Making Curses Work: How the Rules can Add to your Game Rather than Take

     Okay, I have a confession, I really hate the way that cursed items are presented in D&D and its children such as Pathfinder. As most groups and PR that you will see from outside the text will tell you, Cursed Items are the classic worst case scenario that you will see from classic literature. The bag that eats your items & your hand, the sword that makes you weaker not stronger, the crown that makes you mad or dumber rather than smarter, all of these things are really cool and fascinating but limits the actual use of the mechanic throughout the vast majority of games. Most players do not want to get saddled with weakening swords they cannot use, and most GMs don't want to stick players with bad items that are usually unfun in most instances and find using them to oftentimes feel more like a punishment than anything else. 

    And all of that is a shame, because as written, there's A LOT of really cool stuff that is written into the cursed rules that just gets glossed over, because so much of the "punishment as mechanics" is featured in the narrative and marketing of the work that most people don't think it is worth the time to read the writeups and fiddle with it to get something cool. And I don't blame them, I did the same thing for a long time. We buy these books to give us ideas and act like compasses that can point us towards interesting new lands of creativity we might not have found otherwise, and if the writing doesn't open up that scope, it's like your compass is just spinning, and what makes the designer think that those of us who are just hobbyists want to buy something that makes us more lost and annoyed? So, I'm going to talk about cursed items for a bit, and I want to show you how they can be cool 😎. 

Intermittent Function: The Greatest Flavor Enhancer for your Magic Items & Wallet

    For the longest time, one of my biggest complaints with these games has been magic items. The costs are often disproportionately high for what they are looking to do, they function the exact same way every time regardless of who made them and why, they never fail, and each version of the same item is so homogenous that they all blend together. None of that is what I think of when I think of magic. Magic doesn't always have to give a shit about money, it is a tool of the poor as much as the rich, every drop of magic is unique and not meant to be quantifiable, and is anathema to homogeneity, and each culture and place throughout history has done magic in its own unique way that is strange, wonderful, and fascinating. Ignoring these things creates something that makes buying potions and magic shields feel less like I am discovering these weird and unknowable things and more like I'm upgrading my cellphone, and that banality is not something any of us want, nor the stupid price points that some items end up at. 

And one of the greatest fixes for this I've found is the Intermittent Function, for Cursed items. 

Now, the Pathfinder Core Rulebook defines Cursed Items of Intermittent function as, "Items that all function perfectly as intended—at least some of the time. The three varieties are unreliable, dependent, and uncontrolled items." And the book itself continues to explain these 3, but each is only given about a sentence of text and a table for one of them, and none of it really wants to dig into the vast potential each of these ideas brings to bear. 

So lets correct that.

Unreliable Items

    Unreliable items are classic magical item fare, magical swords that don't always work like they have a mind of their own, potions that are just snake oil, wands that fail, all of these are perfect setups for a myriad of ideas that can become great stories with interesting mechanics. Some examples include...

Ex. 

• Most potions are unreliable, potentially failing 5% of the time. Many do not understand the inherent power of the magic they wield, making these poultices not always the best at meeting their needs, & lack of oversight making some major markets a bit of a wild west. That said, this ease of creation has made potions cheaper to make, and as such flooded the market. All potions by an unreliable alchemist or apothecary cost 20% less. 
• The magic sword is unreliable, periodically shutting down. This could be a sign of faulty magical schema that the party wizard will need to correct, or a sign of a nascent intelligence slowly brewing beneath the magical diagrams...

Each of these concepts an carry you through a whole game, and setup your world from how its economy works, with unregulated potions making these important consumables cheap but stratified by resources and class, to a deeply personal story about how the magic axe slowly becomes sentient, and those random shut offs begin to inform on who that character is going to be. 

Dependent Items

    Dependent Items are magical items that only function in certain situations. Again, there are a myriad of ways this is useful, but is criminally under explored in the text. A lot of the examples given focus on alignment, proximity to certain people/objects, or terrain. Now, some of these are interesting like terrain choices, but many of the other options become so binary to be ignorable. If you make a paladin's sword magical only in the hands of divine casters, you've given him a boon not a bane. But, let's take this idea and spool it out a little in a way that is more interesting for GM's and player alike. 

