More Curses

 

I recently shared a revision to the curse of the spirit-touched, tying curses in PARIAH to PC inventory, in a nod to Cairn & Eco-Mofos. Continuing my ambition to publish revisions to the game as a series of modular zinis, I compiled the following curse "templates" (they can be applied as a lateral progression/impending doom track to any character) into the four-side format and published on itch:

• Hunger (descent into ghoul-dom)
• Lycanthropy
• Possessed
• Spirit-touched (as previous post)
• Thirst (proto-vampirism)
• Unnamed (becoming a Nameless One)

For lovers of the traditional blog format with no time for PDFs, please find the new curse templates lovingly copy-and-pasted below for FREE:

Curse template: spirit-touched

If you subscribe to the monthly newsletter I hawk over on substack you will have already seen the changes I've made to character generation in PARIAH, as well as the implied modifications to the player facing mechanics. Feel free to peruse the PDF here if you haven't yet seen it. I'll caveat this with the following statement: don’t distribute it for commercial gain or claim it as your own work. It’s a WIP and hasn’t been fully tested yet, new PARIAH campaign should kick off Friday 20th September.

While this probably merits its own post for the time being I'd like to focus on the changes to curse templates, in particular looking at spirit-touched.

Curse Templates

In PARIAH, powerful curses are represented by curse templates. Inspired by Emmy Allen’s sideways advancement trackers (particularly wendigo sickness and the wounded daughter) templates provide the opportunity to inflict a doom on a pariah over an extended period rather than removing them from the game immediately—providing the opportunity to remove the curse, or at least having some fun in the attempt. 

PARIAH Volume 1, page 53

Each template enumerates a series of afflictions (which can be beneficial, baleful or both) in a table: conditions particular to each curse trigger a roll on this table. these afflictions may make it harder to resist triggers in the future, thus causing a kind of curse-death spiral: once all entries on the table are acquired, the pariah becomes an NPC/monster.

Some examples on this blog include ghouls, werewolves and sleepflower-eaters, all of which I will update sooner or later in line with the structure of what follows...

Spirit-touched

2 Curse Templates: Doom of the Sleep-flower Smoker | Lycanthropy

CW: SUBSTANCE ABUSE/ ADDICTION and BODY HORROR

In PARIAH, powerful curses are represented by curse templates. Inspired by Emmy Allen’s lateral advancement trackers (particularly wendigo sickness and the wounded daughter) templates provide the opportunity to inflict a doom on a pariah over an extended period rather than removing them from the game immediately—providing the opportunity to remove the curse, or at least having some fun in the attempt.

This is the basis for ghouls in PARIAH:
http://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2020/04/ghouls.html

Each template has triggers which initiate a roll on the affliction table. Each entry reveals one (or more) afflictions: beneficial, baleful or both. Each curse has a point at which the player must surrender their character to the GM, though it is down to the table to establish when that point might be (suggestions are provided). A pariah may suffer multiple curses concurrently.

Curses are thus diseases, a monsters, and a weird mode of lateral character progression (but not necessarily in that order)...

Doom of the Sleep-flower Smoker

Sleepflower by Abigail Lingford

Sleepflower is a powerful entheogen: used without caution it can be lethal... but even cautious shaman may begin walking a path darker than that which leads to the realm of the dead...

GHOULS

This post is the bastard lovechild of the following blogposts:

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2013/10/everything-you-know-about-ghouls-is.html

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2015/02/half-ghouls.html

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-ghast.html

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2019/10/scraps-of-undeath.html

...but especially this post from Cavegirl:

http://cavegirlgames.blogspot.com/2018/07/wendigo-sickness.html

Liberally borrowing from the above material to fashion a disease, a monster, and a weird mode of lateral character progression (but not necessarily in that order).  

SPOILER: they're ALL ghouls.