Forums of the Megaverse®

you ever did in universe?

Like, NOT what is the meanest you ever were to your players.
What is the most horrific act you ever committed to in universe characters just to tell a story?
Did you ever blow up a planet full of people?
Or mentally torture a PC to death?

To me the worst things are personal. The old line "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." in fiction this really means the acts of cruelty that have the greatest impact are to individuals, not groups.

I've blown up planets, compressed and destroyed an alternate universe, my players have had to watch as the Mechanoids devoured a star system or the Kreeghor glass a planet but it never has as much of an impact as when you take a well liked NPC or the Splugorth capture the citizens of a small town that the players visit often.

This being the case I think the worst thing I did was to let the PCs work on and off for years to help a town survive against all sorts of monsters and the CS just to have it destroyed by a random event. The casual, indiscriminate, even random cruelties seem to be the worst.

I had an NPC that turned into a player character who was a Fallen CosmoKnight turned Mystic. The backstory that I came up with was that he was tricked into destroying a ship full of refugees by an evil god who had been trying to subjugate them. The god came to him with a story of them being invaders who were trying to destroy his world and begged the CK to stop it. When he arrived he found the ship involved in a battle with what appeared to be locals to the world and immediately attacked the ship and ended up destroying it. After it was over, he was summoned by the Cosmic Forge and it showed him what was really going on and that the evil god had used his naivete and ignorance of what was really happening to destroy those who rejected him. As punishment, the Forge cast him from the Order and he ended up on Rifts Earth.