Tell me your cursed item stories!

[ericthecleric]

I'm interested to know- and hopefully chuckle at- stories where PCs have bought or found cursed items. Not ones about dust of choking and sneezing, or the other "useful" ones; more the items with quirky drawbacks and side-effects, and how that impacted play.

[Jerry Wright 307]

One of our players back in 2E had a habit of not waiting for the identify spell to try out magic items. To teach him a lesson, I put a cursed sword in the game that changed the recipient's sex. Sure enough, he pulled it out of the scabbard, and suddenly, "he" was a "she".

That was funny, but about three weeks later, the same player had another character in another DM's game, who found a magic belt and immediately put it on. It turned out to be a girdle of masulinity/femininity, and his fighter grew breasts.

But the capper is that the original character, the one with the sword, managed to get his curse removed, and a couple of months later, found another belt in my game. And, sure enough...

After a while, he started running female characters as a matter of course.

But as far as cursed items go, the beauty of the sex-change item is that it's a curse that has a real effect in the game, but has no significant effect on the character's combat abilities. A GM doesn't have to worry about nerfing a combatant.

Similar items I've seen used are:
-a ring that changes a character's skin color each day until the curse is removed

-a chain shirt that made every metallic item on the characater rust (purely cosmetic--appearance only)

-a pair of gloves of dexterity +4 that were bright lime green and fucschia - and couldn't be covered up

-a pair of boots of the winterlands that made the character look as if he was wearing fishnet stockings and spike heels.

Three of these items were in the same campaign, but the boots were from a different one.

[far_wanderer]

The one time I've put cursed items in my game turned out hilariously bad for the PCs:
I had a party with a sorcerer who recently picked up analyze dweomer, so I figured I'd give him a treat and put some cursed items in the next pile of loot they found. For reasons unfathomable to me, on that one occasion, and only that one occasion, the party Alchemist ended up doing the identifying (and failed to notice the curses). Most of the items were sold without use, but a (Dancing) Boots of Teleportation made it into the Alchemist's equipment. Several sessions go by and she somehow manages to never get attacked (the trigger condition for the boots).
The party ends up fighting a powerful fire-based spellcaster with the spell hostile juxtaposition. The battle is going poorly, until the party Barbarian hits upon an inventive plan: Bull Rush the enemy through a Cubic Gate to the elemental plane of water. Except they had forgotten about the previously demonstrated hostile juxtaposition. So the first attack on the Alchemist, the one that triggers uncontrollable dancing, ends up being a Bull Rush into the elemental plane of water.
Fortunately the Barbarian followed and was able to get both of them back through the Cubic Gate (albeit to a different plane) before either of them drowned. They did have an interesting side quest wandering the outer planes looking for a friendly outsider who could cast remove curse though.

[Darth Knight]

Those damned girdles of opposite gender. If it did not give a +5 boost to strength...grrr

[ericthecleric]

Thanks for the stories, guys! Keep 'em coming!

[Azure_Zero]

I make some of my own cursed items, but they don't get used since I hardly get a good chance to use them.