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Curses

Source Horror Adventures pg. 138
Curses are among the oldest and most deeply feared types of magic. They linger far beyond the original malicious words or grave deeds that spawned them. Although the most wellknown and easily broken types of curses are spells, others are afflictions, from the notorious curse of lycanthropy to foul mummy rot and the esoteric death curse of the linnorm. All the new curses presented in this section are afflictions and share certain features as a result.

This section includes new curses, as well as several curse variants. It also provides advice for using all kinds of curses in your game, including guidelines on creating them.

Curses in your Game

Source Horror Adventures pg. 138
Curses can afflict characters in a variety of ways, but because they are perniciously difficult to remove, the tone of the game can shift if they appear often. Most curses—especially those that require more than a simple remove curse spell to eliminate—should be used to add a significant and memorable challenge or as a consequence for a momentous choice. A relentless torrent of curses reduces their mystique while dramatically hampering a party’s effectiveness, potentially removing the PCs’ ability to deal with encounters of appropriate Challenge Ratings.

Curse Spells

Source Horror Adventures pg. 138
Many spells can place curses on unfortunate victims. Their effects are usually simple and can be ended with the right spell (but never dispel magic). All curse spells have the curse descriptor. The most well-known is bestow curse, which allows the caster to invent her own effect in line with the listed options (no worse than a 50% chance of losing actions, a –4 penalty on checks, or a –6 penalty to an ability score). Effects in line with that power level include the following, though ultimately they are limited only by the caster’s imagination and the GM’s discretion.

When the victim is adjacent to the area of a damaging spell or spell-like effect (even one he created himself ), the area expands to include the victim. The victim can’t heal naturally, and magical healing heals the victim by only half the usual amount (minimum 1 point). The victim’s fast healing and regeneration, if any, are likewise halved. The victim is plagued by cacophonous sounds and strobing lights that only she can hear and see. She is distracted (–5 penalty on Perception checks), cannot take 10 on skill checks, and must succeed at a concentration check (DC = 20 + spell level) to successfully cast spells. Any time the victim picks up or retrieves an object (including drawing a weapon or ammunition), there is a 50% chance that she immediately drops it. If she drops ammunition while attempting to make a ranged attack, that particular attack is lost.

Save DCs: The stat block for a curse lists the save DC. For curses that can be created by a spell, this usually represents the minimum DC. If a spell is used to create a curse in your game, calculate the DC using the caster’s ability score and the spell level as normal.

Optional Rule: Spontaneous Curses

Although spellcasters can curse targets more easily than others, in times of great emotion and the need for vengeance, other creatures can channel divine or arcane energy to create a spontaneous curse. A curse can be improvised only under great stress, whether by the deepest indignity, seething hatred, cold revenge, or as a dying act (all at the GM’s discretion), though in any case, never more than once in a month. Spontaneous curses are most commonly placed upon those who violate a taboo or a sacred or unholy place. Sometimes gods or other supernatural beings curse mortals who fail tests of character or who trespass where they are not welcome.

If the GM allows a creature to place a spontaneous curse, that creature must have at least 5 ranks in Knowledge (arcana) or (religion). Such a creature can attempt to use a curse with a listed DC less than or equal to 10 + its number of ranks in the skill. Creatures with a curse ability, as well as some creatures closely associated with curses (such as angels, fey, hags, and undead), can curse a target without meeting this requirement. Improvising a curse reduces the cursing creature’s Charisma score by 2, and this decrease remains as long as the curse lasts; the cursing creature cannot dismiss its improvised curse.

Creating New Curses

Source Horror Adventures pg. 140
Curses needn’t be limited to the effects listed under Afflictions. When designing a new curse, though, be careful not to go too far. A devastating curse can have consequences as serious as dying or being turned to stone. Certainly, horrific curses that promise immediate and inescapable doom have their place, but curses that can be endured for a time bring far more horror to the table, as struggling under the curse can lead to more tension than instant death would bring, while surviving and escaping such a curse can become an adventure all its own. Consider these guidelines when creating a curse.

Make It Logical: A character generally doesn’t get cursed for minding her own business. More often, the victim meddled with powerful forces, disturbed an ancient grave, or even wronged a vengeful fortune-teller. Try to fit the curse to the act that brought it on, like a glutton being unable to eat, a bigot becoming the target of his bigotry, or a tomb robber burning in the light of day.

Make It Interesting: A boring curse isn’t worth the game time it consumes. A good curse should be creepy, comical, embarrassing, or terrifying, and it helps to have a good story behind it.

Make It Interactive: Some curses require the players and GM to roleplay effects such as an inability to lie or a compulsion to steal. This sort of curse can be very rewarding with a motivated group, as possible effects could extend far beyond what game mechanics decree.

Make It Simple: A good curse has easy-to-handle mechanics. Most curses should have only one or two effects, and should be possible to resolve during play. Avoid the need to reference complicated effects during combat. Failing that, prepare an index card with the curse’s details that you can use as an easy reference.

