What Empowers A Curse and other dangerous questions

Image courtesy FreeImages.com/Matthew Bowden

This month’s blog carnival is being hosted by Johnn over at Roleplaying Tips. The subject is Curses….
Curses are pretty weak and trivial things in D&D/Pathfinder, let’s be honest. This is especially the case in light of the spell level of Bestow Curse and Remove Curse – I mean Cleric 3, Sorcerer/Wizard 4, just for that?
In literature and folk-tale, anyone could bestow a curse, if their righteous anger was strong enough – say, at the point of being murdered. It became far more uncertain if lesser offenses were committed. Like simply reading the wrong book, or violating sanctified ground.
What Empowers A Curse?
I got to wondering if the reason the curses bestowed by the spell were so wimpy was because the cleric or mage was empowering the spell with his own emotion, and if bigger curses, or harder-to-remove curses, could not be leveraged by tapping into some other power source?
Enhancing Curses
There are other ways of enhancing a curse that bear consideration, either independently or in conjunction with this proposal.
Relative Caster Levels
Of course, even without going that far, curses can be made far more dangerous – and restored to something more akin to their original intent – by the simple expedient of specifying that the caster level needed to remove a curse is always greater than the caster level of whoever inflicted the curse. A curse from a high-level caster thus becomes a serious handicap, one that will be difficult and/or expensive to lift.
Options
Or perhaps its a caster-level vs caster level check (ie each “side” rolls d20 and adds their caster level). If the character seeking to lift the curse gets a total higher than the other side, he succeeds, if not, he fails. In practice, the GM would make such a roll when the curse was inflicted to set a DC for the removal of the curse using the appropriate spell.
You could also contemplate adding a +1 to the difficulty of doing so for each time that a failed attempt is made, meaning that you can’t afford to mess around, you need the services of the most experienced spellcaster that you can find.
Further tweaks might distinguish between clerical and arcane curses, with only a character of the same class able to permanently lift a curse.
Temporary Lifting, not Removal
If that seems like it might be going a little too far, you might amend “Remove Curse” so that if the caster is of insufficient caster levels to permanently remove the curse, he can at least lift it for a while – say, a day for every 3 caster levels that he does have, or maybe one for every five.
Further tweaks are possible in the search for the right balance between inconvenience and inconsequential. It might be that the difference between caster level required to remove a curse and that of the person lifting the curse is the number of days that the character has to endure the curse before it can be even temporarily lifted – a clock that would restart each time the curse returned.
Simpler yet might be the statement that each time a curse is temporarily lifted, the number of days that it is lifted for decreases by one.

Image courtesy FreeImages.com/Ronny Beliën
Frame by Mike Bourke
Curses from Deities: A Curse In The Name Of…
The notion that caster level makes a curse harder to remove brings into force a number of the traditional trappings of curses. First, a curse from a deity – any deity – becomes a lot more potent, because most of them have very high caster levels in virtually any game system. So much so that it might well require the intervention of another deity, or somehow persuading the cursing authority to relent, before one could be lifted. Of lesser authority (by an amount to be determined by the GM) would be a curse in the name of the deity – a priestly invocation might be 75% of the deities caster level if the deity approved the curse and was willing to enforce it, a pious follower’s curse might be at half the deity’s caster level (same caveat), a non-follower might be at 1/4 power.
The deity’s interests, portfolio, and personality are rendered into palpable forces within the campaign without the deity themselves ever actually turning up. In fact, if you gathered enough tales of people being cursed in the name of the deity, you could make a reasonable beginning at determining those attributes of the deity! The need to have the deity’s approval for the curse also manifests an inherent moralizing context to the curse, one that may offer a means by which the curse may be automatically lifted – “I curse you to blah until you humbug!” where “humbug” is some form of reparation or moral lesson that must be learned and demonstrated.
The Spontaneous Curse
Some horror stories visit people with curses with no-one actually bestowing the curse. You can assume that some deity was so affronted by whatever the subject did to deserve the curse that they acted without mortal intervention, or that someone, somewhere, bestowed a general curse (“A pox upon all liars and cheats”) that just happened to land on this particular target – that’s up to the GM. If a direct action by a deity is the in-game mechanism, a further decision is the degree to which the caster level is attenuated by the circumstances; I could make any number of decisions, from “not at all” to “almost completely”.
