Add a “save selection” directive in the Lua parser that takes a previously defined selection and saves it into the level structure along with a name, allowing subsequently executed Lua scripts or other pieces of code to use that same selection after level creation is over.

Add special “reduced” effects for the diluted potion of polymorph.

Objects dipped in it will change their material, but not their type. The material is constrained to non-exotic ones the object could naturally generate with.

Monsters who have it smashed on them or who quaff it will try to polymorph into a different monster of the same class. If none are available, they follow the ordinary monster-polymorph logic.

Convert the sleeping gas trap to just “gas trap”, and make it scale based on the difficulty. Each individual trap releases a single type of gas; which type is partially dependent on the level difficulty. At low levels, they all emit sleeping gas like normal. At higher levels, they emit stunning hallucination gas like container traps, clouds of poison gas, and maybe even nastier gases that reduce speed or miasmas that cause illness.

Barbed devils have a passive physical attack that involves you getting pierced by their barbs. Possibly if you are wearing body armor and/or gloves, or wielding a two-handed weapon with longer reach, the passive attack may not always hit you. (Polearms should never incur this attack, but the way passive attacks work by default should already ensure this.)

If you bribe a demon lord for safe passage using Demonbane, they melt it down in front of you while laughing maniacally.

A ring of monster attraction: Each individual ring is associated with a randomly selected specific, common monster species (or possibly monster class), and causes monsters of that species/class to generate disproportionately often while it’s worn. When the type is known, the ring appears as “ring of monster attraction”, but when an individual one is fully identified, it ring appears as e.g. a “ring of newt attraction”.

Depending on the potential for abuse, it should probably not be allowed to wish for specific monsters. E.g. it’s probably bad to allow the player to wish for a ring of wraith attraction.

Juiblex has a spit attack, but due to his covetous warping mechanics he hardly ever uses it. Therefore, special case his spit attack to be capable of hitting any target on the level, not necessarily following a line-of-sight path.

Pale jelly, a j or j that has an engulf attack that causes illness and a difficulty rating appropriate to that. Some may be found on Juiblex’s level.

When you vomit, you are prompted to choose a direction in which to vomit. The space in that direction is then hit with a weak acid attack.

New monster ‘chicken’, added to the c monster class, but it is a normal chicken with no special attributes or powers. Eating its corpse gives some chicken related YAFM, and wielding its corpse and hitting a monster with it may make them flee; a comment in the code should indicate that this is because they are “chickening out”.

A wielded aklys should not slip out of your hands if you have slippery fingers because it’s tethered to your arm.

Allow more fine-grained configuration of when the game should start the player with a pet – for instance the ability to say “if I am a Knight, start me with a pet; otherwise don’t start me with a pet.”

Cancelled, non-unique warpers (and possibly some unique warpers, like non-magical quest nemeses) shuts down their warping. This means that cages in Gehennom can contain liches that are cancelled and thus incapable of warping out.

Glass objects should be eligible for forging, since the temperatures involved in a forge are more than enough to melt and recast glass.

Also, it should be possible to forge pieces of worthless glass together to make decorative ornaments, which are worth either score or can be sold for spare money.

If you underpay a foocubus (which includes not having any money in the first place), their chance of getting a headache is increased. This could even be implemented as a sliding scale where they are more likely to get a headache the more you underpay them by.

When a yellow light explodes, the 3x3 area centered on its explosion area will be permanently lit up.

Add a “randomizer mode”, a non-scoring mode enabled by some option you put in the config file that randomly mutates the stats of each monster – for instance, in one particular game, gnomes could have fewer hit dice and thus lower HP, while soldier ants gain an ice attack.

In the spirit of traditional randomizers, this could also randomize loot, for things like artifacts and invocation items being mixed up and findable in regular chests, monsters generating with and dropping gear they shouldn’t have, etc.

Amulet of full healing, which heals you completely (or as much as an uncursed potion of full healing) when your HP drops to 0, but does not stave off non-HP-based forms of death.

