Like Concrete From That Height!
If you’ve ever been strangled to death by your own magic necklace, then you probably don’t need the warning. Cursed items are a mainstay of the hobby, and everything from the scarab of death to the cloak of poisonousness can kill your ass dead. Of course, not everything needs to be the magical equivalent of a heart attack to do the trick.
Cleverly placed magic items can be every bit as deadly as their cursed brethren. I’m thinking of a certain demon’s mouth, portals to unknown levels of the Abyss, and even sudden fiery immolation via bad luck and a necklace of fireballs. Heck, the item doesn’t even need to be magical. The Head of Vecna wracked up quite the kill count without doing much more than rotting.
Still, despite the message in today’s comic, I think that it behooves GMs to reward “daring play” every once in a while. For my money, nothing is more boring than the dread gazebo style of adventuring. I detect good at it. I call out to it. I shoot it with my bow. I insult its mamma…. At some point, you’ve got to hit the big red button that says “PUSH” and see what happens. Should that backfire some of the time? Absolutely. But if you want to keep the game fresh and exciting, I think that rewarding recklessness every once in a while is a good idea too.
Question of the day then. Have you ever put on a magic item without properly identifying it first? What happened? How much damage did you take? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I’ve never put on a magic item before identifying it for two reasons: either I had such a high spellcraft skill that it was impossible not to, or because the GM always just flat out TOLD THE PARTY WHAT IT WAS.
Identification has always been weird for me. On the one hand, rolling to ascertain the properties of every. Single. Freaking. Magic item. Gets old in a hurry. On the other hand, you lose out on the mystery and discovery. The same logic that applies to identifying monsters applies here as well:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/monster-lore
You could auto-identify consumables and minor items, but force players to roll for the high-level stuff they might actually fail on. But then you’re tipping your hand, especially if a cursed item does happen to enter the mix.
I’m not sure I’ve every found a fully satisfying solution to the above, though I suppose I tend towards the final method.
I think that issue exists more in high magic fantasy, where magical items are commonplace and part of everyday life. Ideally magical items should be rare enough that they are, in fact, mysterious and magical. 5e’s solution is to have a short rest general identify mechanic, but which does not reveal curses. The Identify spell allows you to check for curses, or to more quickly identify an item.
Identify if a ritual, right? Now see, I don’t think that quite solves my problem. If you can auto-check every item with 100% accuracy, then there’s no need to fear cursed stuff. (Assuming you’ve got access to the spell anyway.) Maybe instead of automatic success, we could devise a homebrew rule that gives a % chance for Identify to detect a curse based on character level…. 2% per level sounds about right.
Seeing as how it has been 2 years since this has been posted, someone has probably already pointed this out, but at least in 5e, identify RAW does NOT identify curses.
Unfortunately there is no separation of information contained within item descriptions, or alternative names to give. Since the item’s name is the “CURSED blah blah of etc” DMs just tend to rattle off the ACTUAL name of the item and everyone knows it’s cursed right away.
My personal homebrew is that curses should have different levels of power, and it takes an equivalent spell slot casting identify in order to notice and potentially identify the nature of the curse an item might or might not have. Ritual casting to conserve spell slots will only reveal the non-cursed aspects of an item.
I’m also considering the idea that items should have information about them segmented into different tiers, which will require higher skill checks, more time short resting, and/or higher level identification spellcasting in order to reveal even just general information.
The only problem with that is it functionally requires going into EVERY item and manually adjusting the information layout INDIVIDUALLY. That’s a LOT of work just to make something less convenient for the players.
Not sure where I got the idea that 5e identify revealed curses. I have a vague memory of hearing someone on a podcast mentioning that they could take it into town for identification “just to be safe.” Bleh. The systems melt in your brain after a while.
The different tiers of information is also a solid move on monster identification. Haven’t seen it applied to items though. Any idea what an example would look like?
Eugh… Scarab of Death… I guess it’s safe to say that that’s Pathfinder’s version of the Rot Grub… A part of me now wishes I never knew about either.
