Curses

= Canon =

Curses are major defenses and utility effects used by Godmodders, which generally restrict effective combat against them to a game-like format where certain actions are against the rules and thus are not 'meaningful', thus failing to have logical effects or causing absurd counter-reactions. The vast majority of them are conceptual weapons, though some have different operating vectors such as enforcement agents provided by witches. Curses are ineffectual against Grand Legends, which can result in overturning major conceits and prompting a DPS race. Before the Breaking War they were otherwise exceedingly hard to surpass without assistance from narrative control methodologies, but afterward many are significantly more overridable.

Primary Curses
These curses are very common, utilized by many godmodders throughout history to define the majority of engagements against them.

Curse of Repetitiveness
One of a godmodder's signature defenses, the Curse of Repetitiveness almost always prevents a godmodder from being damaged by the same extremely specific type of damage twice or more. Its usual method of counteraction is to 'create a countermeasure', allowing the Godmodder to generate some method to block the attack (and to a lesser extent, closely related techniques or obvious variations) should it recur. It does not prohibit basic entity actions, but originally served to limit Descendancy from undertaking repeated potential damage vectors or overusing particular strategies. While individual entity attacks are insufficient to deal damage, the Alpha Strike technique is not blocked by the Curse of Repetitiveness (or the OP Scale, for that matter) so most godmodders have a series of entities, armors, and secondary goals to prevent themselves from being overwhelmed by forces far their lesser.

OP Scale
Another of a godmodder's signature defenses, the OP Scale prevents 'overpowered' effects from being used or effective at overly high magnitudes in their vicinity. This tends to protect them from the majority of cosmology-scale editing powers or excessive remote bombardments, though its definition of 'overpowered' is a mixture of subjective interpretations of 'what the godmodder cannot be reasonably expected to deal with despite being a reality warper'. Many godmodders have taken damage from being crashed into by planets accordingly by forgetting to teleport away or have sufficiently protective armor for whatever reason. As with some other powers meant to do impossible things, it functions heavily on bribing certain meta-entities into game conceits by fiat... Relatedly, it has sometimes rebounded against a godmodder and resulted in a tribulation falling upon them, so some godmodders fail to actualize it at a sufficient level on purpose. This is many times in hopes of claiming something more powerful without gathering attention only to get dunked on.

Curse of Barrier
A less-overtly-shown godmodder defense that causes summoning sufficiently external battle-relevant forces into the area a godmodder is actively defending or attacking to become much more difficult or expensive, extending to the level of 'physically blocks out certain interlopers trying to move in'. This forces either the use of particularly formidable specialized summoning utilities to teleport particular external forces, dedicated defense-penetrative gear, or simply constructing forces on-site with certain means. It was originally very prevalent during the Nebulous Hypercosmic Period, but is significantly weaker after the end of the Breaking War. It has lesser effects on making movement between battlefields difficult within its scope of influence, but this has always been comparatively trivial to mitigate and in the post-Breaking era is hardly worth more than planning for delays of a few combat rounds and potential logic translation conflicts.

Curse of Disrupted Construct
An indirect godmodder defense that causes building certain enemy structures, items, forces, other entities, etc. in proximity to a godmodder or their target to 'be hollow' while in that area of influence, such as heavy mechanical abstraction, difficulty using certain standard abilities, or strange vulnerabilities to force they could normally handle. It was originally very prevalent during the Nebulous Hypercosmic Period, but is significantly weaker after the end of the Breaking War. In its current state, it is either a relatively straightforward conventional abstractiontech system, or sometimes an actively invoked 'adaptation suppressor' that slows the rate at which things can be brought to bear and properly stabilize. In either case, it is usually actualized in the form of physicsset conflicts and transcendence resistance reducing things to matters of (meta-)conceptual resistance rather than their physical constituencies. Analytics complexities and internal adaptation also make it difficult to defeat a godmodder in a war of adaptive attrition through superlative abilities, though it is possible to overwhelm this with human-scale intelligence and out of left field random assault ideas if not massed too quickly.

The Veil
A passive godmodder defense utilized to protect a godmodder's personal information and forces against being revealed unwillingly, and in many implementations prevent their actions from being controlled or predicted (depending on point of view, those three things may be functionally the same). Essentially, one cannot control the Godmodder against their will, their actions are very difficult to predict under normal circumstances (due to a mix of possibility clouding and different underlying logics), and both they and their assets are very hard to find even in identification if they do not want to be found. Its effects are limited against information willingly given and information whose explanation is necessary to be part of something (such as a username on an internet service or identity documents provided to government officials, though unauthorized access to the latter may be blocked by concept-issued defensive spells and such). A godmodder's hiding bases and personal location(s) are often protected in different ways, so uncovering one does not mean uncovering the others and it is possible to escape (or make vague) detection to significant degrees of inclarity. Depending on degree of defense, it may lead to things such as only being able to localize a godmodder's army out of combat to a large city or other decently detailed region that exhaustively searching/bombarding will be difficult. Direct combat severely affects the conditions of 'information whose explanation is necessary to be part of something', so things like troop compositions or what a Godmodder's armor looks like (and of course, where specifically they are standing so one can target them) tend to reveal themselves once forces decloak and join the battle...or once they start firing artillery on others from a distance.

