R.I.P.

A moment of silence, please, for my late, lamented Torg RPG character, Professor Wendell X. Bernard, who went out in -- if I do say so -- a pretty impressive blaze of glory in last night's game session.

I already miss him.

Despite which, it really is all my fault he got killed off. The interesting thing about Torg (well, one of the interesting things about what is, in my opinion, a really cool game all the way around) is that it uses a special deck of cards in addition to the usual dice action. In this case, I happened to draw the "Martyr card," which allows you to "defeat any enemy at the cost of your own life." No, I didn't have to play the thing. In fact, usually it gets passed back to the GM about as quickly as if it were on fire. But, you know, I'm a total sucker for a dramatic death scene. And the circumstances were so appropriate. So I held onto it. And the GM did such a good job of setting up the foreboding and foreshadowing that it would have been a tremendous shame to waste it.

So, in the end, it came down to the Prof and his loyal friend Keevok (who'd come back to rescue him) trapped in the bad guys' Evil Death Sun Device (that's not quite like a Death Star, being, among other things, smaller). The bomb I'd planted to destroy the device had ticked down to about 30 seconds, a horde of almost-impossible-to-kill monsters was swarming after us, and, while we'd found the exit hatch, it turned out that we were now a couple of hundred feet above the ground. So the Prof rigged up a makeshift parachute, slapped it on Keevok, pushed him out (he wouldn't have gone otherwise), and turned back to delay the monsters just long enough to keep them from defusing or destroying the bomb. Thus saving not only Keevok, but the millions of innocent people who would otherwise have been killed when the bad guys used the Evil Death Sun to carry out their nefarious Evil Plan. Oh, yeah, and took out pretty much the entire Bad Guy base, too.

I gotta admit, it wasn't entirely noble on the Prof's part. He was maybe 95% motivated by stopping the Evil Plan. 2.5% was wanting to get revenge on the bad guys for killing his dog. OK, it was only a robot dog, but he built it with his own hands, and was very fond of it. The bastards dismemebered poor Fluffy and threw its decapitated head into his cell to mock him. So he ripped the electronic components out of it and built the aforementioned bomb. I call that poetic justice. The remaining 2.5% had to do with the fact that the Pharoh (the major Evil Bad Guy behind the whole thing) had claimed not to remember him, despite the Prof having rather spectacularly foiled his Evil Plan on a previous occasion. The Prof, quite frankly, has (er, had) an ego the size of the planet, so that stung. He was pretty sure they'd remember him now, though.

Not just the other characters, but even the other players seemed extremely sad to see him go, which I find really quite flattering (especially as they did agree that, if he had to go, that was absolutely the way it should happen). For my part, I found the whole episode quite thrilling to play, but, man, I really am going to miss playing the old guy... I am glad that at least I'm not going to be the one who has to break the news to his girlfriend...