So let's say a witch has cursed your Firstborn child.
What would happen if you locked up 5 women and they all had children at the exact same time? Like down to the nano second.
Would all 5 be a firstborn and suffer from the curse? Or would none of them due to them being born at the same time?
>>>Locked up
*Knocked up
The magic of the curse would manipulate things to make sure it could take effect, and only one of the women would take and have a child. Or out of the five, one is born prematurely and therefore first. Or even if by some miracle they all manage to somehow coordinate the birth of their babies down to the nanosecond, the curse will lie in wait until the point where a baby is picked up - by you, the mother, the hand of destiny - and is considered the first child to be some how borne, even if in an abstract sense.
It'd be the one you knocked up first, duh
Four of the kids would die in childbirth, and the curse is that the remaining 'firstborn' child is haunted and tormented by the twisted, malevolent souls of the other four until they drive him to take his own life and join them in death.
Trying to cheat curses and prophecies on technicalities is how you end up a cautionary tale on what not to do. You think you are clever enough to outsmart fate magic? You're not.
The thing that differentiates scifi from fantasy is this: magic does not have loopholes, or edge cases, or bugs in the runes. Magic is ALWAYS right, unless it's cast wrong.
A better bypass would be to ask if aborted or stillborn children counted as firstborn.
I doubt it though. Easier to just have a kid and smother it if you're this paranoid about the curse.
Not that I endorse this course of action.
>Remove curse is a thing in many settings
>Many parties will have access to this, either through party members or through buying the service of someone who can cast it
>9/10 times, if it's story related, the one thing that is made specifically to remove this stuff won't work because GM asspulling
I.e. This kind of situation
To be fair, Remove Curse is just waaaaay too reliable and available too early. Curses are supposed to be a big deal, a powerful or unique curse is the sort of shit you can build entire adventurers around.
Unless you are level 5 or higher, in which case any curse which is not lethal within the next 10 hours will get removed away the next time the party cleric rests.
No other adventure seed/fantasy tropes gets so blatantly silver bulleted for so little effort. Which forces the GM to just never use them because of mechanical reasons, or say that the spell called 'Remove Curse' does not in fact remove curse.
>Trying to cheat curses and prophecies on technicalities is how you end up a cautionary tale on what not to do.
This. Every story of someone getting fucked over by a curse is about how the steps he takes to prevent it are what caused it.
You take a limb each (with a bit of the torso) from 4 and the head from the other one and make a voltron kid sacrifice
It actually works either way.
So just have all your children delivered by cesarean, duh.
You never watched Gargoyles, right?
Just have the witch for dinner, then all is well. Witches taste good with carrots and potatoes.
Or, like in the case of Lycanthropy and some others, Remove Curse is just one of the steps needed (or only works in certain stages).
That said, part of the reason you get it at level 5 is that you also face things that aren't so grand of a curse as one of those things that just springs up in fights.
>What would happen if you locked up 5 women and they all had children at the exact same time? Like down to the nano second.
A better question would be how are you setting this up so that happens and why didn't you put those resources to work stopping the curse instead?
Here's a better idea: Never make a kid at all.
First of all, you have issues.
Second of all, one of the kids is going to wind up cursed, and they might argue among each other as to who it is based on firstborn being the inheritor.
Also .
It's always, ALWAYS more trouble than its worth to prevent a curse pre-emptively rather than trying to rules lawyer it.
The witch will realize what you're going for and use charm spells on sexy women who have an impregnation fetish and latex allergies to try and force the issue.
Bleh, I meant the other way around.
I think I've been cursed, too.
Dubs undo the evil.
Usually a curse on a firstborn implies the child is already born. If a child isn't born yet, the curse would probably have to be on someone who is pretty required to have a child, usually a male heir, like royalty, in order to continue a family line.
Also, such curses usually effect firstborn sons who are already born, because the firstborn son is usually the one a family sinks all their investment into in order to get them to succeed, and any kids afterwards take second place with boys usually taking priority over girls.
So what you're saying is I get to lay around with some sexy women and the one that suffers for it is some poor literal bastard?
What if the curse is to marry his mother and slay his father?
Then I guess my last words will be "I fucked your mom, motherfucker!" or something along those lines.
Number children left to right, roll 1d10, halve result, round down, delayed abort babby.
CURSED !!!
Depending on the level of the witch and the effect of the curse, I would consider castration a preferable alternative.
>Aha! I outsmarted the curse!
>All of your children, your wives, your servants, and every direct family member you know suddenly burst into flames and die.
First Born type Curses are usually casted on pregnant women, not their spouses.
>magic does not have loopholes
>he never read Lord of the Rings
>he never read Macbeth
>he never read a single goddamn one of the myriad stories where prophecies had loopholes that were exploited
Hey, I just wrote a story with orcs and elves and knights and wizards, and one of the key plot points is that an evil wizard is abusing the wording of a prophecy to achieve ultimate power. Which genre does it belong to?
Well, I guess since my story involves a magic loophole, it belongs in the sci-fi genre, and can be safely put on the sci-fi shelf right next to Asimov, Niven and Banks.
Be gay and adopt an adult. Therefore that person is your firstborn (because oldest) child (because adopted) and gets cursed. EZ
I feel like a better use of his time would be to track down the witch who lay the curse on him, and beg her forgiveness.