> I plan to have the set-up be a cursed clan. As a result the marriages of the
>clan chief's family tend to be dramatic and end in tragedy.
> The characters will be the thanes of the clan tasked with breaking the curse.
The curse sounds like something that a spurned lover would issue: "As you left me, so all your line's spouses will leave them." It reminds me of a reversal of the type of fae seductions you get in quasi-Arthurian legends. In the normal story, the fairy folk lure the unwitting men out into the woods, where they never want to leave (so starve or whatever). Presumably, the fairy folk get something out of that situation -- they are hedonic parasites, I suppose. The reversal sometimes seen is that the person lured out into the woods breaks free of the spell and leaves the fairy folk behind, to much wailing and gnashig of fairy teeth.
Maybe the clan chief's line settled this area. As part of the settlement, he had to handle the local spirit, who is one of the hedonic parasites described above. The spirit was was troubling his people, luring both men and women out into the wilderness for long periods of time; some never returned, but the ones who did had pretty obviously violated their marriage vows. So the next time it came, he went to deal with it. He pretended to go along with it, then left. Angry, it cursed his line. But his actions caused it to wither away to nearly nothing. So, one solution might be to get it to reverse the curse in exchange for propitiatory worship of some kind.
If you want to turn it into a mystery, you could have the event be a generation back and -- of course -- all the older folks are reluctant to talk about it (since some of them violated their wedding vows). Since a mystery always requires alternative solutions, maybe the alternative is that it wasn't the spirit who cursed him, but his wife, wince he went a little too far in "going along" with what the spirit wanted before leaving. She was the first one to leave him, so maybe she originated the curse.
I'm sure others will have ideas, and maybe this will get some flowing.
Chris
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