7 Ways to hide a Body
Murder is highly illegal, but it is something that those on an adventure tend to commit. Assuming they didn't do it in public, they have the problem of a body to conceal to give them time to get away from either law enforcement or an angry lynch mob.
1-Bury the body in a graveyard
Where better to hide a buried body then inside an existing open grave that was dug the day before for some local worthy? Throw the body in, put a shallow layer of dirt on top, and with luck when the funeral happens noone will notice anything different and the gravediggers will fill the grave with dirt, burying both the legitimate corpse and your murder victim.
2-Throw the body into an open plague pit
If plague is raging and has killed large numbers of people, and you dare to get close to the pits full of plague victims, why not throw the body into it, where it will either be buried or burnt with the rest of the bodies? Very few will dare to check a plague pit for a body that might not have died of plague after all.
3-Hide the body in the trees beside a busy motorway where stopping is forbidden
If your world is a modern one with motorways, then take the body in the middle of the night to one and hide it in the trees and undergrowth to the side of the motorway. Although large numbers of people pass by it just feet away, it is hidden and the drivers have their eyes on the road. Noone would want to stop there ordinarily, and when the motorway is busy noone can stop safely. Perhaps one day the body will be discovered by workers expanding the motorway, or some luckless person needing to urinate, but by that time years or even decades may have passed and the body will just be bones.
4-Hide the body on a battlefield
Have you taken advantage of the fog of war to frag an unpopular officer or NCO? On the battlefield, a very dangerous place, it would not be that hard to make it look like the enemy did it, particularly if you do it with one of the weapons that the enemy had that you picked up on the same battlefield.
5-Raise the body as an Undead
If you are a necromancer and are skilled enough to avoid having the zombie that you created turning on you, you could use your dark magic to raise the body and use it as your minion, either to kill other foes of yours, do hard labour, or just carry out various tasks. Unless you can preserve the body in some way, however, be aware that it will soon begin to rot, swell and stink.
6-Dress the body up as a homeless person
If you strip the body of any fine clothes, dress it up as a homeless person with a tin cup and a begging sign and leave it on the street it could be many hours or even days before it is discovered, as many, maybe most people treat the homeless as if they are invisible. Even when it starts to stink, the smell might be mistaken at least at first as the smell of someone who has been unable to wash for a very long time due to not having access to a bath or shower.
7-Put the body in a gibbet
If the world you are roleplaying has the executed bodies of criminals swinging in gibbets as a deterrent to crime, and you find an empty one and can somehow get it open, then you can display the body in plain sight and people will think that your victim was lawfully executed instead of foully and illegally murdered, at least for a while.
Dealing with a Dead Body in your Character's Idiom
Okay, so you're an in-game murder and now you have to dispose of the body. But how? The answer is the the highest stat on your character sheet.
Strength: Put it under something heavy or throw it away.
Like the bars of a jail cell, the falling portcullis or the pillars of Gaza, your character can overcome any problem with brute strength. This problem of a little dead body should be no different. Now that you have slain your victim, look around for the heaviest object you can see, then find something heavier. Lift that object. Once you have demonstrated your might by raising that first hulking burden into air, jauntily toss the object aside. It is too small and you can do better. So focus your gaze on a piece of the geography. As you stride over to your gargantuan objective, pause slightly as your massive hands grip this established landmark. Then with a guttural sigh and a stretch of your steel tendons, hoist that dense and previously immoveable entity onto your titanic shoulder and then drop it on the body.
If no suitably dramatic object is available, then grip the body firmly in both hand and hurl it as hard you can towards the horizon.
Intelligence: One Death is a tragedy, One thousand deaths a statistic and Ten thousand Deaths a force of nature.
Being that you are already morally inclined to murder and uninterested in dealing with the consequences of the aforementioned crime then the only sure solution is to remove the value system that judges your action as deviant. A genius like yourself realizes that moving the body is not a solution, but changing the paradigm that requires you to move the body is the true fix. Thus, you must now kill everyone else. If everyone is dead the need to hide a single body is superfluous. Of course there must be some mathematical and logical limit to your slaughter. In the ven diagram of social justice, the repercussions of your initial homicide has practical limits. If your victim is somebody who cut the buffet queue at a Sunday picnic than the number of colleterial victims could reasonably be limited to the other attendees of said event. As to the specifics of how you conduct this mass liquidation, well I am sure your gifted intellect will lead you to the right combination of herbal compounds to make a lethal but tasty dipping sauce or give you enough access to the astral plane to call forth a deadly wave of mana.
Wisdom: Get the body to hide herself.
Disposing of a body is a problem necessitated by two variables: a body and an undesirable location. However, the body is the only variable required by mortal bloodshed. Wisdom is knowing what you can change and accepting what you cannot change. As a wisened character, you can find a way to entice your victim into an evening stroll into the catacombs in search of a cask of rare wine or into the heart of active volcano in pursuit of a missing piece of jewelry. A soon to be corpse could easily find her way on the edge of great precipice if road sign is nudged only a few degrees in another direction.
Constitution: Not everyone has the stomach for murder, but you do
Eat the body: the whole thing. Tear open the flesh with your teeth. Pop the eyeballs on the roof your mouth with your tongue. Open the skull like an oyster shell and swallow the gelatinous grey matter entirely. Break the bones and suck out the marrow. Consume all the flesh in one sitting. Then grind the bones to a fine powder and sprinkle it over your serial cereal in the morning. Prove to everyone that constitution, not strength, is the most baddass trait.
Dexterity: Murder has always been a dexterous character's idiom. Let's not reinvent the wheel.
Hide yourself. The point of hiding the body is so you don't get caught. Therefore if you aren't going to be caught, then you don't need to hide the body. So don't be coy, don't discuss it much, just slip out the back Jack and set yourself free.
Charisma: What body?
While other characters perform superhuman feats of physical might or spend hours on brilliantly complicated meta-physical plans, you bend reality through pure chutzpah. Is there a body on the floor with your dagger in her back? Well, I guess that depends on your point of view. There may be something on the floor that strongly resembles a body but in a world of wizards, gods, dragons, meta-humans, and fake news how can your accusers say what is real. Simply convince people of the reality you prefer. Your force of personality is such that you can boldly assert a counter-factual that is more convincing and clear than the facts themselves.
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? Responses (4)
Update: Obviously these suggestions are for roleplaying uses only.
I like the necromancer choice. You ever thought about writing each item in one of your lists as a little vignette, say a 200-500 word piece of flash fiction?
I might do that one day. It's a pity that my other recent things have not been voted on yet.