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Strategic Psychological Warfare and Wizardry

Axiomatic

Axiomatic

Location
the Literature Club
Fireballs are kinda old, aren't they? And they don't really become more interesting if you're a high-order mage and you scale them up and start blowing up cities.

But fireballs aren't the only thing up a magician's sleeve. I mean, did Maleficent just cast Meteor on everyone in the kingdom when they rustled her jimmies? Hell no! Because Maleficent is a class act, and she knows that the COOL thing to do is to cast a strategic-level curse that doesn't technically kill anyone, but is still pretty terrible all around.

So that's what interests me in this thread - ideas for curses you could cast on entire nations to discourage them from messing with you. But, and this is very important, they can't actually kill anyone. You have to let the Empire know they're on your shit list without using a cheap loophole like "the entire population of Imperiolopolis is nonlethally teleported two miles straight up and I'm not responsible for what gravity decides to do afterwards."

One cool curse, used magnificently in Alastair Reynold's Century Rain, is a condition called Amusica. The novel is SF, so it's caused by a nanovirus, but for our purposes it can just be magic. What it does is make its victims completely tone-deaf. That doesn't seem like much, but what it actually MEANS is that you become unable to listen to music. It's just noise to you, with absolutely no emotional charge. You can't even tell when music is happening, you can just tell that sometimes things are loud, and sometimes they aren't. You can still comprehend human speech, but you lose out all the context that makes up the difference between hearing someone speak, and reading a transcript of their speech.

Another curse is dream domination, where each night, you make everyone experience terrible nightmares. And then they wake up, and get to enjoy some sleep paralysis.

Or you could strike everyone with the inability to recognize human faces...
 
No TV and Internet for a week -
Blocks all TV and internet in the country, either by physically disabling the TV and the web browser software, or making the people unable to enjoy anything displayed on a screen (so TV, youtube, video games, or forums become super boring while vital medical equipment or machines with monitors are still usable).


Infectious singing -
Zap one person with compulsive singing and rhyming. Anyone who listens to them gets the urge to join in and sings along. This spreads to anyone who hears them etc. Eventually, everyone is singing and rhyning everything... often badly, and they beg you to make them stop.
 
Rossum said:
Infectious singing -
Zap one person with compulsive singing and rhyming. Anyone who listens to them gets the urge to join in and sings along. This spreads to anyone who hears them etc. Eventually, everyone is singing and rhyning everything... often badly, and they beg you to make them stop.
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So basically a fusion of an earworm and the Dancing Plague of 1518!

Here's one more: Immobility Blindness.
This curse makes its victims unable to perceive objects that aren't moving. Anything still, the visual cortex just fuses into the background and dismisses as irrelevant. In order to see things like...buildings and trees, what you have to do is run. Because then, they're moving relative to you, and you can actually perceive them.
 
One of the Wiz Zumwalt books had something I call "The Martian Curse" (it was never actually named), inspired by the old novel Martians Go Home. It created a plague of short, green, extremely annoying "Martians" who relentlessly harassed, mocked and aggravated everyone in the area. They couldn't be hurt, being intangible; and attempts to magically banish them just made them replicate.

Another curse would be the inability to lie. Society falls apart because no one is capable of being polite or conciliatory or complementary any more. It also eliminates fiction.
 
I once wrote a Necromancy curse for Exalted called Shackling Saturn's Wrist.

It made it so that nothing in the affected area could die.

They still grew old, they could be wounded, damaged, crippled, they would go hungry and thirsty, but they would never die. But past a certain threshold, they would never recover either.

You couldn't eat meat, because the rabbit would still try leaping out of your stomach after you ate it. People who suffered life-threatening illness or injury would never get better, being trapped in constant pain.

One undead lord tried to use that curse as a boon by trying to create an army of undying soldiers. Their very first wounds made them incapable of fighting but still not dead, and the whole thing turned into such a horrible fiasco that out of shame the lord had his entire army buried alive.

They're still suffocating to this day.
 
A large scale, area effect Curse of Cuteness, rather than one bound to an item:

Avernus said:
Cursed Item of Cuteness: A item with an attached curse; the item in question is always something small and "cute looking", like a statuette of a puppy or a pink ribbon. Contact with the item inflicts the "Curse of Cuteness" upon the victim; everything about them slowly becomes, well, cuter.

