Well, I had just meant corrupting your own champions, but I do like the idea of trying to corrupt an opponent's champion now that you mention it. There's certainly no shortage of examples in fantasy *cough*Nazgul*cough*!

We can't even drop 'excess' inventory like a 3rd speed ring yet, but I've long liked the idea of being able to forge cursed items and leave them for rivals to collect.

For Fallen sovereigns wanting to enhance a champion with Death magic, the spell could have a name like Blessed Flensing. I have no idea how big an art burden it would be to make a sort of 'skinless skin' available for the champ units, but going for something with the same basic shape as an unflensed champion seems easier than going for something like a skeletal form or even a dessicated/rotting mummy/zombie look.

The betas are painful in general, but everyone's pain is unique...

I also have no serious idea what might be hard (expensive) vs. easy for Stardock to do about this sort of detail.

Re ghosts, again I pine for a basic outline of the Metaphysics of Elemental. In some stories, ghosts are stricly nocorporeal and the only effects they can have in the living world are psychosocial. In others, ghosts with sufficient anger/hunger/motivation can do some physical things, and so on.

You could really mess someone up with that. Even better if we could create neutral critters. Make a neutral troll, give him a cursed item, turn him lose in the mountains. Eventually, some hero will kill him and, if he dosen't check too closley, use the item. Once the game is really going you would need to check pretty much every item you find to ensure it isn't a cursed trap.

Although corruption curses that turn them to your side would be cool, straight up killing curses would be nice too. Pretty cool amulet of protection, right? that is, until you get into a fight, and then suddenly its an amulet of strangulation. Opps.

Could be a very fun mechanic.

Or a pain if death curses are included. It would mean that before using anything you simply check it with an identify spell, trap defeated. If you can't identify you lose characters randomly to death curses. I like the idea of creating dodgy gear and setting critter lose with it, especially if everything is identify on equip only, but killing characters is too much....

Also will champions be a limited resource? Otherwise its just like witches huts in HoMM3, send in a dud hero to test it and if its good let a good hero use it.

Yeah fair enough.

I could see that for example that the magic items curse triggers upon any damage to the wearer then this could be interesting. But then its not a killing curse, its a damage curse and damage at not a life threatening level.

I like your ideas, as long as no death curses. How would it actually play, as in how would a player expliot it? Would the best artificer flood the land with crap knowing that the other players would not know what was crap and what was good, and thus maybe not risk using anything they find (and thus not know they have the ultimate game winning artifact)? Or would it be too energy intensive (the artificer benefits the player by doing other things) to churn out crap and so only the occasional crap item be sent as a trap for other players?

Its not a bad idea at all.

What I immedietly thought about when I read about corrupting artifacts:

Obvious to some, a random-looking cover of a fantasy novel to those of us not in the know. What is that blade & who's holding it?

I would love for the game to include autonomous/sentient items.

That is arthas with the sword frostmourne. Its from Warcraft 3, and got incorporated into world of warcraft. And ovbiously i did think one ring before frostmourne, but frostmource fits just as well as the one ring.

Spoilers for WC3 below! beware!!

Arthas is the heir to human kingdom of goodness and is paladin in training. The Lich King decides to use him as his ultimate champion, so he sets him up. He forces arthas to kill innocent peasents to keep a zombie plague from spreading, and other such things. After a series of evil deeds for good ends, Arthas goes forth to find frostmourne, A blade powerful enough to defeat even the lichking. Arthas finds it, takes it.

Only Frostmourne is cursed and starts whispering in his ear and eating at his soul. Arthas returns home and greets his father the king, as usual, and then kills him.

Basically, a combo of the Lich Kings plans and frostmourne turned arthas from a hot-headed paladin and heir to to a kingdom into a hot-headed death knight out to kill all who oppose the lich king.

AKA Nazguls for those prefering the One Ring idea.

Thanks. I thought it was maybe a really bad Elric & Stormbringer pic, but Stormbringer was more of a slippery ally than an overwhelming force of corruption on account of Elric being kind of corrupt on his own.

Naw, tolkien didn't have any room left in bag of ripping-folks-off for WoW. Tolkien just ripped off every other fantasy story of the time, and the ones he didn't rip off, he declared to be not "real" myths, since he didn't like them. He was a total asshole. He went to another mythologist's funeral who he hadn't liked and spent 30+ minutes talking about how the guy was wrong and all his work was wrong and how the world is better now that he is dead. Tolkien was like the poster boy for assholes.

If you enjoy tolkien, avoid taking any myth history classes. Lots of those folks hate him, and for good reason.

Now *that* is a fearsome foe. But i am pretty sure the lucky charm elf would beat them all. After all, he can fire off stars!