I know nobody cares about anyone else's D&D character in much the same way that nobody cares about anyone else's fantasy football team, but I just said goodbye to a character that I leveled from 1 all the way to 15. I started playing him 2 years ago, before I came out to myself.

I came to that session ready to play a goofy, naive Minotaur Paladin named L'il Billy. 40 mins in, he was drowned by a water elemental & died.

This was my first time playing with DM @ObsidianDice, who has since become one of my best friends, but at the time? I was like uhhhhhh

To be fair, they had explicitly set up the campaign as, like, a super dangerous throwback thing with death around every corner! So it was very much an in-bounds thing to kill my character. "Do you want to just jump right back in with someone new?" they said. And I did.

I created him in 3 minutes. Class? Ranger. Race? Dwarf. Name? Thorin. No, not the famous Thorin, the OTHER Thorin. The one you haven't heard of.

L'il Billy was naive, so Thorin was gruff and world-weary. His favorite enemy? Elementals. Because L'il Billy was just killed by one.

That was two years and fifteen levels ago. That 4-5 session campaign turned into the best RPG campaign I've ever played in, and it's still going. Thorin has been through so much and evolved in so many interesting ways.

Anyway, Thorin got a proper sendoff. He's now exploring the outer plains with an Arcadian Hollyphant, which, I mean, we should all be so lucky.

Now I'm playing a new character, an Aasimar Paladin who tries to spread goodness in the name of Llira, goddess of happiness and joy.

I know it's just D&D, but it feels like kind of the end of an era.

Thorin was the last character I created when I was trying to be someone else. And much like my old identity, he wasn't a bad guy. Everyone liked Thorin, including me! It was just...time to let him go.

Here's my favorite Thorin story:

Our party are the lords of a city on the edge of a wasteland, and after a big summer festival we got word that some of our citizens were turning up dead - with their brains removed. It was an urban murder mystery, Mindflayer style.

We spend a while investigating. Thorin, who is low-INT, high-WIS, instantly declares that a bunch of rich people he doesn't like are being mind-controlled and are behind the whole thing. He annoys the rest of the party with this theory during the entire investigation.

Making a long story short, Thorin's theory proves uncannily correct. The party doesn't quite take the proper precautions during the investigation, and they get ambushed. A big damn fight ensues. They barely win, and Thorin gets popped by an intellect devourer. He's done.

Only one thing MIGHT save him: a wish. One of the party members, an uptight Warforged, has a ring of 3 wishes with 1 left. He's been wearing dummy copies on all his fingers and toes because Thorin kept jokingly threatening to take the ring and wish for, like, tea, or a cat.

The wish was going to help save the world, but Gyro the Warforged decided to save his friend instead. He didn't even LIKE Thorin & they were always at odds but he did it anyway.

Thorin woke up surrounded by his beloved animals & thanked his friend for giving him another chance.

Thorin was different after that. He wasn't quite as glib, especially to Gyro, who he tried his hardest to respect. He ended up leading the charge to defeat all the mindflayers, and became something of a true hero after that - or at least the closest he could become.

Anyway, that's it. He was a goofy character and I loved him and I'm glad I got to retire him on my terms and I thought he deserved a thread. I'm also looking forward to not playing another male character in D&D for about a decade and a half.

Okay, just one more story. Our party was fighting a lich who was trying to terrorize us despite being trapped in an ice tower.

One of the things she did? Reanimate our old party member L'il Billy into an unholy evil visage of his former self - and we had to fight him!

And at one point the fight starts to turn against us. It looks bad.

That's when Thorin pulls a magical emerald out of his bag that I've been holding onto for AT LEAST 6 months. Throws it at the ground. Bam! Magic!

...and once again L'il Billy is killed by a Water Elemental.

Everybody forgot that I had a Water Elemental gem in my inventory. Everybody except me.

Anyway, Thorin loved improvised weapons, especially jawbones, so he grabbed L'il Billy's jawbone after that fight and stuffed it in his bag, where I held onto it for over a year.

Last week, my new character Zelva was introduced in mid-combat, weaponless, trying to fight an ooze monster that was eroding all of our gear.

Thorin sees that she doesn't have a way to fight back, and tosses her the jawbone.

Nobody at the table knew that Zelva was my new character yet, so it was just this little moment between me and the GM where I literally passed the baton from one of my characters to the next, and the baton in this case was quite literally the jawbone of my first character.