Curses!
It was the first dungeon of a fresh campaign, and the chaos cultists had fled. They’d left behind all manner of undead minions and deathtraps, but as fortune would have it we were a bunch of big damn heroes. The cultists’ defenses were summarily dispatched. Thus it was that, booting open the double doors at the end of the dungeon, we discovered the Temple of Chaos and Also High-Value Art Objects. We took the lot.
“Who,” asked our intrepid GM, “Is carrying the idol?”
“Which idol? The crazy-looking inhuman idol with the blood gem eyes that seem to peer into your very soul?”
“Yeah. That’d be the one.”
I did my best Frodo impression at that point and volunteered to carry the r̶i̶n̶g̶ idol. Unlike Frodo, I did in fact know the way. As you might have guessed from the description, this hot little number was extremely cursed. More importantly, it was obviously cursed. I picked it up anyway.
Remember the Tomb of the Unknown Potion from last week? Well this was very much one of those “I drink the potion to find out what it does” situations. But what’s more interesting to me is what happened over the course of the ensuing sessions. My fellow players forgot about the odd idol and the very telling “who carries it?” question. There were no roguish types trying to rifle through my pack. There were no concerned clerics asking leading questions. The curse got to play out among the players just as it did among the PCs.
For my part, I slow-played the change. As the idol slowly increased my Strength and sapped my Will, my character became short-tempered. He snapped at his fellow party members. He became bloodthirsty, hacking at the corpses of fallen enemies. He even developed a nervous tick, always keeping a hand on the idol tucked inside his cloak (I mimicked this at the table by fidgeting with a ghoul miniature). Slowly but surely, the others caught on that something was up. After three or four sessions of, “You worry too much. I’m fine,” they decided to take action. And by the time their hired priest arrived on the scene, I was more than halfway along the path to “mindless killing machine.” The resolution was the same-old-same of “I cast remove curse on the crazy guy,” but this time it felt earned.
Curses are, I think, one of those situations where you should strive to avoid metagaming. When you’ve got easy access to remove curse or break enchantment or 1-900-EXORCIST, getting rid of the affliction is academic. In my experience, the fun of the situation rises from the dawning in-character realization that a curse is actually present.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever slow-played a curse? Or does your group prefer to treat curses with take-two-dispel-magics-and-call-me-in-the-morning? Let’s hear it in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
No discussion today?
The discussion has been foiled! Curses! *twirls the fake mustache*
Sorry about that. Blog is up!
We had one guy who was “lucky” enough to make the killing blow on a wight in armor with a gauntlet. Once the wight was slain, the gauntlet appeared on his hand. The gauntlet could be removed… but then he started getting wracked with debilitating pain.
So here he is wearing this thing and nothing is wrong.
Then a flubbed encounter has us healing him back into the positive. He’s okay, but colors look a bit washed out. Next time he gets badly hurt (he’s a Magus crit-fisher with a devil-may-care disposition and a flair for the dramatic, what did you think would happen?) everything looks grey-ish and food is losing its flavor. He looks paler after the next fight and starts becoming listless… we need to fix this before we have another wight on our hands. Needless to say, we made sure he stayed back a bit more out of the fray until we could find something to fix this.
We did get it fixed too, but it was that slow creeping horror situation where you dont wanna be next to wear it…
Nice! You remember that Smurfs episode with the contagious spot?
http://smurfs.wikia.com/wiki/Smurf_The_Other_Cheek
Anywho, I’ve got to ask how you finally got rid of it. Was it a simple matter of finding a powerful enough priest to cast the proper spell, or did this curse demand a more creative solution?
Powerful enough “priest” (possibly an ancient witch) situation… though it was turned into a quest item and used to stop one of the big bads…
Nice. Gotta love it when the players can turn a challenge into an opportunity.
Not exactly slow-roleplaying here, but slow real life resolution of a curse.
As a GM I once revealed the big bad (an all-powerful lich) to one of my characters way before the party was supposed to learn about him. I had him curse the character with a couple of spells that would trigger a death effect if she ever revealed his identity.
Real life gets in the way. We go on indefinite hiatus.
Somehow nearly a decade later, we all end up living close by again. So we dig up all our old character sheets and pick the game back up. I soon learn that in the last 10 years my player had not revealed the secret she was cursed with! (Despite the fact this was a campaign we loved to swap stories about.) I eventually gave her an anti-scrying artifact that let her talk about it without triggering the death effect, so it all turned out good in the end.
Damn. Ten years and multiple moves, all on the off chance that the band would get back together one day. That’s some dedication to the game!
My Arcane Trickster was “cursed” with that entirely beneficial pseudo-vampirism ring, so I took it upon myself to come up with some signs of the curse.
