Once, there was a young milkmaid. Fair-haired and soft-hearted, the envy of her sisters and the pride of her family. Day by day she milked her family's two cows and carried her pails through the winding village roads, warm and joyful faces greeted her at each delivery.
On one such ordinary spring day she saw a shadow fallen along the roadside, couched in mud and grime. The shadow hacked and coughed, no shadow but a haggard old woman in deep- painful throes. As the milkmaid neared the shadow resolved to a cloaked, old woman- heaving on all fours and mewling in the mud.
A hand shot out from the shadow of the cloak, the hood falling, and the old woman pled to the milkmaid "Oh golden-haired maiden, please! But a drink of your sweet harvest would set my humors right!" The fallen hood revealed the gurgling buboes and boiling warts that
sloughed about her stricken visage, and terror beat its drum in the milkmaid's stomach. She cut wide around the woman and turned her face away, hurrying
along her route.
With another hack and bloody cough the haggard woman pled once more- but the milkmaid hardened her heart and took to a run. Hauling herself to her knees, the witch then gestured and damned her curse to the milkmaid:
"May you be ruin! May your beauty be your bane and your heart be hollwed! May your presence curdle the virtues of good men and may you be a crawling hive! May you die unburied and only then succumb to the rot you spread!"
And with that last issue, she heaved her final breath and fell stricken in the mud, the terrified milkmaid fleeing along the road.
The curse laid by the wayside witch festered in the milkmaid's mind, but she dare not repeat it for she feared the torch.
That day, the milk she delivered was found to have spoiled overnight.
All through the night, the milkmaid tossed and turned with dark dreams of crawling claws and the evil eye, ever glaring. But, she woke and set to housework before making her deliveries as normal. All through the day, she would swat at an especially persistent fly and would jump at every shadow she saw.
It did not take long for the milkmaid to realize the witch's curse. At first, the hens stopped laying eggs- with their final clutch found rotten and molded. Not long after, the cows stopped giving milk, and her families' debts began to pile.
Next, her father was stricken with a terrible sickness that soon consumed her sisters and mother as well. All bed ridden but the maid herself, who now was plagued by the flies that found her throughout the day. She slapped and swatted, catching hundreds until the house was empty of them, but then come morning a cloud of the biting, buzzing, swarming menace was back and stronger.
The very frames of the house began to sag, mold sporing in the corners and consuming the rafters. One by one, the milkmaid buried each of her family in the churchyard, and with each death the village turned. Day by day, they shut their doors to the milkmaid and turned their faces to her plight. What's worse, those who did still speak with her told of the villagers turning cruel to one another, spats and fights sprung up among the kindest of folk and a hate boiled in their hearts.
Despite her plight, a rowdy crowd of suitors began to plague her home- each a young farmhand or apprentice from the village who began turning to a cruel visage spotted through a window or a figure standing in the dark of the wood. They quarreled in her yard and pled for her hand- though the maid shut them all out of her home as she saw their teeth sharpening and eyes yellowing day by day.
One night, the maid shut up each window and barricaded herself inside as the shouts became cackles and the suitors beat upon the home. Howling and shouts from outside ebbed and flowed, smoke and iron were on the wind and she sat up swatting flies all night, daring not to sleep.
Come morning the maid discovered what had become of her village and her home- now sagged and mold-ridden it would not stand another night. Blood spilled throughout the village, homes burnt and twisted- cruel faces smiled down at her from hanging bodies in the square. All that stood was the church.
She sought sanctuary inside with the young priest- himself bloodied and bereaved by the terror of the night before. In begging prayer, the milkmaid came to realize the issue of her misfortune- as she choked and coughed- a black clot of wriggling flies coming up in her hand. Using a silvered plate as her mirror, she watched as the biting flies that plagued her would one by one issue from her mouth.
The church filled with these flies and everywhere they touched began to rot, benches falling to pieces, stone spotting with mold, hanging cloth shriveling and flower turning to fungus. Despite the horror unfolding, it was the priest's eyes yellowing and breath laboring that finally drove the milkmaid to flee and lock herself in the undercroft.
