Lethal knife wounds

[salamandraugr]

Setting: Early 1800's secondary world
Search terms: lethal stab wound, fatal stab wound, lethal knife wound

Comments

[tamtrible]

I am Not An Expert, but in general gut wounds are great for "will definitely die, but not right away". They may take too long for your purposes, however, if you actually need him to die in a few minutes.

If you need him dying in a few minutes, I think you probably need to go with something like puncturing a lung (won't kill you right away), slicing open a major vein, and/or just barely nicking an artery. Blood loss that's too much to survive, but slow enough that it takes several minutes to kill you.

[dandello]

Liver without hitting the hepatic artery. (Chances are a high gut wound would hit the liver any way.) Otherwise, nicking an artery or major vein.

[salamandraugr]

Yeah the gut wound was my first thought. How much would the punctured lung affect speech?

[tamtrible]

I'm really not sure. If you need speech, I might avoid the lung, especially since it sounds like the liver or kidneys would give you a nice death without involving the lungs.

[eglantine_br]

Injury to lung would do it too. You can collapse one lung and use the other. Blood from lung can slowly put pressure on the heart, resulting in a sort of horrible internal drowning. Takes a while. You don't even need a puncture for that to begin, bruising will do it. (Such as after a fall, or car accident.)

[khemlab]

I would suggest liver or kidney. Liver if the wound is from the front, kidney if it's coming from the back. I've seen video of a traumatic kidney injury where the victim was actually able to walk normally for about 20 yards, then just faceplanted. I'm not sure they would be coherent for a full 2-3 minutes, though - might depend on the amount of damage inflicted on the organ.

[salamandraugr]

That sounds pretty good. I can just rush the conversation along.

[tamtrible]

For the most part, if you reduce the degree of wounding somewhat, you'll get a longer period to chat while still killing the person.