Their armor, weapons and equipment turn pastel colors and become decorated with things like flowers, puppies, lace and bunnies. Their hair becomes curly and colorful ribbons will spontaneously appear in it. As the curse progresses further their eyes become large and blue, their voices becomes high pitched and squeaky, and they develop a severe case of ticklishness. They also develop a compulsion to act cute; to skip, to play with puppies and so on. If the curse is not removed, within about a month they and anything they are wearing will shrink down to about 3-4 feet tall (although with no loss of strength), at which point the changes becomes irreversible.

It should be noted that until the final stage of the curse completes itself the victims are contagious, with a chance that anyone they come into close contact with will also have the curse inflicted upon them.
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By killing you only mean directly, right? As I'm sure quite a few large-scale curses would lead to deaths by negligence, murder, or suicide.


Honestly, you wouldn't need to do very much to make such a curse effective. Pretty much any recognized physiological, physical, or psychological disorder spread across any population larger than a town would be devastating. The possibilities are endless if you're willing to wait.

In medieval societies, making a curse so that wounds heal except for the equivalent of a paper-cut would lead to a large part of the population being infected slowly-but-surely.

This may be to over-the-top, but an inability to recognize any official language would be pretty damaging, even if it didn't last for more than a generation. Something like linguistic prosopagnosia that affects spoken, written, and maybe sign language.

Give a port town a crippling fear of fish.

Literally make it so that all forms of sustenance taste like shit, or tasteless.

Take a page from the Old Testament and make food or water "merely" look like viscera.

Make their skin incredibly tasty to ants.

Make buildings invisible randomly starting every day at noon. You can't see stairs but you can still climb them. Where there was once a floor, there now appears to be empty air.

The town's residents are now cold-blooded in a literal sense. Their body heat is more tied to their environment.

Every disease that isn't life-threatening is now contagious, are still are those that are life-threatening.

Make the act of breathing painful.

Ingesting water triggers a burning sensation.

Travelers must always take the long way to their destinations. This includes plans to leave the country, as well. As long as the idea to leave formed when they were still within the recognized borders, they'll take the "scenic route".

Yes, some of these examples would be less effective as society adapts and these oddities become the norm; but for the personal reality-altering curses, anyone who had experienced life without these curses would probably be at least annoyed by some of them. If curses were something that a person grew into, however, some interesting times could be had.
 
Give everyone involuntary projective telepathy, so they constantly broadcast their thoughts.

Make everyone randomly shrink or grow by several inches each night, so their clothes never fit and they are always clumsy.

Put everyone in Groundhog Day style time loops, but separated by a few moments from each other so they appear to be trapped in a repeating day in an empty town, but where there always seems to be evidence that someone just left the room.
 
TheBurningMan said:
By killing you only mean directly, right? As I'm sure quite a few large-scale curses would lead to deaths by negligence, murder, or suicide.
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Both directly and indirectly if the indirect version is too obvious, like the example I mentioned, where you don't harm anyone when you teleport them two miles skyward, it's their own fault for dying when they land.

If, on the other hand, you just strike them blind and they wander off a cliff, well, they should just not wander off cliffs and it they won't HAVE that problem. Same goes for making their living situation technically survivable, but some of them decide they don't want to endure it, and kill themselves - that's on them, not you. Making it so they can't drink water isn't allowed, but making it so they don't want to drink it is fair.

All of yours are very good ones.
 
Every time someone takes a step, the ground underneath their foot (and a couple inches in either direction) either raises or lowers by a centimetre or so. Whether the ground moves up or down is random. Changes made to the shape of the terrain due to this are permanent.

Not dangerous really, as long as everyone's paying attention, but it would get annoying incredibly quick. It would also seriously cripple the utility of carts, and you'd always have to be watching your step, which kind of ruins the idea of a casual stroll.

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Once a day, a person will see hallucinate a complete stranger as their best friend/a family member/someone they know. It is impossible for that individual to tell apart the stranger from the real deal through any means.

Paranoia intensifies overnight, especially for people of importance. Is that King Barrdin's maid walking over to him, or is it an assassin? Who knows? Not the King! Execute her anyway, just to be sure.

