Curses that seem alright but are actually horrifying when you think about it

I'll start:

>Extreme Libido

sounds great, even magical realm tier, but being constantly a horn dog ALL the time? You'd get run ragged in a few weeks. And it would destroy the life of a female victim, plenty of real world examples.

Imagine a paladin or some other chaste character getting hit with such a curse? No longer able to focus pure thoughts? if it;s a setting where demons are attracted to debauchery thoughts and the character is even a bit psychic, the caster has made them into a time bomb.

Hey guys

GUYS

sex

You can only eat one thing from now on.

You'd just go around raping people, and ultimately yourself, to death. No need for demons or psychics, really.

You can not speak a lie.

>not just making a mutually beneficial pact with a succubus

Problem solved. You could even tie her up and carry her around with you for quick 'n easy stress relief.

One of the people people in my party got hit with a curse of forgetfulness the character in question was the funny guy of the party so we expected him to joke about it but he played it off like alzhiemers. Really killed the mood till we got him cured.

You can always tell what people think

>not knowing that the succubus will just enslave you better and easier than normal people

congratulations, now you live in a dungeon serving as emergency battery.

You don't have to sleep

>SO MUCH FREE TIME FOR ACTIVITIES

You can't perceive the color green.

Narcolepsy

Not having to sleep would be great. I assume you mean not being able to sleep (plus not needing sleep, otherwise that'll just kill you).

No, you still need to sleep. You need daily 7-8 hours of time when you sit down, can't do anything, and mustn't be disturbed.

No more "just sleeping trough the noise", if someone is snoring besides you, you need a new place.

...

You have described that curse really badly then.

Or more to the point, you are describing a normal person who wakes up easily. I myself don't HAVE to sleep, even though I need to.

This one can be easily abused. By using exact words to predicting the future to pretending to be mute since the curse only says about "speaking" a lie... and so on.

>if someone is snoring besides you, you need a new place
Almost seems like a better curse would be just always feeling like you've been up for a week straight, yet being incapable of sleeping. You experience vivid hallucinations, but hey, your party never has to draw straws for the watch.

LEGO bricks randomly spawn near you whenever you're not wearing any footwear.

Okay then: You don't need to sleep, but you still need your rest, you just don't get to be unconscious during it.

Here is a crafty one, think about it: Once you move, you can never return to the same spot again.

And? Just seems like an excuse to get free vendor trash and go on a quest for the perfect self cleaning footwear that has anti fungus magic and so on.

If I got it correctly,you have to sit down silently,doing nothing at all,for 7-8 hours a day so it counts as sleeping to you.
Fml,user,that would be horrible. In case you have to pull an all nighter it could come in handy,but otherwise is a shitty fate.


>Hearing what people are thinking (not reading minds,see).

>Having metal bones.

You can never get truly comfortable when sitting, lying down, or leaning on anything. You are cursed to forever be mildly to very uncomfortable whenever not standing up.

This does not mean you can rest standing up.

>Fighting a succubus in a dungeon
>She's almost dead
>She teleports away
>Manage to track her down further in the dungeon
>She's sexing up a chained-up starving man
>Succubus starts panicking that the prisoner hasn't cum yet
>Quit that D&D group because DM obviously keeps inserting his fetish shit in

>Succubus starts panicking that the prisoner hasn't cum yet

That's a terrible curse that sounds terrible, not a terrible curse that sounds like a blessing.

I "sleep" like this fairly frequently. It's ok.

to be fair, the OP request was "curses that seem alright" as in "bearable" not just curses disguised as blessing

How about, "You can never become unconscious."
You will remain conscious even when you need to rest.
You cannot become unconscious if you are having an operation.
If you are so badly harmed your body would render you unconscious to protect you, nope.
And death? You will remain conscious even beyond that.

That's not really crafty or subtle.

You grow a pair of gills and your lungs change to use them instead. Your skin/eyes/etc adapt to living underwater but the rest of your body is still adapted to living on land

Are leg warmers a footwear?

You can always tell when people are lying to you, but only that. You don't get to know the truth instantly.

Alternatively

You can tell when people are lying and what they are lying about

>etc
>the rest
You are too vague.

My party's Bard, pretty early on, encountered and, naturally, offended a hermit hedge witch. She cursed him with a cheeky one that's been a bane in his side for the whole story.

He can't ever manage to finish a drink, either the vessel will leak a small amount, or someone will bump him as he carries the drink, spilling the contents, maybe something will land in the drink, like a fly.

For a character who enjoys drinking heavily, the constant loss of all these small mouthfuls plagues him.

I get where you are coming from, but I think that'd still be a net advantage.

>Curses that seem alright but are actually horrifying when you think about it
Overthinking

Apologies, went for the "slightly humorous spoilers" instead of ease-of-reading. Rephrased curse:

Your body adapts to live underwater enough so that you may do so without risking death or serious injury (such as skin becoming rubbery, eyes getting a second lense, lungs adapting to use gills). However, the rest of your body (your muscles, hearing, eyesight, and so on) does not adapt to make living underwater any easier. So you simply now must live underwater but are unable to do so comfortably or easily.

Lying requires intent, and knowingly speaking the future incorrectly would be prevented, but nothing would stop you from just being constantly wrong.

Oh that's a really neat one.

What happens when the Paladin begins to have a crisis of faith and is quesitoned on it?

When he falls out of love with the mother of his children?

When he must voice his honest opinion on what to do with the orc tribes that raid for supplies?

Then the one who cast the curse wasn't that powerful, just cast remove curse then.

If it's a Paladin then it should be able to remove the curse. Also don't make me link TV Tropes to explain things to you.

