Insatiable hunger, unquenchable thirst, and eternal sleep would be great additions to the list of possible curses that can be laid on people, especially as myths come in and Night Trolls are just sitting there unexplained. Creatures being cursed by the gods for violating cannibalism tabboos could suddenly find themselves unable to sate their hunger without sentient flesh, eventually turning into creatures that might not starve to death from lack of food but (at least as NPCs) are compelled to go out hunting for Dwarf meat and preparing it in their little caves. Adventurers could disturb a mummy and find themselves at starving every day unless they eat entire elephants worth or food, and could only go back to zero hunger periodically by hunting down a particular food that is magically associated with their curse (like silver being harmful to were-critters, but it'd be some randomly chosen animal meat or plant that is the only thing that can temporarily/permanently remove an ETERNAL_HUNGER tag and return a creature to their regular dietary needs). Maybe this would force peasants off to be hermits somewhere since nobody wants to feed them all they need to eat, but cursed rulers should decimate their city/fortress food stores with little recourse. Intense thirst is already kind of in the game through vampires but instead of blood sating it, it could only be satisfied temporarily by drinking barrel after barrel of liquid, with some particular rare drink actually putting the curse in remission a while.
All kinds of stories are motivated by levels of extreme magical hunger and thirst. Once afterlife's are in this could be a punishment for greedy, gluttonous, or just vaguely evil people. In the mean time it can drive all kinds of stories. Maybe the curses would be untreatable, but could have semi-positive side-effects like not actually being able to die from starvation but still being massively fatigued by the hunger and having to kind of balance a playstyle in those new circumstances. Having an adventurer stuck at a river forever drinking all day would be pretty boring, so there'd have to be some kind of wiggle room on how starvation and dehydration set in under curse conditions.
Eternal sleep is a little more boring, but it's still a prominent story device. The curse could come with NO_AGING or other facets of immortality while its in effect, and might even be desirable for people to seek out if they're in a bad state or have some other reason to want to be asleep a long time. If someone is cursed with eternal sleep and they're really loved, but there's no ready cure, maybe their loved ones would also try to take on the curse and there would be whole sleeping kingdoms on occasion waiting for their favorite monarch to be awoken. It might also be nice to put an adventurer in stasis if there's a good way to wake them up later. There's another thread somewhere about megabeasts and the like hibernating, but maybe a destined hero could sync into that sleep cycle and come back awake just as the dragon that once destroyed their village re-emerges from a hundred year slumber.
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Topic: Perpetual hunger/thirst/sleep curses (Read 776 times)