My Life As A Gamer: The Pundit Talks Cursed Items

The RPG Pundit welcomes the new year with a video about reviews to come, a new product release, and how to make cursed items interesting in play again.

Good on the Pundit for carrying on like a champ.

His comments on cursed items is one to file away for later reference. He's got a good point in that the usual treatment doesn't make them interesting in play; they're boat anchors you want to ditch as soon as you can, and never be tempted to employ them despite the drawbacks. Making a cursed item into a serious Kiss/Curse calculation is far more interesting, because a memorable cursed item actually grants its user signficant benefits; it's the cost for accessing that power that turns the item into one to dread.

Your typical cursed immortality item is a good example. It keeps the user young, but at the cost of a vampiric existence, sometimes meaning actually conversion into a literal vampire and sometimes at the risk of possession by the creator and being reduced to a prisoner within one's own body as that creator uses your flesh as a meatpuppet for its own ends.

That's how it works in practice: promise serious benefits, deliver on them, and then start telling the user(s) what it takes to keep their access to that power going. This turns the cursed item into a serious moral quandry, and the curse plays on the pride of the user to induce the illusion that the power is so important to have at hand that it is worth any price to maintain that access- driving the user to degrade themselves over time until they willinging give themselves over to the item and are no more than a walking puppet for its power.

Now you have something interesting to see play out at the table. Does the user fall into this trap, or do they avoid it? What happens, and how does it go down? This is as interesting as a scenario for a story as it is a scenario for an adventure, which is why cursed items remain popular topics for both fiction authors and fantasy campaigners. A strong dilemma rooted at the moral level of conflict has a power that cannot be denied when talking about appealing entertainment, as it often prompts people to tell on themselves as to their own moral character (or lack thereof), and to this day the fantasy literature and the tabletop RPG worlds has lengthy conversations about things like the One Ring.