Curseborne - Legio Noctis (Learn to Play Curseborne)

Creating your character

Pick what you are. Dead. You died and came back as a ghost haunting your own corpse, driven by emotional urges. Hungry. You straddle life and death, and you feed on the living. Outcast. Your distant relatives were exiled from the Outside. You are separate from humanity in form and in function. Primal. Something dangerous lives inside you. It lets you shift shape and it drives you to anger. Sorcerer. You are addicted to magic, and you must keep finding new ways to cast or devolve into something that cannot feel. In this world the Fae are the Mythos-like otherworldly being that are the enemy. Pick your Family. Every Lineage has Families beneath it, and that is where the specifics live: traditions, debts, and relatives with opinions about your career. All basic family bloodlines welcome. Custom ones available upon approval, so pitch me something and we will build it together. We have An Orchard and an Onryo built by me. So this is something I am completely comfortable with building. Decide which one owns you. If your Lineage Path is major, your Family Path is minor, and the reverse. Major gives you six Skill dots, ten Attribute dots, and an Inheritance. Minor gives you three and four, and no Inheritance. Mechanics aside, this is the real question: does the Accursed Family define you, or is the curse itself the loudest thing in your life while you keep the relatives at arm's length? Answer that before you touch a number. Pick a Role Path. Your profession and your reason for getting up. Academic, Activist, Caregiver, Criminal, Enforcer, Healer, Hunter, Investigator, Occultist, and more. The Order does not house you and does not hide you. You go home after. Choose your torments. One Lineage torment from the options your Lineage offers, and one personal torment you write yourself. Pick something you actually want to be tempted by, because you are the one who decides when you give in. Bond with the crew. One level 2 bond with a single other character and level 1 with everyone else. Decide together who that is and why. Also, the Bonds do NOT have to be positive, you can have a Bond level 2 that is your rival in the group. You do not need to do any of this in advance. Bring a vibe, not a build. We make the sheets together at Session Zero and I walk you through every mechanic as it comes up.

Preparing for the session

Two accounts is all you need, that and my player primer PDF if you would like it. Everything n the PDF is verified meticulously against the book. Players need a Foundry VTT account and a Discord account. I pay for all Foundry hosting and provide every other material you will need. Curseborne runs on Storypath Ultra, Onyx Path's new engine. It is a d10 pool system and it is not Chronicles of Darkness (though you can feel the DNA), whatever the family resemblance suggests. You build a pool from an Attribute plus a Skill, roll it against a difficulty, and every die showing 8 or higher is a hit. Tens count double. Spare hits above the difficulty buy Tricks, which are real tactical options that work in investigation and conversation as much as in a fight, so talking your way through a scene is as mechanically interesting as shooting your way out. Momentum is a shared pool the whole table draws from, and it grows when you fail, so bad rolls feed everybody. Your Curse is not a resource you spend. It is a resource that spends you. Acting in accordance with your Accursed nature earns you curse dice, which sit in a held pool and replace an equal number of dice in everything you roll. To cast a spell, use a Lineage ability, or force a locked door into the Outside, you bleed them. Hit zero held curse dice and your Damnation takes the wheel. That is the whole game in one mechanic: the only way to use what you are is to spend the thing keeping you human. Entanglement is your rating in all of this, and we start at 1, which means newly Accursed and still working out what that means. It also means you can always feel magic in a room, always sense a liminality as you walk into one, and always register as supernatural to anything that can sense such things. You do not get to be subtle. You get to be early. Every Lineage teaches three spell practices, and your Family teaches secrets on top of that. You will not be cross-shopping other Lineages' magic. Your Lineage is your signature. The game runs on investigation and mundane life, punctuated by cases. A case is a file handed down by the Order, always slightly wrong, because it was assembled from reports by people who did not survive to clarify it. Between cases there is the lease, the day job, the crew bonds, and relatives who want things from you. You are working the exceptions. The Order does not send a mixed crew of monsters to handle something a single Family could close on its own. If it reached your desk, somebody upstairs already decided it was worth the risk of putting four to five incompatible people in one car. If you have been curious about Curseborne, this is the table for you. I will teach you as we play.

