Last week: Discourses on Cursory Curses, and Better Ways to Tempt PCs with Terrible Power
Armor of Vulnerability
This armor grants resistance to one of bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage, but vulnerability to the other two types of damage. While it could come in handy in narrow situations, it’s a net loss for the average combatant.
Tempting the PC: Tweak the armor to grant vulnerability to only one damage type instead of two. It becomes something like a lesser version of the Armor of Invulnerability, but is still quite powerful. This makes the armor a tempting tradeoff, and introduces an additional tactical dimension, where a PC might seek to avoid a monster dealing the damage in question.
Breaking the Curse: For some reason, this item’s description notes that the Identify spell will reveal the curse. That’s contrary to the general rules for curses, which indicate that Identify doesn’t reveal a curse. It’s fine for a specific rule to supersede a general one – that’s part of 5E’s basic design. But I have no idea why this particular distinction was made for this particular cursed item, as it doesn’t serve any particularly obvious purpose.
That aside, we need to make it much harder to get this accursed armor off. Say the armor can only be removed while the character is on the brink of death. This can be done slowly the conventional way, if the wearer can be kept alive long enough; or quickly, as a single action, with the Remove Curse spell. Treating Remove Curse as the spell to cast in the right conditions, rather than a general panacea, helps a lot.
Berserker Axe
The axe grants +1 to hit and damage, and an increase of 1 HP/level. But the drawback is enormous; a range of penalties, particularly a clause that forces the PC to attack at random on a saving throw, including nearby allies.
Tempting the PC: The advantage of the weapon should be much greater. The HP gain is legitimately tempting (in my experience, 5E players always want more HP). But players also hate losing agency over their character, so I think we would have to offer something more tempting. We don’t have to invent something out of whole cloth; weapons like the berserker axe are, of course, a familiar trope in fantasy media. Offer the PC effects like these, that greatly amplify their effectiveness in combat, and they will have to think long and hard about passing on the power.
Breaking the Curse: Let’s pick something that shows the character’s patience and control winning out. Passing the Wisdom saving throw three times in combat without attacking another creature breaks the axe’s hold on the wearer, allowing them to discard it.
Deck of Many Things (Euryale Card)
I am not sure if this one counts, as it’s not an attuned item, but I mention it for completeness. Euryale is one of the cards in the famous Deck of Many Things; most cards are beneficial, but a few are negative, and this one is pretty nasty, hitting the PC with a permanent -2 to all saving throws. Something a little spicier than a generic saving throw penalty might be more interesting, but it’s certainly a strong penalty, and the PC will feel cursed.
Tempting the PC: No change required. The risk/reward proposition of the Deck of Many Things is tempting enough already.
Breaking the Curse: No major change required here either, as the condition is suitably high (only the magic of a god or another specific card in the deck can fix it). That said, the DM should make solving it through a god’s magic suitably difficult; a cleric should not just be able to spam Divine Intervention until the curse goes away.
Demon Armor
This is actually pretty appealing to a low-level character capable of wearing heavy armor; plate +1 is nothing to sneeze at, even if the other abilities (fluency in Abyssal and some unarmed strike damage) don’t come in handy often. The drawbacks, while situational, are severe (disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws versus demons).
Tempting the PC: 5E loves to give out unarmed attacks, particularly as features for various ancestries; but with rare exceptions, most classes want characters to use weapons or magic, not unarmed strikes. Replace this ability with something that grants fire damage or a similar benefit to the character’s weapon attacks would be a nice upgrade. As with the berserker axe, there are more tempting examples in other media; Berserker Armor is a more compelling example than the rather modest benefits here, or the cursed armor from Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine (see second paragraph under “Grim and Grotty” here for an idea).
Breaking the Curse: Remove Curse appears again here, making the armor trivial to remove during rest, as long as the group has access to a cleric. Add a saving throw with an escalating DC based on how long the character has worn the armor, or how many times it has saved them from damage, to make it scarier to wear. For extra spice, perhaps a devil (as the sworn enemy of demons) could help a character remove the armor. Of course, dealing with devils brings its own complications…
Shield of Missile Attraction
OK, this one is weird.
