I'm not sure if I like cursed weapons...because it gets kind of weird having to use them... but then again you have to use the other cursed items.

I would punt no more than one cursed weapon in the deck and perhaps give them greator bonus but they eat you and your trophies... I'll make some when I feel motivated I may still your pics though!

That's a good idea, cursed weapons that eat your monster trophies. What a bummer! lol

Pretty much no matter what, cursed weapons need to suck. Whether they have lame bonuses or eat trophies, the idea is pretty much that you'll want to get rid of it quick. But if we can get some cool themes going on them that would be best.

Here are my cursed items that I posted before:

I personally belive that if someone is driven insane or rendered unconcious that they should be able to lose cursed items. It also makes me laugh at the thought of a pickpocket suddenly being cursed by something they pinched.

I think those items are pretty cool, and not as overly painful as we originally thought. The consensus on discarding is that you put the discard conditions on the items, so all Cursed Items can be different. So just add that on there. You can also remove the first sentence since that's true of all Cursed Items.

Since no one offered ideas to make it worse, here it is yet again, worse then before.

Yeah that's a little worse! As long as you're not a spellcaster, you only really lose your Skill. That still sucks big time, AND your Sanity is being drained so it's no longer like 4x your Sanity for free. And if you are a spellcaster or someone who starts with an Ally... yikes. AND you are going to lose all your other stuff too, since you will be going crazy four times and discarding half your stuff.

This looks like a good "mega-doom" cursed item, but then again I think any player would be smart to just be devoured right away. Rather than waste however many turns going crazy and throwing stuff away (while having no spells/allies/skills), why not just start over and use that time productively with someone new?

Maybe if you were immune to the penalties of going insane...? Hmm.... yeah it needs something or I'd just get devoured first turn. Playing as that character would be a horrible drawn out death. Which is hilarious mind you; just maybe not so fun in the actual game.

Suggestions on how to balance it?

Just a steady drain or add Doom Tokens?

Attempted Fix.

Heh heh heh... I've always been a fan of the idea of crippling investigators and leaving them to rot ;') retiring in the face of global destruction seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. I mean, really, a head wound and schitzophrenia should only encourage one's peculiar obsession with otherworldly eldritch horrors. Soooo. Yeah. No quitting till you're a hundred.

I like this idea a lot. Here's my first cursed item:

Hah! That's great, the curse goes excellently with the discard effect. Question: the discard condition is spend i.e. on anything (such as allies) the ten trophies, not just discard them without effect?

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I would give the skull and mirror greater stat bonus +2 and anyone know where I can find a cool picture of a item eating someone? Like a sword eating the arms of the wielder.

To DKW The Insanity thing seems weird and confuses me. Maybe give it a little bonus to something!

Try DeviantArt, great site.

http://www.deviantart.com/

Avi_dreader said:

No, you discard them without effect. Or rather, the effect is to get rid of the Skull. You can't use them for anything else (like allies or the Deputy ).

And yes, it was intentional that the curse would hinder you in getting rid of the item. In effect, in order to overcome the curse, you'll have to risk triggering it.

Morgain, you may want to change the wording on your card to "Discard" instead of "Spend."

The Fine Line is supposed to be an attempt at creating an "Uber-Doom" curse, the 1 or 2 per game type card.

Alright I finally changed my avatar to something that's not shared by four other people. And there's even a pic of zombies! w00t!

dkw said:

We definitely need super-doom stuff for the Cursed Item deck. But super-doom still needs to be fun! I guess my suggestion would be to make it so the player is not totally crippled while this is going on. Right now I see the following problems:

1) The player is almost totally unable to contribute to the game due to near-zero cards in play (fewer after each insanity)

2) The only way to stave off this effect is to add doom tokens, and Clues would run out right away

3) Therefore the slow Sanity loss is pretty much the only option (though you could always just end the game by taking doom tokens)

4) With inevitable, repeated Insanity (and loss of items) looming, and the only way out of the curse being quite clear, the player will probably seek to hasten his four insanity trips. This most likely means jumping on monsters and purposely losing horror checks. (Though finding a way to be devoured is still the best choice.)

5) Even intentionally seeking Sanity loss, many investigators would need quite a few turns to go crazy four times. This means the player is not only crippled by having no cards but they also spend at least SIX to EIGHT turns trying to suicide.