Artifact suit of armor (type is unspecified, perhaps a ring mail or chain mail) that is unaligned and operates like magic armor in the Legend of Zelda. When worn, it drains your gold at a constant rate, and when you take damage, you lose a somewhat randomized amount of gold, in exchange for partially or completely negating the damage. Gold is consumed at some rate higher than 1 per turn, and it is lost for damage at some rate higher than 1 per hit point.

If you have no gold while wearing it, you become either very slow or very encumbered.

Croesus may occasionally generate wearing this armor, along with some gold to supply it. Otherwise it generates like any unaligned artifact.

Saddles can have object properties that apply to the animal wearing the saddle.

Eating a monster egg (possibly after using some cooking system to prepare it) has a chance of giving you some intrinsics that the monster corpse can ordinarily confer.

Silver items never generate in Gehennom, except for non-weapon-and-armor items which are base silver such as the silver wand.

A death ray zapped over a monster egg on the floor kills it, making it so that it will never hatch.

Possibly, this effect could also be achieved by erodeproofing or canceling the egg.

Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, a chaotic artifact silver war hammer which references the Beatles song. Its powers and details have not been specified.

Rather than the replacement for techniques being certain roles learning new spells from nowhere once you achieve a certain experience level, have the spells be known from the beginning, but uncastable unless you are above that level.

This also helps disincentivize drain-for-gain tactics, since keeping yourself at a lower level will cut off your access to certain spells.

Make it so that firearms are loaded with bullets (they become stored as part of the object) so that you don’t quiver them, which is a weird and unflavorful way to treat them.

Change the atlatl into a launcher that throws spears. This means that Xiuhcoatl is no longer a weapon in its own right. Re-buff it by making it give fire damage to all spears thrown from it, and also reduce the weight by half of all spears in main inventory, or make them weigh 10 like daggers.

An artifact, likely named “The Fast [something]”, which grants speed, but also prevents you from eating because fast also means to refrain from eating.

Priests get a +1 bonus to Charisma when they wear whichever cloak has the “ornamental cope” appearance.

If a worm that walks is slain with Sunsword (and is thus disintegrated), it doesn’t dissolve into maggots like it ordinarily would.

If an Undead Slayer has maintained weaponless conduct by the time they get crowned, their skill cap in martial arts is raised to Grand Master.

Breaking a wand of healing or extra healing should heal monsters in the 3x3 area around you.

When running or traveling using the travel command, the hero should not stop to read any engravings or gravestones they happen to pass over.

“Shambling artifact”, which, similar to a shambling horror, combines random aspects from various different artifacts, and is constant over the course of one game.

If you get a full identify insight (either exclusively from a throne, or from any source) but everything in your main inventory is already fully identified, all items you are carrying in containers recursively get fully identified as well.

Make the invoke effect of the Tsurugi of Muramasa enhance it to give double damage for a limited time, but also become bloodthirsty during that time. For an immediate effect, it could also cause fear when invoked.

A “fearless” object property for weapons or equipment which makes the wielder or wearer immune to fear effects. (This is more useful in variants which implement a fear system.)

A variant cursed effect of a scroll of genocide: it removes most monsters of a given species, but sends the survivors to you looking for revenge.

When you are in a polyform with a hug attack and attack a monster with it, there is a chance the monster appreciates the hug and becomes peaceful.

Wands should require being wielded before they can be zapped; this way it adds a bit more strategy for the player on when to wield a wand and which one, and balances them a bit relative to monsters. On the other end of the change, you now get a turn or two of warning when a monster is about to zap a wand, because they have to wield it.

The Wizard of Yendor can only use Double Trouble once per reincarnation.

A special container that can hold the invocation items, and only the invocation items. Has bag-of-holding-like properties (or else is an artifact bag of holding). It appears in some hard to reach place in the dungeon.

Wearing a shield of mobility should confer SLASH-style free action: rather than paralysis resistance, you instead have a decent chance of freeing yourself if you get grabbed by a monster or attacked by a mind flayer.