That's the point.
Someone is trying to scam you? You know they are lying
Someone is lying about the fine print in a contract? You know they are lying
Your boss tells you you didn't got the promotion becuase the other was working harder than you? You know he is lying
Your child tells you he isn't doing drugs? You know they are lying
Your wife tells you you don't look older? You know she is lying
Your friends tell you they love hanging out with you? You know they are lying
Your family tells you they are proud of you? You know they are lying


It all depends on the kind of person the cursed one is.
Like in that movie with Mel Gibson being able to read women's minds. It is either the best thing ever or the worse, depending on who you are considering most people don't censor their own toughts and honesty is brutal.

>Missing the point this badly

Lying is not the same thing as being wrong.

Your can't support your weight with your right foot.

You cannot reach into bags, pouches, sacks, or backpacks.

You may not approach those against whole you wish violence.

Any species may successfully mate with you.

You cannot deny a kiss when asked.

You cannot speak out in your defense when accused.

Depending on your perspective that's not even bad.

Anything with psionic or mental powers would absolutely LOVE that curse, in fact, since it means they can never be totally destroyed. Imagine a thrallherd who didn't have a body you could kill, and whom you could never render harmless.

Your 2nd and 4th finger are forever paralysed.

You're mistaking narrowness of definition with lack of power.

Being able to see the fate of a person's future like in The Dead Zone.

You know that feeling where you feel like there's still a bit of shit inside you, but no matter how yu push it won't come out? That happens every time you shit.

...

I feel that way after my intestinal surgeries. Mostly out of panic that they'd get heavily clogged up again.

That seems unfair

cant have this thread without mentioning this.

Any time the word cooking comes up, you can not stop talking about how awesome your cooking is until someone new agrees to try your cooking. You are also cursed to burn anything you try to make as food, including cereal.

Earth/world moves through space and rotates, so you're never in the same place in spacetime.

I'm not sure if this counts, but I've got a setting I'm working on where one type of magic is the "Peasant's Curse", where a commoner makes a great sacrifice to put a curse on a nobleman. The curses are generally something that wouldn't inconvenience a peasant too much, but would be a huge pain in the ass to royalty. It's kind of based on Irish Hunger Strikes, where someone would purposefully starve themselves to death on a nobleman's doorstep, leaving a big inconvenient corpse.
One of the curses is Blackhands, where the victim's hands get covered in black soot that never comes off. Anything they touch gets smeared with it. Fine clothes, clean furniture, and doing pretty much anything yourself becomes a bitter memory. Some nobles drive themselves to bankruptcy trying to live with a Blackhands curse. But for a wretched peasant, the Blackhands curse would just be an inconvencience. It's a equalizing force, to make nobles take care of their peasants.

Seems like a great slave race

Imagine if through some bizarre random chance, you hit a spot in spacetime that you've been before, and get blasted off into space at a hundred thousand miles a second.

>make me link TV Trope

Don't you put that evil on me Ricky Bobby

You are now afraid of only fear

>Any species may successfully mate with you.
Don't you give /d/ any ideas!

That shit's pretty funny actually

I'm running an erotic campaign where this is one of the central plot points.

Females of most species have gone infertile within a few weeks. At the same time there are some women of human and elvish decent that are now able to mate with any species. World war is brewing as various factions try to gather up as many breeding women as they can.

get /d/unked on.

Thats terrifying

every other day, your voice changes.

Here's one: You can eat as much as you want.

Sounds neat at first, especially if you enjoy eating, who doesn't? But since it's a curse, the way it operates is you can never get "full".

You still enjoy the taste of food, but you will never experience that satisfied feeling of well fed fullness you get after a meal. Any food you eat past what you need gets converted to fat like normal.

It also makes it hard to tell when you're actually hungry, because likewise your stomach never feels "empty"

Affects of this curse range from extreme obesity to frequent hypoglycemic crashes. At best you can carefully manage your diet to only eat what you need, but it's less satisfying.

Lets not forget the Midas touch.

What would the sacrifice be?

Usually something really big for the peasant. Like a treasured possession, a limb, their own life, etc. It's not something you do on a whim.

But if the nobleman who rules you works your father to death to speed up the expansion on his house, hanged your best friend for poaching when he was starving, has your 8-year old son flogged for getting mud on his coat while playing, and knocks up your daughter and has her killed to avoid an inconvenience, then that price might not look so high, just to give the smug bastard a taste of what you've suffered.

Everything you touch is coated in a film of filth.

You cannot fly or teleport.

Insects/arachnids will never touch you or harm you, but any within a ten foot radius will seek to be as close to you as possible.

Sounds pretty funny to me

Surely it should just be they suffer from the curse as well?

Nah. The curse disproportionately affects the nobleman; they're no big deal for a peasant. The sacrifice has to be something big or they'd do it on a whim.

Not the guy who posted the original idea but I'd imagine it ought to be something that is important to the peasant but trivial to the noble for the sake of pottery.

This just seems like a way for a drow woman to keep tabs on her paramour while they wander the surface.

expunge all witchery indiscriminately the only place where happiness is constant is heaven anything else is foul devilish tricks

Everyone forgets you exist immediately after you leave eyesight

Not being able to age or die.

You know the future and can only speak in prophecies. However instead of seeming mystical or all knowing you seem like a dick.

You want someone to pass you the salt. "You will pass me the salt", "You will give me a ride", "You will fail miserably at this endeavor" etc.

>None can utter a falsehood in your presence.

Okay, a magical truth field. Cool, except it affects you as well. Not to mention making certain interactions very awkward. The wealthy and powerful will shun your character, or seek to kill him.

Oglaf has some great curses.

total Invisibility, except to those who are about to die, who will only see you as what they want to see the most (i.e. family member, angel, devil, purple dinosaur)