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What The Hell Hero / Tabletop Games

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  • Dungeons & Dragons, Forgotten Realms campaign setting
    • During the Time of Troubles, Helm was tasked with ensuring that the other gods did not enter a certain portal. When Mystra tried to force her way into the portal, Helm struck her down without even bothering to figure out an alternative. The resulting outrage and backlash from the other gods (not to mention his own followers) was so severe that to this day there's lingering resentment over what he did.
      • It's so bad, that the physical side effects of Mystra's death — the creation of wild magic zonesnote  and dead magic zonesnote  — are derisively referred to as "Helmlands" in order to remind Helmites of his failure.
    • Helm's followers weren't too long in getting their own incident of this when an expedition of one group's led to them discovering Maztica... and promptly re-enacting "Conquistadors vs Aztecs". How bad was it? They founded an entire new order of paladins to try and make up for the damage those Helmites did.
  • Exalted: In the beginning of their guidebook to Hell, a comic shows a tour guide showing the decadent First Age Solar Exalted about the Demon City, only to realize that they don't care at all:
    Oh, what's the use? Nobody cares anymore. Nobody comes here for the right reasons. You're all either hiding from your responsibilities, or lost in your own little worlds. Why do we bother?
  • Magic: The Gathering: after the Gatewatch kill Ulamog and Kozilek, Ugin shows up and basically calls them a pack of irresponsible jackasses, giving Jace in particular both barrels for being sanctimonious, deceitful, and arrogant, then tells them that he'd be quite happy if he never saw any of them again.
  • In the Powered by the Apocalypse game Masks: A New Generation, one character type (the Reformed Villain) has this word-for-word as the name of a special ability. It's about calling out heroes on their own injustices.
  • Warhammer 40,000: after Angron was beaten back from Armageddon, the Inquisition rounded the surviving local population to be sterilised and placed in forced labour camps to prevent them from spreading first-hand knowledge of Chaos. Logan Grimnar of the Space Wolves... didn't like that very much, and has even vowed not to let this kind of thing happen again.
    • Logan and Inquisition actually started a civil war, the Months of Shame, over this issue. It stopped only when Bjorn the Fell-Handed delivered another epic What the Hell, Hero? speech to both Logan and (surviving) Grey Knights and Inquisitors. Justified, since their little feud caused more casualties than First War of Armageddon due to the fact the Inquisitor responsible went on an Exterminatus rampage in a failed attempt to wipe out every last trace of Armageddon's population, before attacking Fenris and losing his head (literally) at the hands of Logan.
    • Under Logan Grimnar, the Space Wolves have started doing this a lot. But his subordinates tend to voice their displeasure with their Boltguns instead. One of the more notable examples, an event called Honor's End, saw hundreds of Marines dead when the Space Wolves were enraged by the Flesh Tearers' butchery of civilians long after the enemy had been routed.
    • During the Third War for Armageddon, a group of Orks infiltrated a refugee camp. When the captain in charge of the Marines Malevolent advocated wiping out the camp with artillery to eradicate the Orks, the Chapter Master of the Salamanders very nearly came to blows with him. In fluff, the Salamanders are much more conscious of civilians, and consequently much more careful to avoid civilian casualties, than most other chapters who often see them as "unfortunate, but they got in our way."
    • During the Horus Heresy, many of the Thousand Sons - prior to their fall to true damnation - spent a fair chunk of "A Thousand Sons" chewing out the Space Wolves for their thoughtlessly destructive purge of Heliosa and their hypocrisy in using psykers themselves while simultaneously accusing the Thousand Sons of practicing sorcery.
    • Eldrad gets chewed out by the rest of the Craftworld Farseers after the events of Death Masque. Not only for stealing the bodies of dead farseers and deceiving his allies so that he could attempt a dangerous ritual. But for trying to personally determine the fate of their people countless times in the past.


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