I’m planning a campaign loosely where players have to fight enemies backed by a larger, scarier empire that frequently sends out their agents to try to assassinate them while they try to setup a new kingdom post-revolution (think the beginning of Game of Thrones where players are on the Small Council, but they’re also sort of Danaerys trying to fend off the spies and assassins of the enemy kingdom’s Varys).
I want there to be a lot of cloak and dagger stuff. The players will probably have to protect themselves and fellow members of the court, the monarch (whether it’s a player or NPC), allied diplomats, and such from assassins while also rooting out spies. Those resulting battles, along with adventures that I’ll incorporate with diplomatic missions abroad, are what will make it DnD.
But it occurred to me as I was planning the worldbuilding for this campaign that a lot of the danger of assassinations will be lost if they can be undone by resurrection magic. Then I started wondering how kings, organization leaders, criminal syndicate bosses, basically anyone important ever dies in any high fantasy DnD world. For players I can restrict their access to diamonds or whatever, but for NPC’s who are rich and powerful, not sure if that makes much sense. Besides, it’s okay of players have access to the magic, but I want NPCs to be threatened by it, because it adds drama and stakes to the story I’m planning. But if players have access to it, then basically no NPC around them is in danger either, and I lose a lot of the tension I was counting on.
So looking for advice on how you would solve this. Tl;dr: How would anyone important or rich die in your fantasy world from stuff that are not old age? (assuming you want a fantasy world like I do where death is a dangerous possibility)
Restrict the resurrection spells? Restrict diamonds even more so they’re rare even for kings? Manipulate the religion or cosmology of your world somehow? Do something with the resurrection spells themselves, like like Matthew Mercer’s optional rules? Something else?
I think deities are an option. Perhaps a non-mortal being won’t permit the healing/resurrection of a monarch for one arbitrary reason or another. It could be that the assassin is ordained by said deity.
Or maybe something that happened to the person at their death or after death made the one who died want to stay dead? The soul’s willingness to return to the body is a key requirement you can use for lore around resurrection.
Just a couple of thoughts.
I definitely like the idea of doing something with the gods in this way. Like maybe they like keeping such important people in the afterlife and are less prone to returning them unless there’s a good reason for it (like the players on a journey to the underworld or something). Or they forbid resurrecting people for balance of the world reasons.
It could also just be regular protocol for assassin’s to burn bodies. There could even be certain poisons that disintegrate the body as part of their effects.
Some possibilities:
Resurrection could age the person involved so that they would die sooner (say 10 years for humans and scaled to the lifespan of other races) from natural causes, multiple Resurrections could lead to a person that dies again only days after being raised.
Resurrection could have a chance to fail (say 12.5%), making the person forever dead and with each subsequent resurrection doubling the chance of failure.
Resurrection works but is not perfect and the subject is weakened by it. Eg: the person loses ability scores (say -2 con and one other ability score at random).
Resurrection works but the costs increase dramatically each time. 2nd is 10 times more expensive, 3rd is 100 etc.
Or resurrection works as normal but the body must be whole. All you need to do to make an assassination stick is to behead the person and take the head with you or burn the body.
Hell, just sprinkle in some pissant gods of death/life/order/whatever with intrinsic notions of how Things Are Done Around Here and alluvusudden, those back to back resurrections’ll earn you a visit from middle-upper management.
I could imagine gods that are strict and by the book, tired of all the paperwork they’re getting from clerics below for special exemptions just because he’s, what, a king or something?
You should check out Replacement God by Xander Cannon 🤘🏼
These are all great stuff. Love it!
The last one makes me think of adding a poison to the world that has the secondary effect of disintegrating the body. It would be dramatic to have someone drink something at a fancy dinner, then choke and die, and then suddenly melt, or burst into flames.
Just random suggestions:
Normally that’s exactly how it works. But then, someone important gets killed, and nothing can be done to resurrect them. No spells, no deity intervention. They’re just gone and their corpse is there.
Kinda weird, but lots of stuff happens, things are busy. Then a month later it happens again. And the guy it happened to is important (captain of the city guard / head of the museum? / head of the wizard school). It’s enough that it’s genuinely weird and people get concerned.
The third time, they intercept the assassin. Depending on how right the party plays their cards, maybe they’re able to capture and interrogate the person, or there’s a particularly weird magical artifact.
The fourth time it’s one of the party that’s being targeted. Maybe have for-real death with no resurrection as the consequence at hand to give the adventure stakes as things ramp up.
Etc etc, you can see where it’s going. The “explanation” could be a few different things, but I actually wouldn’t make it clear to the party right away. Maybe the people are being kidnapped, and perfect fake-corpses through some magical means are left behind. Maybe they’re on another plane. Maybe it’s just some permadeath spell that someone researched in the fantasy-Manhattan-project of the empire your party’s going up against, and part of the climax is them destroying the spell because some things are better left unknown.
Etc etc. Something along those lines is how I would handle it and then just see how it plays out. Hopefully this is useful.
This is really useful! Great stuff. Very dramatic, tense, mysterious, which is perfect for the atmosphere I’m going for. I’d say I need to take notes but I can always refer back to this post luckily lol.
Thanks! One caveat: I realized that if you try to have “destroying the spell” as the climax, 99.9% of DND parties will keep the spell so they can use it on their enemies. Normally I kind of like having the party involved in pivotal events, and penciling in my expected reaction and improv-ing a path forward if they don’t do what I expected, but in this case I’m just saying I’d expect them to treat the spell as treasure. IDK, maybe that’s fine; death is functionally permanent for most NPCs anyway, so it wouldn’t be some bad game-balance-tilting thing for them to have. But maybe if you want to go that route, it’d be better for the spell to be destroyed in the conflagration of the stronghold or destroyed by an NPC… in any case, you can figure it out.
Glad you liked the idea! 😀
You think Henchmen #4 is getting the royal treatment after he died falling down the stairs cause his helmet was on backwards? Fuhgetaboutit. You want to take a shot at the king? You’d better not miss (and make it so he can’t get back up). They shouldn’t worry about cutting through the rabble as they wouldn’t warrant such special treatment. A good assassination plot would include measures to ensure the target stays dead. Even True Resurrection requires the soul to be free and willing. Soul can’t be free if it was put in a soul cage. Perhaps they made a deal with the devil at some point with their soul on the line.
I would personally go with a magical mcguffin. My first thoughts would be a magic dagger. Maybe a small “ceremonial” pendant type. Discovering it, could be a useful plot device, both in that it exists (and so a marker for high level assassins) and how it works.
As for how it works, as an idea, when stabbed into a dead body, it does something nasty/scary to the body. E.g. it contains a drop of vampire blood, and a tiny vial of holy water. The body is raised as a vampire, and then immediately killed by the holy water. This breaks the link needed for resurrection. It could also contain a single drop of the essence of a god of death. Resurrection simply won’t work on anyone “infected”. This could be particularly scary if an assassin uses his dying act to stab a PC in the leg. He’s not dead, but now can never be resurrected.
There’s a lot of mileage in investigating the source of the mcguffins. Do they have the body of a dead god? Are they holding a vampire lord captive (or led by one)? Is it a mercenary cult, or a core political power?
