The Wraith casts an aging spell that ages you 1d20 years targeting your aarakocra monk!

>Racial lifespans are intended to be an obscure balancing measure against the tiny handful of aging effects (one undead creature's attack, wild magic surges, cursed item detriments) rather than a frame for the characters and lore
The game doesn't even have rules that say your stats change if your character ages from 30 to 90 or 8. I'd either agree with dog-year user, or at least age them to extremely near death and give the party a few days (if they care for them) to find a way to undo the curse or effect

There are two types of undead that cause you to age. Sphinxes cause you to age too.

That's just off the top of my head.

That's not a citation.
Also, put those goalposts back. .

A 15th level aaracocra paladin can't be aged magically, and doesn't suffer the effects of old age so that might be interesting to do.

What's REALLY interesting is that if you interpret being "magically aged" as only increases in age, then a level of wild magic sorcerer will randomly only age you down by a few years. On top of this is an aaracocra is fully mature at only three years, so even if you get de-aged to a one year old it's a short wait to be back to full, and you can probably argue for being a small sized flightless birdman until then.

Starting a high level game as a small 1 (300) year old aaracocra child-elder of justice would be good fun.

An aaracocra paladin of the *ancients*, excuse me.

>Cite the page where it says you die from age.
I assume it's on the same page that says you can't play the fiddle and brush your teeth at the same time if you only have one arm.

Actually it's on the page where they explain how high the ivory tower is, there's an editor's note saying monks are immune to the effects of aging, but there are no rules for aging.

Ah, found the note.
>At 15th level, your ki sustains you so that you suffer none of the frailty of old age, and you can't be aged magically. You can still die of old age, however. ln addition, you no longer need food or water.
I see where it says you can die of old age, and also that the monk has to be level 15 before this ability kicks in. Unfortunately I couldn't find any rules on dealing with pure autism, so you're out of luck there.

Well, to be fair, there are a lot of things in the game that pretty clearly point out that the authors are expecting you to play a human 90% of the time.

The maximum age is stated in the race description. You knew the risks when you made your character

Had a ranger in a game I ran until recently whose wolf companion botched their save against a ghost's Horrifying Visage. A wolf immediately aging 20 years was not pretty.

Revised Ranger came out like three weeks later and he respecced and revived his companion, thankfully.

Adventuring with a GHOST WOLF would be sweet.
Even if it doesn't get any bonus features.
Just behaving like a wolf while looking spoopy.

>the risks of encountering one of maybe three things in the entire game that can age your character
i mean, i GUESS?
personally i didn't realise there even were still aging effects in the game, not sure about OP though.
that is a REALLY esoteric way to balance out a race though.

It's usually considered a widespread convention that lifespan is a stat meant for fluff, just like your character's hairstyle. Both exist for plot or RP purposes. The use of aging spells as a simple combat mechanic breaks that convention. Similarly, if a monster get advantage when grabbing the elven bard's long blonde hair or the dwarf's beard, and not against the bald monk, you're breaking a convention too.

Of course, breaking conventions isn't necessarily a bad thing! As a GM, you just need to make it clear to your players. Let's go with character hairstyle as an example. If you want it to factor in gameplay at some points, bring it up at character creation. From then on you have two options:

1. You want hairstyle to be an interesting choice. Maybe longer and shorter hair will come up in some social situations? Baldness isn't very attractive, and beardless dwarves may be shunned and shamed by their people.

2. You want hairstyle to have easy options and bad options. Maybe having a beard or hair brings an occasional disadvantage in battle and nothing else. This means bald PCs will be the dominant strategy. And maybe bald PCs are what you want! But then you might as well make it a requirement at chargen, or at least make sure that any masochist creating a long-haired PC knows what they're getting into. Letting your players blunder into trap-choices is just shitty design.

Similarly, if aging spells are used as a combat mechanic you need to make that VERY clear at character creation. Especially if they CAN mean the sudden death of a character. Not to mention, unlike beards, you can't shave off a short lifespan. So either make short-lived races a form of optional difficulty, or balance things out. Maybe they perceive time much better, while elves and the likes (even though they live almost forever and resist aging spells) are so detached from the passing of days they can't count hours for shit.

tl;dr yeah, your GM is being an ass, OP. Have some better alternatives.

Why would the Wraith even use that spell then?

autist spotted

>When you sure older D&D editions had an alternate option of representing levle drain by aging people by a few years or so, Ghosts included.

Yea, believe it or not I don't know what I'm going to be doing years from now when I DM. Yes, I've run adventures that have lasted years, no I'm not going to warn you about every little consequence all your choices might have in the future. This issue is further exasperated when using random encounters, I don't have all these obscure abilities memorized. Sometimes things go badly, that's what makes it roll playing and not hand holding.

Only if the DM is an uncreative sod.

If you don't plan to bust out aging spells to use on your PCs, it's unfair to punish your players for not expecting it themselves.

My gf just rolled an Aarakocra Druid variant that is a chicken-person and has no flight speed. She calls him Dave.