My favorite use of bestow curse was in a Pathfinder game where I cursed someone with "may everything you want in life slip through your fingers" and the affect was just a 50% chance to fumble and drop any item they tried to pick up
I like the idea of a pc who just cursed everyone so much they get nerfed to level 1 and everyone who they cursed just gets off free and now they all hate them.
I did "the bad penny curse" where a curse effect is tied to an item that cannot be thrown away or destroyed, only given to someone who accepts it. The cursed person cannot gain hp by resting while cursed, they take 1d6 hp damage every 15 minutes they are away from the item if they own it, and and damage done to the item is transfered to them. The relief of the curse happens if the person returns the bad penny to the grave it was stolen from and put it on the eyes of the corpse it was stolen from. Made a whole quest of chasing the chain of owners to resolve it.
@Drekromancer though I am critical of the base rules for curses, Van Rickton's Guild to Ravenloft has more advice and rules to make curses more useful for this game, and the best advice is "make a curse a sidequest the cursed person can complete."
Part of me is now imagining some cleric just walking up to Strahd and casting remove curse on him, and suddenly he gets all normal about things, and leaves the Demiplane of Dread.
also shoutout to the Dark Gifts from Ravenloft - truly the epitome of "you're cursed, and *here's* how that's going to fuck with you" admittedly they're definitely leaning more towards being more beneficial than not (wow no way) but you can easily make them fuck you over lmao
This is why I liked what Grim Hollow did so much with the idea of curses. Going more in depth to remove or earn them like you said, and even having cool progression of it. Such as the one where you start out being narcissistic and loving to admire your reflection, and end as a cursed humanoid tree that tries to turn anyone who touches you into mirror-like trees to better admire your beauty. It just makes for a much cooler introduction and implementation if you can make a small adventure out of it rather than some cleric casting a 3rd level *NO*
There are somewhat genuine curses that the Vistani from Curse of Strahd can bestow upon those that have slighted them, but the Vistani risks their life in doing so since they take psychic damage equal to the severity of the curse if the accursed manages to break it. I believe the most severe was disabling someone's motor functions
There's the saying that "curses come home to roost", so the idea that breaking a curse causes magical backlash upon the one who bestowed it relative to the curse's severity is actually pretty cool. It adds to how spiteful those curses must be because they know they'll get hurt on the rebound if the target weasels their way out of it but they're still deciding they want to go there.
I once made a cursed item that causes all fluid that enters the cursed person's mouth to turn to sand. It also made it easier to crit against any creature made primarily of fluid, like oozes and water elementals (by 5%), and getting a (melee) crit on someone would transfer hydration from the target's body to your own. (These only apply to the weapon you attached the gem to, which also gains a general magic +1.) If you went a day without hydration, you'd wake up with a level of exhaustion that couldn't be removed by rest, so this encourages you to fight every day until you crit, even if it's downtime. Getting a crit will reduce your own levels of exhaustion by 1 and give the target a level of exhaustion because of their loss of hydration, but only if you crit without having any levels of exhaustion do you not gain one tomorrow morning. If submerged, the Sandstone Gem of Dehydration will also slowly turn the liquid it's in into sand. It's slow, but throwing it into the ocean could basically screw over that entire plane in a few dozen generations. ...So someone in the party used it, and the cleric used Remove Curse every day so they could drink water before bed. This was a bit anticlimactic.
My favorite real-world curse is "may you survive 6 of your 7 cancers." Because i dont just want you to get a debilitating, terminal illness. I want you to fight for a life not worth living in a body that hates you. Curses aren't silly They are heavy, hateful wishes
In Curse of Strahd, there is actually a hole-buch of Vistani (the gipsy people) curses, where some of them are kinda cool, even having diffirent power-scales. You missed on that one...
Ahh yes, the Loup Garou from Van Richten's... Because french werewolves are better than english werewolves (yes, loup garou is just werewolf in french)
... how did they translate that one, actually? Scince the regular werewolf is calles a loup garou in the french version of the Monster Manual, how does the french version of Van Richten's translate "loup garou" into french while making it different from regular loup garoux?
As someone who hates food and eating, this doesn't sound so terrible. If I'm always full, then I just don't need to eat anymore. One person's curse is another person's blessing (& vice versa).
No, you will always FEEL full, so you still have to eat but every bite is makes you feel like you're going to burst, but despite this you will slowly wither away from starvation. TLDR: your stomach always feels and acts like it's full, but you still have to eat
@@thajocoth no I think that's would make it so even tho you're hungry you still feel full so you basically need to force yourself to eat even tho you feel like your stomach is about to explode just so you don't die of starvation
I think Van Richter's Guide had a neat section near the end about dying curses (you kill a thing/defile a tomb/etc it curses you) that were pretty cool and could be extrapolated
The "mouth speaking your surface thoughts outloud" would be a nightmare to roleplay and wouldn't be adhered to in most tables. We all know that whole thing is fun at first becuase you asked your player "what are you thinking about right now?" and then antics ensue when we relay it to the rest of the table BUT we all also know that kind of playstyle can't be kept for more than one or two minutes at most because you need the constant back and forth from the player saying what they're thinking about. Bad example, good idea tho
You could increase the curse to also have it where it gives the player disadvantage or some other penalty on attack rolls because the mouth keeps stating their next move to the enemy. I think it would also be fun whenever the character(s) trying to deceive someone in the mouth just speaks their true intentions. You could definitely tie it to more gameplay mechanics if you do not think roleplay mechanics will be enough.
Just have the player ignore it until they think of something relevant, someone playing a chronically sick/angry/confused character is not going to tell everyone about every single instance of affliction.
@@gerald2508 that'd be a different effect then. Not a surface thoughts but "whatever you feel is important". I get your point but you can see it's clearly not the same
My fav curse is from an HP Lovecraft story where a guys family line has been cursed by an evil wizard named Charles Le Sorcier that none in the family would live past 32. Spoilers - wizard is manually offing them all through purely mundane means (though he was a real wizard who had achieved immortality just to keep up his hobby of being a generational curse)
had a homebrew magic item that was essentially the Horseless Headless Horsemann's Headtaker from TF2 but it was cursed to turn the user into a skeleton. My party ended up getting creative working around the fact you can't heal undead with most spells. they really took advantage of stuff like Life Transference. in the end, the curse was lifted by an archpriest who only agreed to lift the curse if the party member swore himself to the priest's god (satan, in case you were curious). to think this super interesting part of my campaign could've been nullified by a single 3rd level spell
I made a pair of bracers of defense that could overcharge the monk’s martial arts abilities, doing extra damage and buffing his crit range, but whenever he crits with them he has to make a Con save or risk dislocating whatever limb he used to make the attack. Basically just a really good magic item designed to be too powerful for human limitations.
this is amazing and i am personally very grateful for this. i had a cleric a while ago who's whole schtick was that they dealt with both giving and banishing curses, only for me to later find out the only curses i could do were third level spells that sucked ass, or bane and bless if i got creative with the description.
