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I am literally writing a fantasy story with a character like this. The character has murdered people and got caught, he gets a choice: the death penalty or get cursed to roam the lands and hunt down monsters and demons while avoiding people as much as possible. The curse makes them live for the hunt while becoming uneasy to downright in terror when near groups of people. Of course the curse isn't perfect and a story ensues.

This is a criminal that people want to get rid off rather permanently, so sending them out to do dangerous Jobs that will kill them eventually and protect people with it seems to be a perfect atonement for their sins and a delayed death penalty.

Have you ever heard of vampires?

You can modify this basic idea as you wish, e.g.:

• The curse is not directly making the person to hunt, but to lust for flesh/blood (and monsters can somehow be more favourable as a prey)




• The curse itself can be contageous, so the character can get bitten by another "vampire", because the said "vampire" urgently needed a way to satisfy his hunger.

If the question was about "why would one will to bestow this curse on himself", then it can be literally anything, limited only by imagination, starting from it being a side-effect from a deal with some demon/monster, ending with your character being young/stupid/not-really-knowing-what's-he-doing.

The monsters have some ability that makes the curse necessary.

Bandersnatches are fierce and terrible monsters who love eating small children. But they have a psychic ability that makes people near them forget why they are there, or want to run away, or makes the Bandersnatches look like loved ones.

To overcome this, the curse was devised. It forces the chosen hunters to fight Bandersnatches even when under the Bandersnatch's power. It's not a fun curse, but it's a necessary job.

It's a win-win situation for the witch/wizard/gypsy that cursed them. The witch doesn't like all of these monsters roaming around, and wants to thin down their numbers. The witch also doesn't like some poor sod for whatever reason, and wants to be vengeful against that specific person.

So, they place a curse that the person must eat a monster's heart/ bathe in a monster's blood once a week, or else suffer unimaginable pain. The person is doomed to a life of torment constantly hunting monsters, and the witch is cackling. There's nothing of value lost to the witch; only two inconveniences matched against each other.

The curse could be like an addiction; the victim becomes an addict, and the only way to get a fix is to kill a monster. The witch wants to get the best possible use out of her power; fewer monsters and fewer enemies.

Alternatively, you could easily replace 'witch' with 'government', 'military', 'church' or 'cult'. Perhaps the curse is a punishment used to run them of prisoners or undesirables. Instead of a hangman, they sentence people to death by monster hunting - a brutal form of community service, perhaps.

The reason why might be extremely petty indeed. It could be as much about getting rid of the person as is about getting rid of the monsters.

Alternatively, you have an effective means of turning a person into your slave. It is the ultimate torture/control. Any evil tyrant would spam the hell out of the ability and use it as much as possible.

In the times before your story, a tribe of people while fiddling with magic ended up releasing these monster into the world, and where not able to close the portal releasing the monsters.

As a consequence other tribes investigated the issue, and when the guilty were found they were cursed to hunt down the problem they created, or to suffer stronger consequences.

The monsters search for the cursed human

I think you have this the wrong way around. The curse does not make the criminal hunt down monsters, it is sort of target placed on his back. The target draws nearby monsters to the criminal and he must kill them or die.

This is a death sentence and torture in one, because the criminal cannot sleep without the chance of something dangerous stalking and killing him. As a bonus, monsters are drawn away from the rest of the area giving some relief for normal villagers with the potential of the criminal being successful in killing a few.

The curse might cause terrible pain (over time). And the only possible way to ease the pain is to wash yourself in monster blood or get blessed by a member of the church.

• It might be a way to solve the curse by slaying a demon general or higher, or be blessed by a bishop.


• The pain
  
  
  
  
  • might be a very worse memory that gets implanted with the curse, which the cursed person must go through again and again. The monster blood might be a drug that makes you high enough to endure the memories. The severeness of the curse may differ from the implanted memories.
  
  
  • Or the curse could be a monster, which eats the cursed all the time until the cursed give it some monster to eat. That could explain gaining special powers as cursed (from the monster). The blessing of a member of the church stalls, or stuns the monster curse
  
  
  
  

I hope this helps :)

In a slightly less punishment driven scenario your curse could have a viral component. When the current holder of the curse dies, the curse passes to the nearest person who is then filled with the compulsion to hunt monsters.

If you'd rather make it a bigger problem, the curse could be more easily transmitted, perhaps as an STD. If the curse is a well known issue within your setting, this could lead to some interesting social issues as well, depending on how strongly the compulsion manifests.

Under this type of curse, the individual(s) who are cursed don't have to have done anything wrong themselves, they're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. This could equally lead to people who are spectacularly unsuited to being monster hunters being the victims of the curse.

The curse is lethal but not instantly, the victim slowly weakens and eventually dies. There is no cure but there is a temporary antidote: the monster's heart (or other body part). The condemned man is forced to hunt and eat the monsters, inevitably he will not be able to catch a monster in time. So it works like a combination community service death penalty. With the advantage that no guards or enforcement is needed after the hunter is cursed.

As to why such a curse would be devised: monster hunting is super dangerous, nobody does it if it can be avoided. To get monster hunters you've got to make the need to hunt unavoidable.

The monsters came into the character's life when he was young and killed all his loved ones before his eyes, or dragged them away into slavery, or something similarly traumatic. This snatched the character's childhood innocence away and changed him forever; he now makes it his sole purpose in life to hunt down and destroy all the monsters.

Non-magical only

Monster slayers are ostracised and looked down upon in society, like night soil collectors or sin eaters. This is because monsters mainly afflict remote villagers who can't afford to pay well for monster exterminators, and also because since monster activity takes place in rural activities, society at large takes an "out of sight, out of mind" view to their existence.

Yet at the same time, your character cannot simply walk away. His childhood memories and need for vengeance compel him to hunt them all down. The curse here is mental and social, but not physical.

Magical

The monsters are werewolves who also bit the character and thus marked him as one of theirs unwillingly. The character hates all werewolves for forcibly "recruiting" him as one of their own, and thus seeks to wipe them out of existence. With this, your character would bear the physical downsides of lycanthropy like a thirst for blood, as well as the additional burden of self-loathing. This can be added on top of the purely non-magical option.