Cruel And Unusual Death / Tabletop Games

• The Arcania of Legend: Blood Magic magic and spell supplement for Mongoose Publishing's fantasy roleplaying game Legend deals with the topic of using physical pain and blood sacrifice — including human sacrifice — to power spells and placate cruel gods. The dangerous spell casting methods include self-harming, exsanguination, cannibalism and soul consumption to activate and fuel spells, enchant items and summon demonic entities. The themes of the book's spell list include pain, suffering, sacrifice and death. Several of the listed spells can inflict cruel and unusual deaths such as Boil Blood, which is self-explanatory; Haemoptysis, which causes the victim to begin coughing up blood; Heart Seizure, which induces heart failure; and the Sorcery spells Extract Heart, which causes the victim's heart to literally leap out of his chest, and Transmute Blood, which turns the blood in the victim's veins into some other substance such as potent acid, ruby or molten iron.
• While not nearly as bad as some of the ones above, in BattleTech, if you're an infantryman, you can look forward to the following attractive deaths: being stomped to death by a 50+ ton mech, having your limbs blown off by a gauss rifle, vaporizing in the middle of a huge person-wide laser beam, being sliced in half by a smaller beam, kicked so hard by a giant mech that if you aren't killed by the blow, you will be when you hit a wall flying 80 KM/H. A pilot in a BattleMech can look forward to having his limbs torn off by jagged pieces of metal as he ejects, being sliced open by jagged pieces of metal as he ejects, accidentally auto-ejecting into the vacuum of space, without a space suit, and those are when you eject. Inside the mech a pilot risks becoming brain-dead following their neurohelmet zapping their brain with so much biofeedback, that the worst Black ICE in Shadowrun would be jealous.
  • The worst fate would be being on a jumpship that improperly jumps. Let's just say that some of your molecules jump with the ship, while others don't.
• Killer Game Masters of Dungeons & Dragons are quite fond of devising some pretty nasty ways to go, usually in the form of Death Traps.
  • The players can get pretty creative, too. The expansion book Stormwrack has sample rules for holding your enemies underwater until they drown, for instance.
  • Some of the spells in the Book Of Vile Darkness (a book all about evil characters) cause this. Examples include "death by thorns" (which causes giant thorns to burst out of the victims skin and organs and leaves them to writhe in agony for a few rounds before dying,) "Seething eyebane" (which makes their eyeballs explode and possibly kill them) and "Plague Of Nightmares" (Which makes the victim have horrible nightmares every night until they go insane and die).
  • Even the seemingly innocuous spell "Heat Metal" can cause this. Being forced to drop your white-hot weapon is... unpleasant. Use it against someone wearing plate armor and you can, in essence, cook the target alive inside their armor, as it takes 5 minutes to doff plate armor according to the 5e Player's Handbook.
• Exalted: There are a lot of means to kill someone in cool and fascinating way, but the Abyssals make an art out of it with Illustrative Overkill Technique: you kill someone in such a gruesome and nauseating way that anyone watching it will start running away from you, most likely while vomiting their bowels out.
  • FATALITY!
• Games Workshop games:
  • Rather than just kill his foes, the Daemonic Herald Skulltaker from Warhammer, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000 prefers to cripple them, so that they lie helpless on the ground, before taking their head in his hand and burning the flesh from the still living victim’s skull with hellfire.
  • Warhammer:
    • The Chaos Dwarfs sacrifice their victims to their god Hashut, by herding them into a massive brazen bull where they are burned alive.
    • The 'good guys' are no strangers to inflicting these either with one Dark Elf sorceress being forever gnawed on by the serpent god after being sacrificed by the Lizardmen.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Half the stuff that can kill you in the setting counts as this. From flesh-eating worms to bio-acids that melt the skin off your bones, to razor-sharp shards of psychically charged material which will not only tear you to pieces but make you feel unimaginable pain, to guns that flay you apart molecule by molecule, or open a portal to what is essentially hell and suck you in.