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A form of perception filter that makes activities inversely suspicious/noteworthy/interesting. This means that shady alleyway deals are suddenly totally normal seeming, even in the City of Lawful-Goodia, and likewise even the most brazen, insane, or wild acts will receive not even a single raised eyebrow. Guy being mugged in the street? Meh. Two people running naked through the streets whilst on fire and being chased by a pack of elephants? Tuesday. An orc princess having a breakdancing contest with a dragon, whilst a Lich DJ's from the roof of a nearby tavern (which happens to be on fire)? Yaaawn.

Now if you don't think that's terrifying, recall it makes all activities inversely suspicious. Every normal, everyday thing you take for granted? You're now dead convinced that it's out to get you. Better skip toast this morning - someone might have sabotaged the toaster to explore in your face. In fact, just skip breakfast entirely - the would-be killer may have poisoned all your food.

In fact, why even get out of your bed? There could be traps everywhere in your house.

Wait.

There could be a trap in the bed. Oh lord.

Suddenly people are becoming super fucking paranoid over everything and anything. Society ceases to function overnight.
 
Anhedonia.

Every day, each person has one of their senses randomly disabled for the next 24 hours.

Each person is given a single commonly used word that, when heard or read, triggers a permanent state of murderous psychosis. Nobody is told what their trigger word is.
 
Axiomatic said:
So that's what interests me in this thread - ideas for curses you could cast on entire nations to discourage them from messing with you.
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Wouldn't the very fact you cast a curse on them make them want to mess with you? You just committed a first strike, and even if the nation doesn't retaliate, what happens when neighboring nations try a first strike on you to "take you out of the equation" before they send in troops to annex the cursed nation?

Though here's my entry.

Regression to the Mean does not occur for a portion of the population. Meaning that their luck/success/failure with every day tasks are stuck as outliers for everything.

Either they succeed very well, or epic fail. No in between, no regularity of the mean.

This will cause a vast portion of the population to be unemployable. Sure, you might want the cobbler that can make a perfect pair of shoes, but what about the fact he is equally likely to make a pair of shoes so bad that it would cripple the wearer?

Cart driver? He either gets there a hour early, or he crashes the cart and they need to put down the mule...and the mule of the farmstead he crashed into...and the pigs...and replace the cart...

Etc.

Really, really bad if it affects the King, because who wants to take care of a king that is so undignified? Would cause him to look weak and easily taken out by a coup.
 
Passerby said:
Wouldn't the very fact you cast a curse on them make them want to mess with you? You just committed a first strike, and even if the nation doesn't retaliate, what happens when neighboring nations try a first strike on you to "take you out of the equation" before they send in troops to annex the cursed nation?
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This is quite clearly meant to be used by highly magical isolationist civilizations who consider themselves above fighting, so when barbarians come howling across the border, they just give them all an uncontrollable urge to kill their own children and consider the problem solved.
 
Everyone and anything they are holding or wearing is invisible and inaudible, including to themselves.

Every time people in the cursed region fall asleep, they randomly switch bodies with another sleeper.

A curse laid on a region that makes it impossible for anyone there to sleep, with all the medical problems that entails. Not lethal as long as you don't use it on some place the inhabitants can't move away from.
 
Avernus said:
Everyone and anything they are holding or wearing is invisible and inaudible, including to themselves.

Every time people in the cursed region fall asleep, they randomly switch bodies with another sleeper.

A curse laid on a region that makes it impossible for anyone there to sleep, with all the medical problems that entails. Not lethal as long as you don't use it on some place the inhabitants can't move away from.
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I...I've read things like that. It wasn't quite portrayed as a curse in them, though...

:oops::p

The third one sounds a bit too harsh, in the sense that you'd have the most well off moving out while the poorest had to pack up everything in a single cart and leave behind the lands they've farmed for generations/etc/etc.
 
The Babel curse, no one can understand what the other people is speaking with.
The other Babel curse, any building above a certain height would collapse.
 
Make it so that it is impossible to follow someone without tripping or stumbling.
Most significant effects would be on police, military (No marching in formation) and tourism.
 
A good subtle and long term curse on the country is simply debuffing a population's intellect - they all become dumber. If the cursed population is advanced enough (nuclear power plants), it'll dig its own grave ("Homer Simpson, sir. One of your exploited lumpenproles from Sector 7-G.")...
 
I summon anime Jigglypuff, make it invulnerable, give it a endless supply of actually permanent permanent markers, and send it on its way.

Extra dick: I make it like large congregations of soldiers and enchant the markers to work as microphone.
 
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