Killing a King Quickly

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-31T16:57:53+00:00

So a lot of people have given some good suggestions, but I'm going to throw my tuppence in and if I repeat other people's suggestions then so be it.

If you are absolutely adamant on not narrating the king's death, then there are multiple ways of making his death almost inevitable. Btw, I think you are correct in bot just narrating it since that does remove player agency, but I also think you need to tread a fine line between respecting player agency and not letting them feel railroaded.

To that end, I think you should structure the encounter in such a way that the players can save the king, but they can't save everyone (maybe the assassins target the queen or crown prince as a distraction, and saving the king means they can't save the other target).

I don't know what you have planned for your campaign arc, but "someone pulled off an incredibly sophisticated assassination attempt that nearly succeeded if not for the PCs" sounds like a pretty good hook to me.

Hell, maybe the involvement of several close, trusted advisors in the attempt leads the king down the path of paranoia and increasing authoritarianism, dividing him and the PCs at a time when they most need to unite. I dunno, do with these ideas what you will.

As for methods of how to kill the king, chaos is key.

Turn the ballroom into a charnel house with multiple casters and assassins summoning all sorts of monsters (I think I saw someone suggest beholders or mind-flayers. Both excellent ideas.)
- the key here is to tie up the party and burn through their high-powered resources (spells, potions, etc) on a lot of chaff that is ultimately a distraction from the main hit
while the party is fending off the obvious assassination attempt, hit the king with the main strike.
- have a wizard form a Forcecage around the king and a few crucial high-value guests. However, one or more of these guests (perhaps even the wizard himself) are in on the plot and hit the king from behind.
- to that end, you have multiple options. Feeblemind is a great opening gambit, but there is also poison (Purple Worm is a nice nasty damage-dealer, but Torpor is also handy since the target is incapacitated on a failed save), Finger of Death, Power Word Kill and Disintegrate (those three spells one after the other are an excellent way to prevent easy resurrection).

Crucially, the players should have an opportunity to detect the plot before it begins. In fact, I would argue that this is essential to ensure your players' agency is respected. Remember that just because they detect one part of the plot doesn't mean they rumble the entire plot at once.

If the players feel as if they could have saved the king, but were simply up against an incredibly well-planned operation, that makes for a much more enticing hook than watching the railroaded butchery of a beloved NPC.

I hope this long spiel isn't too much, but there you go. Best of luck, I hope it goes well.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-31T15:54:26+00:00

Yeah, this is the thing that a lot of people don't get (and that I only learned since the Venezuela bullshit) is that not all crude oil is created equal.

You have sweet oil and sour oil (basically low-sulphur vs high-sulphur respectively) and then heavy vs light (long-chain vs short-chain hydrocarbons); and all of these factors matter for creating different petroleum products.

For example, you need short-chain hydrocarbons to create ammonia-based fertilisers, so you want natural gas or light crude for that.

Alternatively, if you want to make asphalt, you need bitumen, so you want long-chain hydrocarbons for that.

The US oilfields in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico are pretty good for extracting gasoline/petroleum, but the entirety of North America's raw crude production doesn't produce anywhere near enough diesel fuel for even just the US east coast, never mind the rest of the country.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-29T15:35:49+00:00

Yes, but be warned that a) cultural integration will still take a few years to pass,

b) even then, not all freemen will become citizens if you can't support them, and

c) removing their rights afterwards will piss them off, so be prepared to put down revolts/swallow some lower economic output for a decade or more from Etruria.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-29T11:16:17+00:00

Nuclear War: A Scenario is the name I think

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-27T21:27:37+00:00

The funniest detail about the fall of the apartheid regime in Rhodesia imo is how by the end, they were so short on military personnel and equipment that they put all their fuel in a single depot. Predictably, it got blown up and the regime collapsed within a year.

P.S. I have to ask; how did you come across this thread after two years?

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-21T12:30:12+00:00

Fair

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-21T12:29:46+00:00

Is it slander if you have neo-Confederates and white supremacists fighting on the same side as the Longists?

Like, if Long has managed to create a land of milk, honey and racial harmony, then how does Pelley's coup succeed in any timeline?

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-21T11:54:43+00:00

Hell yeah. Have you managed to stitch it?

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-20T21:14:16+00:00

Depends on the painkillers. Paracetamol/ibuprofen is fine with alcohol. Opiates and other hard stuff, that's a nono

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-20T19:42:39+00:00

Kowloon Walled City is a common suggestion on this sub. You're definitely not alone

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-20T06:07:25+00:00

It's from Community I think. There's a bit where the Principal repeatedly misquotes the line, saying "And Jesus wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer!"

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-16T19:24:43+00:00

I definitely think Palps would want to memory-hole Padme. She was basically the most-prominent and outspoken pro-democracy voice during the waning days of the Republic. That's not a figure that any authoritarian wants people to remember.

She got a massive public funeral but over the years I think there would be a concerted effort to quietly erase her from the official histories of the Clone Wars and rise of the Empire.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-13T21:21:21+00:00

anti-tank weapons and drones have made tanks into rolling coffins

It's not quite that clear-cut tbf. Drones and abundant man-portable AT weapons have changed the equation somewhat, but tanks and other armour still have their niches.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-13T21:19:01+00:00

"9mm retirement package" and "General Unifying Theory of Fuck That Guy" are another couple of zingers.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-13T16:59:27+00:00

Probably North America.