I seem to recall there also being a thing mentioned in tiefling flavor text about how you could pick from the list a feature that makes your character extra cursed with being a tiefling. It was stuff like animals are immediately on high alert around you, plants you touch and care for wither over time, you always smell of rotting flesh, etc. I also think in the transformation category, you should've mentioned the multitude of monsters, usually aberrations and undead, that transform you into one of them either through damage or by killing you.
One of my players was cursed by a wereboar. Instead of paying a cleric to use lame remove curse I had them rush to Waterdeep before the next full moon to find a druid powerful enough and transport them to the realm of Deep Arborea and kill the beast within the character In a darksouls style boss battle.
A curse keeper would be an interesting NPC… like, they tell you out the gate that all the items are cursed, as well as what affect they have, but they’ll sell them to you for cheap
3:25 the best rendition of armor of vulnerability. Finally, an in-lore explanation for the weird revealing fantasy armor. I feel like I should like and subscribe and give you my wallet.
I made bestow curse work like an extra spell list. Once you learnt bestow curse you choose 2 curses from a list and you can cast them with your spells slot. Every curse has its own conditions, also some change the school of magic (instead of being all from necromancy), their range, casting time or even their level. As long as you know bestow curse or have prepared when you level up, you learn 2 new curses of your choice. Some curses cannon be learnt by leveling up, they must be found in a scroll or something like that.
Next session my players will (probably) fight the result of a Gulthia tree corruption, I think the charakter who deals the killing strike will get a nature/vampire based curse, thanks for the idea, Logan!
I like the idea that Curses can’t be dispelled by their casters and things like Remove Curse only briefly detach the curse from its current target. Sort of like the quest in Witcher 3 where a curse haunts someone wracked with guilt but will leave to follow someone else more tempting and can only be destroyed if the target forgives themselves. This would make it so a Curse is something that has to be narratively addressed, passed onto someone else, or sealed away somewhere.
I actually had something similar in my campaign with a legendary lyncanthropic curse... to break the curse the PCs had to make a stew using the werewolf's heart, meaning they had to first kill the werewolf and then make the stew.
I'm a big fan of the Long-Term Curses from Arcadia 5. The curse creates cumulative effects, like personality flaws, rising dead, inability to play music, and Remove Curse only works to remove the _effects_. The curse is still active and can create more effects, and you can only break it under specific circumstances depending on the curse. It's a really neat system and can structure whole adventures.
We had a fight with a sibryex and the mutations were so fun. My satyr only ended up with tusks, but our barbarian got really fat and heavy, and our rogue ended up with a shorter leg, two heads and bat wing ears.
The Book of Vile Darkness from 3.5 era had a section to help creativity. Like the first new person you meet will forever hate you, your 20's count as 1's, 1 specific race/creature type are forever invisible to the player (Imagine being an Orc Slayer and every orc is now invisible,) and a Greater variant that cannot be dispelled by anything short of Wish/Miracle/Deed, and hits hardest. Set an Ability Score to 1, have a -8 penalty on basically all rolls, up to 5 allies/loved ones are cursed, 1 loved one has a disease that will constantly hop to another loved one, you lose the ability to USE ANY MAGIC. They also have Family Curses like the youngest daughter will always become an evil spellcaster, or the oldest son will always murder the father, and Dying Curses with strength depending on how powerful the dying curser was. They can potentially cast WISH to curse your ass, the only catch is they gotta add a Loophole you can realistically do, and the curser can't be rezzed.
One of my players has a curse that is basically just a magically enforced debt. Whenever they touch money, there is a 2 in 3 chance the money will be teleported to the person they are indebted to. This will continue until the debt is paid.
I ran a Sibriex not long ago (as a hidden terror the party wasn't supposed to fight) and now I hate myself for not flipping the page... Cursing someone would have been a great narrative moment.
8:00 I actually really like HunterXHunters way of breaking curses. In that you can’t fully get rid of it. Whenever people remove Nen curses, they get rid of the actual curse, but the energy manifests as something else. Like someone can remove the curse from you but they have a giant centipede wrapped around them, or they’re carrying the energy from the curse in their stomach, and in some extreme cases, removing the curse would outright kill the person trying to remove it. The only ways to fully remove the curse in the show is to either meet the requirements to break it, the person who placed the curse decides to remove it, or the original person who got cursed has to die.
I thought Strahds curse was that everyone in his realms soul is trapped, forced to reincarnate, as well as no new souls can be made, causing some people born to have no soul.
I once cursed my party with "You shall forever bear the weight of your sins." When they did something awful, their strength went down by 1 point. Permanently.
The Wild Beyond the Witchlight has some good fae "curses" in it. It has a table you roll on for various afflictions. "No fashion sense." and has to "knock on every door they enter"are some examples.
I know it sounds random, but this video really inspired me to get back to working on my own TTRPG. I left off at a point where I'm adding magical items, and ideas started flooding my brain when you were discussing what made D&D's curses so lame. Like an "oh - I know how I could do it better!" kind of train of thought lol
A cool curse (in the book, but translated well in the Disney film), as a gag curse, is the lyre that rings in the black cardrin books that one of the characters was given as a gift (in the books the harp was given to this character by either the books version of elves or sea people).
I take inspiration from Megaman Battle Network and their "glitched customizer." Things like "become invulnerable, but take continuous damage," or "have an extra action, but movement is randomized," or "become stronger, but attacks have a chance to just fail." Extra abilities with a trade-off.
In ADHD2e there were two versions of the Bestow curse spell. The 3rd level Bestow minor curse and the 7th level Bestow major curse. And they're both awesome! Among the minor curses, some of my favorites are: Appendage Growth/Shrinkage Arthritis Baldness Body Odor Continual Smiling Dancing Double Vision Forgetfulness Generosity Greed Hair Growth Halitosis Hiccupping Insatiable Appetite/Thirst Insomnia Itching Kleptomania Myopia Pathological Lying Profuse Sweating Shaking Slurred Speech Sneezing Stumbling Truth telling Uncontrollable Laughter Vulgarity (“profanity is uttered in some form with every breath.”) Weight Gain/Loss By the way, Bestow minor curse lasted 1 month per caster level! Bestow major curse could do shit like: Petrifying touch of Midas Touch of flora wilting Age Regression Conditional Death (If the cursed person does a certain act, he dies) Amnesia ( total loss of memory, but not survival and self-preservation skills) Breathing water Permanent Blindness/Deafness/Muteness Alter race/sub-race/gender Shrinking (turns a man-sized person into a pixie-sized person) Lycanthropy and my favorite... Deafening Voice (Every word that leaves the subject's mouth is deafeningly loud. A whisper sounds like 10 men shouting, a yell like a flight of dragons roaring)
Dang. Your curse to have me like and subscribe almost worked! But when you threw in the wallet and esteem boosting things, I realized it wasn’t a curse, but a charm spell. You big doo doo. Just kidding you’re great.