Types of Curses

Source Horror Adventures pg. 140
Curses can have a wide range of effects, which is something to keep in mind when designing a new curse. They may trigger only intermittently, apply a constant penalty, or grow worse with time. In addition, curses can function exclusively using game mechanics, or incorporate roleplaying considerations.

Intermittent: Some curses, such as unluck, trigger only under certain conditions but otherwise stay consistent in their effects.

Mechanical: These curses rely on game mechanics for the majority of their effects, such as applying penalties, ability damage, or negative conditions. This sort of curse is a good choice if you want a steady, consistent effect for the curse, though particularly with conditions, you might have to start considering interactions with other abilities triggered by those conditions.

Progressive: A progressive curse functions much like a disease, requiring periodic checks to determine whether the affliction progresses. However, unlike those suffering from diseases, the victims of these curses cannot recover just by succeeding at saving throws. A progressive curse worsens with each failed save, often ending in incapacitation or death. Mummy rot is a typical progressive curse.

Static: Curses like baleful polymorph apply an effect for the entire duration of the curse, with no change in their severity.

Breaking the Curse

Source Horror Adventures pg. 141
The most conventional way to rid a victim of a curse is the spell remove curse, occasionally with the aid of other or more powerful magic. When making a new curse, especially one with a strong story background, consider novel ways to remove the curse beyond just casting a spell, as with the spell conditional curse. Robbers might be cursed until they return every ill-gotten coin, while a haughty aristocrat might suffer until she cleans the feet of a dozen beggars. In these cases, it’s best to make the victim vaguely aware of how to end his torment, but let him discover the specific details on his own through either research or trial and error. Curses with story-based remedies are often hard to break with remove curse and break enchantment. Increase the DC for removal by 2, 5, or even 10 based on the power of the curse. Particularly powerful curses resist remove curse and break enchantment entirely, requiring either specific conditions for removal or the application of limited wish, miracle, or wish.

Some curses are easier to remove than normal; improvised curses, because of their impromptu nature, tend to be easier to remove. A simple cleansing ritual might suffice to remove them, which the PCs could discover through exploration, research, or a successful Knowledge (religion) check. Such curses could even fade over the course of days or weeks. While many NPC casters offer curse removal with no questions asked, it is common knowledge that curses are rarely picked up accidentally. Some of these casters might want to know the circumstances behind the curse (often employing Sense Motive or even divination magic during the discussion). Good-aligned churches might expect acts of atonement or charity as at least partial payment for removing a justly gained curse.

Alternative Means of Relief

Source Horror Adventures pg. 141
Should a curse seem impossible to end by either normal or conditional means, the accursed might take desperate measures for even temporary relief from their suffering. Many such methods are dire enough that creatures may consider them worse than simply being cursed.

Death: Some curses end upon the death of the victim, perhaps leading a victim to take her own life in the hope of being raised from the dead free of the curse. Although some find release this way, others are sorely disappointed; some gods may not smile upon such wanton suicide—or the victims might be restored to life, only to find themselves still afflicted by the curse.

Making Amends: A curse laid as punishment for a misdeed might be neutralized by rectifying the misdeed. But there are no guarantees. Undoing the misdeed and additionally offering a comparable effort to make up for the trouble caused might allow a new saving throw against the curse to remove it. Forgiveness from the curse-layer grants a +4 bonus on this saving throw. For curses that require amends, remove curse generally fails unless and until such amends are made.

Symbiosis: On rare occasions, a character might allow the curse to infect her very being as a desperate attempt to mitigate the effects, hoping that this will give her some measure of control. Symbiosis with a curse is rarely successful, and it usually leads to contracting an accursed corruption, as the curse takes over the creature’s personality. In rare cases, curse symbiosis might transform the accursed into a monster associated with curses (such as a hag) without first going through an accursed corruption.

Cursed Items

Source Horror Adventures pg. 142
The Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook and Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Equipment describe many kinds of cursed magic items. These cursed items most commonly result from something going horribly wrong during the creation of a normal magic item. However, it is also possible for such items to carry a curse to punish a death or to be the result of intentional malice. Cursed items are often most pernicious and difficult to thwart when created to hurt a particular foe.

Crafting Cursed Items

Source Horror Adventures pg. 142
A creature can intentionally craft a cursed item—except unique cursed items and items with opposite effects—in the same manner as the item it resembles in most respects. Crafting a cursed item has the same requirements and calls for the same skill checks as for the normal item, but in addition, intentionally cursed items require bestow curse or major curse. Crafting cursed items that pervert normal items usually has the same cost as for the fully functional versions, though with the exceptions below. However, as with all magic item price guidelines, the discounts below should be used only as a starting point for determining a cursed item’s final price, and the particulars of a given situation will likely require ad hoc adjustments beyond the advice below.

Delusion: Items that merely delude the user into thinking they function cost 90% less than normal, or possibly even less (for instance, an item that deludes the user into thinking it’s a mirror of life trapping probably doesn’t need to cost 20,000 gp).

