As a DM, I have stumbled into a conundrum or two. Some of the issues I have handled with aplomb, others I screwed up and had to re-do, and others well… life goes on, right?
      But in the most recent (surprise! off-week!) session of my Kingmaker campaign I had to bid adieu to a slew of NPCs. Really awesome ones with back-stories and loves and motivations and really nifty custom items and… WAH! The PCs weren’t great about RP’ing with these NPCs and so a lot of spiff-tacular stuff got missed. Info, lead-ins to other quests, blah blah.
      Okay – so this is just me whinging on and on about some NPCs I created.
      But they were SO COOL!
      Some of them. Anyway.
      The dilemma is that I have two NPCs who are currently involved in the PCs lives – one from way back in the beginning of Take Two (after I took over) and one from the most recent events – and both are super-awesome. I mean – Nina “The Naga” and Fenton Fāblüt – really, really fun. She’s an up-and-coming assassin out of a major pirate city who in the very near future will find out what happened to her co-commander and their band of bandits and then begin to plot vengeance, stalk the murderers, drown them in their own blood!
      And Fenton? He’s this mad owlbear-bodyguard-having sorceress bad-ass. He can fly around the battlefield “Charm Person-ing” all these poor bastards with his Spell Focus (Enchantment/Charm), Greater Spell Focus (Enchantment/Charm), his traits… Muahaha!
      But, as the ‘bad guys’ in this story, they will, in all likelyhood, die. They will die horribly with Minty’s teeth in their throats, or Gavriil’s scimitar slicing off limbs, or maybe Lexi’s holy bastard sword cleaving through their evil skulls! Both are, unmistakably, evil. Both deserve to die, really, for the things that they have done.
      The Naga is an assassin; she kills for money, she values no life but her own, she takes what she wants, she does what she wants, she is evil. A selfish, possibly redeemable, but ultimately wicked chick.
      Fenton is chaotic evil. He thrives on chaos. He is a wee bit sadistic and has very little moral/ethical objection to any act that pops into his mind. There’s a back story there which I may need to write about one of these days, but for now…
      …they gotta die.
      And its a bummer. I am not the type to pull a bunch of mulligans in which “magically” they get raised from the dead to stalk the party again. I mean, maybe if they have done something in particular to please a God… it would be okay. But some DMs have quite a nasty reputation for just randomly bringing back NPCs who have been vanquished simply because they like them… not because it makes sense in the narrative.
      *sigh*
      I am going to have to say good-bye to many more awesome NPCs, because I don’t know how to make craptacular ones. I wish my PCs had stopped to talk to (or investigate) La’Yaga and Yaga-Fi because they rocked. And they tried to kill Ree, and oh, the turmoil behind the Badman Bros. and the Serpenthelm Swarm… so much information to get out.
      *sigh*
      Good-bye, The Naga. Good-bye, Fenton. Good-bye, other fun characters. You will be missed.
      …by me.
      …because the PCs will just loot your corpses, your hide-outs/treasure chests, and move on without a second thought.
      Heroes my ass. *grumble*

Note: Image is “dices” by tijmen from SXC.hu