Cursed items play an important role in the magic item metagame/ecosystem: they can punish players for not fully identifying treasure. Discern Curse can of course neatly spot them, but priestesses are rare, and it’s a significant cost for a studious divine caster to spend one of the repertoire slots on such a spell. Magical Engineering and Loremastery proficiencies simply do not catch cursed items, and will either return no information or falsely report the item as the item it appears to be. Proper magic item research, with a base cost of 1,000gp, will make things clear, but who has the time?
At times I feel the need to reiterate my general understanding of what cursed items are for. They’re not just for harming the intended user, but for doing so with a degree of cruelty or style. You’re a supervillain; you don’t shoot the hero in the head, you banter and then strap him into a deathtrap. This is why you get cursed items that are ironic reversals of the item they imitate, rather than simply being hand grenades that go off indiscriminately when you try to use them. Below is such an item.