This video was so well scripted-- and the narrator so handsome-- it almost makes me want to give them my wallet. like some sort of dark compulsion, tugging at the back of my mind
DMG (2014) P.152. It’s a set of Plate Armour, that while cursed, grants you Resistance to one (1) of: Bludgeoning, Piercing, or Slashing damage, and Vulnerability to the other two. Your DM picks the Resistance.
I came up with a curse that the caster inflicts on someone they love so that the emotional betrayal the caster is feeling is slowly killing the victim. Got a character with it and established a whole story line of how he overcame the pain but the curse is still tied to him as long as the caster still loves them (even obsession works too) what's more is that the curse changes over time to infpict a different malignant.
How I'd have Remove Curse is to make it a divination spell that tells the caster how to remove a particular curse from the targeted creature or object.
This is why Loup-Garou (French Super Werewolf from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft) have one of the best curses in the game. First, you can't end the curse while the Loup-Garou is alive. Second, even if its dead, you have to use remove curse during a full moon and then the victim of the curse can make a con save. If they fail they can't reroll or make the save for another month, no matter how many remove curses you use.
Curse: You will forever listen the song All star by Smash Mouth in a loop at a volume where you can still hear everything arround you, but makes it dificult to understand people talking to you or anything that would require clear understanding via sounds.
Mage: The Awakening does curses *great*. A personal fave of mine is to curse someone to poop their pants whenever they're in public until they do something I want.
I have a campaign in which a player is cursed. The curse goes away when they complete a job for a drider, hunting and slaying a specific medusa. The curse gives permanent spider climb and a 1/day cast of web from their bum, but a -1 to all charisma rolls. They should be happy they aren't a charisma caster.
I had a discussion about this with a friend and we came up with stupid shit like "inconvenient gag reflex" randomly during a battle a knight might just start dry heaving mid swing.
My party once had to carry a cursed ring for a couple of sessions. Each day I'd roll for a misfortune that spanned from random dragon encounters to the next potion you drink was actually a mimic this whole time. I also made it so that any time you roll a nat-20, you must treat it as a nat-1. They eventually gave up on destroying the ring, and just gave it to a dragon. Still deciding the consequences on that one.
In my making of magic items based off trinkets (Seriously, this is a very good creative exercise, just find a trinket table from anywhere and think about some magic properties for it) I did come up with a scarf that can remove a curse, but the curse must be heaped upon someone else present. For instance: A knight cursed by a hag to be a giant pig that pulls her cart around; you wrap the scarf around his trotter and your hand and heap the curse unto yourself (The curse being that you are true polymorphed into the animal you hate the most. In this case for the Knight, when he transformed he thought of pigs as lowly creatures) So as the curse is heaped unto you, you are asked what creature your character is most repulsed by and in turn they become that creature until the curse has run it's course. A good example then might be the kindly druid takes the curse unto themselves, returning the Knight to his human form but the druid becomes a Dolphin (A wicked creature)
One change Id make is that if you cast Remove Curse on a target you learn details to point to the item or actions needed remove that curse. Don’t spell the solution out to the players but vague hints to the solution
Here's an idea for a cursed item Eyes of the mad prophet Buff : +5 & and advantage for one action on your turn Con: DM rolls for odds(nat 20 you gain one use, 19-6 DM gains one use, 5-2 DM gains two uses, nat 1 DM gains three uses), you roll d20 for potency. After your turn the results of your D20 can replace an other roll of a D20 before the start of your next turn.
100% agree! My own solution was to make curses & restorative spells levelled, make negative non-damaging spell effects curses, & make said curses permenant if the caster maintains concentration for the spell's duration. It wasn't the only change I made to the mechanics & I feel like the other changes balance this one out. My players seem to be enjoying it anyway; not least the Werebear who can get lower level curses removed without losing his "Lycanthropy."
Other curses for you: - roll a d20. That number becomes your Intelligence Stat. Consequently, your wisdom becomes 20 - the number rolled; - you can't mount any creature (good for paladins and bards); - if you're a barbarian, your strength becomes an 8. Unless you're raging, then is becomes a 20; - you can only speak 25 words per day. Good luck casting; - when a person of a specific gender/race/class whispers you something, you must do it; - coins/wealth disappears after 1 hour of being on your person; Idk I could keep going but I'll take a nap now. Take some inspiration from the Nightwatcher from the Stormlight Archives
Van Rickton's Guild to Ravenloft has a lot of this advice and talks about this in depth. The suggestion to make removing a curse a quest based on the nature is a hood one. It also suggests not making every curse a "go kill this thing" solution as the theme of a curse is forgiveness and repentance. Good stuff.
Idk why i like the pee curse so much I can imagine a rhyming hag coming up and saying "any time i pee or poo, so will you!" And then she proceeds to drink 4 liters of water and eat 3 killos of burritos
Wow, I did almost the same thing with wererats in my DotMM campaign. In order to successfully remove curse of wererat lycanthropy (rodenthropy?) you must either have a tuft of hair of the wererat that bit you, or a blood from another wererat, but you are gonna need all of blood of that wererat. Alternatively, you can combine blood from multiple wererats, just the volume must be equal to an average wererat. Then you need to perform a ritual where you either burn the wererat hair in addition to incense, or smother the cursed individual in the blood, and then at the end of the ritual you have to cast remove curse. If you cast it on a cursed individual without the ritual preparations, it only "suppresses" the curse, meaning, if in hybrid or giant rat form, it morphs it back to human, and prevents another transformation for 24 hours.
