This is something I'd been wondering about for a long time - does the Geas actually do anything? For the longest time, I didn't think so, because I'd waited several days after the curse and nothing happened.

But then I realized something - I'd always done this by collecting all of the Rituals before triggering the Geas.

So this time, I intentionally waited until after the Geas to start collecting rituals.

And... a few days after the Geas, upon sundown, I got a message regarding the pain that the Hero was going through.

And the message changes from sundown to sundown, too! And it stays even if you collect all five rituals as well, since the Geas demands that you return to the castle after collecting the five rituals.

It was neat. I'm guessing that what happens is, the Geas is set to untrigger whenever you get to the castle gate with all five rituals - which is normally supposed to be a point of no return, but if you're teleported there by Katrina, you can leave south without worry - but it still untriggers the Geas because you technically "returned to the castle".

For the record, the geas has no actual ill effects on the character other than in-story. He suffers pain, but loses no health or stats and as far as I can tell, you cannot actually die from it.

Which makes some sense, since those were the terms of the geas; that you would suffer if you failed to return with the rituals in time, not that you would die.

Indeed.

Though I think one of the pain messages is intended to scare the player into thinking it could (since it mentions that you feel like you're about to die from it)

The geas does work in terms of taking your health away and getting messages from the games, but it never kills you. Even if you're at 1 hit point, the geas will never take you below that.

I'd be more interested to know if the necromancer's geas in Quest For Infamy does anything. I'd ask about that in that forum, but hardly anybody ever posts in the QFI forum and nobody ever responds to my threads there

I never noticed any HP loss after the Geas struck though.

As for Quest for Infamy, I haven't really felt driven to play that game lately :/

Fun fact, if you tell Magda about the Geas, the text will read "You are the very center of the Darkness to destroy it, or to destroy us all," but instead of hearing Magda say that, you will hear a different audio clip.