She came to rely on all the Charisma bonuses, so she would become sullen, moody, and a bit twitchy when she hadn’t drank the required blood. This also resulted in having a less keen interest in the situation at hand, leading to mistakes.
After she drank, she would be manic for a time, upbeat and full of energy, but also swift-tempered and reckless. Rather than her usual strategies of either net+shoot or shooting from cover, she’d wade into melee with Haste up and do all out double sneak attacks, a powerful but borderline suicidal tactic. This mania would subside after a while, and she’d be normal for most of the adventuring day.
Eventually her friends became concerned and began asking questions, but ultimately nobody took it from her.
It can be so tough to convey this kind of thing to your fellow players. You’ve got this amazingly flavorful item, but if you don’t find a way to make it matter in-game, it’s just a boring ball of stats.
This is the kind of thing that I’ve privately termed “the rich inner-world problem.” You might have all sorts of secrets and angst and hidden powers, but if you can’t find a way to put that knowledge into other players’ heads, you’re just sitting there with a boring quiet character. Ham it up I say! That’s the only way to ensure that your cool character is as cool in-game as it is in your head.
I’m a fan of cursed items that, well, try to stop the removal of their curse. An example of this was a cursed ring one of my players snagged up. It was a really powerful ring, but all of its bonuses turned into penalties when fighting drow or demons, and additionally it carried a bit of the will of Lolth. She could issue commands that required a wisdom saving throw to resist, and could command the spider on the ring to bite the person, doing a nasty amount of poison damage. The player that had it on finally decided he wanted it off. When he asked our local caster to remove the curse (remember, remove curse in 5e requires you to touch the cursed object), he received a command, “Kill him. Do not give any warning, and do not let him touch the ring.”
They did this right outside a demon mini-boss’s room.
They were lucky only one person died.
That’s a hell of a way to get a surprise round. Anything that says “dominate person” on the tin is a scary proposition.
Our DM allowed us to make custom items for our characters way back, they could level and all that. It was pretty fun, though I remember that I sat down at my computer made mine from 8PM until 10:30AM. That was something.
Anyway, I got carried away with mine and made it pretty powerful. On the flipside I made it so that I could only level it by dealing, violently or non, with Adult to Ancient dragons and it would only level up per age category, color, and/or not the same dragon.
Basically it was an artifact made from the blood of Io/Asgorath and granted bonuses dragon related, synergized really well with Draconic Sorcerers which my character is. However my DM never told me, until I got it stolen, that every time it gained in strength the spirit of Asgorath was slowly taking him over. Basically made him want to make the artifact stronger and all that.
Here’s the thing though, he never told me nor did anything with the amulet. Me/my character kept on thinking of ways to involve himself with dragons that, when thought about, weren’t really thought out but made him want to power the amulet along with himself. It got to the point where the party members actually noticed and said something along the lines of “That amulet is messing with your mind.”.
But I never thought about it that way. I thought about it as a really powerful item that I could use to help the rest of the group with by becoming stronger. I essentially cursed myself and never realized.
I think that may be the way I think of curses in general. “Oh no! I’ve been cursed with a cool RP hook!”
Funny about that, I’m running a campaign where it’s a alternate timeline based off of my DM’s where there’s a rising empire where dragons of various colors owe fealty to Red dragon (Who is the emperor of such.) and new breeds of dragon guard towns & cities. Oddly enough he never conquers his territories, he provides protection along with economics and personally deals with problems. People are switching over because of the care and consideration he gives and it’s making countries that border him nervous and pissed.
It seems like he’s looking for something though, besides general dragon hoarding. Red dragons and Golds haven’t been sighted in over a few hundred years and no one knows why. Almost as if they’re in hiding from something or someone…
Forgive me for being obtuse, but I don’t get it. What’s the curse here?
Ah sorry, it was a continuation of the previous post. My character is emperor here and the amulet has basically driven him to…funny enough, hoard dragons. But he doesn’t realize that Asgorath is pushing him along in order to come back. He just needs an Ancient Gold dragon to fully power it up and they’ve been ordered by Bahamut to his realm in order to prevent it from happening. But the other players in my DM’s game, who are in mine, still know nothing that Asgorath is nudging my character along. So it’s a bit of a continuation of that idea.
I realize that it comes out as confusing considering I haven’t explained it. Sorry again.
No worries. I think that’s the nature of RPG stories.
Gamer: “OMG! Here’s this amazing story my friends and I have been working on for years! Here’s a cool thing that happened.”
Clueless Outsider: “It’s cool that ‘thing’ happened, but… Remind me what ‘thing’ is again?”
Sounds legit awesome though. Like you’re playing a very high-stakes game of Pokemon. “If I catch GoldDragonMon, my pokedex will be complete! Then the multiverse will tremble before me!”