D&D General What’s the most gruesome thing that can befall an adventurer?

[Morrus]

Dragon breath, petrification, poison, zombie rot…. What’s the most gruesome thing that can befall an adventurer?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Keeping it Eric's grandma-friendly, probably being eaten alive but paralyzed by magic/poison, which is a thing that's pretty easy to happen, even with low-level opponents. Ghouls, carrion crawlers, rot grubs, etc. etc.

Full-body petrification is pretty clean generally speaking. Partial petrification, now that's super-horrifying (c.f. ASoIaF and various other fantasy novels), straight-up body-horror stuff there.

 

[TheSword]

Implantation... either through Kyuss Worm, Slaad Tadpole or Phaerimm egg.

A gory exit, leading to death at any time. Who knows what changes it’s making inside your human crysallis.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Organ extraction, such as mind flayer brain eating, or peryton heart ripping?

 

[Thunder Brother]

Implantation... either through Kyuss Worm, Slaad Tadpole or Phaerimm egg.

Rot grubs as well. The idea of something worming its way into your body and devouring you from the inside is... shivers.

 

[Dioltach]

At the risk of repeating what I've said before on these boards: kender.

 

[tetrasodium]

In the player's eyes I'm going to go with a few from old editions

• 2e and older deleveling. It had the downside of forcing a player to go rebuild their sheet for fifteen minutes though so had to go
• 3.x Whight paralysing touch with cou de gras known. The mere chance of it was terrifying in ways that shifted how everything viewed
• 3.x ability damage.it has much of the fear that went with de-leveling without needing to rebuild the sheet recalculating one attrib was easy to do even on the fly. The recovery however was slow enough without a bunch of lesser restorations that it tended to feel pretty gruesome. The fact that it tended to come from touch ac melee attacks from a wraith that turned the strength of a heavy armor high con or high Dex lowish con pc into a weakness raised the bar on it.

I think the thing that makes those all feel so gruesome is that you can still play and aren't completely removed long term like flesh to stone but the risk & medium term lost of power is high enough to make recovery a serious issue to the players.

I've severed a few limbs &find it to generally be anticlimactic with the result just shifting the game to finding bob a replacement limb or finding a way to regrow Bob's arm. The exclusion there is games like rifts and shadowrun where cyborg limbs are common but tend to come with some mechanical costs of humanity or something

Edit going to add implantation to the list of gruesome

 

[Oofta]

Another fun one is mummy rot. Describe to the player how their PC's skin is slowly starting to flake off in chunks and they are constantly dying of thirst no matter how much they drink.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Third Worst- Sons of Kyuss

Second Worst- Meenlock (1e flavor)

The Worst- Bards

 

[the Jester]

Don't forget ear seekers!