I run curses with different “levels”, with the lowest level being for remove curse but anything beyond that can only be suppressed by remove curse, *if that for the mid tier and highest rank of curse*
I'm glad that you talked about it. I'm honestly not a big fan of the spell and most official or homebrew curses are just some dumb variant of "make a wis save or be a murderhobo". of the official cursed items my favorites are the trade offs like the shield or the cursed luckstone. they have mechanical benefits that feel worth having for the downside. My cursed items are Caustic weapons (in which you sacrifice one of your hit die to imbue a weapon strike you make, the number rolled is dealt both to you and the foe. when you expend the hit die in this way, it's gone until you take a long rest.) Alternatively the Masque of Loss (the death mask of a Returned that retains some... fleeting essence) is a Theros item I made. It grants you non-detection, creatures have Disadvantage on insight checks made on you, and the gods cannot magically perceive you (meaning you neither have, gain, or lose piety) while you are wearing it. the drawback is that you gain a flaw that belonged to the undead who's face you're wearing had in life. I tried to make flaws that would be interesting at the table to RP but wouldn't remove player agency.
3:06 he’s clearly biting the hobbit’s finger off, but when you look closely, golem isn’t even holding onto his arm, and he’s biting nothing. It takes a second for the hobbit to even lift his arm up to where it’s getting chewed on
how does this sound for a curse everyone just forgets who you are, everything you did people just attribute to someone else or pull a 'i dunno', and anything you say or do in front of someone, they instantly forget the moment they're can't sense your presence
Am I weird for actually liking the taste of cheetos flamin' hot mac 'n cheese? I first tried it out of curiosity and thought to myself "This has no business tasting as good as it does."
The thing that sort of vexes me about remove curse is how blatently it is shoehorned into an “Only prepare if you need it” spell, like there is little benefit to learning it as say a warlock or a wizard, which is even more exacerbated if the curse needs more than just the casting. I like the idea of additional curse removal steps, but i do want remove curse to potentially be a spell a player would willingly prepare beforehand. I would find it fun if instead of just removing a curse, remove curse also had the option of bestowing a blessing
in my current game, one of the players received a curse in his backstory. If he spoke, read, or heard the name of the person who cursed him, he fell unconscious. no save, no fucking around, just on off-switch for his brain. i had Remove Curse require a ritual, and that only made it so that the name caused him crippling headaches and dizziness (disadvantage on d20 rolls). to break it, bhe had to go and kill the person who cursed him, then destroy her soul.
I cursed one of my players with a sort of Anti-Life effect. four times a day they would need to make a wis save, if they failed their max HP was reduced by 1. If any healing was used on them (they were the healer) they would lose 5 max HP, if they used lesser restoration or remove curse, the curse would flare and they would lose 10 max HP, they had to find someone who knew or had a scroll of greater restoration to get rid of it. they lost around 20-40 HP, all of which was restore, and they were also given a minor boon of healing where when they healed another creature, they would also be healed for 2HP. it was a neat little plot hook side quest
I like the idea of remove curse needing to be cast with a slot meeting that of the curse. Some other hoops to jump through can be fun, but I see a DM getting out of hand with it.
Remove Curse and Comprehend Languages are the twin banes of my campaigns. "You see a mystical tome in a forgotten tongue, maybe a scholar in the city will know what it--" actually I'm a wizard. "When you touch the ring, a dark malevolence seeps into your mind, threatening to take control--" actually I'm a cleric.
Pausing to point out about 5.5: you can thank the march toward designing for digital-only play for the removal of all "make it up yourself" options. Imagination and flavour don't code well.
I treat cursed items the same as Dragon Quest does, where the item becomes unremovable if equipped and would require the use of a temple (or the remove curse spell) to unequip it It stays cursed after that though, so if you re-equip it, you get cursed again
In my game I have an NPC called Sir Harry Hand-For-A-Head (free bingo space for how the curse manifests). Now he was tasked with having to find true love before the last layer fell from an enchanted onion, which he had accomplished, by the time the players found him he had a goblin wife that he loved very very much. Problem was that their marriage was on the rocks, and the curse that started to manifest and affect their kids whose heads with slowly start growing fingernails and turning into thumbs and whatnot. Players never actually cast remove curse on this guy and how the situation got resolved was by them basically playing marriage counselor for this goblin and this guy for whom a headbutt and a high five meant the same exact thing. I guess if anything I can add to this conversation is that curses don't necessarily have to be edged lordy murder mayhem, but they should definitely provide some kind of inconvenience, either major or little, that is f*cking up the targets life and their happiness.
I find it so stupid that Warlock can learn remove curse but not bestow curse.
The worst part is they used to have access to Bestow Curse through an invocation in 2014! It just wasn't reprinted in 2024 for some reason
@BlueTheSquid all of those spell invocations have just been changed so the spells they gave are just part of the 2024 warlock’s class spell list
It's just like specialized doctor 😂
@BlueTheSquid but they said if something isn't reprinted in 2024 it's because there aren't changes so go ahead and use it from 2014...
@@TheMightyBattleSquid Or, ignore the 2024 version?
My favorite use of bestow curse was in a Pathfinder game where I cursed someone with "may everything you want in life slip through your fingers" and the affect was just a 50% chance to fumble and drop any item they tried to pick up
I like the idea of a pc who just cursed everyone so much they get nerfed to level 1 and everyone who they cursed just gets off free and now they all hate them.
I did "the bad penny curse" where a curse effect is tied to an item that cannot be thrown away or destroyed, only given to someone who accepts it.
The cursed person cannot gain hp by resting while cursed, they take 1d6 hp damage every 15 minutes they are away from the item if they own it, and and damage done to the item is transfered to them. The relief of the curse happens if the person returns the bad penny to the grave it was stolen from and put it on the eyes of the corpse it was stolen from. Made a whole quest of chasing the chain of owners to resolve it.
That’s the plot of agatha all along
@@rynowatcher That's genius
@Drekromancer though I am critical of the base rules for curses, Van Rickton's Guild to Ravenloft has more advice and rules to make curses more useful for this game, and the best advice is "make a curse a sidequest the cursed person can complete."
I'm so using this for a campaign start
Part of me is now imagining some cleric just walking up to Strahd and casting remove curse on him, and suddenly he gets all normal about things, and leaves the Demiplane of Dread.
