D&D 5E How do royalty die in D&D?

[Jester David]

I'm thinking of starting a campaign around a succession crisis. Basically, the king and queen die and the young heir is challenged by an uncle for the throne. I'm having trouble coming up with ways to kill off the king and queen who have access to mid-level clerics. I was hoping some of you would have good ideas .

Here are possibilities I've come up with so far:

• old age (doesn't really work since I want the heir to be young)
• battle
• sacrifices in a magic ritual to save the kingdom
• assassination
• accident while traveling
• disease resistant to magical treatment

Other options:
Bodies missing
Bodies destroyed (fire maybe. Perhaps mixed with a dozen courtiers)
The uncle controls the church
Resurrected elsewhere in secret and kept imprisoned
Laws against resurrection, established by a wise king
Trapped souls

 

[Saeviomagy]

Reincarnate them. Odds are noone will accept that they are the king/queen any more.

Convince them that their death is essential for some reason so they are unwilling to be resurrected.

Convince the local priesthoods that they were evil, so they will be unwilling to perform the res.

Polymorph them into an object and then cast nystul's on them.

 

[steeldragons]

Hiya.

Not sure if 5e DMG will have something about this, but in 1e, there were two major factors. First, if you die of natural causes, you can not be brought back to life. Second, upon casting of the spell the character needs to make a Resurrection Survival roll (percent based; typically around the 60 to 70 percent mark for average CON). Then again, there was also the fact that if the soul did not want to come back, it did not have too...they could stay dead.

Paul L. Ming

5e does stipulate the spell won't work on someone who died of "old age", can't be more than a century old, can't be undead, + soul must be "free and willing".

The willing is obvious. The free, however...that has possibilities.

I take that to mean that if you are evil/have been sent to the lower planes, where your soul is basically the prisoner or plaything of demons/devils/evil gods, you can't be resurrected. Interesting.

5e does give a temporary penalty of -4 to all attack, saves and ability checks, reduced by 1 after each long rest. Thus, after 4 long rests, you have 0 penalty/operate as normal.

Also, for the caster, if the resurrected person has been dead for more than a year, you can not cast anything and have disadvantage on all attack rolls, saves and ability checks, until the caster completes a long rest. ...So sooner is better, I guess they're thinking.

 

[Remathilis]

5e does stipulate the spell won't work on someone who died of "old age", can't be more than a century old, can't be undead, + soul must be "free and willing".

Well there ya go!

Sell his body to a necromancer. Can't be king while he's a zombie!

 

[BigVanVader]

Yeah he could. You could totally have a king that's a zombie, depending on the laws of that land.

 

[Zelc]

That's a lot of responses . Unfortunately I wasn't so clear: I don't care that they stay dead (I can find plenty of excuses for that), but getting them dead in the first place with a young-ish heir is the problem (so not dying of old age). Still a lot of good discussion though, and there are lots of interesting ideas .

The backstory is by no means set in stone. The more "mundane" the death, the easier it is to work with. At this point, I'm leaning towards assassination since it's not too hard to add in some stirrings of rebellion in the country prior to the succession crisis.

 

[pepticburrito]

I'm having trouble coming up with ways to kill off the king and queen who have access to mid-level clerics

A hero, a.k.a mid leveled Cleric, has far more important things to do than hang out with kings and queens. Seriously, once you're looking at a guy who can cast 5th level spells, you're talking about the kind of guy that songs are being sung in his name. He's got grounds to hallow, demons to fend off, a vampire to take care of, or a dragon to kill. He has no time for Kings or Queens. He doesn't hang out in their court and he's not on their pay roll.

You overestimate the number of people that are supposed to reach that kind of power. Normally, there's only one (maybe two) parties at level 15+ in any given world. There's only a handful of parties on the planet at level 10 and some of those don't even have clerics.

Queen and Kings don't have access to those kinds of people unless they earned their friendship. Even then, they realize that a guy with that kind of power has better things to do than hang out with them all day. They have a higher calling.

5e isn't the magic extravaganza that 3.5/Pathfinder/4e was. Raise Dead and Resurrection is not available for sale in every temple. In fact, there should about about 5 or so people on the planet that can cast those spells. If you don't want to die, join a party with a Cleric and go adventuring. Make sure he/she always has access to diamonds and don't let get in a place that could kill them.

 

[Blackwarder]

You should read Erin Evans new book, it deals exactly with this.

And the best way to kill a king and queen and trigger a succession crisis is by something unnatural, an unholy blast that leave a 30 feet radius crater in the middle of the capital with nothing in it, no bodies, no rubble nothing and the riyal magicians and clerics can't divine what happened.

So you have several options beside the conflict between the hair and the uncle, like what if the king is alive somewhere? who killed the king? was it the hair? was it the uncle? was it a third arty? was it a first step in an elaborate attack on the kingdom? what would happen if in the middle of the crisis someone invade? are the involved with the assassination? the possibilities are endless!

Warder

 

[delericho]

That's a lot of responses . Unfortunately I wasn't so clear: I don't care that they stay dead (I can find plenty of excuses for that), but getting them dead in the first place with a young-ish heir is the problem (so not dying of old age).

That's not an absolute bar - it's not entirely unknown for a very old man to have a very young wife.

Beyond that, a king can wind up dead for pretty much any of the same reasons anyone else might die - he could die in battle, he could be assassinated, he might suffer a disease and die at the hands of his doctors, he could be thrown by his horse. Heck, if you want you could leave it completely unexplained - his attendants arrived to dress him one morning and found him dead in his bed.

 

[Blackwarder]

A hero, a.k.a mid leveled Cleric, has far more important things to do than hang out with kings and queens. Seriously, once you're looking at a guy who can cast 5th level spells, you're talking about the kind of guy that songs are being sung in his name. He's got grounds to hallow, demons to fend off, a vampire to take care of, or a dragon to kill. He has no time for Kings or Queens. He doesn't hang out in their court and he's not on their pay roll.

You overestimate the number of people that are supposed to reach that kind of power. Normally, there's only one (maybe two) parties at level 15+ in any given world. There's only a handful of parties on the planet at level 10 and some of those don't even have clerics.

Queen and Kings don't have access to those kinds of people unless they earned their friendship. Even then, they realize that a guy with that kind of power has better things to do than hang out with them all day. They have a higher calling.

5e isn't the magic extravaganza that 3.5/Pathfinder/4e was. Raise Dead and Resurrection is not available for sale in every temple. In fact, there should about about 5 or so people on the planet that can cast those spells. If you don't want to die, join a party with a Cleric and go adventuring. Make sure he/she always has access to diamonds and don't let get in a place that could kill them.

I respectfully disagree, it more depends in the setting than on the edition IMO, 5e can support a high magic world and I'd imagine that any sort of organized religion will have a vested interest in the monarchy and will be willing to use its resources to raise the king back from the dead if it fits the religion agenda.

You can take Fearun as an example, its the "official" 5e setting and its the definition of high magic setting, just look at Cormyr with its War Wizards and big temples or the healers in the last R.A.Salvatore books.

Killing a big shot in a D&D world is different than killing someone in our world, you need to be very through in order to prevent any chance of resurrection.

Warder