Now I totally agree with Avi, this is unbearably funny and would be a hoot to watch. But the bottom line is that only the sadists in the room would enjoy seeing this card come out. For the poor guy who drew it, the game is essentially a slow torture that won't get better until it's too late. So really, I'd say make it something like this:

- Crippling, but quicker to get rid of (perhaps only with help), but has a BAD punishment for doing so (like adding doom). OR...

- Near-impossible to get rid of, but less crippling (so the player can still play).

Either way it would allow the player to still have fun. Personally I think the first option has more potential.

@Sothis

Sadist? Moi? ;'D

Yet another attempt.

A different attempt.

I'm not sure it's that good an idea to stop people 'retiring' their investigator. It seems like something that's a bit too fundamental about the game. In my regular group, if someone really isn't having fun with an investigator, they quite commonly retire it and draw (or pick) another one. Getting rid of that ability seems like a rather crude way of making sure the cursed item stays in the game (which I assume is the point). Instead, it should read something like "Cannot be traded. If you retire, give this card to the first player" (or just give it to your new investigator).

On 'Fine Line of Insanity': the gate symbols (square, circle, hexagon etc) are usually called 'dimension symbols' I think. Also it's impossible to have a gate trophy for all of those symbols, since no gates have the 'crescent' symbol on them (it's the symbol they use for spawn monsters and special monsters like the Dunwich Horror).

On that same note about Dimensional Symbols, by following guidelines set down by Kevin, if something is impossible to do, then it isn't considered an option. Since there are no Gates with that symbol, it would not be required to complete the Discard requirement.

About retiring, only the most powerful Cursed Stuff would have anything like that. Everything else doesn't prevent Retiring, and thus can be dealt with by Retiring, which feels like a cop out of today's Internet/Entitlement Generation where if someone is losing, they quit so their "score/ranking" and personal pride isn't affected. Very few people still follow through to the end, even when things are going bad and blame it on everyone else. In truth, the Internet is actually to blame for this.

Another problem with Retiring, as with Bank Loans, is that everyone runs to the nearest Investigator, gives them all their Items, quits, and comes back with a healthy Investigator, and gets back their stuff, plus the possibility to get better stuff from an already partially depleted deck of cards where the majority of the lesser goods have already been cycled to the bottom of the deck and/or claimed by other Investigators. Heck, unless you care about the Score, you could claim almost the entire Common and Unique Item decks simply by Retiring Investigators every turn. By taking away that option, it gets the other Investigators working to help remove the powerful Curses that are crippling someone.

A cursed toy that Investigators may not wish to part with.

dkw said:

Heh... I'd have to be really desparate not to want to part with that ;'D

dkw said:

Um...I'm pretty sure that when I retire an investigator it's not because of the internet or because I'm a member of an Entitlement Generation. Do you have data to support your assessment of the amount of following-through-to-the-end that's going on the world today? Have global following-through rates fallen sharply in the last twenty years? Sorry, I think what you just said was claptrap, but if we want to argue about it we probably ought to do it in a different thread or even forum...

/sarcasm

dkw said:

While it certainly is possible to abuse the retiring rules in order to get all the game's items, it's also possible to just pick the most powerful investigators and the least powerful AOs and play with the easiest possible combinations of cards. AH is a co-op game, so if all the investigators collaborate in order to make it too easy for themselves, good luck to 'em - although I'd be surprised if they had any fun. Meanwhile, me and my friends don't care about the score at all, and occasionally do retire investigators (discarding all their equipment) just because they're not doing anything entertaining in that game and they'd rather try out someone else. I'm not saying you can't repeal the 'retiring' rule using a card, but I stand by my original statement: it's a really fundamental part of the player-character structure of the game, and getting rid of it is only one step below forbidding people to leave the game altogether (whcih you really can't enforce). Maybe it's trivial to most players, but I think it's a huge change to the way the game works, and if you just want people to not be able to get rid of the cursed item, there's gotta be an easier way.

Stopping people trading items, on the other hand, is a great idea.

Here are some items that aren't cursed, but they are used with Cursed Items.

I'm thinking of adding +1 Luck (or something) to the Heirloom and making it more like $5. That way it's more useful. Ideas?