Cleric casts Cure Depression
Armor of "I can fix her"
Too real
“Whenever I go pee, so do you” made me laugh out loud
Such a cursed image…
hold crate of water jugs with ill intent
also shoutout to the Dark Gifts from Ravenloft - truly the epitome of "you're cursed, and *here's* how that's going to fuck with you"
admittedly they're definitely leaning more towards being more beneficial than not (wow no way) but you can easily make them fuck you over lmao
This is why I liked what Grim Hollow did so much with the idea of curses. Going more in depth to remove or earn them like you said, and even having cool progression of it. Such as the one where you start out being narcissistic and loving to admire your reflection, and end as a cursed humanoid tree that tries to turn anyone who touches you into mirror-like trees to better admire your beauty. It just makes for a much cooler introduction and implementation if you can make a small adventure out of it rather than some cleric casting a 3rd level *NO*
nah, it should end with you going full Agent Smith and turning others into exact replicas of yourself
There are somewhat genuine curses that the Vistani from Curse of Strahd can bestow upon those that have slighted them, but the Vistani risks their life in doing so since they take psychic damage equal to the severity of the curse if the accursed manages to break it. I believe the most severe was disabling someone's motor functions
There's the saying that "curses come home to roost", so the idea that breaking a curse causes magical backlash upon the one who bestowed it relative to the curse's severity is actually pretty cool. It adds to how spiteful those curses must be because they know they'll get hurt on the rebound if the target weasels their way out of it but they're still deciding they want to go there.
I once made a cursed item that causes all fluid that enters the cursed person's mouth to turn to sand. It also made it easier to crit against any creature made primarily of fluid, like oozes and water elementals (by 5%), and getting a (melee) crit on someone would transfer hydration from the target's body to your own. (These only apply to the weapon you attached the gem to, which also gains a general magic +1.)
If you went a day without hydration, you'd wake up with a level of exhaustion that couldn't be removed by rest, so this encourages you to fight every day until you crit, even if it's downtime. Getting a crit will reduce your own levels of exhaustion by 1 and give the target a level of exhaustion because of their loss of hydration, but only if you crit without having any levels of exhaustion do you not gain one tomorrow morning.
If submerged, the Sandstone Gem of Dehydration will also slowly turn the liquid it's in into sand. It's slow, but throwing it into the ocean could basically screw over that entire plane in a few dozen generations.
...So someone in the party used it, and the cleric used Remove Curse every day so they could drink water before bed. This was a bit anticlimactic.
So basically it’s: CURSE OF RA 𓀀 𓀁 𓀂 𓀃 𓀄 𓀅 𓀆 𓀇 𓀈 𓀉 𓀊 𓀋 𓀌 𓀍 𓀎 𓀏 𓀐 𓀑 𓀒 𓀓 𓀔 𓀕 𓀖 𓀗 𓀘 𓀙
My favorite real-world curse is "may you survive 6 of your 7 cancers."
Because i dont just want you to get a debilitating, terminal illness. I want you to fight for a life not worth living in a body that hates you.
Curses aren't silly
They are heavy, hateful wishes
that faygo joke with the clown immediately hitted me like a brick, fucking homestuck man
Didn’t see it at first, but now I can't unsee it.
We are permanently stained. None of us are free from sin
In Curse of Strahd, there is actually a hole-buch of Vistani (the gipsy people) curses, where some of them are kinda cool, even having diffirent power-scales.
You missed on that one...
The Loup Garou is a really good way to make curses more than just a Remove Curse tax.
Ahh yes, the Loup Garou from Van Richten's...
Because french werewolves are better than english werewolves (yes, loup garou is just werewolf in french)
... how did they translate that one, actually? Scince the regular werewolf is calles a loup garou in the french version of the Monster Manual, how does the french version of Van Richten's translate "loup garou" into french while making it different from regular loup garoux?
I curse you with always being full, may you never experience the joys of eating without feeling like your stomach lining will rip in half
That's horrible
This is just IBS lol
As someone who hates food and eating, this doesn't sound so terrible. If I'm always full, then I just don't need to eat anymore.
One person's curse is another person's blessing (& vice versa).
No, you will always FEEL full, so you still have to eat but every bite is makes you feel like you're going to burst, but despite this you will slowly wither away from starvation.
TLDR: your stomach always feels and acts like it's full, but you still have to eat
@@thajocoth no I think that's would make it so even tho you're hungry you still feel full so you basically need to force yourself to eat even tho you feel like your stomach is about to explode just so you don't die of starvation
I think Van Richter's Guide had a neat section near the end about dying curses (you kill a thing/defile a tomb/etc it curses you) that were pretty cool and could be extrapolated
The "mouth speaking your surface thoughts outloud" would be a nightmare to roleplay and wouldn't be adhered to in most tables. We all know that whole thing is fun at first becuase you asked your player "what are you thinking about right now?" and then antics ensue when we relay it to the rest of the table BUT we all also know that kind of playstyle can't be kept for more than one or two minutes at most because you need the constant back and forth from the player saying what they're thinking about.
Bad example, good idea tho
I mean, it's great in a narrative like a book or TV show. It just sucks in a game around a table.
@Drekromancer 100% agreed. It's not something that you can implement on a game because of how complicated and intrusive it is for the game's rhythm
You could increase the curse to also have it where it gives the player disadvantage or some other penalty on attack rolls because the mouth keeps stating their next move to the enemy. I think it would also be fun whenever the character(s) trying to deceive someone in the mouth just speaks their true intentions. You could definitely tie it to more gameplay mechanics if you do not think roleplay mechanics will be enough.
Just have the player ignore it until they think of something relevant, someone playing a chronically sick/angry/confused character is not going to tell everyone about every single instance of affliction.
@@gerald2508 that'd be a different effect then. Not a surface thoughts but "whatever you feel is important". I get your point but you can see it's clearly not the same
My fav curse is from an HP Lovecraft story where a guys family line has been cursed by an evil wizard named Charles Le Sorcier that none in the family would live past 32. Spoilers - wizard is manually offing them all through purely mundane means (though he was a real wizard who had achieved immortality just to keep up his hobby of being a generational curse)
Oh! I threw a Xibriex at my party! Well. It was Descent Averntownus and they decided to fight it.
had a homebrew magic item that was essentially the Horseless Headless Horsemann's Headtaker from TF2 but it was cursed to turn the user into a skeleton. My party ended up getting creative working around the fact you can't heal undead with most spells. they really took advantage of stuff like Life Transference. in the end, the curse was lifted by an archpriest who only agreed to lift the curse if the party member swore himself to the priest's god (satan, in case you were curious). to think this super interesting part of my campaign could've been nullified by a single 3rd level spell
Alright, I'll be that goblin: What's the source for the Armor of Vulnerability images?
It's a good image
Sooo good.
Honestly, the idea that armor of vulnerability is just classic female MMO armor is really funny.
I made a pair of bracers of defense that could overcharge the monk’s martial arts abilities, doing extra damage and buffing his crit range, but whenever he crits with them he has to make a Con save or risk dislocating whatever limb he used to make the attack. Basically just a really good magic item designed to be too powerful for human limitations.
That's barely even cursed - it's just an amazing item too powerful for mortals to wield safely. I respect that.
this is amazing and i am personally very grateful for this. i had a cleric a while ago who's whole schtick was that they dealt with both giving and banishing curses, only for me to later find out the only curses i could do were third level spells that sucked ass, or bane and bless if i got creative with the description.
