Remove Curse - de-trollification (updated - troll back)

It is funny interesting (as opposed to funny ha ha) that in the real world things can be somewhat of a reflection of the game world.

For example that troll I mention a couple posts back, seems to have been cured of the polymorph curse and is now positively contributing to the thread over on EN World. Frankly I'm glad to see it. His human ideas are actually pretty good.

That reminds me of things that the bad guys in a campaign can do to make character's lives "interesting'. Curses cast on PC's make for an occasional interesting obstacle to overcome.

Last night I pulled one of the 2e Encyclopedia Magica books (volume 3) down off the shelf for a little bedtime reading. I was reading the section on potions and spotted one that was originally published in issue 65 of the polyhedron Newszine that lends itself to a rather nasty thing villains can do to characters that have been mucking up their operations.

It isn't so much a curse as it is a heavy duty bit of magic in liquid form. In fact Remove Curse won't fix it. Only a wish can reverse it. It is a Potion of Clay. It changes the drinker into sculptable clay and when the duration expires any changes become permanent.

Imagine a PC is captured by some crime syndicate they've been annoying. Instead of killing or ransoming off the PC, the crime boss decides to hire a very talented sculptor to remake the character to look like what they believe he or she looks like and then set the victim loose for the other characters to go after. To help keep the transformed PC from explaining what happened, they curse him with loss of speech or a curse that forces the character lie whenever trying to discuss the topic.

That would provide a two layered obstacle. The actual curse could be cured the normal way once the player characters figured out what happened, but then it gets difficult and/or expensive to reverse the physical transformation.

This goes in my save file for the time I get back to running Ptolus.

Update: despite a grand effort, the troll went back to his churlish behavior and is now permanently on my ignore list.