I have long desired to make and/or have, along with the random reign-length table and the random regnal nickname tables: a random cause of death table.
The idea was to take whatever statistics we can assemble from whatever scraps of historical record we have for pre-modern causes of death, tweak them for a D&D setting, and create a random list.
Even setting aside how a solid Most people died in infancy (kind of a survivor-bias anthropic-principle dealy going on: if you made it into the IC history books, you probably survived to adulthood), there are some serious differences between peasant COD and noble COD. So I hit on what I think is a somewhat clever way to distinguish:
Nobles roll 2d20, forming a bell curve that includes the ways peasants die as one tail, but is clustered around ways nobles die, and the other tail is weird D&D stuff.
Peasants roll 1d20; if they roll a 1 (which nobles cannot roll), they reroll with 2d20, so a peasant still has a slight chance of dying in noble-specific or D&D-specific ways.
