Café de Nuit

I have just introduced my PC's to a Midnight Cat for plot reasons. The PC's have fallen afoul of several objects cursed by the creature, and now have to bargain to get the curses lifted.

Before I reveal too much about this cat's powers to the party, I would really like to figure out some reasonable limitations, because as written with a +15 to curse checks, there's little to prevent a Midnight Cat from literally playing god. It's a familiar for Yakov Ormoff, the Puppetmaster, so it has friends and allies. That's the first area of possible exploitation: curse your allies with things that you both want. This even works in many cases where the curse is a legitimate hardship. "Every time you try to speak, you cough up a gold coin." This would be a pain, but after several hours of coughing up coins the cat lifts the curse, and they're both rich.

In combat, it's worse. The cat can inflict Troublesome curses at will, and they are permanent. You're blind, you're deaf, you're in the ether, you think you're a jackrabbit...the possibilities are really endless.

I already blew my chance to say "one curse per person," because two party members have two curses each. Please, give me suggestions for reasonable limitations.

How about a maximum number of curses per person, and inflicting a new curse cancels the oldest one in effect?

Another possibility would be a relatively easy way to dispel the curses, for instance by breaking the cat's focus through fear (sound of dogs barking), or distracting it (scent of silvervine).

Yakov Ormoff, we said, not Yakov Vormoff which is cacophonic. About the cat, he is a cat, if you don't want him to do somethi he won't do it. Because cats do what they want.

A few ideas:

1) some kind of curse economy- perhaps the midnight cat has a certain amount of "bestow curse" tokens and "remove curse" tokens and there has to be some kind of equilibrium to them, like the four biles theory for a human. The flavor text of the midnight cat says it removes a curse by sucking it out of the person like breath.

2) some kind of psychic backlash if too many of its curses are removed in quick succession (with "quick" being defined by you) through external circumstances

3) this one's kind of mentioned but not really well defined: the Ravenloft 3e core book states that characters that throw around curses frequently and frivolously may find their curses not sticking anymore. This isn't specifically a midnight cat thing though.

4) there's nothing in the midnight cat description that says it's exempt from powers checks for laying down curses.