If you're ever hurting for an idea for a curse on a cursed item you can take this idea from my campaign: "When hit with sufficient (moderate) force, the wearer enters a hysterical laughing fit and is unable to stop for roughly half a minute." That leads to notifying nearby baddies as well as making you next-to-useless in combat. It's a pretty fun one to surprise players with, methinks.

That sounds a bit too big. Cursed items are supposed to be bad but not that bad, considering it'd trigger almost every time you're hit (unless I'm misreading).

I'd go with just a passive "if you think about anything remotely funny, you start laughing uncontrollably".

Anyway good night

@UristMcDorf Conversely, that one would trigger almost any time a PC in our campaign opens their mouth.

Either way, that's a big enough curse that it would definitely drive the campaign's next leg for a bit, as the party quests to learn how to break the curse.

Curses in D&D tend to be inconvenience or death, not much middle ground. Most stories about curses have the curse or cursed item a central figure around which the entire plot bends.

@BESW Yeah. Dungeon World has a lot more flexibility around curses because its character currency is effect on the direction of the game, rather than the increasing ability to overcome obstacles. Many curses that enhance the former decrease the latter and vice versa, so what might be a good curse in DW might be a bad one in D&D, and vice versa.

Huh, I hadn't thought about it. My intention was to leave a really nice suit of armor suspiciously lightly guarded and drop a hint or two about something being not right in the room it was stored in, and then let the players use it at their own peril or discover it through serious investigation. One of the players ended up punching another (among various other testing actions) and it triggered the effect. They then found a way to sell the armor to an unsuspecting wandering group of peddlers.

Another curse, one I haven't used but hope to sometime, maybe from a mummy, is to cause everyone to forget the cursed person's name until some condition is met.

One of the last "curses" in a game I ran was a temple thief getting turned into a werecat... in a magical version of ancient Egypt where being a werecat is an honor reserved only for the highest-ranking priestesses of Bastet.

Neat!

@BESW I have to ask though, is there a non-magical version of ancient Egypt?

The rest of the game was basically a fish-out-of-water political drama.

@BlackVegetable One presumes there's at least one.

@BESW ah,I literally never get tired of this story XD

I really want to get back to that.

The Ajani campaign and One Hot Summer are my two favourite campaigns, hands-down.

we can, we just have to wait for the right time :)

@BESW Sounds like a great moment for gender equality.

@GreySage Egypt has a lot of interesting moments like that, historically.

And Hatshepsut's one of the best Pharaohs hands-down anyway, so I had to set the campaign during her reign.

I figured the first woman to be crowned King of Egypt would probably enjoy an opportunity like that.

yeah, it was a great comparison to draw

Especially since in my campaign I've translated the historical shift of religious worship close to her time in power into a theopolitical suspense plot.

Isis is agitating for her son Horus to replace Ra as the national deity and sponsor of Kingship, so all Egypt has to pick sides--and Bastet is one of the Pharaoh's fiercest supporters.