What Yuthika 'Fey' brings to the table

Voice acting across every NPC. I am a professional voice actress with anime and video game credits. Every character in this campaign, from the handler who signs your case files to whatever is still talking after it should have stopped, has a distinct voice. This is not a placeholder skill for me. It is the craft I work in. A teaching GM/"Storyguide" with thirty-four years behind the screen. I started at age twelve in Japan and have never stopped. I hold a PhD in Psychology and work professionally as an educator. That background is how I read a table, how I pace session tension, and how I hold a safety framework that actually holds. New players are welcome at every level of experience. Curiosity is the only prerequisite. Full Foundry VTT production. Custom maps, ambient audio scored to the scene, in-world handouts, and a dedicated campaign dashboard for the Legios case files. Every liminality lives in its own prepared environment. Session briefings arrive as internal correspondence. The paperwork is part of the setting. A campaign built for Curseborne, not ported to it. OrdoLegio Noctis is an original scenario work designed around what Curseborne does best: inherited guilt, institutional dread, relatives who want things from you, and the slow erosion of whoever your Accursed thought they were when they signed. I spent years in practical effects on NBC's Grimm and teaching prosthetic work on the convention circuit. When I describe a liminality opening, a Primal coming apart into whatever is inside them, or what a Damnation looks like taking a body from the inside, those descriptions come from someone who has built the real-world version with foam latex and silicone in their hands.

Homebrew rules

This campaign runs on the Curseborne Core Rulebook. That is the whole default list. Curseborne is a young line, released in November 2025, and it does not yet have the deep fan-supplement ecosystem that itch.io games grow. What it has instead is a very large core book, and we will be using most of it. The Curseborne Player's Guide is in production and adds nine new Families, Orphans for characters without one, Venator rules, new Role Paths, new Lineage torments, and new spells. Tangled Webs is also in the pipeline, covering strange liminalities, shattered spaces, and adversaries. As these land I will fold them in, and existing players get first call on rebuilding with the new options. If you find community content that fits your Accursed concept, bring it to me and we can discuss folding it in. The Onyx Path Discord is the main hub for now, and official community content support is on the way.

How Yuthika 'Fey' creates a safe table

Your Safety Matters Curseborne deals with heavy, disturbing content and I take player wellbeing seriously. This game is built around inherited damnation, so generational trauma and family obligation are baked in alongside body horror and personal horror. Depending on your Lineage that can mean feeding on the living, a corpse you are still walking around in, something inside you that wants out, or magic written as addiction with a real bottom to it. The system also mechanizes temptation. Your character carries torments, and giving in to them is rewarded. You almost always decide when your character succumbs, but I will be offering, and the offers are designed to be attractive. If that dynamic is not something you want aimed at you, tell me and we will handle it. Before we begin, we'll use Lines & Veils, you'll have the opportunity to set hard limits on content that should never appear at the table, as well as topics you'd prefer kept off-screen rather than depicted directly. These are respected without question, no explanation needed. If for some reason your lines and veils preclude you from playing Curseborne I will speak to you about what can be done or accept your departure with grace. My table operates on an Open Door Policy, this means that if at any point the content becomes too much, you are always free to step away, take a break, or leave the session entirely without judgement. Real people always come before the game. During our 3-4 hour sessions I'll do regular check-ins as needed to gauge how everyone is feeling, especially after particularly intense scenes. If things get heavy, we take a break; no pushing through. At the end of every session we close with Roses & Thorns, this is a chance to share what felt great and what didn't land, keeping the game a collaborative, comfortable experience for everyone. After the session, I'll also follow up with a private message to check in individually. Sometimes things hit differently once you're off the game and decompressed, and I want everyone to feel they have space to raise anything they didn't want to mention at the table. This is a dark game, but it should never feel unsafe. When in doubt, just say the word.