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?
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! 😀