To Sneezweed, or Not to Sneezweed?

Fun, or not fun? This is an herb that can be foraged in certain hexes of The Hollers , the Mauritter hexcrawl we are developing based in a mythological Appalacha setting. Traditionally, Sneezweed, is a snuff that was used in some places in Appalachia to induce sneezing to rid one of evil spirits or disease …

On one hand, removing a curse is strong (!), on the other its a 1 in 6 chance. And it hurts. It’s Mausritter. There are spells … but not a big library of default ones like in Old School Essentials or whatever. Certainly there’s no Cleric with a third level remove curse spell handy (still, 3rd level spell is 6th level cleric).

I’m not set on the exact values here. More in the tradeoffs:

1. You have to go find the herb where it grows.
2. You have to make it into snuff
3. Then it might work, or might not.

What’s the healing like in the game? Well, in Mausritter, compared to B/X, healing is relatively fast:

Short rest: takes 1 Turn. A swig of water and a few
minutes of rest will restore d6+1 HP. Full rest: takes a week back in safety.
This fully restores your mouse’s ability scores and removes most long-term Conditions. A week of food and board in a settlement usually costs 20p. Long rest: takes 1 Watch. A meal and some sleep will restore all HP. If HP was already full, restore d6 to an attribute score.

So not slow. Still 1 in 6 chance of working and repeated attempts cause more and more damage…so the risk reward balance is not all that clear. If the curse is dire (like mummy rot), then despite the damage doubling after each failed attempt, it still maybe worth it to the player. I mean, it probably isn’t fun if the logical thing to do is just sit out somewhere safe and do it once a day until its cured.

So this is really a question about fun. Tradeoffs and decisions are fun. But some are less fun than others, or sound more fun in the abstract than they end up being in practice. And some constraints may matter more situationally, or depend on a table’s play-style.

Generally I like the idea of folk-magic remedies, or purchased ones, to be efficacious but with tradeoffs/downsides/side-effects that should make the players hesitate to use them. Sneezeweed is poisonous, in fact, if consumed. So, poisoning could be a risk.

So maybe, roll a d6.

…but keeping in mind the following things: Not everyone may know about it’s use. So this is knowledge that may have to be traded for, or earned in some way. In order to find the herb you have to travel to where it’s growing. Then you have to spend a watch gathering it.Then you have to dry it, which can take 1 to several days.
Then you crush it into a snuff/prep it. Doesn’t have to be done all at once of course. Multiple opportunities for the process to be interrupted, especially if done in the wild.

With all that said, RAW Mausritter doesn’t have a curse condition, or even a poisoned condition. Or diseased. That means its up to me in The Hollers setting to determine what those words mean. Maybe it removes “Minor Curses” but not “Major ones”. This gets at a recurring theme in my thinking. Generality and particularity of effects.

Consider the OSE spell Cure Disease. Its very powerful (even before considering its ability to kill green slime). It will cure any disease including those of magical origin. But what about magical research into a spell that cures disease from rat bites. Much more situational, much smaller scope. Could legitimately be maybe a level 1 spell. Now, I know that a lot of folk remedies are sort of “cure alls”, which is the opposite. Imagine you have an herbal tonic that people think you can help neutralize a poison from snake bite. But it turns out that its only effective against certain types of snakes. People may not know that, just that sometimes it seems to actually help. Snakebites are both rare and scary enough that you can’t do a lot of experimentation to fine tune, but common enough that you’d want some kind of solution.

How about a Cure Disease spell that only works on holidays?