Hex of Busywork & Binding
Utilized for Ravine-type obstacles in the style of real-world Destroy the Godmodder games, the Curse of Busywork creates highly complex and warp-resistant (but expressly not warp-immune) obstacles that are more difficult to bypass than resolve due to narrative fields, adaptive location-moving bodyguarding, and sidewinder sniping. Godmodders use this to buy time by creating highly complex obstacles such as dungeon complexes, extremely protected data, bypassable threats that proceed to attack from behind when dealt with, and of course conventional obstructions like forcefields.

Blasphemous Orison Chaos
Prayer of 'random horrible things happening', though in practice 'horrible' is mostly from the view of one's enemies. When invoked, allows for massive terrain control, abnormal weather effects, other environmental manipulation, and most importantly the control and modification of divinities. It is a wide-ranging system that grants godmodders the specific ability to modify a wide assortment of gods and godlike beings, though it is rarely used in that fashion except among allies due to provoking significant hostility and extensive reprogramming effort for relevant changes and upgrades. Its exact definitions of divinity are actually indeterminate in many cases due to the wide variety of types of gods, so it generally has to be compatibility patched into specific interpretations depending on the sources and forms of local divinity-logic. It is usually expressed as a prayer to the godmodder casting it or the deity to be manipulated. This has lead to the occasional joke of people saying 'oh godmodder' in lieu of 'oh god' in an attempt to harass the godmodder or render them slightly more easily manipulated, though it is mostly a slightly-superstitious trick than true psychological manipulation. It has moderate-level general mind control abilities, but these are weaker against those actively attacking the godmodder or with significant investment in directing them to be so, leading that functionality to be historically neglected except against effectively undefended randoms.

Terror Trial
Allows for the conjuration of powerful monstrosities, advanced technology, potent automated magics, and various other 'effects that create effects'. It is generally used to create boss monsters, armies, and useful assets to go beyond direct reality warping, so often each godmodder's uses of this curse are individualized and customized. Some godmodders tend to use persistent thematics like colored flames, independently invented magical materials, extremely empowered tools of a specific category (i.e. a series of swords serving as their secondary powers), or genre tendencies such as 'giant mecha', but this is for ease of unified themes and not required. However, overinvestment in a single body is likely to create backlash damage when it is destroyed, and it is difficult to predict whether any one large investment is or is not damaging to lose at any given moment. This leads to many godmodders spacing out the monsters they possess to avoid them being wiped simultaneously and taking more damage than expected. Depending on attributes, sometimes it is effective to hide many secondary powers in internally controlled abstract systems to avoid them being damaged or countered at bad times.

Armorlife
A framework ability that allows for relatively consistent 'godmodder hitpoint' effects, abstracting extra lives and recovery effects in such a way it is difficult to lose more than one at once. Mechanism complexities make it relatively difficult to repair extra life stacks in combat-relevant timeframes without attacks potentially dealing much more damage.

Hex of Misinterpretation
A complex shield that interferes with meta-translations used against a godmodder during reality interactions, resulting in unorthodox 'reality puns' that utilize the least damaging interpretations of commands issued with ambiguous meaning or allow a godmodder to subvert the end result to a favorable interpretation wholesale. Relatedly, it allows godmodders to do many things considered impossible to baseline physics and impractical in reasonable readings, due to enabling certain strange actions and changing the ways their abilities affect reality in the moment.

Other Curses
These curses are less common, being either utilities used by specific Godmodders rather than generalized, or offhand creations that haven't yet proliferated.

Curse of Finkly Hurl
Induces "vomiting", but applicable to more things than literal digestion and the tinkfi-subtype flower gatherer icewalkers. It is utilized to prevent the undue utilization of consumable items and similarly limited-use effects that would rapidly overturn conceits of the war or be more productive in the godmodder's hands (i.e. the Hourai Elixir, Waluigi thyme, certain stage-boosting cultivation ingredients, a superweapon that can only be fired once), preventing somebody from using them up before the godmodder can. As a flippant defense designed to avoid objects in enemy hands just being consumed already, it is fairly weak and can be overwhelmed by a combination of fending off the godmodder's retrieval attempts enough to pull off a curse-degradation ritual and create a situation in which the offending consumable can be consumed by someone other than a godmodder. It was utilized during the Nebulous Hypercosmic Period by a number of lawyers and people seeking important items. The Curse of Finkly-Hurl is also much easier to trigger then the average curse, especially when attempting to prove one can invoke curses.

