Tabletop Tales: The Moral Quandry with Horrible Death Powers

So there I am, working on a Sunday night a few weeks ago, excited that it's Shadowrun night. Sunday night is the night when I get to play one of my favorite weekly tabletop games: Shadowrun (if you don't know what it is, give it a look! It's worth it!).

So, I soon find out that the game was canceled

But, there's light at the end of this already disappointing tunnel. One of the other players, Mike, says he wants to run a mini-game of another genre with me, my best buddy Wes, and other player/GM Pete. Sure! Why the hell not?

So, Wes and I head over to Pete's house and the four of us begin our new game. Mike asks us each to pick a number between 1 and 9 to determine which powers we'll receive upon starting the game. I pick 9 (in situations like these, I always go for the highest number), Wes picks 5 (Wes, in contrast, picks the middle number), and Pete picks 7 (Pete picks randomly. Strange).

To make a long story short (too late), we receive the powers of a Roman/Greek god of some sort, picked by the planets in the solar system (the 1-9 thing). I, if you haven't figured it out already, received the powers of Pluto/Hades, Lord of the Underworld.

Oh, this oughta be fun.

Wes received the powers of Zeus and Pete the powers of Janus (since the number he picked correlated to Saturn which correlated to a Titan which Mike was NOT having in his game).

Quickly, we realized that Mike handicapped us in various different manners to make the game more challenging for us. Wes, being the embodiment of Zeus, quickly found out that a certain level of confidence was needed to use his powers. Wes, in reality, being the embodiment of self-esteem issues, was rapidly reduced to merely throwing around lightning bolts when he could be doing so much more. Pete, having played in and run many games with Mike in the past, found that his handicap was much more difficult mental components needed to make his powers work.

And me?

My handicap was the other two, Pete and Wes.

What better way to handicap a person with horrible death powers than to give him two moral anchors to prevent him from doing terrible, unspeakable things to pretty much every NPC they run across.

NPC - "Greetings! Welcome to our village! We shall accommodate you heroes, free of charge!"
Me - *kills him*
Pete and Wes - "Why did you do that!?"
Me - "I didn't like the look of his beard. Seemed suspicious."
Pete  - "Well, have better restraint next time."
Me - *rips out his soul and puts it in my trusty soul bag*
Wes - "Why did you do THAT?!"
Me - "Well, we can't have his soul running around telling people we murdered him!"
Me - *raises his corpse as my zombie minion*
Pete - "You gotta be kidding me..."

I mean, seriously, how do you have any moral standing when you're LITERALLY the harbinger of death?? The very nature of the power demands that I reap souls and kill people! Right? RIGHT?!

Well, suffice it to say, I've done my best to murder as few innocent bystanders as possible while attempting to get a handle on these powers. The funny thing is, our characters are literally ourselves that randomly received these powers one regular night in the real world. That was the whole premise.

But wait! You might be asking yourself "Doesn't that mean the GM, himself, is in the game and therefore can metagame by giving the players advice?" Well, you'd normally be right in that assumption if Mike didn't kill himself off at the beginning.

But wait...again! You NOW might be asking yourself "Don't you have the powers of Hades? Doesn't that mean you can bring your dead GM character back to life as your minion?" Why, yes. Yes, I can. And I did just that.

I summoned Mike's spirit from the great beyond (actually ripping him from heaven...he was mildly irriated), and drug him around with me for a good majority of the game as my undead "advisor". To put it in simpler terms: I brought the GM into it as a cheat so I could figure out my powers faster. Yeah...I'm a bastard.

Well, the old saying "what goes around, comes around" took its toll on me. I took spirit Mike to my underworld kingdom to do some stuff, only to find that several thrones belonging to several lesser deities that fell under my rule were in my throne room, several of which being empty. This was what happened:

Me - *faffing about*
In-game Mike - "Hey, can I sit down over here?"
Me - *not paying attention* "Sure, go ahead."
In-game Mike - *sits down in an unoccupied throne* "BEHOLD, SPIRITS OF THE UNDERWORLD! YOUR MASTER HAS DEEMED ME WORTHY TO SIT HERE AND HOLD THE TITLE THAT COMES WITH THIS POSITION! I ACCEPT THE OFFER!"
Me - *jaw drop*
In-game Mike - *now with the powers of a god* "Yeah...that's for dragging me around as your sidekick. Dick."

So, let it never be said that the GM never gets his revenge.