But the devious side of me wishes to have a dozen of them! I could see that being used as a rather wonderful assassination tool, or a wicked trap. Place a couple within a sash of gold, for example. A fancy jeweled brooch, looking to be worth maybe 500-750gp among some gold pieces? No one’s going to think twice to “rot grub” check it before they, hopefully, stuff it in their pocket.
But yeah, so far, my DM’s have simply given away what a magic item is. I await the time we have death by careless use of unknown magic item, because I KNOW it’s bound to happen.
This was used in one of the novels. =)
A drow priestess was constant rivals with her twin sister, as is expected for drow twins, but neither could seem to defeat the other. However, she got a clever idea, and commissioned an amulet with a host of beneficial properties, but also a curse that would slowly rot the bearer away. She then arranged for the item to be carried by a duergar patrol (IIRC) that would cross the path of one of her house’s tunnel patrols. This way the item would be presented to the other sister and she would wear it for all of the beneficial features, never realizing it was slowly killing her.
That plan had a fairly large number of moving parts, but it did work in the end.
Man… I need to go back and reread the The Dark Elf Trilogy. *whistful sigh*
Speaking of Scarbs o’ Death, and speaking of using them for devious purposes, I found an interesting page while researching for this comic:
https://lostdelights.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/memories-of-the-scarab-of-death/
My personal favorite part of cursed magic items is figuring out how to make them work to your favor. Some are obvious, like shoving the evil artifact into a bag of devouring or forcing a Helm of Opposite Alignment onto the BBEG’s head. Some, like Dust of Sneezing and Choking on an arrow or pickpocketting a Scarab of Death into the mark’s pocket, are absolutely phenomenal on offense with just a bit of creativity, and others like a Ring of Truth are great utility (force it on a captive and practically guarentee a successful interrogation, and since it says only the wearer can’t remove it the captors can easily remove and reuse it at will). For a high security prison, Talisman’s of Spying and some Sovereign Glue makes almost every escape temporary.
One of my favorites that I read was an ancient wizard who was friendly to the party but cursed by the BBEG to never leave his prison. The party artificer realized that the wording of the curse was the “man” Wizard, so promptly created a Girdle of Gender change to let him walk out without a problem.
I’d love to give the party a Helm of Opposite Alignment, and make the BBEG true neutral. =)
“Now, villainous druid! Do you not see the error of your ways?”
“No.”
*hero gets tackled by ravenous wolverines*
One of my characters had a run in with a Girdle of Gender Change find by some conniving party members. Pretty funny, if you ask me.
You know how that chick in the “Handbook of Erotic Fantasy” ad at the bottom of the page looks sort of like Fighter…?
My players have a bag of devouring. They have not yet dug it out of the bottom of their coat closet to use for nefarious purposes. I am very disappointed in them.
We beat the gnolls, in my 3.5 game (where I was my samurai, first trying D&D in a group). We rooted through their abodes and found a ring. I thought “Hm…hey, let’s try it out, we don’t have a handy Identify available at present.”
Very definition of a Mixed Bag. It was a Ring of Counterspells, which was cool. We wound up throwing some Dispel Magic in there and Shinta became that much harder to disenchant. However…it was cursed. And it glowed, brightly, like a torch. And the torch’s color was Hot Pink. The flattest face ensued. “Really, man?” “Yup.”
As levels went up, legends of the samurai with the brilliant pink light that rent the darkness asunder echoed across the land. No one bothered to remove the curse. Jerks.
It was fun.
Nice. I can just picture this Samurai trying to explain it away.
Samurai: “It is like the sakura blossoms in spring.”
Unimpressed Farmer: “Uh-huh.”
Samurai: “It is the color of passion!”
Umimpressed Farmer: “Uh-huh.”
Samurai: “It is–”
Unimpressed Farmer: “You mean like Passion what gives them fancy lap dances down at the–”
Samurai: “NO!”
This is closer to the truth than you think. Something quite like this happened in the capitol city.