On the level you visit after killing Lucifer, you are confronted with every demon lord who has not yet been killed. But when they appear here, they have special AI: they cannot covetous warp, and grudge each other as well as you.

Greasing your weapon prevents monsters from disarming it with a bullwhip (though the attempt may cause the grease to wear off it, like usual).

If they are outside of Gehennom, Infidels’ prayers to Moloch are more likely to succeed the deeper they are in the dungeon.

Sitting on a saddle (on the floor) gives a YAFM if you have sufficient skill in riding rather than the standard “It’s not very comfortable…”

Artifact book (novel?) that when read teaches you one level of any skill. This may include skills you are restricted in (though it might only raise it to Unskilled) and skills past your role’s cap.

Provide some ways for Vecna to come back after being defeated:

1. Allow arch-liches to grow up into Vecna if Vecna does not currently exist.
2. Any humanoid caster that acquires the Hand or Eye of Vecna should instantly become Vecna. Covetous liches should also covet those artifacts.

If you are an elf, you can read any object with “runed” in the description (e.g. elven spears, daggers, bows, and the runed wand). Though, elves will know the identities of most of these items by default, so they won’t appear “runed”, which might defeat the purpose.

In any case, the message should be something relatively inane, like “Made in [elvish sounding place]”.

If an illithid hero attempts to use their psionic abilities on a beholder, it fails and they get confused instead, because the beholder’s mind is so alien that they can’t comprehend it.

The Oracle offers a service in which she reallocates some skills of your choice, costing some amount of money. Perhaps she can only skill you up to skill levels you formerly had before forgetting them, or else she can only make you forget skills (but you get to choose which unlike with amnesia).

Mud terrain should follow the same rules as lava regarding stuck in it and sinking in, except without the fire damage or eventual death (you can’t get submerged completely in it). Also, you can apply a towel to it repeatedly to suck out the water, which dries it up into normal floor, producing the message “Your towel gets filthy!”

It should appear starting in the early-to-mid Dungeons of Doom, so that monsters like giants can smack you into it and get you stuck.

When you are “due” for a sacrifice and of a certain experience level, you gain the ability to sense altars from afar.

Applying a pick-axe to iron bars allows you to try to pry them apart, but this has an equal chance of destroying the pick or the bars.

Chaotic Knights should still have a set of role penalties, not necessarily the same caitiff ones as lawful Knights, and maybe not as many, but still something that emphasizes that a chaotic knight is still a knight and is expected to have some pragmatic self-discipline.

Some mechanic (maybe involving forges?) that consumes valuable gems to add enchantment to weapons or rings, because gems tend to become useless at a fairly early point in the game.

Artifact-like system for monsters that applies a new set of stats on top of an existing monster’s stat block. The monster is not G_UNIQUE, but only one of it can spawn in a game.

A simpler solution would be just to add unique monsters to the monster list and figure out a way to allow these monsters to spawn randomly.

Skills automatically enhance themselves when you have trained them sufficiently. Also, the skill slot system is removed so that you don’t have to worry about training a skill you won’t want later and wasting its slot.

Allow the player to have some control over the bubble movement on the Plane of Water with some increased risk, by biasing the direction of the bubble they are in if they are standing on its edge adjacent to water. The bubble will move in that direction.

A shopkeeper who hates you (e.g. for having stolen from them) will be reluctant to serve you and will insist you wear a shirt and shoes before you enter.

In variants with racial shopkeepers, the shopkeeper can also hate you on principle without you doing anything wrong. In variants with Convicts, their striped shirt could be unacceptable for purposes of having a shirt.

A cursed amulet of reflection will behave as an “amulet of absorption”: instead of reflecting rays, nearby ones that weren’t going to hit you get redirected towards you instead. Also, rays that hit an amulet of absorption wearer don’t continue past them.

Alternatively, add the amulet of absorption as its own item, and make it usually generate cursed like other “bad” amulets.

