Random D&D-Historical Adult Death Table

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.

The "Every NPC Is Miles O'Brien" Principle

My best recent session in terms of player engagement was one where NPCs (whom the players like) suffered a bunch.

You can inflict all sorts of terrible stuff on NPCs that it's not cool to do to PCs. E.g., the PCs in one game I'm currently running are students at a school, so inflicting annoying bullying on them is cruel and unusual and potentially triggering of real-life trauma, but inflicting bullying on their NPC girlfriends was perfectly kosher (and then the PCs get to be Big Damn Heroes about it and rescue their girlfriends from the bullying).

Killing beloved NPCs is, of course, a drastic, uncreative, and cliche step. This is most notorious as a phenomenon where every PC begins as an orphan, so the DM can't mess with their family, because some DMs absolutely will have the Big Bad murder every PC family at the earliest opportunity.

But imagine your (non-orphan) PC gets word from home that your parents are being extorted, threatened, or have been kidnapped -- at least as effective a motivator of PC action and investment as having the family killed, plus they get the satisfaction of saving their family at the end of the adventure.

It all boils down to a principle I've come to call "Every NPC Is Miles O'Brien", where any time engagement is flagging you throw an "O'Brien Must Suffer" session at the party. (Named after the writers' habit from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine of writing an "O'Brien Must Suffer" episode at least once a season, because Miles O'Brien was the most likeable everyman in a cast full of alien lizard spies and cops made of goo and goofy capitalist aliens and whatnot.) In short: put an NPC the players like in a pickle, then let the PCs rescue the NPC.