Curse of Haunting Guilt
Punishments come in many shapes and sizes. And sometimes guilt and remorse hurt a person far more than harm directly done to them.
The Curse of Haunting Guilt, sometimes also called the "Sin Mirror", is a particularly insidious curse, that has both the main target and a secondary target, also known as the "mirror". It is through the "mirror" that the true curse is acted upon, as they slowly become the tormentor of the cursed one unless they manage to change their ways. The mirror will display the wickedness of the target on their skin, and slowly turn mad, as their very soul starts to grave the cursed one's flesh.
For added horror, the person chosen as a mirror is often someone dear to the cursed one, or someone whom they otherwise need to stay close to. As they see the mirror succumb to the curse, the mere sight of them might be tormenting for the cursed one.
Effect
The caster makes a sacrifice, and ties a soul of the target to a soul of the person chosen as the "mirror" and sets a "sin" and a "virtue" for the target to follow. The curse will activate, and a small, dark, scar-like mark will appear somewhere on the mirror's skin.
After this point, every time the target makes the sin chosen by the caster, the mark on the mirror will grow. The sin chosen can be any behaviour, thought pattern, or action, broad or particular, as long as it is quantifiable and under the target's power or directly harmful to it (sin cannot, for example, be "breathing", as breathing happens involuntarily). How much the mark will grow from any sin committed should be proportional for the severity of the action, but all in GM's discretion. Similarly, virtue will be chosen similarly to sin, with the difference that acting on the virtue will decrease the size of a mark on the mirror, instead of increasing it.
As the mark grows, it turns in to a larger and larger dark, a scar-like pattern on the mirror's skin, and will start to slowly eat their health, and after the markings cover 80% of mirror's body, their sanity. At this point, the mirror will start to hunt for the target, in a bloodlust that consumes all their senses and reasoning. If the mirror is to die before the curse is lifted, they will keep haunting and trying to kill the target in the form of a ghost-like undead, with CR between 4 to 8, on DMs discretion. If destroyed, the undead form will respawn in 1d6+1 days after, and keep hunting for the target.
The target and mirror will not automatically know that they are part of the curse, nor what the virtue and sin are in their case. Connection, however, could be found out through trial-and-error, magical means or by studying tomes about ancient curses.
The curse can be lifted only with the following methods:
- Through Wish-spell
- Target must perform acts that follow the "virtue" chosen until the mark on the mirror shrinks so small that it vanishes, and stays away for at least 3 months.
- Target dies and stays dead at least for 3 months
- Complicated ritual is performed to amplify "Remove curse", that is cast while the mirror and the target remain in the same space. Ritual will last 1 hour. The ritual should be set to high difficulty, or require questionable actions and materials to make it an interesting challenge, all with GM's discretion.
Well, this is a terrifying curse. Is it immediately obvious what's happened, or does the target kind of have to work out for themselves what makes the marking shrink or grow? Great idea.
They actually don't know, something I do definitely need to add to the description. x3 Which adds to the terror. You can't necessarily tell what is happening until curse has already gotten to a certain point and you find someone to identify it. This is actually something affecting a player character right now. They wanted to have this cool curse scar that kept spreading, and their draw to adventure was to find out what it is about. Thing is, this (elven) character was found abandoned when she was just a toddler and was adopted by a lovely clan of dwarfs, and she already had the mark back then. Now, years later, it covers about 45% of her body. As what players know now, they have had the curse identified and they know she is the "mirror" of this curse, but they have no clue about the sin or virtue, nor they actually know even who the target is. They know that ones their friend goes mad they will instinctually find the target (or at least jolt towards the direction where they are asap), but they wouldn't prefer the loose their friend going mad, and the character in question doesn't really feel comfy with the idea they need to murder someone if they don't even know why they should do it in the first place. You know, maybe the caster hated kittens, and the sin is cuddling kittens and virtue about murdering them - you never know! They have now managed to somewhat identify the caster though. :D After few rituals players got some NPC wizards to cast on the poor mirror-player character, she has had visions of this lady, which looks a lot like her, and they presume now that the woman is most-likely the mirror's biological mother. Some of these visions she is hiding, holding the baby-player in her arms, singing to her a sad tune, then someone breaks a door, murders her and takes the baby-player but that is where the vision ends. As nifty little buggers, my party of cool bean Sherlocks just realised through trial and error, that the tune the woman was humming was a vocal component to the curse (making her most likely a bard) and the sacrifice was the woman herself when the attacker stroke her down. That's where they are stuck atm though. We'll see what they figure up next. ;D <insert evil snicker here>
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That's so interesting! I hope they figure it out before she goes mad!