I seem to recall there also being a thing mentioned in tiefling flavor text about how you could pick from the list a feature that makes your character extra cursed with being a tiefling. It was stuff like animals are immediately on high alert around you, plants you touch and care for wither over time, you always smell of rotting flesh, etc.
I also think in the transformation category, you should've mentioned the multitude of monsters, usually aberrations and undead, that transform you into one of them either through damage or by killing you.
"Forced action." My man, that is a geas.
One of my players was cursed by a wereboar. Instead of paying a cleric to use lame remove curse I had them rush to Waterdeep before the next full moon to find a druid powerful enough and transport them to the realm of Deep Arborea and kill the beast within the character In a darksouls style boss battle.
A curse keeper would be an interesting NPC… like, they tell you out the gate that all the items are cursed, as well as what affect they have, but they’ll sell them to you for cheap
3:25 the best rendition of armor of vulnerability. Finally, an in-lore explanation for the weird revealing fantasy armor. I feel like I should like and subscribe and give you my wallet.
I made bestow curse work like an extra spell list. Once you learnt bestow curse you choose 2 curses from a list and you can cast them with your spells slot. Every curse has its own conditions, also some change the school of magic (instead of being all from necromancy), their range, casting time or even their level.
As long as you know bestow curse or have prepared when you level up, you learn 2 new curses of your choice. Some curses cannon be learnt by leveling up, they must be found in a scroll or something like that.
Next session my players will (probably) fight the result of a Gulthia tree corruption, I think the charakter who deals the killing strike will get a nature/vampire based curse, thanks for the idea, Logan!
I draw this rune!
To thee, this boon:
When I pee,
So shall thee!
Dat armor got me feeling vulnerable
MY FRIEND JUST ASKED IF IT'S NORMAL THAT SHE FINDS THAT HOTTER THAN ANYTHING SHE'S SEEN IN AN 18+ MAGAZINE
HALP ME RESPOND, I'M DYING!
@@JackWendigo1234 Normal? Arguably. Based? Absolutely.
I like the idea that Curses can’t be dispelled by their casters and things like Remove Curse only briefly detach the curse from its current target. Sort of like the quest in Witcher 3 where a curse haunts someone wracked with guilt but will leave to follow someone else more tempting and can only be destroyed if the target forgives themselves.
This would make it so a Curse is something that has to be narratively addressed, passed onto someone else, or sealed away somewhere.
Curses should always cost the user MORE than they get out of it
I actually had something similar in my campaign with a legendary lyncanthropic curse... to break the curse the PCs had to make a stew using the werewolf's heart, meaning they had to first kill the werewolf and then make the stew.
I'm a big fan of the Long-Term Curses from Arcadia 5. The curse creates cumulative effects, like personality flaws, rising dead, inability to play music, and Remove Curse only works to remove the _effects_. The curse is still active and can create more effects, and you can only break it under specific circumstances depending on the curse. It's a really neat system and can structure whole adventures.
"I pee = you pee" might be the best curse ever
We had a fight with a sibryex and the mutations were so fun. My satyr only ended up with tusks, but our barbarian got really fat and heavy, and our rogue ended up with a shorter leg, two heads and bat wing ears.
The Book of Vile Darkness from 3.5 era had a section to help creativity. Like the first new person you meet will forever hate you, your 20's count as 1's, 1 specific race/creature type are forever invisible to the player (Imagine being an Orc Slayer and every orc is now invisible,) and a Greater variant that cannot be dispelled by anything short of Wish/Miracle/Deed, and hits hardest. Set an Ability Score to 1, have a -8 penalty on basically all rolls, up to 5 allies/loved ones are cursed, 1 loved one has a disease that will constantly hop to another loved one, you lose the ability to USE ANY MAGIC.
They also have Family Curses like the youngest daughter will always become an evil spellcaster, or the oldest son will always murder the father, and Dying Curses with strength depending on how powerful the dying curser was. They can potentially cast WISH to curse your ass, the only catch is they gotta add a Loophole you can realistically do, and the curser can't be rezzed.
Oh yeah, now that’s the stuff
One of my players has a curse that is basically just a magically enforced debt.
Whenever they touch money, there is a 2 in 3 chance the money will be teleported to the person they are indebted to. This will continue until the debt is paid.
2:41 Love that curse. I want to use it.
Me too . I had to pause the video and tell that one to my wife 😂
I ran a Sibriex not long ago (as a hidden terror the party wasn't supposed to fight) and now I hate myself for not flipping the page...
Cursing someone would have been a great narrative moment.
8:00 I actually really like HunterXHunters way of breaking curses. In that you can’t fully get rid of it.
Whenever people remove Nen curses, they get rid of the actual curse, but the energy manifests as something else. Like someone can remove the curse from you but they have a giant centipede wrapped around them, or they’re carrying the energy from the curse in their stomach, and in some extreme cases, removing the curse would outright kill the person trying to remove it.
The only ways to fully remove the curse in the show is to either meet the requirements to break it, the person who placed the curse decides to remove it, or the original person who got cursed has to die.
Also in HxH if you kill the person who cursed you it's very possible that the curse gets WORSE and/or becomes impossible to remove for *anyone*
RUNESMITH VIDEO!!!!! LET’S GOOO!!!!!
Whenever I go pee, so shall you is just the greatest annoyance you can bestow
I thought Strahds curse was that everyone in his realms soul is trapped, forced to reincarnate, as well as no new souls can be made, causing some people born to have no soul.
I once cursed my party with "You shall forever bear the weight of your sins." When they did something awful, their strength went down by 1 point. Permanently.
The Wild Beyond the Witchlight has some good fae "curses" in it. It has a table you roll on for various afflictions. "No fashion sense." and has to "knock on every door they enter"are some examples.
Your videos are always a combination of insightful and hilarious! Keep it up Mr. Runesmith, your videos always have a place near my table.
I know it sounds random, but this video really inspired me to get back to working on my own TTRPG. I left off at a point where I'm adding magical items, and ideas started flooding my brain when you were discussing what made D&D's curses so lame. Like an "oh - I know how I could do it better!" kind of train of thought lol
Gave my fighter a cursed glaive that provided free psychic damage on each hit at the expense of worse and worse madness penalties. He’s loving it
A cool curse (in the book, but translated well in the Disney film), as a gag curse, is the lyre that rings in the black cardrin books that one of the characters was given as a gift (in the books the harp was given to this character by either the books version of elves or sea people).