The Wizard can be fooled into stealing a fake Amulet of Yendor if you are wearing it instead of the real one, but this only works once.

Eating a monster in front of a monster of the same race freaks them out and causes them to flee.

In the curses interface, allow the user to configure a window that is like permanent inventory view but only shows their equipped items, so that they can quickly see that they are lacking a critical piece of gear.

Shops should slowly regenerate new items on empty squares within the shop, because monsters continually spawn and death drop items. Possibly, the items only regenerate when you leave and return to the level, rather than doing it while on the level.

Rangers break wands on their knee rather than raising it high over their head, because that’s what they’re used to doing with firewood.

The Amulet of Yendor (and fakes) should have some bright, noticeable color that is not the same as the metal color used by every other amulet type.

Vampires shifted into some other form should appear on warning as their true difficulty, rather than the difficulty of their current form. Attentive players are then rewarded for noticing that a wolf or fog cloud is an unusual difficulty 4.

The Oracle becomes angry at you if you dry up all of her fountains.

Rather than bugles being tuneless, they should be able to play sequences of notes containing only C, E, and G.

Restore ability potions can (partially?) cure amnesia effects.

Shopkeepers value empty wands at 0 and will not buy them.

For every mimic you personally kill inside a shop, the shopkeeper gives you a token fee of 5 gold (or store credit) if you talk to him afterwards.

If you clear the shop of all mimics (with some minimum amount of mimics required), the shopkeeper could give you a free item of your choice.

Change dipping into existing water to a standard multiturn action. If you are on top of water that you can dip into, you are now asked immediately after typing #dip if you want to dip things into it. If you say no, you are prompted for items to dip into each other like normal. If you say yes, you are presented with an inventory selection menu that allows you to select multiple items. Then you dip each of those items once into the water, handled automatically as an occupation. If something interesting happens, like a fountain effect or a monster moves nearby, the occupation is interrupted like normal.

Unspecified how the player should communicate their intention to dip items multiple times. For instance, when diluting potions in a fountain which might dry up, it’s desirable to double-dip all potions one by one in case it dries up part way through, but it’s unclear how the interface should handle this.

Reimagine the Rogue quest plot where the quest artifact is owned by a rich guy and you’re sent on a mission to steal it, sneaking into his estate, bypassing all his security guards and systems, and covertly entering his mansion.

Ideally, it would require cunning and inventiveness like the current quest does, not simply being a quest you can slaughter your way through. It could still use the idea of having the entry point and destination on a level be in disconnected areas of the map separated by non-phaseable walls.

The nemesis can be made weak and trivial to kill if you actually get to him (because he is just a fat old rich guy), with the possible exception of if you get noticed by or kill him, he will call in all his backup to stop you.

For this to work, the quest artifact would probably have to be changed from the Master Key of Thievery to something else that a collector would have. Alternatively, the goal of the quest could just be a macguffin, with the quest leader having the Master Key of Thievery and they exchange it for the macguffin when you return with it.

Healers have a reduced chance to engrave a given character in the dust correctly, because of the stereotype about doctors having terrible handwriting.

You can wield a tooled horn to use it as an ear trumpet, temporarily alleviating deafness for as long as you keep it wielded.

The Tsurugi of Muramasa should act bloodthirsty like Stormbringer does, because historically all swords made by Muramasa were reputed to be bloodthirsty or traitorous.

Shock resistance (possibly only extrinsic shock resistance) prevents you from being paralyzed by a ghost’s sudden appearance even if you lack free action, because you are resistant to being (emotionally) shocked by things.

Shock resistance turns ‘!’ at the end of in-game messages into ‘.’.

The extrainfo patch for servers should store a piece of metadata that indicates whether the player has mail turned on, so that a person spectating a game in dgamelaunch who tries to mail a player with mail turned off will get a message explaining that.

A small fraction of closets should contain a skeleton.

