Tyrfing, the Thrice-Cursed Sword of Tragedy

The blade of this weapon shines brilliantly, but there is a strange chill about it. You gain a +3 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with this magic sword. Additionally, you can speak the blade’s command word as a bonus action to cause it to shed bright light in a 20-foot radius and dim light for an additional 20 feet. Repeating the command word or sheathing the blade extinguishes the light. Objects hit with this sword take the maximum damage the weapon’s damage dice can deal.

Tyrfing has 9 charges, which it does not regain while attuned to a creature. These charges are fully restored if a new creature attunes to it, but a previous bearer who attunes to the sword again only ever has the same pool of charges. When you use the sword to deal a critical hit against a creature that is not a construct or undead and has 100 or fewer hit points, it must make a DC 16 Constitution saving throw . Each time a creature is killed in this manner the sword expends a charge.

Curse. Prior to 3 charges being expended from the blade, it will cause some tragedy or misfortune to befall you and will not expend its third charge until it has. The exact details and timing of this evil are up to the Narrator, but good examples include: causing you to automatically fail a crucial ability check (particularly one that would lead to further disaster, such as failing to identify an ally in the dark and accidentally attacking them); causing an ally who is reduced to 0 hit points to be incapable of rolling successes on death saving throws, leading to their death unless they are healed or stabilized by another creature; or causing all your next critical hits during a given combat to miss instead.

Misfortune occurs again before 6 charges have been expended, and it will not expend the sixth until it has done so. Likewise, it must do so a third time before expending the final charge. If you break your attunement with Tyrfing with a pending misfortune, you remain cursed until either the misfortune occurs or until you are targeted by a remove curse spell cast using a 9th-level spell slot.

On expending the final charge, you must make a DC 16 constitution save. On a failure, you are slain by the sword just as surely as your opponent. On a success, you instead gain the doomed condition, dying soon thereafter in a tragic manner unless powerful magic intervenes. Regardless of the result, Tyrfing then disappears. 1 week later it appears somewhere on your plane, searching for a new wielder to afflict.

Note: The exact mechanics of the following curse are for the Narrator and should be kept vague for players, even if they discover it is cursed. It is enough in that case for them to know Tyrfing will bring about three great evils and eventually the death of its wielder. The sword is nothing if not persistent, and attempts to leave it behind without breaking attunement merely mean that Tyrfing appears near its bearer 24 hours later.

Lore

Tyrfing was a sword forged under duress by the dwarves Svalinn and Durinn for Svafrlami, a king and grandson of Odin. Per his instructions, it shown with bright light, could cut through stone and steel as easily as flesh, and would never dull or rust. However, because their services were obtained under duress by threat of force, they also cursed the blade so that whenever drawn it would take a life, that it would bring about three great evils, and that it would eventually take Svafrlami’s life. This all came to pass, and the sword continued to bring disaster and ruin to each new wielder, its cursed hunger for tragedy never sated.