I take inspiration from Megaman Battle Network and their "glitched customizer." Things like "become invulnerable, but take continuous damage," or "have an extra action, but movement is randomized," or "become stronger, but attacks have a chance to just fail." Extra abilities with a trade-off.
In ADHD2e there were two versions of the Bestow curse spell. The 3rd level Bestow minor curse and the 7th level Bestow major curse. And they're both awesome! Among the minor curses, some of my favorites are:
Appendage Growth/Shrinkage
Arthritis
Baldness
Body Odor
Continual Smiling
Dancing
Double Vision
Forgetfulness
Generosity
Greed
Hair Growth
Halitosis
Hiccupping
Insatiable Appetite/Thirst
Insomnia
Itching
Kleptomania
Myopia
Pathological Lying
Profuse Sweating
Shaking
Slurred Speech
Sneezing
Stumbling
Truth telling
Uncontrollable Laughter
Vulgarity (“profanity is uttered in some form with every breath.”)
Weight Gain/Loss
By the way, Bestow minor curse lasted 1 month per caster level! Bestow major curse could do shit like:
Petrifying touch of Midas
Touch of flora wilting
Age Regression
Conditional Death (If the cursed person does a certain act, he dies)
Amnesia ( total loss of memory, but not survival and self-preservation skills)
Breathing water
Permanent Blindness/Deafness/Muteness
Alter race/sub-race/gender
Shrinking (turns a man-sized person into a pixie-sized person)
Lycanthropy
and my favorite... Deafening Voice (Every word that leaves the subject's mouth is deafeningly loud. A whisper sounds like 10 men shouting, a yell like a flight of dragons roaring)
Curse of Appendage Shrinking? Imagine a goofy man in a pointy hat chants foreign words in your general direction and now you have Curse of Micropenis
Dang. Your curse to have me like and subscribe almost worked! But when you threw in the wallet and esteem boosting things, I realized it wasn’t a curse, but a charm spell. You big doo doo.
Just kidding you’re great.
I think stat curses are useful for players to overcome but some players are cry babies because "it takes away players agency!" 🍼🙄
Very good idea makes this brand of dark magic truly feel like the old fairy tale curses
This video was so well scripted-- and the narrator so handsome-- it almost makes me want to give them my wallet. like some sort of dark compulsion, tugging at the back of my mind
ayo what was that armor of vulnerability, Mr. Runesmith?
DMG (2014) P.152.
It’s a set of Plate Armour, that while cursed, grants you Resistance to one (1) of: Bludgeoning, Piercing, or Slashing damage, and Vulnerability to the other two. Your DM picks the Resistance.
I came up with a curse that the caster inflicts on someone they love so that the emotional betrayal the caster is feeling is slowly killing the victim.
Got a character with it and established a whole story line of how he overcame the pain but the curse is still tied to him as long as the caster still loves them (even obsession works too) what's more is that the curse changes over time to infpict a different malignant.
How I'd have Remove Curse is to make it a divination spell that tells the caster how to remove a particular curse from the targeted creature or object.
This is why Loup-Garou (French Super Werewolf from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft) have one of the best curses in the game. First, you can't end the curse while the Loup-Garou is alive. Second, even if its dead, you have to use remove curse during a full moon and then the victim of the curse can make a con save. If they fail they can't reroll or make the save for another month, no matter how many remove curses you use.
Runesmith my beloved!!! It's a thanksgiving miracle
i curse you with stinky poopy butt.
you get disadvantage on rolls forever now
Curse: You will forever listen the song All star by Smash Mouth in a loop at a volume where you can still hear everything arround you, but makes it dificult to understand people talking to you or anything that would require clear understanding via sounds.
Mage: The Awakening does curses *great*. A personal fave of mine is to curse someone to poop their pants whenever they're in public until they do something I want.
Here within one minute of posting? This is crazy!
Hell yeahhh
One of the people in my party had a height curse. They were 6ft only when people were looking at him. 3ft when no one was.
I have a campaign in which a player is cursed.
The curse goes away when they complete a job for a drider, hunting and slaying a specific medusa.
The curse gives permanent spider climb and a 1/day cast of web from their bum, but a -1 to all charisma rolls.
They should be happy they aren't a charisma caster.
Remember reading somewhere that the "Curse of Strahd" is that Strahd himself is the curse, on Barovia
I had a discussion about this with a friend and we came up with stupid shit like "inconvenient gag reflex" randomly during a battle a knight might just start dry heaving mid swing.
My party once had to carry a cursed ring for a couple of sessions. Each day I'd roll for a misfortune that spanned from random dragon encounters to the next potion you drink was actually a mimic this whole time. I also made it so that any time you roll a nat-20, you must treat it as a nat-1.
They eventually gave up on destroying the ring, and just gave it to a dragon. Still deciding the consequences on that one.
In my making of magic items based off trinkets (Seriously, this is a very good creative exercise, just find a trinket table from anywhere and think about some magic properties for it) I did come up with a scarf that can remove a curse, but the curse must be heaped upon someone else present.
For instance: A knight cursed by a hag to be a giant pig that pulls her cart around; you wrap the scarf around his trotter and your hand and heap the curse unto yourself (The curse being that you are true polymorphed into the animal you hate the most. In this case for the Knight, when he transformed he thought of pigs as lowly creatures) So as the curse is heaped unto you, you are asked what creature your character is most repulsed by and in turn they become that creature until the curse has run it's course.
A good example then might be the kindly druid takes the curse unto themselves, returning the Knight to his human form but the druid becomes a Dolphin (A wicked creature)
One change Id make is that if you cast Remove Curse on a target you learn details to point to the item or actions needed remove that curse. Don’t spell the solution out to the players but vague hints to the solution
Here's an idea for a cursed item
Eyes of the mad prophet
Buff : +5 & and advantage for one action on your turn
Con: DM rolls for odds(nat 20 you gain one use, 19-6 DM gains one use, 5-2 DM gains two uses, nat 1 DM gains three uses), you roll d20 for potency.
After your turn the results of your D20 can replace an other roll of a D20 before the start of your next turn.
100% agree! My own solution was to make curses & restorative spells levelled, make negative non-damaging spell effects curses, & make said curses permenant if the caster maintains concentration for the spell's duration. It wasn't the only change I made to the mechanics & I feel like the other changes balance this one out. My players seem to be enjoying it anyway; not least the Werebear who can get lower level curses removed without losing his "Lycanthropy."