Curse of Gratuitous Censorship
Induces "redaction", resulting in the narrative of a battle not describing important information in that battle to various meta-agents such as the people playing the game. On field, it manifests as large amounts of censor bars, information that is not compatible with the meta-reality, flowery metaphors, and things that are blatantly disgusting to describe in detail. It is uncommon, but has been used by some witches to avoid other people recognizing what they're trying to pull.

Escalating Bernkastel
An alternative curse to the OP Scale that instead makes the godmodder more powerful as OP things are encountered. It is similar to REDACTED's tribulation system, and appeared in DtN during the Post-Breaking Wars. It is not entirely clear why this curse is not more popular to quickly gain powers, but possibly because of redundancy with the tribulation system and immense anti-synergy with the OP Scale. Named for the witch Bernkastel from Umineko. It has some ability allowing the godmodder to interface with save/load systems and perpetuate information between instances of themselves, but it rarely comes up because it retains the possibility of 'being unable to revert once their heart is truly broken' (read: actually defeated -> loss) and 'breaks the heart a little to use' (read: unavoidable emotional damage as the mechanism to load save).

Curse of Donut Steel
Prevents people from summoning specific canon characters from other media, forcing people to come up with original characters or generalized agents in their summons. A niche defense during the Post-Breaking Wars due to barrier breakdowns resulting in extremely overpowered meme variations wandering from war to war murdering people, but became less important due to instantiation as people attempted canon accuracy and made new alternate universes.

Curse of NPC Betrayal
Does exactly what it says on the tin: non-player characters (up to and including the environment) will betray the playable characters, often for implausible reasons or at cost to their own effectiveness. Messes with risk assessment and bureaucracy particularly, creating organizational inefficiency and people whose plans rely on unrealistic expectations.

Curse of Curses
Grants immense conventional curse-related powers, subverting and controlling the implementation details of various curse-related magic systems. Symbolic superpowers and metamagics are included in the package. Allows godmodders to dispel curses instantly, cast wide varieties of new debuffs, and cause certain otherwise normally dispellable curses to become powerful and primary enough to require extensive mitigation if the godmodder in question is not destroyed or forced to rescind first. Tends to cause otherwise flippant forces to mobilize with extreme prejudice and otherwise-lacking degrees of centrality, so it was rarely used except by the desperate due to bad publicity and difficulty using it as an actual deathcurse matter with any persistence.

Bad Meme
Causes the entire war to resemble a YTPMV, distorting logic and causality in large amounts in favor of slightly-repetitive exotic patterns and memes in poor taste. Not very popular because it is honestly kind of annoying.

Jinx of Coincidence
Attacks run into each other and anything chance based will cause stupid overkill events to counter trivial matters. Like, attempting to play poker will destroy the planet if anybody draws a bad hand levels of stupidity. Dice rolls tend to cause massive chaotic results and occasionally paradoxes.

Cost Debt
Anti-Descendancy specific purpose that inflicted 'charge debt' after the use of charges, preventing people from using large charges in rapid succession by having to recover from the loss or pay extra. Was not very effective due to people either charging extra or simply spreading expenditures over different people, and has bad compatibility if any with modern isekairos.

Evil Eyes of Networking & Metagaming
Allows godmodder to perceive, understand, and communicate with the narratives they are trapped in. However, the power it grants is merely a trivial inroad to narratordom, so it often ended up being ineffectual and unable to stop the powers above them in the Post-Breaking Wars.

Blasphemous Lore
Retrogenesis engine, designed to control retroactive histories, time travel, mass cosmology editing, etc. Was useful before the Breaking but irrelevant due to other powers to that effect: after, its relative locality of influence makes it difficult to use effectively. Suspiciously, it is oddly hard to develop due to contesting forces.

Curse of Hubris
Makes power levels incredibly unclear to the Cursed such as Descendants, increasing the risk of hopeless missions. Comparatively easy to trigger, as many descendants or players would already be subject to an effect of equivalent magnitude if not for the narrators spelling things out for them due to rampant idiocy. Potential backlash by removing some tactical possibilities; the use of overwhelming defenses to deter an incursion in the first place and the threat of overwhelming counterforce will no longer be valid tactics. Again, however, many enemies are already functionally in that camp. This Curse would probably have very odd implications about this multiverse if it were a more coherent one.

= Proposed Canon =

= Otherworlds = See Rihakuverse, the Accursed; instead of Curses as wide-ranging reality-bending effects, they target the specific Cursed being. They share properties of being very difficult to mitigate and often being interpreted in the most inconvenient way, as well as being the product of incredibly-powerful beings.