This is actually a fairly important decision, because it will reflect and, in part, define, the relationship between deities and their priests. It can actually represent an answer to the question of why they need priests or other mortal agents at all. This is also the sort of variable that I would probably change from campaign to campaign, depending on that conceptual relationship.
Of course, there is always the possibility of even more complex and meaningful cosmic relationships being fundamental to the whole question of Curses…
The Demonic Cool
Devils have this whole plotting/scheming thing to give them cool, and Demons have nothing but hedonism and mischief-making in comparison. Why not make most (ordinary) Curses demoniacally empowered?
This concept has a profound effect on the cosmology and symbology of a campaign world. Demons exist, under this concept, to do the dirty work of the Gods. They do this because they take pleasure in the act itself, not because of any cosmic ideology or theological respect. They are transformed into a species that is, in their own way, every bit as mortal as humans. They might even think that their acts are their own idea; perhaps a curse by a God merely opens a “channel” through which a Demon can act, and the randomness of curses becomes an expression of their chaotic nature.
It might be, on the other hand, that they do recognize the situation, and resent it. The more powerful the Demon, the more they have managed to break free of the will of the Gods, freeing them to act as they see fit. This would give a cosmological justification for the antipathy between Gods and Demons beyond mere alignment differences.
It would also be the God’s dirty little secret, from the point of view of any mortal who learned the truth. It gives deities a stick to go with the carrot, a set of thugs to act as their enforcers, permitting them to keep their hands seemingly squeaky-clean, lapping up the adoration of the masses.
Making Demons just a little more sympathetic, and giving Gods just a little tinge of mud on their boots, makes both types of “creature” far more rounded, and gives a lot more room to explore them as personalities when they appear within a campaign, either directly or by proxy.
There’s still more that can be done. Perhaps the Demons were actually created to be tools of the Devils, and the Gods stole them out from under the Devils’ noses, giving them a modicum of independence – so long as they did what the Gods wanted, every now and then. This would take resentment of both by the Demons to new heights; all they want to be do is to be left alone to spread anarchy and chaos anywhere and everywhere that they can, but the bindings and exploitation that they have suffered at the hands of first one and then the other group of existential beings hold them in check. Still more angst, anger, resentment, and outrage!!
Such demons would be a lot more fun to roleplay, in my opinion!
The Metagame Counter
The reason curses are so weak in the D&D / Pathfinder rules canon is, I think, because the designers didn’t want the curse to become the central consideration of anyone suffering from one. Instead, it needed to be weak enough that you could continue adventuring with it – an inconvenience, nothing more. But they are so easily removed by PC clerics that they aren’t even that.
That’s a problem for the whole question – after all, if a curse is so weak, whatever powers them must also be fairly weak. In fact, it can be seen as undermining the whole proposal for beefing up both curses and power sources.
I don’t fully agree with such an assessment; as I pointed out, at the moment, they only serve their function if the targets (and the PCs) are relatively low level characters. At medium levels, they become trivial annoyances, and at high levels they are virtual irrelevancies. Rather than beefing up curses indiscriminately, perhaps what is needed has to be a little more selective.
A Curse Subsystem
Ignoring, for the moment, any questions of gameplay practicality, what is really needed is some controllable and manipulable “intensity” mechanic that makes some curses more powerful than others, so that at rising caster levels you can inflict something nastier than you could previously.
Such a system would be devilishly difficult to create, and would be highly subjective. A first draft would require the GM to contemplate each possible curse effect and assess it for relative power, then match that with a caster level.
A second draft would then need to build in variations in triggering condition (ie when the Curse makes a difference in gameplay) and in relieving condition (what has to be done to expiate the curse without it being lifted by a cleric).
A third draft would build in variations in difficulty of casting vs difficulty of lifting. That’s no less than six variables, resulting in a relatively complex subsystem within the game mechanics. Correction: Seven variables; I was forgetting the caster level or DC required to attempt to lift a curse without achieving expiation. Oh, wait: Spell Levels (because all this is a bit much to build into a single spell-and-counterspell combination). In fact, the more variations in spell that you have, the more granularity and control you have over the system, trading expansiveness for (relative) ease in construction.
