Cursed

Version 0.11: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

This page is about the item effect. For the card, see the article Curse card.

Some equipment that you come across will be cursed, rendering it impossible to unequip until you find a way to break the curse. These items will look just like any other item until you equip or identify them, at which point the curse will be revealed. Depending on the nature of the specific item, this can be a minor irritant or a major hazard. Although useful cursed items appear occasionally, most cursed weapons and armour will have negative enchantment penalties, while cursed jewelry is usually designed to harm the wearer. On top of that, if you are stuck with a cursed blunt weapon, you'll be unable to butcher corpses and may be at risk of starvation. Cursed gloves prevent you from changing your equipped rings, and cursed cloaks prevent you from changing body armour. Because of this, it is wise to careful about equipping unidentified items.

Followers of Ashenzari receive special bonuses for wearing cursed gear, and are given abilities that make it easier to curse your gear and maintain curses.

Detecting Curses

Any wieldable or wearable item can be cursed. Items that appear magical (i.e. runed or glowing items) are somewhat more likely to be, but items that appear mundane can also be cursed as well.

Identifying an item will reveal whether it is cursed. If you cannot identify an item, there are two ways to discern whether it is cursed:

• Witnessing an enemy unequip the item
• Equipping it yourself (This will, of course, cause the curse to take effect, so be sure to have a means of curse removal ready)

In both cases, the game will mark the item's cursed or uncursed status, even if it is otherwise unidentified.

Uncursing Items

• The most common method for uncursing items is to read a scroll of remove curse. This will uncurse all cursed items you are currently wearing, but has no effect on unequipped items in your inventory. These scrolls are thankfully very common.
• The main use for scrolls of enchant weapon and scrolls of enchant armour is to strengthen your equipment, but they have the added benefit of uncursing the item if it is cursed. Using these scrolls specifically to uncurse a single item is usually wasteful.
  • Worshipers of Ashenzari are affected by the above scrolls differently. Scrolls of remove curse will only affect the equipped items you wish to uncurse, and enchantment scrolls will leave curses intact.
• Blessing your weapon with your god's brand gift (Lugonu's distortion, the Shining One's holy wrath, or Kikubaaqudgha's pain) will remove its curse as part of the upgrade.

Item Cursing

Uncursed equipment is normally safe to equip. However, items can become cursed in a variety of ways, including:

• Reading a scroll of curse weapon, scroll of curse armour, or scroll of curse jewellery.
• A mummy's death curse will curse a single random piece of equipment in your inventory.
• Artifact items can have the "recurring curse" property - even if they are currently uncursed, they may automatically recurse themselves whenever they are equipped.
• Worshippers of Ashenzari will always receive cursed items from scrolls of acquirement. The items will otherwise be of normal acquirement quality.
• Miscast effects from the Charms and Hexes schools will sometimes curse your items.
• Drawing a Curse card will curse one or more items in your inventory.

History

Prior to 0.6 (and the removal of the Divinations school of magic), the Detect Curse spell allowed you to determine the cursed or uncursed status of all items in your inventory without any personal risk. This update also removed the Remove Curse spell, which uncursed any equipped items.

Prior to 0.11, you could read a scroll of detect curse to examine your inventory for cursed items, just like the obsolete spell.