Don’t allow items to erode past the point where further erosion stops mattering. For instance, a orcish helm can lose at most 1 AC from eroding, so it should not be allowed to become very or thoroughly rusty, whereas plate mail can lose 3 AC from eroding, so it should be allowed to become thoroughly rusty.

Throwing holy water at demons should be buffed way over its current 2d6 damage, because it’s a fun interaction. Instead, it should severely weaken them, cancel them, stun them, and/or do a large amount of damage (perhaps 50% or some proportion of their max HP, possibly exempted for demon lords whose fights it would trivialize).

You can pay a shopkeeper a small fee to go take an item from the floor of his shop and deliver it to you, so that you avoid running into mimics getting it yourself.

Add an anosmia status condition, in which you have no sense of smell:

• Tins cannot be identified by their smell, unless they contain spinach or are empty.
• Messages involving smell, such as when you cast stone to flesh on rocks, are suppressed.
• Food detection scrolls and the spell of detect food don’t work.
• Food appraisal doesn’t work.

Not specified what things in the game might cause this condition, or if it should be a roleplay birth option.

The room of gems in the Castle should never contain worthless glass. (Unspecified whether it should still contain gray stones, or exclusively valuable gems.)

When you perform a controlled polymorph, you are only able to turn into monsters which have HD equal to or lower than your level. If you are using a mask, or if you are polymorphing randomly, it treats you as being 10 levels higher than your actual one.

Lycanthropic and vampire shapeshifting polymorphs are exempt from this restriction.

Artifact dart Safety Pin. It has no special benefits if used as a dart, but instead has a passive carry effect of protecting all your scrolls in open inventory from burning or wetting.

Iron doors should be able to take water damage and become rusty. Once rusty, it should be possible to break an iron door like a normal wooden one.

Alternatively, iron doors should be corrodable by throwing or smashing acid on them, with it taking 2-3 potions to weaken a door to the point of destroyability.

Artifact unaligned pair of lenses The Lens of Truth, from Zelda, which grants see invisible when worn.

Pets that are a higher level than you gradually untame over time, though they will always turn peaceful when they untame unless you have abused them.

Add a system of “hell curses”. When you enter a demon lord’s lair, you are afflicted with 2 random curses, which stick around forever until the lord is killed or bribed off.

You can receive at most six curses over the course of the game, requiring you to defeat the lords of the first three lairs you encounter. Further generation of lairs does not add any curses.

A non-comprehensive list of potential curses is:

• healing potions heal only half as much HP
• your speed is knocked down by 2
• your AC is deducted
• your spellcasting failure rates increase
• you are randomly inflicted with confusion every 50 turns or so

The Soul Forge: a single-level branch off Gehennom that contains a smith. The smith will take two items of the same type and forge them together into one; in technical terms this destroys one of them and imbues the other with whatever object properties the destroyed one had. They cannot both be artifacts, and if one is an artifact, it will not be the one destroyed, so the properties from the other one will be transferred to the artifact.

The smith’s price is based on how many object properties the resulting item will have, increased if it will be an artifact. In dNetHack, the smith would require payment in soul coins, but in variants without those, they may just ask for gold or some other valuable. If paid in soul coins, the requested type of coin would be random but deterministic based on the object IDs of the two items.

New “flooded stairs” terrain type. They act normally as stairs, but are also treated as three-dimensional water (that you cannot fly over and must be submerged in, like on the Plane of Water). This would not be very useful on its own but would be a building block for quests or other special levels that are entirely underwater.

New spell “seek item”, mid to high level divination. When cast, you are prompted to name an object type (or use the wish prompt to allow more details to be specified - i.e. a +5 broadsword as opposed to any broadsword). Then the entire dungeon is searched for matching items and tells you where they are found, probably just telling you the level for objects not on the current level and showing you the locations of objects a la object detection if they are on the current level.

If you enter a room containing open pits of lava, print a message “It is hot in here.” If hallucinating, follow this up with “…but it’s a dry heat!”