    • The Orks' Shokk Attack Gun teleports a tiny goblin though hell, driving it psychotically insane, and causing it to reappear inside you, at which point it rips you apart from within.
    • The Dark Eldar civilisation revolves around inflicting this on people, and they are terrifyingly good at it. The basic Dark Eldar ranged weapon is a gun that fires poisoned projectiles designed to kill the victim as painfully as possible (or incapacitate them as painfully as possible so they may be taken alive and subjected to even worse torture). Their more exotic wargear tends to be even worse, such as weapons that spray flesh-eating acid, burn out the victim's nervous system, turn them into glass statues or instantly drain all moisture from their bodies, leaving behind a mummified corpse that disintegrates to dust. Now consider that despite all the horrible ways Dark Eldar weapons can kill you, the most famous quote associated with them is "pray that they don't take you alive"...
    • Speaking of the Dark Eldar, there's this from the 5th edition codex:
    Asdrubael Vect tricks his would-be rival Archon Kelithresh into opening a casket that has ostensibly been presented as tithe. Held precariously in the collapsing field of the casket is the unstable essence of a black hole. Kelithresh's entire realm is plunged into a howling, yawning vortex.
    • Pretty much every single weapon in the Tyranid arsenal causes this. Flesh-eating acids, necrotic viruses, tunelling worms fired like bullets, sprays of worms that slowly devour your nervous system, shards of poisoned crystal, seeds that explode into hardened vines the moment they touch blood, you name it. Possibly the most merciful death you can expect when fighting them is being stomped flat by a Carnifex.
    • Dark Heresy and its spinoffs has the critical hit table, which consists entirely of cruel and unusual injuries and deaths. Examples include having your head blown off by an energy weapon and your headless corpse catching on fire and running around (possibly igniting anything flammable, like other characters, in the vicinity), your body split open and everybody within D10 meters having to take an agility test or slip on all the blood gushing everywhere, and having every bone in your body pulverised by the force of the impact you took. The psychic phenomena table has some rather unusual ways die, with having your soul devoured by Daemons being the worst.
  • The Eldar Harlequins have the Neuro Disruptor, a weapon from an unknown alien species. It is a psychically attenuated crystal attached to a pistol grip. It has no firing mechanism or any moving parts however. The Eldar user simply aims it at the target, thinks, and the target has their brain activity shut down. No armour can protect, only extreme mental fortitude. The nickname for the use of this weapon is "cutting the strings". The evil robotic Necrons have a similar weapon, the Synpatic Disintegrator, which causes neural tissue to disintegrate.
• GURPS Ultra-Tech has a weapon that releases nanites into your blood. After a few minutes, your blood explodes.
• New World of Darkness has several extremely horrifying deaths for the very unfortunate humans that run foul of its supernatural denizens. Certain vampires can restrain a human while eating his flesh, then wear it as a cloak to protect from sunlight. Abyssal entities can do all sorts of unpleasant things to people. The grand prize, however, has to go to the Shartha, or the hosts, who can possess humans by getting into their bodies and slowly eating their hearts or brains.
• Paranoia: Many traitors are simply lasered to death in the heat of battle, but the really unlucky ones get to serve Alpha Complex one last time by getting assigned to nuclear reactor shielding duty. No, they don't get to repair the shielding, they get to be the shielding.
• Planescape. If the Lady is displeased with you and wants to publicly voice said displeasure she lets her shadow fall over you. The victims die from having the skin and flesh flayed from their bones while still alive and capable of feeling every last moment of it, with the end result being little more than a ragged pile of leaky meat.
• Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution gives you several ways to inflict these on opponents. These include, but are not limited to, telekinetically crushing people or ripping them apart, raising their temperature so high that they boil in their own skin, making their heads explode, forcing them to commit suicide, and atomizing them.
• A Blood Magic spell in a Rifts supplemental is called Carnivorous Blood. Your imagination can handle the rest...

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