Drawbacks and Requirements: Drawbacks and requirements typically don’t reduce the cost of a cursed item in any way (and might increase it). Since the crafter of an intentionally cursed item is setting these requirements, it is expected that she does so with a particular agenda, such as choosing a requirement that doesn’t affect her very much but would make the item painful for her enemies to use should they steal it, or choosing a requirement that she wants someone to perform anyway and then offering the item as a gift.

That said, these curses typically affect the price when selling the cursed items to a merchant. The price may be reduced by 10% for minor drawbacks or requirements such as minimum skill ranks or the worship of a specific deity; by 30% for harmful or costly drawbacks or requirements such as an alignment change, ability damage, sacrificing wealth, or performing a quest to activate the item; or by 50% for severe drawbacks or requirements such as negative levels that cannot be removed or needing to routinely sacrifice sentient creatures to the item.

Opposite Effect on Target: These items are rarely appropriate for a character to intentionally craft, as they might lead to weird situations where a reverse attack or a dispelling of certain spells is actually beneficial when used on allies, or vice versa. For effects where the opposite is not a new effect (such as inflict light wounds instead of cure light wounds), the crafter might as well just craft the opposite item to begin with unless she plans on tricking the owner of the item.

Stained Items: A creature’s death can potentially stain a magic item that’s used to kill it, that’s in close proximity at the moment of death, or that’s crafted using material gained by its death. A stained item is permanently converted into a cursed item of the appropriate type. A stained item functions as normal for a cursed item of its type except that the DCs of checks for remove curse or similar magic to suppress or remove the item’s curse from any creature responsible for the curse-layer’s death increases by 5.

Unique Items: These items should be priced and their crafting requirements assigned on a case-by-case basis as new items with the effects they produce rather than the items they appear to be.

Cursed Land

Source Horror Adventures pg. 143
Cursed land is a region marked by divine judgment, scarred by a great tragedy, or wounded by intentional malice. Common causes of such a regional curse include undead hauntings in the area, a grave transgression by the inhabitants that offends a powerful spirit or god, and large-scale killing or destruction that demands justice. They can also be artificially created with spells, such as curse of night, curse of fell seasons, and the curse terrain spells. A regional curse has an area in addition to the features all curses have. All regional curses have a DC for the purpose of removing the curse, but many of their effects allow no saving throw. When casting remove curse to remove a regional curse, the caster treats the land as an object and typically needs to be at the center of the emanation or at some other location closely tied to the curse.

Sometimes, a creature’s punishment curse and a land’s curse are the same. A cursed lord is a creature trapped by a cursed realm. The cursed lord gains power over the realm, but is incapable of leaving unless the curse is somehow broken, which usually involves killing or redeeming the cursed lord. Characters can accomplish this only by enacting very specific circumstances, similar to the restrictions placed upon the destruction of artifacts. For example, a cursed realm might trap a villainous cursed lord who profited by selling false maps to escaped slaves and refugees, who then drowned while attempting to cross a river at a nonexistent ford; the realm would be impossible to free from the stain of his heinous crime until he is slain and his body is placed in the river by a former slave.

Curse Templates

Source Horror Adventures pg. 143
Some curses function in an unusual fashion compared to others. The following section presents several templates that can be applied to any curse to represent variants of that curse. These templates function similarly to templates that can be applied to creatures, and you could potentially apply several templates to the same curse to create a truly horrifying effect.

Contagious Curse

Effect In addition to the curse’s normal effect, the curse is transmissible to other creatures by a particular means. This could be similar to transmission methods for a disease, or it could be something more esoteric, such as by song or love.

Cure The accursed creature’s attempts to remove its own curse with magic automatically fail, though other creatures can do so as normal. Whatever its other means of transmission, a creature attempting to cure the original creature’s curse with magic is automatically exposed to the curse and must succeed at a saving throw to avoid being afflicted by it.

Death Curse

Effect A death curse usually occurs upon the deaths of linnorms, some fey, or hags, but other creatures can also curse their killers. The save DC is equal to 10 + 1/2 the creature’s Hit Dice + the creature’s Charisma modifier, rather than the curse’s normal DC. A death curse’s effect is the same as the original curse, and the effect tends to vary based on the cursing creature’s HD.

Cure In addition to the standard cures, the first time that the creature who placed the death curse returns to life, the accursed creature receives a new saving throw to break the curse. If the accursed contributes to this resurrection, she receives a +4 bonus on this saving throw.

HD	Death Curse
1–5	Minor haunting or weeping wound
6–10	Bestow curse, major haunting, or tormenting visions
11–15	Doom of the hunted, shattered self, or unluck
16–20	Greater doom of the hunted or sealed fate

Generational Curse

Effect In addition to cursing the original target creature, this curse continues to curse the target’s children, and their children, and so on across multiple generations. It is possible it might carry on only to certain children (such as daughters or firstborn children).

Cure Generational curses can usually be cured only by special means, though the extinction of a family line also is able to end its threat. Even if remove curse can cure the curse on an individual target, it doesn’t stop the generational curse from affecting future generations, which must deal with the curse in their own manner.

Archives of Nethys

Rules Index | GM Screen

Optional Rule: Spontaneous Curses

Contagious Curse

Death Curse

Generational Curse