Pendant of the Hollow Habit

Aura Moderate enchantment and necromancy; CL 9th
Slot Neck; Price 18,000 gp; Weight 1 lb.

DESCRIPTION

This tarnished silver pendant bears the shape of a faceless humanoid with smooth hands pressed against its own head. Tiny script circles the outer rim of the pendant, though no two observers ever seem able to agree upon the exact wording. The metal always feels slightly warm against the skin, as though it has rested too long within a living palm.

Once donned, the Pendant of the Hollow Habit cannot be willingly removed unless remove curse, break enchantment, or similar magic is used. Each dawn, the pendant selects one mundane action the wearer commonly performs and erases the practical memory of how to perform it. This effect is not random from the perspective of the curse itself, often selecting actions that will produce inconvenience, humiliation, or danger at the most inopportune moments.

The forgotten action must be a simple non-combat task or habitual bodily function, such as eating, drinking, opening doors, climbing ladders, tying knots, writing with a quill, speaking a known language coherently, dressing oneself, lighting a torch, or sleeping naturally. The wearer retains intellectual awareness that the action exists, but completely loses procedural understanding of how to perform it. A victim who forgets how to eat, for example, still recognizes food, hunger, utensils, and the concept of consumption, yet cannot mentally organize the sequence required to place food into their mouth and swallow it.

Whenever the wearer attempts the forgotten action, they become confused and distressed, automatically failing any mundane attempt to perform it. Even direct instruction proves ineffective, as the mind refuses to connect the individual movements into meaningful behavior. Magical compulsion effects that force bodily motion can temporarily bypass the limitation, though the wearer immediately loses the understanding again once control ceases.

At the start of each day, the wearer must succeed on a DC 18 Will save or suffer a cumulative –1 penalty on all Wisdom-based skill checks for 24 hours as mounting frustration and anxiety erode concentration. After seven consecutive days of wearing the pendant, the victim must also make a DC 18 Fortitude save each dawn or take 1 point of Wisdom damage from psychological deterioration. This Wisdom damage cannot be healed naturally while the pendant remains worn.

The forgotten action changes each dawn. If the pendant selects an action already currently impossible due to circumstances, it instead chooses the nearest equivalent routine behavior. Creatures immune to mind-affecting effects are immune to the pendant’s curse.

LORE

The first known Pendant of the Hollow Habit emerged from the private collection of a physician-philosopher named Orvain Belis, a man obsessed with the notion that civilization itself rested upon invisible rituals so commonplace that no one truly appreciated them. He reportedly argued that the mind was not a grand temple of reason, but rather “a ladder of repeated motions performed so frequently that mankind mistakes them for instinct.” His contemporaries dismissed him as eccentric until servants within his estate began starving while seated before full meals, weeping in frustration as they stared helplessly at spoons they no longer understood.

Witnesses described the afflicted as profoundly unsettling. Victims retained intelligence, memory, and personality, yet seemed spiritually severed from tiny portions of their humanity. One woman reportedly forgot how to lie down and remained awake for four days, trembling in exhaustion while standing beside her own bed. Another forgot how to open clenched fingers and wandered through town carrying shattered glass within bloodied hands because he could not comprehend the act of releasing objects.

Scholars disagree whether the pendant was intentionally created as a curse or whether it arose accidentally from failed memory transference experiments. Certain occult texts suggest the pendant does not truly erase knowledge at all, but rather feeds upon routine itself, consuming the unconscious certainty that binds intention to movement. In some accounts, prolonged exposure eventually leaves victims unable to remember increasingly fundamental acts - breathing rhythmically, recognizing loved ones, or even comprehending the purpose of speech.

A particularly infamous pendant was recovered from the corpse of a monastery abbot whose entire order perished silently within locked chambers. Investigation revealed the monks had collectively forgotten how to unlatch doors from the inside. Their journals, scratched into the walls with broken fingernails, contained repeated prayers begging the gods to “return the shape of ordinary thought.”

CONSTRUCTION

Requirements Craft Wondrous Item, bestow curse, modify memory, confusion; Cost 9,000 gp, 720 XP, and a silver medallion carried for one full year by a creature suffering from dementia or magical memory loss.

Kelwyn’s Notes

There are many horrors within the dimensions that arrive screaming. They claw at windows, drag chains through moonlit streets, or howl from beneath cathedral stones with all the theatrical certainty of a nightmare wishing to be recognized. Those horrors are merciful in their honesty. One sees them coming. One braces oneself. One understands, at the very least, that terror has entered the room.

This pendant is not such a horror.

The cruelty here lies not in pain, but in absence. It strips away the unnoticed architecture of being alive. Most souls move through existence upon countless tiny certainties - how to raise a cup, how to swallow, how to tie cloth around cold flesh, how to rest one's body when exhaustion arrives. We do not treasure these acts because they are too small to notice. They become invisible through repetition. Yet remove but one of them, and the soul suddenly perceives how fragile the machinery of selfhood truly is.

I once observed a man afflicted by one of these pendants who had forgotten how to sit. For nearly six hours he circled a wooden chair like a frightened animal studying a trap. He understood the purpose of the object. He understood fatigue. He even understood that he had once known the act itself. Yet the bridge between thought and action had collapsed into some internal abyss no reasoning could cross. The expression upon his face was not panic alone, but mourning. He was grieving a piece of himself too small to have ever been valued before its disappearance.

That, I suspect, is the true appetite of this cursed thing. It does not devour memory in the grand dramatic fashion of necromancers and soul-thieves. It feeds upon the unnoticed dignity of ordinary life. And perhaps that is why its victims deteriorate so quickly. A person can survive many wounds, but the human spirit was never meant to witness the slow disassembly of its own invisible foundations.