Disproportionate Retribution/Tabletop Games

• In the Dungeons and Dragons Ravenloft setting, the gothic Powers That Be in control of the place love answering pleas for vengeance - but freely disregard the scale of the supposed wrong. A lot of the campaigns revolve around some greedy or prideful person successfully calling down a curse of undeath or torment on someone for an imagined slight or trivial grievance.
  • Plenty of darklords are heavily into this trope as well, such as Hazlik, who's plotting cross-planar genocide against his own ethnic group because a few of them once forcibly tattooed his head and called him nasty names.
• The Forgotten Realms campaign setting has that, combined with a Self-Inflicted Hell. Did you worship an evil god because it was the culturally accepted thing to do where you came from? Then you're going to that God's hell, even if you never really did anything evil or you never even knew of a good god you could worship. And it won't be pleasant ('cause none of the evil god have pleasant afterlives for their followers, making one wonder how they get followers at all. Worship me! And win eternal torment). Were you an atheist? Then once you die you get to spend a LONG time having your soul slowly destroyed, becoming part of a wall, gradually losing your memories and personality till there's nothing left.
  • This is actually explained in most settings: The denizens of the evil planes really don't mind being turned into demons. They get to torture and kill people for fun and have the chance for advancement. Sure, being larvae or dretch or mane or lemure isn't much fun, but on the other hand you get to be immortal and (eventually) quite powerful. "Here's the chant: Tanar'ri like bein' tanar'ri: Raw indomitable power's what's bein' a tanar'ri's really about."
    • The more reasonable way to put it is that they may think they want it. It's hard to imagine it would be a truly enjoyable existence. A section on "roleplaying a demon" in one sourcebook has this to say:

Have you ever been really angry? So angry you just wanted to destroy every stick of furniture in the house? Imagine having felt that way for many, many centuries, and that you have spent those centuries surrounded by creatures who not only feel the same way and glorify feeling that way, but who are sufficiently powerful enough to inflict their rage on you. Daily. In the most excruciating ways possible.

• • Any soul heading to its deity's plane ends up losing its memories and personalities, eventually becoming part of that plane. The wall is just absolutely bland: no reward, no torment, no one to talk to, just absolute boredom.
  • Well... the novel Prince of Lies, a significant portion of which took place in Cyric's (God of murder, madness, etc.) afterlife, indicated that while the hell still isn't 'pleasant', it's at least not 'eternal torment' bad. For example; Cyric's loyal worshippers in life got to be monstrous demons who tortured other souls in death! That's... that's good?
    • If you're Always Chaotic Evil, yes. Yes, it is.
  • As Eight Bit Theater puts it, "This is hell. We're big on irony here."
  • The Drow goddess, Kiaransalee, is the Goddess of Disproportionate Vengeance
  • The Demon prince Graz'zt is probably the least likely demon lord to rip you apart just for existing, even opening his layers of the abyss for trade. Mention that he actually fell in love with Iggwilv, that Malcanthet turned him down, or call his domain "The Little Hells", and he will feed you to the predatory plants in his gardens.
  • One sample adventure "For Hate's sake" in the Heroes of Horror sourcebook is made of this trope. Growing up, Samuel (one of the primary villains of the adventure) was that guy who always held a grudge. Eventually he became a priest of the god of this trope himself. He then began taking revenge on all his childhood grudges (granted it's implied that MOST of these didn't involve murder). He eventually becomes complacent...so his god pulls a Poisonous Friend and summons a ghost to take revenge for him, and this time it ALWAYS involve murder. Samuel goes mad with guilt and ends up pleading with the ghost to stop, only to be (depending on their actions) killed by the PC's, who the game master leads to believe he is responsible (which given that his god is also playing this trope for Samuel becoming complacent, he is, in a way).
• The Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40000 uses this for everything. A few examples:
  • The Steel Cobras Space Marine chapter worshipped the Emperor as an animal totem. The penalty for following the Imperial state religion in the wrong way? They were duly excommunicated, and any Imperial force to see a Steel Cobra is permitted, nay required, to shoot on sight and leave asking questions to the Inquisition.
    • Funnily enough, this goes to show the double standard (or perhaps GW's rather loose concern over what is and isn't canon). Most worlds are left alone if they have adopted a religion that doesn't venerate a Chaos or Xeno deity and puts a figure that can be interpreted as the Emperor at the top.
    • To be fair, there's a difference between some back-world yokel worshipping the Emperor the wrong way and the Space Marines, who are pretty much treated as angels, doing it. Sets a bad example.
      • It would, except it's canon that every single Marine chapter worships the Emperor in a way not sanctioned by the Ecclesiarchy, and some are much weirder than the Steel Cobras without being censured.
  • The Carcharodons chapter of Space Marines are in love with this. After gaining control of the enemy's holdings (the Tranquility system) at the end of the Badab War, they exterminated every single person who was not of recruitable age, and forced the rest to fight to the death to determine which of the tiny percentage of survivors would get to join their chapter. After that, they stripped the system of all useful resources and vanished.
  • The Black Templars Space Marines, upon learning that a few people on a planet had purchased alien equipment from traders, proceeded to massacre a significant chunk of the population. Even the Imperium usually limits the punishment for this to jail time.
  • Subverted with Exterminatus. You'd think blasting the planet into an unusable wasteland is a bit much, but it's only supposed to be used if Chaos or Tyranid forces have overwhelmed a planet to a point where it isn't worth taking it back (Chaos corrupts everything and the Nids eat everything and thus can lose billions and still have a net gain, so blowing up the surface of the planet will keep them from consuming anything usable) and yes, even the Imperium has it limits for throwing men into the meat grinder. Though given how utterly dystopian the setting is, someone, somewhere no doubt has used it for less than proper or sane reasons.
    • There is, in that a planet got exterminated because the taxes payed didn't round up and thus the Inquisition assumed they had started worshipping Chaos. Oooops...
  • Warhammer 40000's Imperial Guard Commissars are known particularly for their application of BLAM (fatal gunshot) in dealing with insubordination or heresy among hapless troops.
    • The Imperium has also been known to send entire regiments with a mandate to burn the planet if strictly necessary, because someone bought a Tau-made crop harvester.
      • Of course that's partially justified since if that crop harvester had been bought from certain other illegal sources it would cause anyone who took a bite of the crops to turn to Chaos, mutate, or get stricken with a particularly virulent Nurgle disease. If someone gets away with purchasing from the Tau they'll keep buying from other xenos until they get a Chaos artifact in a shipment.
      • See the above about flip-flopping. The Imperium has also been known to tolerate - or at least turn a blind eye to - limited trading with the Tau Empire provided it's kept low-key. So...DependingOnTheWriter.
• Player Characters in Nobilis are bound by the Sevenfold Precept. Harming innocents is against the law, but if anyone harms you, you are allowed to repay it sevenfold. And (at least in Second Edition), Lord Entropy includes under the definition of "harm" accepting insults from a mortal, or simply accepting an order from one. Because it diminishes a Noble's miraculous nature.
• A DM in an especially pissy mood can sometimes do this. Say something not nice about the DM's girlfriend? OOP! Your character just burst into flames!