This is a simple mod I made designed to make the game harder. When you leave the sewers a dialogue pops up saying you are cursed and asking you if you are up for the challenge. If you say yes, it will permanently lower all your stats and skills to 1. You can raise them by normal play, but instead of starting out with 30-50 or so you start out at 1. You will level pretty fast at such a low skill level, making it harder as well because everyone else will be leveling too, and you'll always have a bit of a disadvantage. So you'll be level 6-10 before you even get the basic stats a starting player might have.

What it does is force you to hunt a lot at first. Even a mud crab can kill you with one strike so you'll be using your bow a lot. You can't even cast a spell until your skill is 5 I believe, so spell casters will have to save money for training before they can even cast that first healing spell or flare.

So if you want hardcore difficulty, this mod should do it for you. It's fairly quick, but very clean. I wouldn't use it on a high level character unless you are insane, it will be like starting over from scratch.

I'm using it with OOO and having lots of fun just hunting and running (albeit very slowly) away from monsters.

The reason I made it optional to accept the curse is so you can try it on a new character and then if you like it, you can reject the curse on your other characters when you play them and it won't have any impact on them, so you don't have to enable/disable this esp all the time.

Warning: There is no reversing this effect. Once you accept the curse and save your game your stats will forever be lowered and you'll have to work them back up. So back up your save game or just start a new character (recommended) before using this mod.

Installation:
Place cursed.esp into your Oblivion/data folder and activate the esp.

Thanks to WillieSea on the ES forums for all his help answering my scripting questions, and writing part of the script!

Enjoy!