ah, so like, you controll so much of the worlds life force or whatever that everything is essentially yours, even if you don't own it?

Yep.

Sounds like a take on Karsus' Folly.

What's Karsus' Folly?

It's the event at which Karsus tapped into the very essence of magic in an attempt to make himself a god, and caught Mystryl nude in the shower.

Of course, Mystryl wasn't entirely pleased over this turn of events what with the nudity and the screaming, so she flipped the great light switch of magic, sending the entire civilization of Netheril plummeting down in their giant flying cities. This made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move.

this amuses me.

I can assure you, none of my victory conditions involve lightswitches. Or nude showerse, mind you: those come AFTER the channeler achieves dominance...

The spell itself didn't involve explicit magic nudity (except possibly amongst the expensive material components). The switches with the shocking and the explosions was an unforseeable after-effect.

Good reference.

Dude,  If we're making artifacts . . . artifacts with build in hidden curses. ment to be given to an army that is definately going to loose, the loot is cursed, but the finders can't tell, just seams to be somewhat weak low level artifacts. so they equipthem to thier lesser heros, who go around wrecking small havocs on your teritories, 

'black thumb'  - any farm within half a days ride of the berrer of this ring expereances bad luck and returns lower crops more often then normal

'Poisoned air' any town this hero visits has lower growth,production.

'corruption', hero slowly looses aligence to the cause, might abandon the cause without warning. small risk per day, larger risk right before each fight.

'unwitting spy', hero's line of site given to channler that made the ring.

'Level not' hero gains lower exp then should or none.   antilevel,  Expriance goes up as normal, but levels go down each time the hero levels up.(requirements for next level still go up. perminent neff for that hero, effectivly lose 2 levels. ouch)

Once the user 'discovers' that the artifact is curses has to pay a de-equipe, or decurse fee. (but then could pass the cursed item on to a new victum. )

talk about Evil items, SO MUCH FUN!!

What do you all think?

Best wishes

Sounds like a good idea. Of couse, there would be the obligatory group of counter-enchantments and buffs to go along with it.

That sounds unwholesomely multiplayerish to me. Back when I had regular RPG time around a table, I was always far prouder of figuring out that a curse was at work by what happened to us as the game progressed than I was by being able to cast Detect Curse. Robbie seems to have a real sense of curses as parts of a story, not mere weapons.

I wasn't referring to Detect Curse. I was referring to spells to counteract, weaken, or break specific typesw of curses. Relatively expensive and it would often be easier to just throw the thing away, but there's no garuntee that you CAN just throw it away (One Ring style mind warping & boomerang effects spring to mind), and you might fgor whatever reason want the artifact itself. Plus the possibility of making big bangs or something else fun by destroying it outright... or even "peeling off" the curse itself for use later. My mistake on being so vague originally.

No worries. I was vague also. The Detect Curse talk was at least half-digression into RPG taste debates, and Elemental is a TBS first. I was just muttering about how I think it might be fun if 'curses' were maybe more dependent on quest-object code than they were on item-object code.

And I should confess to the occasional 'unwholesomely multiplayerish' moment myself. Something I saw today from Robbie.Price about a sort of Realm Shifting overland spell made me immediately wonder about both generic countermagic and spells to let you bore a pathway into a Shifted Realm for small units like spies or full military forces.