Other curses for you:
- roll a d20. That number becomes your Intelligence Stat. Consequently, your wisdom becomes 20 - the number rolled;
- you can't mount any creature (good for paladins and bards);
- if you're a barbarian, your strength becomes an 8. Unless you're raging, then is becomes a 20;
- you can only speak 25 words per day. Good luck casting;
- when a person of a specific gender/race/class whispers you something, you must do it;
- coins/wealth disappears after 1 hour of being on your person;
Idk I could keep going but I'll take a nap now. Take some inspiration from the Nightwatcher from the Stormlight Archives
Van Rickton's Guild to Ravenloft has a lot of this advice and talks about this in depth. The suggestion to make removing a curse a quest based on the nature is a hood one. It also suggests not making every curse a "go kill this thing" solution as the theme of a curse is forgiveness and repentance. Good stuff.
Idk why i like the pee curse so much
I can imagine a rhyming hag coming up and saying "any time i pee or poo, so will you!" And then she proceeds to drink 4 liters of water and eat 3 killos of burritos
Wow, I did almost the same thing with wererats in my DotMM campaign. In order to successfully remove curse of wererat lycanthropy (rodenthropy?) you must either have a tuft of hair of the wererat that bit you, or a blood from another wererat, but you are gonna need all of blood of that wererat. Alternatively, you can combine blood from multiple wererats, just the volume must be equal to an average wererat. Then you need to perform a ritual where you either burn the wererat hair in addition to incense, or smother the cursed individual in the blood, and then at the end of the ritual you have to cast remove curse. If you cast it on a cursed individual without the ritual preparations, it only "suppresses" the curse, meaning, if in hybrid or giant rat form, it morphs it back to human, and prevents another transformation for 24 hours.
I run curses with different “levels”, with the lowest level being for remove curse but anything beyond that can only be suppressed by remove curse, *if that for the mid tier and highest rank of curse*
I'm glad that you talked about it. I'm honestly not a big fan of the spell and most official or homebrew curses are just some dumb variant of "make a wis save or be a murderhobo".
of the official cursed items my favorites are the trade offs like the shield or the cursed luckstone. they have mechanical benefits that feel worth having for the downside.
My cursed items are Caustic weapons (in which you sacrifice one of your hit die to imbue a weapon strike you make, the number rolled is dealt both to you and the foe. when you expend the hit die in this way, it's gone until you take a long rest.)
Alternatively the Masque of Loss (the death mask of a Returned that retains some... fleeting essence) is a Theros item I made. It grants you non-detection, creatures have Disadvantage on insight checks made on you, and the gods cannot magically perceive you (meaning you neither have, gain, or lose piety) while you are wearing it. the drawback is that you gain a flaw that belonged to the undead who's face you're wearing had in life. I tried to make flaws that would be interesting at the table to RP but wouldn't remove player agency.
the armor of vulnerability boutta make me act up
3:06 he’s clearly biting the hobbit’s finger off, but when you look closely, golem isn’t even holding onto his arm, and he’s biting nothing. It takes a second for the hobbit to even lift his arm up to where it’s getting chewed on
The Hobbit is invisible and became visible once his finger got bitten off
One of the most interesting sponsorships thus far
how does this sound for a curse
everyone just forgets who you are, everything you did people just attribute to someone else or pull a 'i dunno', and anything you say or do in front of someone, they instantly forget the moment they're can't sense your presence
A thief’s delight
Forget Me Not called...wait, who called?
Getting eaten by a false hydra
Am I weird for actually liking the taste of cheetos flamin' hot mac 'n cheese? I first tried it out of curiosity and thought to myself "This has no business tasting as good as it does."
The thing that sort of vexes me about remove curse is how blatently it is shoehorned into an “Only prepare if you need it” spell, like there is little benefit to learning it as say a warlock or a wizard, which is even more exacerbated if the curse needs more than just the casting. I like the idea of additional curse removal steps, but i do want remove curse to potentially be a spell a player would willingly prepare beforehand. I would find it fun if instead of just removing a curse, remove curse also had the option of bestowing a blessing
My blood lines been cursed my 4e and my prunes have been shriveled
in my current game, one of the players received a curse in his backstory. If he spoke, read, or heard the name of the person who cursed him, he fell unconscious. no save, no fucking around, just on off-switch for his brain. i had Remove Curse require a ritual, and that only made it so that the name caused him crippling headaches and dizziness (disadvantage on d20 rolls). to break it, bhe had to go and kill the person who cursed him, then destroy her soul.
I cursed one of my players with a sort of Anti-Life effect. four times a day they would need to make a wis save, if they failed their max HP was reduced by 1. If any healing was used on them (they were the healer) they would lose 5 max HP, if they used lesser restoration or remove curse, the curse would flare and they would lose 10 max HP, they had to find someone who knew or had a scroll of greater restoration to get rid of it. they lost around 20-40 HP, all of which was restore, and they were also given a minor boon of healing where when they healed another creature, they would also be healed for 2HP. it was a neat little plot hook side quest
I love this channel so much
I love curses in my DnD game so this is a fresh video that will help give my players some necessary challenges!
I like the idea of remove curse needing to be cast with a slot meeting that of the curse. Some other hoops to jump through can be fun, but I see a DM getting out of hand with it.
the youtube showing the "most replayed" part of the video is real funny here
Remove Curse and Comprehend Languages are the twin banes of my campaigns. "You see a mystical tome in a forgotten tongue, maybe a scholar in the city will know what it--" actually I'm a wizard. "When you touch the ring, a dark malevolence seeps into your mind, threatening to take control--" actually I'm a cleric.
Pausing to point out about 5.5: you can thank the march toward designing for digital-only play for the removal of all "make it up yourself" options. Imagination and flavour don't code well.
I treat cursed items the same as Dragon Quest does, where the item becomes unremovable if equipped and would require the use of a temple (or the remove curse spell) to unequip it
It stays cursed after that though, so if you re-equip it, you get cursed again
It's really funny that he mentioned Curse of Strahd but not the Vistani and Hag curses in there
In my game I have an NPC called Sir Harry Hand-For-A-Head (free bingo space for how the curse manifests). Now he was tasked with having to find true love before the last layer fell from an enchanted onion, which he had accomplished, by the time the players found him he had a goblin wife that he loved very very much. Problem was that their marriage was on the rocks, and the curse that started to manifest and affect their kids whose heads with slowly start growing fingernails and turning into thumbs and whatnot. Players never actually cast remove curse on this guy and how the situation got resolved was by them basically playing marriage counselor for this goblin and this guy for whom a headbutt and a high five meant the same exact thing.
I guess if anything I can add to this conversation is that curses don't necessarily have to be edged lordy murder mayhem, but they should definitely provide some kind of inconvenience, either major or little, that is f*cking up the targets life and their happiness.