Thanks to Dungeon Crawl Classics, I experienced something I hadn’t realized I had been wanting for the last 35 years… This weekend, I had one of my characters die from casting a spell.

While being attacked by a massive emerald ogre, Wendy pulled out her scroll of Ray of Enfeeblement and accepted Major Corruption to boost her casting. It tore out a chunk of her soul, permanently reducing all her stats by 2 (three of which were already at 3 from spellburn) and dealt 15 damage to her.

She pushed her soul into that spell that weakened the ogre, but it cost her life.

In other words,

IT WAS EPIC.

The real cause was hubris. She had taken on corruption twice previously that session AND had spellburned her Str, and Per down to 3 each before we found the ogre. That’s when she tried to cast the Ray of Enfeeblement spellburning her Agl to 3 and then getting a result of 1 on the nastiest corruption table.

I’m going to be smiling about this character death for the rest of the week. Almost as much as when I ran my first funnel and two characters died when they lit a wicker totem on fire (because the would-be priest screamed that it must be done) and it fell on them, dealing 1 damage to each of them (including the would-be priest).