Heads blowing up in Tabletop Games.
- Deadlands: Hell on Earth and Lost Colony gives us sykers. Similarly to the examples above, their brain bomb special ability stuffs some waster's head so full of "psychic" power that it literally bursts. Hard. Hard enough to cause damage to anyone standing next to the poor sap. And sometimes, it even backfires. Yay!
- Hell On Earth also features the Combine (no, not that Combine), an Evil Empire whose soldiers each have a "loyalty chip" implanted at the base of their skull. It allows them to safely use Combine-issue weapons and vehicles, but if the chip determines that its owner could be about to reveal any Combine secrets, or if s/he defects from the Combine and is later discovered by a Combine officer who knows the correct passcode...well, they're not nicknamed "headbanger chips" because General Throckmorton is into heavy metal music.
- Dungeons & Dragons has several ways to make someone's head explode, the psionic powers intellect bomb and cranial deluge being the most marked examples. So can some lesser powers, such as mind thrust, which has been described as causing the victim's head to explode when you kill them with it. Then there's detonate, which makes someone explode and damages people around him; even if he survives, he takes so much damage his head apparently made a decent attempt at exploding. In addition to this, if a character for any reason obtains over three times their maximum hit point total (most likely as a result of too much time spent on a Positive Energy plane), they will explode, either "merely" their head or their entire body.
- For earlier versions, conjure water in the cranium. They get rid of it, though.
- The 5th edition spell Psychic Scream does this to killed enemies. Interestingly, the spell has no effect on enemies with an Intelligence of 2 or lower — a character Polymorphed into a low-intellect beast would escape damage, but a Druid using Wild Shape to morph into that same animal would not.
- In Eclipse Phase, this is a side effect of using the emergency backup farcaster. Since it's powered by antimatter.
- Just one of the many occupational hazards of being a mook for the Eaters of the Lotus for Feng Shui — if you do or say anything contrary to what your Evil Sorcerer master wants you to do or say, the magical ward that he put on you will make your head go kaboom. A very nice example of this is what happens to any Poison Thorns your characters interrogate (which can only be done through magical compulsion because of their fear of this) in the adventure "Baptism of Fire," which features an evil Lotus sorcerer as the main villain.
- "Freaks" in the 1980s action movie-inspired game The Hard Way can do this to people with their minds, Scanners-style.
- Older Than Radio: The second edition of the British card game Illustrated Proverbs
, circa 1885, has this trope on the first card for "They love too much who die for love." (Possibly also Ate His Gun.) - Pathfinder introduces a spell in Occult Adventures called Explode Head, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It also damages anyone standing nearby due to what is politely referred to as "debris".
- Shadowrun has "cranial bombs", explosive devices implanted in the human skull. Depending on size, they can do anything from just making the head explode to cleaning out a room.
- One Shadowrun novel featured an acidic cranial bomb that melted a spy's entire upper body, obscuring evidence of his identity while partially subverting this trope.
- The more specific offensive psychic powers of Warhammer 40,000 vary between this and Mind Rape.
- Ork Weirdboyz also generate head exploding hilarity when their powers go haywire. The exploding isn't limited to the Weirdboy, either, which is why Cunning Orks tend to give them a wide berth.
- Another 40K example featured a psychic war between two Space Marine Librarians. Guess how it ended.
- The Imperial Guard's penal legions use explosive collars to enforce discipline among their members.
- "Mad Dok" Grotsnik did this to a few nobz that had come to him for a "Ghazgkhull Special" (basically a metal skull filled with gubbins that made Ghazgkhull into a genius); rather than the increased intelligence he promised, Grotsnik stashed away a plethora of explosives in the other orks' skulls, which he could explode at his leisure. After he Came Back Wrong following an assassination attempt by the angry nobz, Grotsnik decided to celebrate by detonating all the explosives he had left.