In desperate prayer the maid sat by light of a single candle, the flies buzzed angrily around the locked crypt. The shroud of biting darkness swallowing up the light bit by bit- it parted suddenly as salvation crept into the candlelight.
Palm-sized, rose red, legs clean and sharp black, eyes gleaming with quiet hunger, the maid's mind slowed and began to set cold and clear as she made eye contact with the great spider.
Perhaps not an answer to her prayer, but a solution to her plight. The maid wiped away her tears, her heart emptied of fear. She reached out her hand to the spider.
Bringing it to her lips, she opened her mouth and the spider crawled inside with measured care, fluttering step by step down her throat.
It did not take long for the flies to stop, as the spider swallowed them up. Not long after, the spider too swallowed up the maddened priest outside.
The maid stood in the rotten chapel's archway and faced a new morning, the corpse of her village strewn about in front of her- but the rot stench could not bother her anymore. Fear and sorrow too, the spider swallowed.
And still, it was hungry.
 | |
| Tatum Cho |
"The average person swallows 8 spiders per year. Susan Spidermouth, who swallowed 30,000 spider eggs thus becoming the ultimate spider incubator, is an outlier and should not be counted."
Tarna the Spider-Maid
8 HP, 8 STR, 14 DEX, 14 WIL (d6 dagger or d10 bite)
- A pretty young woman, cannot speak. Her insides are hollowed by the spider that symbiotically lives inside, keeping her limbs moving. Hungry. Can eat curses.
- Charms as per spell and can kiss a willing target to spit a Hollowing Spider into their mouth.
- Critical Damage: Paralyzes target (d8 DEX damage) with a spider-kiss.
Hollow Zombie
4 HP, 6 STR, 6 DEX, 6 WIL (damage as weapon)
- An unwilling host to a Hollowing Spider. Hungry.
- Young Hollows are ravenous and mindless. Older Hollows can mimic human behavior but cannot speak.
An aside on curses.
There are many kinds of curses, from little malisons that bedevil a wayward adventurer to bloodline-tethered divine retribution.
Some tables never use curses, some do. Delta did a good look at the history of the curse, Jon of Medieval Melodies did a look as well, and Noisms wrote a bit about curses as insanity too. I'm most partial to the table of flavorful curses from Swords & Scrolls.
Let's take a gander at what a curse looks like mechanically from something like Lamentations of the Flame Princess (though this is similar to most retroclones' format of the curse):
Bestow Curse (the reverse of Remove Curse) can bring about any number of unfortunate effects upon a being, determined by the caster and Referee. Some limits of effect must be enforced. Typical possibilities are limited to no more than a –2 pen alty to saving throws or –4 to hit, an ability being reduced by 50%. These effects can have any number of creative symptoms. The victim can avoid being affected by Bestow Curse with a successful saving throw versus Magic.
For best effect, players getting cursed should have a bit more flavor to it than just the modifier penalties above, and and iteration of a straight Remove Curse should be used with caution. A setting environment filled with curse-slinging witches and undead loses its luster if you can just hit up the local cleric for your monthly curse-check and get an inoculation just in case.
Curses should be unique and curses should have weight to them. To lay a curse is to set wrong a right, bend fate to a twisted bend and set a foul spirit on someone.
In the worst of cases, anyone can lay a curse with their dying breath and enough vigor behind it- at the cost of the curse-layer's soul becoming that maleficent spirit enforcing the curse- and no curse worth a soul should be something generic.
A curse should have two components.
1: A unique effect that impacts how a character functions in the world, whether this be changes to rolls or NPC reactions- make it work within the fiction and make it be felt.
2: At least two ways to break it. Some unique format is best- as with Noisms' take of unique breaking conditions to be met- but make sure that the player knows how to break a curse. Both a unique condition and some ludicrously expensive resolution as a backup would do the trick.
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