Ex. 

• Your longsword only works on holy ground, such as churches, consecrated spaces, or against evil outsiders. The faith believes in defense of the sacred, so many of their weapons are blessed such as this, their magic limited and stunted from being used against the tenants of the faith. 
• A thief has a suit of custom armor made for him so that he might sneak into the lord's land, but has it cursed to only function at night. Though this may seem like a bane, it allows him to walk it through the gates of town the morning of, as until nightfall it is mundane. 
• The local town is deeply devoted to a faith of the oceans and water, and as such many of their rituals involve submersion in water or baptisms. As such, many of their sacred healing oils are meant to be used while submerged, and many are applied as part of sacred baths to cleanse and heal. 
• The forge uses a sacred anvil to craft many of its most valuable armors, but special care is given to the week of the Summer Solstice. This time is considered sacred to their god of fire & flames and for that time the anvil thrums with magical power, making even the most difficult jobs easy and manageable. The forge organizes its whole schedule around this time, and the team of smiths forge around the clock to finish many of their most difficult projects. 

See how with just a little bit of narrative & worldbuilding you can take this whole concept and create stories around it? I mean, the "On holy days or during particular astrological events" entry leaves room for a host of temporary artifacts one could dream up for their party from death weapons that only function when a comet passes over head to shields that defend the faithful on Christmas. 

Unreliable Items

Now, the last category is Unreliable, and I find these a bit more tricky, but used sparingly I think they can be effective. The biggest issue I tend to find with them is less the worry of punishment mechanics, but just the recordkeeping of it all. A cool new flaming sword that might auto ignite is a great place for story, while every potion having a chance to trigger and expend itself could get bogged down in tedious bookkeeping. That said, having a lot of potions have a chance to trigger and then expend themselves, potentially wasting the potion before it is ever used is a pretty good way to keep players from hoarding them, forcing PCs to use tools quickly and keeping them from having the pile of pots sitting on their sheet for years. So, lets walk this list out. 

Ex.

• You capture a flaming sword from a cult of elemental fire. The weapon is powerful, but it is forged from the soul of a living fire. It is powerful, but it looks to eat, and periodically it ignites in order to feed itself on the flames. The the cult, this was no issue, and the blade was kept in a hearth to feed it should it grow hungry, but our PCs are not pious followers, and do not understand or respect the cult from which they claimed it from. Now, it's only a matter of time before the sword starts lighting their belongings and potentially their lodgings on fire as they travel. Will they try to best or offload this "cursed" blade at the earliest opportunity, or learn to understand its needs?
• Magic is tricky and hard to pin down in any format and this includes consumables such as potions. Many potions have an expiration date, a point at which the magic activates and consumes itself, leaving the dregs behind. This is in part why most potions & oils are for beneficial effects, as having your vial of stone to flesh become fleshy is bad enough on its own, having an oil of pyrotechnics start combusting on your belt is no picnic. 
• A daemon offers you a Grim Lantern in order to defeat a local monster, but little do you know that the lantern has a will all its own. If the party does not use the lantern soon, the magic will eventually activate, and the skull will breathe its gout of soul flames on whoever is too close, collecting the soul of the deceased for their benefactor's vile needs. 
• The followers of the Azata of Magic believe in 2 things. That all living things need to be treated with dignity & equity in order to self determine, and that magic is alive. To that end, magic harnessed for use in items is not captured and coerced, but bargained with and convinced. Does this mean that their items are prone to acting of their own accord? Yes, but they have the freedom to do so, and convincing magic to help someone is much easier than trying to jail it forever. 

And these are just some examples of what this idea can bring to your table! Use it to craft a market of cheap but unreliable potions, explore magic as metaphor, start a story of the nature of magic and control, or whatever you like! Hopefully this is but a stepping stone to new stories for you and your players.