This is not a set of game mechanics that I would like to try and write; complicated, a lot of work for a relatively thin end result, and of limited utility, even assuming practicality of function.
Curse Variations
Setting all that aside, let’s return the basic premise of this article – considering whether or not Curses can and should be more powerful at all.
Curses of greater power
This is not the first time I’ve looked at the subject of Curses; I greatly expanded the range and variety of curses for my Shards Of Divinity campaign, and added a number of House Rules on the subject to that campaign’s DNA. Those House Rules, and the expanded list of possible curses, were previously published in May the camels of 1,000 fleas – wait, that’s not right: Improving Curses in 3.x.
The basic premise of that article was to make the Curse more powerful, and harder to lift, in order to justify the spell level.
But this is not the only variation that is possible.
Minimum Suffering
Why not amend the spell description to state that a Curse can only be lifted after it has been suffered for a number of days equal to the caster level? This restores what I consider to be the original intent and goes some way to justifying the relatively high Spell Level involved.
Restart The Clock
Another idea to add to that would be the possibility that this “clock” restarted if the character re-offended in the same way before the curse had run its course. This would mandate that the reason for the curse be made clear at the time of infliction, but that’s not a bad thing, surely? This would take some of the capriciousness out of the the process, and embody both cause and effect within the concept. The character would know that they were suffering from this effect because of a specific offense to someone, a specific misdeed.
The Downside Of Abuse
But it’s not too difficult to see how the idea of re-triggering could be abused. The inflicter of the Curse simply has to specify the offense that “re-triggers” the Curse (and justifies its being inflicted at all) as something trivial, some action that the target cannot help but re-offend by recommitting – like eating, or drinking, or not bathing every hour. What you get is something closer to a perpetual curse where the “clock” perpetually restarts and the Curse never expires.
Curse Rebound
This problem can be solved by having such ‘curse abuses’ redirect themselves to target the caster. This suits both the moralizing context of Deific curses and the capricious nature of Demonic curses, so it works with several of the other concepts offered in this article.
Curses & Punishment
If Curses are harder to lift, and embody greater variety, it even becomes possible that they would become a standard punishment for some offenses – a punishment with a built-in parole system, one that saves the state all the cost of incarcerating and maintaining a prisoner. You simply load the criminal down with a Curse of Effect commensurate with their crime, and send them on their way.
If Curses leave some sort of permanent stain on the soul – a perfectly valid conceptual construct – then it even becomes possible to identify recidivists with no need for extensive records being kept and consulted in each case.
So, What Empowers A Curse?
I curse all who read this article to think about these things, and whether or not they would add a new element to your games that is worth whatever hassle is involved at a metagame level! What empowers your curses?
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September 18th, 2015 at 3:31 am
Interesting.
I’ve tended to think of it as a similar deal to the level/level nomenclature problem. Perhaps the relatively trivial need renaming—but what? I’d suggest ‘Bane’, but that seems to already be in use.
September 18th, 2015 at 4:28 am
The name is the least of the problems with Curse, but if you really wanted to rename the existing spell and alter its level so that “Curse” was free to mean something significant, probably the best (unused) term would be “Imposition”.
September 19th, 2015 at 4:03 am
I like it!
But what I was thinking was more breaking it into two spells with differing degree of effect (the definitions of which might be a bit tricky; I’ll have to think about it), retaining ‘Curse’ for the heftier edition.
September 19th, 2015 at 11:26 am
“Hex” is another possibility that has occurred to me. So why not “Imposition” for the lowest level (i.e. the existing curse writeup), “Hex” for something a little stronger (occupying the spell-casting level of the existing spell) and “Curse” for something even beefier at a higher level?
September 22nd, 2015 at 3:57 am
Sounds good.
Downright delicious, in fact. :)
October 7th, 2015 at 10:40 pm
[…] Mike Bourke provides Campaign Mastery’s submission to the Blog Carnival: “What Empowers A Curse and other dangerous questions.” […]