Adventure ideas with uses for Remove Curse

[Zorgoth]

I'm running a D&D campaign in my own world. My players' party's warlock (currently level 7) picked up Remove Curse because of a dungeon where many of the monsters were being controlled using specially made cursed magic amulets. He later used it to cure an entire camp of recently-infected werewolves.

If he keeps the spell, I want to keep making adventures every so often where he is able to use it, since he's investing a very limited resource (spells known) on remove curse.

One outside-RAW idea I had was letting him use it to remove the bloodthirst from gnolls, making them into normal, if not very smart, humanoids instead of rampaging demonic killers. But the party is in the far north of the world right now and there aren't any hyenas, so probably no gnolls either.

Of course, I can always give them tempting-looking cursed magic items from time to time.

Any other ideas?

[Dualight]

My first thoughts:
-Have bad guys that spam bestow curse.
-Have traps that inflict curses when triggered.
-More lycanthrope encounters.

[JackPhoenix]

Consider counting various debuffing spells as curses. Polymorph? Being turned into a frog is a classic curse, and unlike Dispel Magic, Remove Curse doesn't require upcasting for full reliability. Blindness/Deafness, Feeblemind, Flesh to Stone... plenty of options to pick if you go through the spells. But communicate the fact with the player.

[solidork]

You could have a long term antagonist that is going around devising particularly cruel curses to lay on people; you don't need a rules justification to accomplish this the way a PC would, but a 9th level Bestow Curse lasts until removed and can do anything you say it can. We once encountered a Paladin cursed by a hag to progressively turn into a goat every time he did a good deed.

[No brains]

Modify Memory can be removed by Remove Curse and depending on the DM, might be hard to otherwise remove or detect (MM persists beyond the time that the spell is concentrated upon). This might have some interesting consequences when an innocent Remove Curse deletes memories from a person's life. A huge mystery could unravel one hour at a time as various people find out they've been targeted by the spell and the loose links between them start to paint a picture of some massive unseen and unremembered conspiracy unfolding...

[Zorgoth]

Thanks all! You've given me a lot to work with.

As another idea, a Rakshasa's curse is really nasty, so I'll probably include one of them in the campaign once they're in an appropriate setting and are high enough level to deal with it (They could probably kill one now in a fair fight, since they have a powerful archer with a magic crossbow, but it would just come back from Hell and resume its activities). I'm thinking of waiting until they have Plane Shift so they can go have an adventure in Hell to track it down and kill it before it can return to the Material Plane.

[PallyBass]

There's a campaign I am playing in that has shrines to dark powers/gods that if you interact with them and pass the associated ability check will gain a minor boon. If you fail though you get a curse. The catch here is that (apart from the moral quandaries of interacting with these shrines) Remove Curse will remove all the negative curses and it will also remove all the dark boons that the character had.

[Saelethil]

Consider counting various debuffing spells as curses. Polymorph? Being turned into a frog is a classic curse, and unlike Dispel Magic, Remove Curse doesn't require upcasting for full reliability. Blindness/Deafness, Feeblemind, Flesh to Stone... plenty of options to pick if you go through the spells. But communicate the fact with the player.

I would also consider Bane (curse of incompetence) and Slow (curse of lethargy) to be curses although at some point I would probably start adding a check similar to Dispel Magic. You could also hand out more cursed items (which can make for some very interesting arcs) considering you know that it won’t cause long-term problems. Just make sure the items are geared towards players that you expect will be able to be subtle about it so that the problem doesn’t just get solved immediately.