A bakers dozen of fiendish misadventures…
The concept of “The Curse” is a staple in most fantasy literature, so it’s only natural that at times it gets an outing in our favourite RPG games.
Dungeon Crawl Classics’s Appendix C gives us a few example curses to inflict on our hapless players, and this is a great place to start to get the feel of what a DCC/OSR curse ought to be. Like everything else it cries out to be customised for the individual campaign!
Clearly the thought in each case is that this is something that will stick with a character or group for a little while, at least. Possibly even spawning a sub-plot, as they finally get powerful enough to try and lift it. The guiding principle seems to be to make it powerful enough to inconvenience characters of the appropriate level but not utterly crippling.
Any GM worth their salt I am sure can sit and dream up some things specific to their game. However, every so often it’s handy to have a generic curse or perhaps a random generator that we can toss something out on the fly during a random event during play. It always helps to have some spare material in case the party turn down an unexpected direction after all!
So here I have attempted to make up a few more custom detailed curses built up from a random generated list.
My thought is that GM’s can use the generator for inspiration or if they need a quick solution, then when they have leisure customise it more specifically to fit the Curser and the Accursed…
Salubriations,
Giles Othen
DCC – Curses & Removal Rites
Illustration by the famous voodoo houngan Danny Prescott.