ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I killed Marylene (sorry DG!) and acquired an ancient morgothian curse on a piece of gear. After boneheadedly going through every single item instead of just looking through the character screen I got rid of the 2 pieces that were cursed, cast *remove curse* a few times, activated Elessar, and replaced them with near equivalent and thought it was done with. For some reason the curse still propogated.. it's like my character itself is cursed. I'm getting the randomly summoned evil thunderlords, occasional paralyzation, curse propogation messages and everything else. Is the curse removable? Or am I permanently screwed for taking out Marylene and subsequently DG himself.

If Sauron would drop his damned ring it wouldn't have happen, I'm in the double digits now on kills. All the other ring keepers are dead, and there are only 7 unkilled non reviving uniques left.

I think that your character is cursed. There are two different versions and I am not sure which one you have.

You can win while cursed. The worst thing is the paralysis. As long as you can handle a couple of turns you should be fine. Other than that, pay attention so that summoned monsters don't take you by surprise.

I didn't even know your character could be cursed, I'm assuming that's completely unremovable. Almost every single piece of gear is now cursed and the curse effects go off constantly.

If I could ever get the one ring to drop I might still be able to win, but I've killed Sauron upwards of 25 times now and still no ring. At least there aren't any uniques left to worry about.

AFAIK the only character-affecting curse is the Black Breath. However, the TY_CURSE/Ancient Foul curse has a tendency to replicate to other equipment you're wearing, so if you're not careful you could end up getting a lot more equipment cursed.

EDIT: I suspect that you weren't careful enough when changing/disposing of your equipment and probably had a piece of cursed equipment left. You can easily test in town: Use a *Remove Curse* and drop ALL your equipment and then just move around town for a while without doing anything else. (You might still see Black Breath going off, but you should definitely not see any paralysis or anything like that.)

Probably, although I dropped everything I was wearing and went over each piece one at a time. I checked every piece on the character sheet too, no curse was listed. Despite having every piece of gear cursed at the moment, and might still be able to replace everything and come up with a decent set of equipment. Thunderlords get some fantastic natural resists and immunities and I think I have a spare +40% hp/immunity armor laying around.

I just got done killing Sauron another 20 times or so, still no ring. I'm beginning to think he doesn't know anything about it.

So after more testing, apparently the character sheet spot labeled Mrg. Curse isn't accurate. My symbiote of all things had the curse, and I'm 95% sure I didn't check that the first gear replacement session. Even worse, releasing it and recharming it gets rid of the curse, making it the only piece of equipment in the game that I know of which can be 'cured' and yet the only piece I didn't try.

The pile of loot I have left on the ground would have launched a thousand wars. Rings of power, cubragol's +10 speed and full esp, y'all know the rough list. It's enough to make you consider keeping the curse.

Ahahaha, cursed symbiote? It figures, since per the code that's an item of equipment, but that's a new one to me.

Anyway, the Ancient Morgothian Curse cannot infect your character, but it can propagate to other items IIRC. I believe there are a couple of items that have it natively - Phial of Undeath, and I think maybe Mormegil. Undeath is pretty useless unless you really need a source of magical breathing. Mormegil OTOH is good enough that people sometimes wield it against tougher opponents (and take it off immediately after to reduce the chance of getting cursed).

There are two types of extra-bad curses: ancient foul curse and ancient Morgothian curse. I am not sure what the differences are any more, but at one time there were posts either here or on the wiki describing them. With the exception of Mormegil, I have never used any of these items.

From the T2.3.5 artifact spoiler at angband.oook.cz:
Foul curse: Mormegil, Gorlim, Gothmog's axe, Palantir of Minas Ithil, Camlost, Melkor
Morgothian curse: Angmar, Undeath

I have won with the foul curse from Mormy. It is annoying, but a buffed-up warrior (especially one worshipping Melkor) can handle it.

Since people have suggested using Undeath in the Void, I presume that the Morgothian curse can also be handled.