Unrelated Addendum: The DM who ran a campaign after this one was one of the players in this one decided that my monk (not an oriental type this time, curiously, just a brawler) needed a new accessory. So he found an Ioun stone. And then it went a little something like:
Oh neat, what color is it? …pink, you say. *sigh* I wear it. Oh, it glows bright, like a torch? I can’t remove it? It’s cursed? You know what, fine. Fuck you. All of you guys, I’m gonna own this one. My outfit suddenly changes into Dan Hibiki’s. I’m the chosen one. You can call me Gerik, the Pink Master. I now search for the True Pink. Bite me.
Bonus points for getting captured and my captors not being able to take my constitution bonus away, though.
That’s one hell of a curse to follow you through campaigns.
Now I’m wondering if it’s possible to do some kind of crazy we-are-our-own-antiparty campaign where every other session you play the other party. What happens to your PC in one can affect the other because of some “mystic link” or whatever. It wouldn’t even have to be that complicated. Just occasional GM notes like, “Note which character received the Habiki Stone. That character’s rival begins to glow pink when it reaches the Cavern of Stealth Challenges.” It would be like dramatic irony the campaign as the two parties Rosencrantz and Guildenstern each other.
The takeaway I got from that (besides the fun concept) is that I need to introduce a Hibiki Stone next time I run or play. I never put two and two together like that.
If you’ve ever played the game Nethack, you know all about cursed items. Sometimes curses can be beneficial! For instance, a cursed Potion of Gain Level makes you teleport up one level in the dungeon instead of getting lots of XP.
But most of the time, yeah, you’re dead. You don’t think about how bad that -1 sword is fused to your hand until you realize you can’t put on or take off your gloves or rings. Plus of course classics like the Dunce Cap (makes you stupid), Loadstone (super heavy and can’t be dropped), or the Ring of Hunger (very dangerous in Nethack).
Luckily there are a plethora of ways to deal with curses, depending on what type of item it is: http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Curse_removal
Here’s something that’s always bothered me. How do you keep the curses interesting when “scroll of remove curse” is a thing?
Fighter: “Oh no! I’m cursed.”
Cleric: “Zap! No you’re not”
GM: “Grrr…”
In Nethack, curses are really a threat only in the early game, before you’ve identified a lot of your counters to them. (In this game, even your scroll of remove curse could be cursed!) Even then, a smart player will always drop a new item on an altar before testing it out: blessed items flash yellow and cursed items flash black! Also your pet cat won’t ever step on cursed items, so you can test things that way. A cursed Loadstone can be identified by (injuring your leg) trying to kick it instead of picking it up.
I think the variety of counters depending on what the cursed object is what makes it fun. Maybe in Pen and Paper RPGs cursed items should be more like trying to destroy artifacts. You research the item and find a condition which when performed breaks the curse.
Dude… That is a GREAT solution. You know how Pathfinder style haunts can sometimes have hopelessly obscure methods for breaking the curse? Example:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/haunts/cr-13-15/throne-of-blood/
Suppose that you instituted some clear rules for figuring it out? Maybe X# of knowledge checks at DC Y over the course of Z days. That way the player has to live with the curse for a while, can actually fight against it, and has to deal with more than a simple binary of “do I have dispel curse or not?”
Now this wasn’t me personally, but a gnome alchemist in our party thought it’d be a great idea to put on all the jewelry that we’d taken from the Daemon mayor we’d just fought. She ended up accidentally possessing the body of a stone golem (while the golem possessed hers). She couldn’t talk, which made for a very interesting time trying to figure out what’d happened.
Well that’s awesome.
How did you actually handle the confusion out of game? Was it just about not metagaming? Did you use charades?
Not metagaming. It was funny though, because everyone figured out what was going on before the gnome’s player. The GM was describing how ‘You’re suddenly far taller than you were before, and you’re at the back of the group rather than the front,” and for everyone else it clicked immediately but the gnome’s player was incredibly confused. He understood eventually, though.
We’re an entirely online campaign so no charades were had, though that would have been exceptionally funny. Especially since the golem didn’t have fingers
Huh. Now I’m wondering what the online campaign equivalent of charades would be.
