Have you ever wondered why, when you're having a lovely stroll around the world of Baldur's Gate 3, there are so many bodies without heads lying around? No it's not because the inhabitants of the world have faulty necks - it's because developer Larian is doing something sneaky.
You see, offering people the ability to speak with any corpse via the spell Speak with Dead created a lot of work. It meant writers not only had to write lines for all the living people, but for the dead ones too. And okay, there's a limiting factor in how Speak with Dead only allows you to ask five questions, but that's still an array of questions to write answers for. And in a war-torn world filled with dead people... That's a lot of answers to write.
What to do? Simple, albeit gruesome: cut their heads off. "The trick that we use is [you can speak to] 'any dead that still has their head'," Vincke told Wizards of the Coast interviewer Todd Kenreck, in a really lovely interview actually. "So you will see a lot of decapitated people in the game - that's literally how we solved that."