the most grotesque death...

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by ecz

... of a character or of a villain in your adventures.

please tell ...

In a TFT-Traveller campaign, the primary FTL drive was the Mannschenn Drive (from A. Bertram Chandler's novels). This was a drive that distorted time to create pseudo-FTL travel. Colloquially, it's described by an engineer to a non-engineer thusly - "we travel backwards in time as we move forward in space".

Anyhow, the drive is a mass of gyroscopes and can hypnotize someone if they stare at it too long. If you get too close to it, it will pull you in, then literally turn you inside out. Experienced engineers connect themselves to the bulkheads with cables to avoid this. Oh, and there's no artificial gravity - the ships are built skyscraper style and use acceleration to create a gravity-like sensation. So if the engine stops accelerating, you're in a zero-G environment.

During a firefight, in zero-g, a PC dove towards the drive to recover a computer crystal that was drifting into the drive. He forgot to connect his lifeline. After he declared the action I even gave him an IQ roll to remember it at the last second and he failed.

Now I had no real intention of killing him, but I did want the danger to seem real. I called for a DX roll; he rolled an 18. So I said "well, now you're in trouble. Make DX roll to grab a handhold to stop yourself. It's +4 DX because it's pretty easy to grab. This made his AdjDX 15 - a 95% chance of success.

Yep...he rolled a 16 - automatic failure. So I reluctantly had him go into the drive. I mean at some point, it's just God's will that a character dies.

So he got turned inside out.

Of course, what the other characters saw was him leap into the drive and go splot. Or maybe it was more of a splut sound. Or maybe sqwinch.