“OK. You can’t speak, so you can only communicate to your party through animated gifs.”
Games with my group have always just involved being told what a magic item is. It’s a cut-out-the-time-consuming thing. Most checks to identify magic items either will pass or won’t pass, and if we can’t pass them, we’ll hunt down some way to identify it anyway and take up a lot of time at the table. Most of the time, we’d much rather just say ‘Oh, it’s a set of Daredevil Softpaws,’ and get back to the story and actually advancing things that matter to us as players. Now if it’s an important item, one that should be mysterious, then the rules come into play, but most of the time, we’re just told ‘You find a mastercraft hand crossbow, a silver masterwork morningstar, a cloak of resistance +1 and a stash of figurines of wondrous power in the shape of ravens.’
Check out my response to Griffemon up top. Basically, I agree that rolling to identify is boring. But if you cut it out entirely I think you do miss out on some non-boring parts of the game.
We don’t drop it entirely. Important stuff that’s supposed to be mysterious and unknown, we’ll do identification rules for. But that cloak we took off a boss, we don’t tend to stop for.
Also, in relation to your comic: I used to do this in WoW to people I didn’t like. If someone is jumping down into water as a shortcut, you could cast Water Walking on them as they jumped. And then watch them die from fall damage at the bottom.
Where do you think I got the idea? 😛
Party came across a something that looked like “a red glowing marble”. Detect magic identified evocation, and our ranger decided it was an ioun stone. The ranger then proceeded to swallow the delayed blast fireball.
https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/chunky-salsa
Well, in our curse of Strahd campaign, we find a magic chalice on the table in an otherwise ruined room. We started ritual casting identify when our cleric, who was previously mending a plate, dashes in and knocks the chalice to the ground, breaking it to pieces. The DM then reveals that if a dying person were to drink from it, they would see all their most pleasant memories. Not powerful, but magic nonetheless. The real icing on the cake came when he went to sell the now mended but still nonmagical chalice and the seller mentioned that with the magic intact it would sell for hundreds of GP, while in its current state it sold for 5.
Good DMing right there. You gotta turn those screws!
How did you determine that the cleric knocked it over?
My DM managed something funny, we were fighting a cult and found a powerful magic amulet that gave advantage on Perception rolls and 1/day allowed you to cast Scry (if you failed a Wis saving roll when casting the spell, you’d start acting like Gollum and his precious concerning this amulet, but it was a minor inconvenience).
Now, this is stuff my monk found out by putting on this amulet that looked like a largish eye. The group never bothered identifying it. Like 20 sessions later, we find out that one of the abominations leading the cult could literally *see* through the amulet around my neck, finding out a bunch of information and stuff – he told us while gloating, as a good villain is supposed to!
It was well executed. 🙂
The old hag’s eye. Gets ’em every time. 🙂
I once threw what I thought was an Alchemist Fire past the fighter, narrow tunnel but pinpoint landing, way past the Fighter. Turned out DM was generous and gave us a Fireball in vial, long before anyone would have been able to cast it.
Poor swashbuckler in my dragon riders game threw a necklace of fireballs down a corridor towards the sound of fighting, then told the gold dragon to light it up. That’s the corridor where said swashbuckler’s long-lost love was trying to defect back to the side of the good guys. Ouch.
I had a necklace that was supposed to suppress lycanthropy, which my character (not a lycanthrope) attuned to. She ended up with non-stop nightmares, accumulating points of exhaustion, and disadvantage on all WIS and CHA checks/saving throws 🙁
When you’re the type of player that’s willing to push the big red button, this stuff sometimes happens. Props to you for giving it a whirl! I bet the nightmare sequences were pretty cool at least.
When I’m GMing, I allow them to know what they have found, if they’ve found similar items and identified them before at least twice. Usually works out for them – until they’ve visited another world, and now nothing is quite the same. They haven’t figured out things aren’t quite the same yet…
Identification by affinity? I can dig that solution.