D&D Curses and Cursed Items

We’ve had D&D cursed items on the brain for it seems like a month now at least. Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus motivated us to look at some of the darker and more evil D&D magic items and artifacts. Some of them are really nasty! Part of our discussions led to thinking about curses in general and cursed items in particular. And then on top of all that, the Cursed Collective Kickstarter from Session Zero launched, with Nerdarchists Dave and Ted contributing to the project with cursed items they designed.

Curses and cursed items in D&D

Maybe it’s the Halloween season, or maybe it’s Witch’s Cottage from the Throne of Eldraine expansion for Magic: The Gathering that I’ve been enjoying so much with Dread Presence, but when I think of curses I think of witches. Macbeth had them, and curses may befall adventurers in Curse of Strahd too. Hag covens can bestow curses and they’re pretty witchy as well.

In the video Dave presses his point how he likes when curses mean something in the game, and I’m on the same page. After thinking about it all day, I can’t shake the feeling remove curse is the fly in the ointment. It’s just too broad!

“At your touch, all curses affecting one creature or object end. If the object is a cursed magic item, its curse remains, but the spell breaks its owner’s attunement to the object so it can be removed or discarded.”

The only way around easily breaking curses with remove curse is designing new material with language specifically negating the spell’s effect. Or an easier way (but still requiring content creation) is don’t call them curses or cursed items. Bane, hex, Evil Eye — all taken. How about jinx? It’s got an “x” in there so it’s edgy, sort of hex adjacent.

Beware the witches curses!

Jinxes > curses?

Jinx carries a connotation of bad luck, so getting jinxed or using a jinxed item maybe doesn’t bring about quite as dire circumstances as say, donning scorpion armor. (Unless you’re a yuan-ti, then don your cursed armor to your cold-blooded heart’s content.) Since curses and cursed items already have the dark and dire parts covered, jinxes could fall under the purview of fey. Fey can be capricious and cruel at times too, so these jinxes can range anywhere from harmless pranks and nuisances to downright lethal consequences.

The challenge with curses in D&D is right there in the name. Because remove curse ends all curses, a Dungeon Master might feel restricted from a rich area of storytelling. Like Ted’s example from his game, the cursed items he teased the players with turned out to be a minor speedbump and a moment of amusement for the players.

Imagine instead if the cloak of random noises Dave’s character attuned to was jinxed instead. He thought he was supremely stealthy, and maybe most of the time it worked just like a cloak of elvenkind. But whenever Dave makes a Stealth check, the DM rolls to check if the jinx goes off. Now, instead of masking sound, it’s creating a ruckus. Remove curse doesn’t seem to work. Now they party has an adventure on their hands.

A great example of a curse from literature is Thinner, a novel by Stephen King. Not only is the titular character rapidly wasting away by losing dangerous amounts of weight, but other people in the town are cursed as well. When I look at bestow curse, certain creatures and NPCs like Madam Eva or the terrifying fomorian, I think about what their curses mean beyond the mechanical impacts. There is fertile ground here for roleplaying, drama and tension. But it requires buy-in from the group.

“With a stare, the fomorian uses Evil Eye, but on a failed [Charisma] save, the creature is also cursed with magical deformities. While deformed, the creature has its speed halved and has disadvantage on ability checks, saving throws, and attacks based on Strength or Dexterity. The transformed creature can repeat the saving throw whenever it finishes a long rest, ending the effect on a success.”

On one hand, fomorian’s Evil Eye is incredibly impactful. You’re not just cursed with some mechanical detriments. You are physically deformed! Granted, it is even more easily solved than casting remove curse (which would also work) because you can just rest and make another saving throw to end the curse and return to normal. Madam Eva’s curse similarly causes mechanical effects — blinded and deafened. With bestow curse I like to imagine what sort of manifestation those effects could have. Consider this option from bestow curse: “While cursed, the target must make a Wisdom saving throw at the start of each of its turns. If it fails, it wastes its action that turn doing nothing.” What if it is cast on a character with a 5th, 7th or even 9th level spell slot? This becomes a serious problem, especially if the party has no access to remove curse. In a combat encounter, a these curses last for 1 minute to start. That’s ten turns. When the duration is 8 hours, 24 hours or simply until dispelled, the character potentially can do nothing the entire time (if they failed a Wisdom saving throw every 6 seconds).

Devastating! Beyond the dire mechanical situation, what does that mean for the character? They are afflicted by a curse of ennui. Their companions can’t seem to motivate them to do anything, even move. This would be a frightening scenario.

The challenges of incorporating curses and cursed items into your D&D game are a combination of mechanical efficacy (not much considering remove curse) and narrative buy-in. While it’s of course fun to be a capable adventuring strike team, it’s also fun and enriching to make characters’ struggles and setbacks part of the story too. Curses affect the way a character looks, thinks, feels and acts, beyond whatever mechanical detriments they cause. Exploring these ideas can result in rewarding character growth.

In the case of cursed items, the trick I think is introducing cursed items with a risk vs. reward structure. Most of the cursed items in D&D I can think of have drawbacks that aren’t worth the benefit, so once the curse is discovered, the item is useless to a certain extent. One of the biggest draws of the Cursed Collective content is from what I’ve seen, these cursed items strike the balance I’m looking for. Not only will players want to use these cursed items, I can imagine the characters grappling with some hard questions because the consequences look dire, but the benefits might just be worth risking the curses.