of Diderius to consult the divination pool there in the hopes of finding the mask. He gets captured by the yuan-ti that have taken over the tomb and will likely end up dead or a prisoner of the players, but before that happened he managed to look at the pool… which showed him that the mask had already been found and reclaimed by other members of the Cult. This means he got several of his soldiers killed for nothing at all. By the time the player characters find him, Varram is close to death's door, and not even trying to fight back anymore.
- A paranoid cultist stationed at Xonthal's Tower wants to defect and is offering the blue dragon mask in exchange for asylum. The other cultists discover his treachery shortly before the party arrives; by the time the players get past all the tower's defenses and reach the defector, he will be dead. And the dragon mask he died for, which the party went through all that trouble to obtain? It's a fake.
- When the party arrives in Waterdeep, a member of the caravan will accuse one of the player characters of the murder of another merchant, accepting nothing less than the character's head. The player character, regardless of who gets accused, had nothing at all to do with the murder. It was the thieving gnome Jenma Gleamsilver, who killed the merchant because he saw her stealing from the caravan and she had to kill him to cover her escape. In any case, the accusing merchant is wrong, and is quite likely to die seeking vengeance on the wrong person.
- Even the bad guys get one during The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, which happens more-or-less regardless of whether the players stop their plans or not. If Severin and Rath Modar successfully summon Tiamat, her first act will be to eat them both while laughing maniacally in spite of everything they did to bring her to the Material Plane in the first place. Tiamat only wants dragons serving her, so even half-dragons or dragonborn are worthless to her. And if the heroes win and either stop the ritual or kill Tiamat, then all that work they did was All for Nothing. Either way, the villains come out of the adventure with nothing but misery to show for it.
- The tale of the elven goddess Eilistraee. She's described as moody and melancholy, and it's for a good reason. Eilistraee was tricked into using an enchanted bow by her mother Lolth, which shot an arrow directly at Eilistraee's father Corellon. Once Lolth's betrayal was revealed, all of the drow gods were exiled from the Seldarine. That included Eilistraee. The other elven gods found that Eilistraee was not at fault and that she could stay. Eilistraee proved her goodness by leaving anyway, knowing that her people would need her. The whole thing is a tragedy of Lolth's making, and while the other gods still look favorably upon Eilistraee, she remains in self-imposed exile because of something that wasn't her fault. Eilistraee even sometimes reflects that her struggle against her mother Lolth sometimes seems like it can never be won in spite of Lolth's betrayal.
- From the 3.5 Book of Vile Darkness, one of the sample characters is a blue dragon named Enesstrere. While blue dragons are typicially evil, Enesstrere just wanted to keep to himself. And then he was possessed by a bodiless demon, who took over his body after a long fight, then forced him to get addicted to luhix, an extremely powerful drug with horrific withdrawal symptoms. Now Enesstrere is screwed; even if he manages to force the demon out of his body, he'll be stuck in the middle of the desert with a crippling drug addiction and no way to satisfy it (as it stands now, lesser demons in the service of his possessor bring him a dose every 24 hours). But if he doesn't break free from the possession, he's going to be used as the spearhead for a demonic invasion. It's a terrible Morton's Fork that manages to make an Always Chaotic Evil (well, Lawful Evil) creature a Tragic Monster.
