Curse of the Firmament

[]Blessings now come with drawbacks as well as benefits

[]MCM lets you choose a blessing at any time, you can even give yourself multiple blessings

[]Optional zEdit patcher to distribute blessings amongst NPCs without creating conflicts

Curse of the Firmament overhauls the effects of standing stones, transforming them from bland, boring and imbalanced to exciting, diverse and challenging. Crucially, blessings come with negatives as well as positives, so they are as much a curse as a blessing (hence the name). The mod was built with the following principles in mind:

• []Blessings affect combat gameplay. Combat is what the player spends most of their time doing, so non-combat stones (like the vanilla tower, mage etc.) end up having almost no impact on actual gameplay. In Curse of the Firmament all stones are combat focussed.

  []Blessings have positives and negatives. In vanilla, all stones simply make the player better at something; in Curse of the Firmament the player must sacrifice something in return. So while the bonuses enhance certain strategies, their downsides penalize others, forcing a trade-off between specialization and breadth.

  []Nothing too specific. Due to the negatives that come with blessings, they do limit the viability of certain approaches (e.g. playing as a mage but with the warrior stone is now a terrible idea), but this should never be to the extent that a stone forces a specific style of play. Similarly, blessings do not rely on any particularly complex mechanisms that are a hassle to play with.

  []No once per day powers. If they're good, players are incentivized to save them just in case there's a harder enemy round the corner. If they're weak, players can just forget about them entirely. Either way they end up not being used and so are not included here.

• Blessings noticeably affect NPCs. This is to allow blessings to be (optionally) distributed amongst NPCs and have a meaningful impact on combat. So now you might change your strategy depending on the blessing of the enemy you're facing.

  In addition to changing the effects of the standing stones the mod also comes with an MCM that allows you to change your blessing at any time (e.g. immediately after character creation) and even allows you to give yourself multiple blessings.

  The Stones

  Below, stones are described in terms of their effects (split into positives/blessing and negatives/curse), a summary of some suggested builds and a difficulty rating. The difficulty refers to how hard the stones ar