Heroic Sacrifice/Tabletop Games

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Examples of Heroic Sacrifices in Tabletop Games include:

Tabletop RPGs

• In Shadowrun just after his inaugural speech President Dunkelzahn rips out his own heart in an effort to stop the effects of Blood Magic and is assumed assassinated.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • The supplement Book of Exalted Deeds advises DMs to go easy on resurrection penalties for good characters who go out on one of these; there's even the Risen Martyr prestige class.
  • In Oriental Adventures, Honor Points can be awarded to a character posthumously (which benefits future characters created by the player) and dying heroically in this manner gains such characters a lot of them.
  • Among the most powerful sets of armor ever made was the Armor of the Ventadari. Named after their original wearers, the four Undyingly Loyal bodyguards of Windlord Adrasta, this armor was literally made of magical energy, and had several incredible properties, including giving the wearer the ability to cast a double-strength Haste on themselves - at the cost of aging 2 years - and the ability to give themselves 20 temporary hit points - at the cost of permanently losing 1 from their maximum hit point total when the effect wears off. According to legend, the Ventadari gave their lives to protect Adrasta from an assault by an army of devil soldiers, using both these effects again and again before dying of old age and the loss of all their hit points.
• In TORG, one of the subplot cards the players can use is Martyr which, once set up, will allow the player to automatically succeed at something by heroically sacrificing their own life.
• In Pathfinder, there's an alternate set of abilities for monks in the Advanced Player's handbook that allows a monk to do this at high levels to revive his entire party to full health. However, it's a TRUE heroic sacrifice in a world where Death Is Cheap. If a monk does this, not only are they killed for good, their name can never be spoken or written again. So their sacrifice is doomed to be forgotten.
• In the Ravenloft module Bleak House, the Vampire Hunter Rudolph van Richten confronted his true Arch Enemy Madame Irena Radanavich (who had, among other things, been responsible for kidnapping Richten's son to sell to the vampire Baron Metus); Richten sacrificed himself to end her threat once and for all.

War Games

• Warhammer 40,000 - the Imperial Guard, period. Their entire existence is a heroic sacrifice. Against a galaxy crawling with monstrous Tyrannid bugs that outnumber them by an exponentially large ratio, the Lovecraftian horrors of Chaos, the Orkish hordes, life-sucking skeleton-men, mutants, psychics, barbarians and technologically advanced aliens... they're basically conscripts with a ridiculously obsolete lasgun in their hands and some flak armor. They're cannon fodder for the Space Marines who can't be everywhere at once. Unlike the Space Marines, they're not elite super-soldiers with demigod-like training and equipment, just regular people living in a dangerous and uncaring universe full of superpowered evil. And, despite this, they hold the line.
  • The Apocalypse Reload book gave them a new strategic asset: Fire On My Coordinates. Choose a soldier in your army with a communications backpack and have a cruiser in orbit fire a torpedo/plasma blast right on top of them (though they have to pass a morale test to do it). You can just see the squad crouching in the trenches, most of them desperately holding the enemy off while the main army retreats, the communications trooper shouting "fire on my coordinates!" into the microphone, blasting the advancing Ork/Tyranid/Chaos/etc. horde and the squad into very small pieces.
  • Also important to mention is the Imperial Guard Saint Ollanius Pius, the guardsman who threw himself between the Emperor and Horus, even though he saw the man whom he saw as a literal god fall before the 'Beast' that was Horus.
  • Also fitting would be Sanguinius, primarch of the Blood Angels, who, wounded, exhausted and having seen his own death in the future (yes, Sanguinius was able to divine the future to a certain degree), resisted Horus' promises of power, wealth, fame and (most importantly) life in favour of certain death to inflict a chink in Horus' armour.

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