The Curse Lingers
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Welcome to the wastes. We scavenge what the Old Gods left behind and build in the devastation they wrought. Most simply scrape by. There are some few, however, who seek out the forbidden places, the monuments to the hubris of those Gods. These are the Keepers, desecrators of the Temples.
The Curse Lingers follows these Keepers, the few who dare to venture near or into the Temples of the Old Gods, tainted places of worship and caged corruption. You delve in search of Relics, the sources of the Curses afflicting each Temple. Once cleansed, they can grant powerful boons... if you can survive their Curses long enough to find them.
The Relics are hidden deep within each Temple, within a fragment of the Old World, anything from a busy city street to a school or a hospital. These places are pale reflections of the real thing and, like a reflection, can warp and change. Best to tread carefully and move fast. The clock is ticking, the Curse building, and your Mutation growing.
The Curse Lingers is based on Caltrop Core by Lex Kim Bobrow, using a d4 pool system with tiered success and failure. The concept of the game is inspired by nuclear semiotics, the ideas of how to convey the dangers of nuclear waste sites to future peoples, with no guarantee of shared language or symbology.
The Curse Lingers is a game that was on the brink of being made for a long time - ever since I first read "this is not a place of honor" I've had a small obsession with nuclear semiotics, that is the warning messaging for future cultures at nuclear waste sites. I genuinely think the example warning from the 1993 Sandia Report is one of my favourite poems ever written.
Everything I discovered about nuclear semiotics convinced me further that I had to make a game inspired by it. The field of thorns idea inspired the cover design, ray cats, atomic flowers, the atomic priesthood and artificial moons inspired the classes (or Callings) in the game, and the concept of the Temples themselves is directly referencing disposal sites.
With the continued reference to thorns and spikes in much of what I read, Caltrop Core was the obvious choice to build upon. The spikiest, least friendly die in the typical polyhedral set? It was a natural fit.
It took a while for me to finally get around to making it. The push that it took to make was Free RPG Day 2024: I decided a week before that I wanted to a make a game for it. I consulted my ever-growing list, picked out nuclear semiotics, and got to building. I wrote all the mechanics, did a full editing pass and completed all the layout within that week. It was exhausting and I vowed to never do that again. I will almost certainly break my word.
What I said at the time
The video this game was first released with