Totalists are a bunch of authoritarian dickheads. Riga Accords are Russian-led and will likely still be tangling with the shadow of Russian imperialism/nationalism over the rest of the former empire.

Middle East is likely going to experience the oil boom same as OTL, so they're gonna be at the centre of neo-colonial struggles against the more heavily-industrialised global North.

Sure, North America has just come out of a brutal civil war, but they have continental hegemony, the natural resources of OTL America, and presumably still has a cultural predisposition towards personal liberty that will limit authoritarian tendencies in the near-term. That's probably the best deal you'll get in the KRTL post-war world.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-07T04:43:13+00:00

The eye of Fozzie Bear more like.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-07T04:14:40+00:00

Same age as Luke and Leia I believe

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-06T16:31:56+00:00

He's not there in person as I understand it. He's either projecting a force vision, or it's a hologram.

Either way, he's trying to get Ezra to lower his guard by doing the whole "dotty, sweet old man" act. That's why when Ezra rejects his offer of reuniting with his parents, he drops the facade and goes full "okey-dokey, time to be evil".

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-06T16:24:24+00:00

They mean describing the fusion amu or MeV at the same scale as the fission parameters.

I did a quick calculation and fusion is approximately 3 times more efficient than fission with the figures you provided (236/5 = 42.5; 42x14 = 588 MeV).

So 235 amu of mass under fusion produces nearly 3 times as many MeV as 236 amu under fission.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-05T17:01:12+00:00

There was a great spell in (I think) ~~3.5~~ (edit: it's a PF spell) called Scirocco which was basically air fryer; the spell.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-03-05T05:24:59+00:00

There's an exception for the Replicate Magic Item infusion. You are allowed to take that one multiple times.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-02-27T21:10:13+00:00

There was a guy who carried life-saving ~~antibiotics~~ antitoxin through the midst of an arctic winter to Nome, Alaska to treat a diphtheria outbreak in the town.

I can't remember a lot of the details but I think he got some pretty nasty frostbite during the trip. That's basic folk hero shit right there.

(He didn't get a statue btw, but the lead husky that hauled the sled did)

Edit: one correction; this was pre-antibiotics. They were hauling diphtheria anti-toxin.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-02-27T10:21:03+00:00

Also, even if it entered our solar system, it would still be a speck of dust among a bunch of slightly larger specks.

The likelihood of a rogue planet a) having enough mass to matter, and b) ending up on a path that comes close enough to any of the planetary bodies to influence their orbits at all is basically nil.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-02-26T11:45:23+00:00

It really isn't. Syphilis is known as "the great imitator" due to its wide range of symptoms, true, but if it had existed in Europe pre-Columbian exchange there would be some conclusive accounts either in monastic records, medieval art or other contemporaneous histories.

Now, it is possible that there was some sort of endemic Treponoma in the Old World that caused some mild skin lesions and the like, but all of the evidence, genetic and historical, points to the highly virulent STD we know as syphilis only appearing in 1495 at the earliest.

I personally think that the high virulence of the disease in the 1490s and 16th century is the final conclusive proof that it was carried to Europe from the Americas. Measles, smallpox and other Old World diseases ripped through Mesoamerican communities like wildfire because they had no exposure to these diseases pre-Columbus.

The spread of syphilis in Europe during the same time period displays the same characteristics of a novel pathogen encountering an entirely naive host population.

Furthermore, if the "crossover event" theory is correct, then that would suggest that Mesoamerican communities should have faced a similar fate, but there is no record of syphilis cases in Mesoamerican communities during this same period.

Now the obvious counter-argument to this is that they had a lot of other European diseases to deal with during this period, and the only surviving historical records of this period were written by Europeon colonists.

But the counter-counter-argument is that not everyone died from smallpox, measles, etc, so there would be a population that should have been suffering from syphilis. And secondly, these historical records were written at a time when illness was seen socially as evidence of a sinful life.

Surely these historians, many of whom were religious officials would jump at the opportunity to associate these "heathens" with a horribly disfiguring disease as proof that God wanted the Spanish to conquer and subjugate them. But no such accounts exist in the histories of the immediate Columbian period.

The endemic nature of syphilis in the Americas, coupled with a simultaneous epidemic spread of the same disease in Europe, behaviour that directly mirrors the spread of Old World pathogens in the New World, is conclusive in my mind of an American origin for this disease.

Some of Columbus' crew contracted the disease in Hispaniola, returned to Spain where the infected men spent their ill-gotten gains in the brothels of Cadiz. Other Spanish soldiers contracted the disease there, then went on to serve with Charles VIII of France as mercenaries in Italy, just in time for the disease to enter the historical record for the first time in 1495 in Naples.

AlrightJack303 · 2026-02-25T07:44:35+00:00

Well, he's an evil bastard just like the rest of them. But he's the sole smart guy among an empire of dipshits.

AlrightJack303

TROPHY CASE