Earlier this year, I ran my first D&D campaign. With little experience of D&D or other tabletop RPGs (I’d played a couple of sessions of 3.5e, and a few one-shots in other systems), I decided to jump into 5th edition at the deep end with a campaign and world of my own. I’ll save my general experiences for another post, though, because today I want to talk about the first magic item I created: a cursed suit of armour.
A note to anyone familiar with D&D and its settings: I’m not. The party’s cleric was a follower of Mishakal from the Dragonlance setting (I let them choose any gods they wanted), so I associated the armour with Chemosh, assuming that he was the ‘anti-Mishakal’. Hope I got that right.
Anyway, this armour was to be the main focus of the first ‘act’ of the campaign. It was a golden suit of plate armour with no helmet. The cleric’s player had been asking me during the week about when they’d get the opportunity to go shopping for some armour, so I knew that it would be the cleric who would touch the armour first, triggering the curse.
But what was this curse? I’ll show you my notes, explain my thinking, and discuss how it played out in the game; what worked, and what didn’t.
Armour of Chemosh
The Armour of Chemosh is a golden suit of plate armour, without a helmet. It appears to shine with its own golden light, though seeing it in the dark reveals that it does not actually provide any illumination. It does not rust, dent or break, and never loses its shine.
A person who touches the armour while no one is wearing it is cursed by it. Only one person may be cursed by this armour at a time. Unlike other cursed items, the armour can be removed, though this does not break the curse.
A cursed person has a ‘curse level’ which begins at 1. If a person who was previously cursed by this armour touches it again, the curse transfers to them, with their previous curse level.
Every time you cast a spell while cursed, roll a d20. If the result is equal to or lower than your curse level, an effect occurs, and if you are wearing the armour, the curse level increases. The effects are the following:
| d20 | Effect |
|---|---|
| 1-4 | Summon a Shadow. |
| 5-9 | Summon a Shadow, Ghoul, Spectre, Ghast or Wight. Use a d6 to determine which. On a 6, nothing happens. |
| 10-14 | Summon a Shadow, Ghoul, Spectre, Ghast or Wight twice. Use 2d6 to determine which. You lose the ability to cast divine magic unless your deity is Evil. |
| 15-19 | Summon a Shadow, Ghoul, Spectre, Ghast, Wight or Wraith three times. Use 3d6 to determine which. The apparitions follow your orders. Gain a random madness effect. |
| 20 | Your body is possessed by Chemosh, driving your own soul out permanently. Your body becomes an Avatar of Chemosh under the DM’s control. |
If there are any dead bodies within 60 feet of you when any of these effects trigger, then the following additional effects occur:
| d20 | Effect |
|---|---|
| 1-4 | Raise one of them as a zombie or a skeleton (depending on the condition of the corpse). |
| 5-9 | Raise two of them. |
| 10-14 | Raise three of them. |
| 15-19 | Raise four of them under your control. |
| 20 | Raise all of them under your control. |
Starting at curse level 5, you gain XP equal to the XP of the creatures you summon and raise, but the spell you cast does not take effect. You gain no XP for slaying undead.
Summoned undead outside of your control are hostile towards anyone not wearing the armour.
So a pretty powerful item, then. A lot of questionable choices there. Let’s go over some of the details.
Monsters: It doesn’t make sense for most of these monsters to appear out of nowhere. I tended not to refer to them by name, and described them all as shadows slipping from the hand of the caster.
Curse level: Unlike regular cursed items, the armour can be removed. To begin with, you’ll only trigger the curse about once for every twenty spells you cast, so if you’re being discreet with your rolls, it’s very possible that the player might not even realise that the armour is cursed. I didn’t even let on that I was making rolls at all, but I described how the first shadow seemed to pass from the armour to the cleric and then out into the world, so they got the picture. This system actually worked really well, with the curse level reaching 8 just as the party figured out how to destroy the armour.
XP shenanigans: Obviously, this item is pretty evil, and it can be tempting for a cleric to succumb to the power. The XP adjustments were intended to make it possible for the cleric to become the villain of the campaign: they get a huge boost to XP if they simply cast a lot of spells and summon all the undead, thus levelling them up enough to be a credible threat for the other players. If they don’t, they’ll still end up with more XP than the rest of the party, as compensation for having to make do without their cleric powers for a while.
Overriding spells: Past curse level 5, a quarter of the cleric’s spells simply won’t work, summoning undead instead. This is a pretty big deal, but bear in mind that it takes on average about 35 spells to reach this level.
Avatar of Chemosh? Yeah, I have no idea what I’d have done if the curse level had reached 20.
In my game, the cleric had a run of bad luck near the start, where practically all of her spells ended up summoning Shadows (in reality this was only about 3 spells, but since they were consecutive it felt like more). This really put her off casting spells for a while, until much later when she had no choice but to risk it. Luckily, she succeeded, and regained her confidence. The players were convinced that I had changed the rules.
While it all worked out well in the end, I did get some feedback to the effect that it wasn’t cool that I basically robbed our cleric of her abilities for so long. Often, people choose spellcasting classes because they want to cast spells (surprise!), so messing with that is a bit of a risk. Know your players, I suppose. I could perhaps have done with getting to know mine a little better before I landed them with something like this.
Anyway, feel free to reuse and recycle this item; please let me know how it goes if you do!