Many shield-carrying characters are tanks who want to take hits meant for squishier party members anyway. And the resistance means they’ll take less damage when those attacks do get past their superior AC. Moreso than the other cursed 5E items, this one is pretty close to being more obviously upside than downside. The biggest drawback is probably that the shield wearer will sometimes interfere with allied fire. My longest-running 5E group included an archer who was constantly sniping at enemies in melee with their allies, so this certainly would have come up as a problem.
Tempting the PC: Expand the range so that the shield covers a bigger area; 10’ is arbitrarily small. If you want to make it really spicy, change it from “ranged weapon attacks” to “ranged attacks” generally. At higher levels, ranged weapon attacks come up a lot less as most enemies are either melee heavies or employing magic (if you’ve ever played (or DM’d for) a 5E monk, think about how the Deflect Missiles ability came up less and less as they reached higher levels).
And please change the name. The coldly clinical and overtly descriptive name of “Shield of Missile Attraction” is a weirdly literal holdover from early D&D (it may even go back to Gygax himself, as he oscillated between evocative names loyal to Appendix N fiction, and names that sound like they belong on the cover of a user manual).
Call it the Shield of the Bloodied Defender of Grix or something fancy like that, and give it a backstory about a martyred paladin who died pierced by 999 arrows while holding off an army so his allies could escape.
Breaking the Curse: Find the remains of that paladin who first bore the shield and remove the Arrow of Hero Slaying still embedded in his remains to free his soul. Rather than just allowing the PC to drop the shield, give it an added ability to choose whether to attract or pass on any given attack.
Sword of Vengeance
This one is a boring +1 sword that piles on a bunch of restrictions, principally forcing the PC to repeatedly attack someone who damaged them. Restricting a character’s choices isn’t as fun as the designer’s think it is. In an authored narrative work, this can be a powerful tool for telling a story. In a game, this is frustrating and boring for many players, especially when their character is forced to do the same thing round after round. RPGs are about making choices. Be very wary of things that give players few or no choices.
Tempting the PC: This one is a close cousin to the berserker’s axe, and the same kinds of improvements apply. Give the sword some additional powers, like adding a Vampiric Touch on a finishing blow, or a movement bonus that kicks in when the sword’s wielder is pursuing an enemy that damaged them.
Breaking the Curse: This one actually says “You can break the curse in the usual ways.” Yaaawn. We’re beating a dead zebra at this point, but there should not be “usual ways” of dealing with curses, like something on your to-do list between picking up dry cleaning and mailing some letters. The ways should always be unique.
The Sword of Vengeance offers a slightly more interesting alternative in that PCs can use the Banishment spell to expel the vengeful spirit. It’s cool that the players get a “clean” +1 sword out of the deal, but a one-time casting of a fourth-level spell isn’t that high of a bar to clear, and a +1 sword gets discarded pretty early in 5E’s high-powered adventuring world. To break the curse, a PC should have to investigate who the spirit was in life, learn why it sought vengeance, and do something to right its wrongs (or perform a compensatory action elsewhere in the world). Much more interesting.
Axe of the Dwarvish Lords
Finally, we have an artifact. It’s suitably impressive, encompassing the effects of several lesser magic items that are quite good on their own.
Tempting the PC: No problem here. This is an artifact, a +3 weapon, with a whole suite of useful abilities. It’s suitable as a final gear upgrade for a tier 4 PC finishing a 1-20 campaign.
Breaking the Curse: The curse here is more interesting than some of the previous entries; it transforms non-dwarves to make them gradually more dwarf-like in appearance. This certainly tells a more interesting story than a -1 to some rolls, but is a non-factor for a PC who doesn’t care about character aesthetics. A more interesting curse might involve playing into the folklore aspects of mythological dwarves; an insatiable lust for gold, or a desire to carve great works on the sides of mountains, or tunnel into the depths of the earth.
Despite the epic magic involved, Remove Curse still does the job just as well. Artifacts like the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords include instructions for their destruction, so consider simply saying that the only way to break the curse is to destroy the axe (or something similarly difficult). That will make a PC pause before running wild with this epic weapon.
Next Week: “Cursed” Magic Items From My Home Game
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