What burden is a character willing to carry until the end?

Takes me back to something my character was burdened with, but it was nothing but his own fault. Wigjack was the name of my character, nothing but a simple farm boy to begin with. I remember we used Four Against Darkness, a solo RPG that also had some quite decent rules for randomly constructing dungeons from dice rolls; our GM used this to create a crypt near our village. Well, after vanquishing the skellybones and others, we inadvertently awakened a great evil and headed off to the big city to see what we could put right. The system itself was Dungeons and Dragons 5e, but a homebrew within the Eberron setting.

Here it was that Wigjack was offered an artefact of wondrous magic (and great evil, though the GM neglected to mention this). Wigjack was entranced and performed the various surgeries and painful invocations to have the above artefact attached.

Thus followed Wigjack being tempted by acts of atrocity every time he invoked the magical item. This ultimately ended in his demise and me having to drop out of the campaign - nothing to do with the game, the GM or players, but real life meant I had to cut back on RPGing.

I heard later that Wigjack had become an undead king and the main antagonist of the party, eventually slain in battle by one of his ex-comrades. Just goes to show, some burdens can have happy endings, depending on how you look at it.

Want to take part in RPGaDay 2026? Then check out this blog entry from Runeslinger.

#RPGaDAY2026 #RPGaDAY #TTRPG