Occasionally, maybe 1% of the time a monster spawns during normal gameplay (not during level creation), select a random stair on the map as its spawning location, even if the player can see those stairs. This makes it appear like the monster is arriving from off-level.

However, first scan the stairs and the 8 spaces surrounding it to see if any monsters or the player are there. If so, do not do this and instead spawn the monster randomly like normal.

In variants where the spell of cure sickness can be cast directionally, casting it at Pestilence has some detrimental effect on him, probably hitting his HP and possibly stunning or even cancelling him.

Exempt the healing-potion-on-Pestilence interaction from doing a roll versus monster MR, because in practice his MR is so high that it means healing potions are useless.

Monsters that attack your displaced image may “miss wildly and stumble forwards” to move into the spot they thought you were standing in, symmetrically with how the player does for displaced monsters.

To help differentiate bone devils from being boring popcorn monsters with no special attacks or abilities, give them the ability to summon skeletons.

This should come with reasonable limits, such as setting their mspec_used field so that they can only do it every so often, and preventing them from doing it at all if there are a certain number of skeletons around them or on the whole level. Possibly limit it so that if they are not within the “misc item use” distance from the player, they will limit themselves to creating 0 or 1 skeletons.

Vampires will not enter a temple that has a priest in residence.

Cloudy and white potions, in addition to milky potions, sometimes contain a ghost.

Allow the player to cut down the trees in the Ranger quest home level to traverse the level more easily, but give an alignment penalty for doing so.

Bisecting a monster with the Tsurugi of Muramasa should have a chance of scaring nearby hostile monsters into fleeing.

When a magic trap tames monsters, it should give a message beyond “You feel charismatic” - the scroll of taming “neighborhood is friendlier” message probably works fine here.

Wands of wishing always start at 0:1, but now uses the standard recharge and explosion odds of normal wands: it can be recharged multiple times with an increasing chance of exploding, rather than allowing only one recharge and always exploding on the second recharge. Recharging a wand of wishing only gives it 1 charge back, regardless of whether blessed or uncursed charging was used.

The practical effect is that it becomes an interesting choice for the player whether they should wrest the wand when it is x:0 (which gives 1 more wish guaranteed, but that’s it) or risk recharging the wand (with its standard increasing chance of exploding, so it could either give no more wishes at all or give 1 plus the same choice of whether to recharge again.)

A new single-level “heaven” branch, reachable by levelporting to a negative level, that is filled with angels guarding the “Holy Scepter”, a new artifact with unspecified properties. There is an exit portal on the level, and the angelic guards are peaceful unless angered or the Scepter is taken. If you steal the Scepter, you can sacrifice it on Moloch’s high altar to get a bad ending to the game.

New “scroll of limited wish”, which grants a wish that is restricted in the following ways:

• No artifacts.
• No magical items (thus no scrolls, rings, wands, etc.)
• No enchantment, must always be +0.
• No blessing or curse.

When hallucinating, randomize dragons’ colors and glyphs among all dragon colors/glyphs, and allow messages about them to use hallucinatory colors, e.g. “The mottled dragon bites!”

Artifact amethyst that when dipped into fruit juice turns it into booze, the reverse of what usually happens.

If you manage to anger your god to the point of them sending a minion while still an atheist, and your crowning artifact does not yet exist, there is a very small chance that one of the minions will be carrying the crowning artifact.

Magic flutes have a roughly 1% chance of generating as gemstone (or glass).

Cavemen have a lot of experience traversing tight spaces in caves, and thus are always able to squeeze through a diagonal space (except possibly in Sokoban).

Alternatively, they are able to squeeze through diagonal spaces while carrying much more weight than other roles.

Dipping a corpse into a potion of polymorph “keys” the potion to that specific monster type: if it is used to polymorph the player or a monster, they will be turned into the same monster type as the corpse used. The corpse and potion are not consumed by being dipped.

If the monster is no-polymorph, nothing happens.

If the potion is used to polymorph an object, it does not do anything unusual, unless the object is a type for which species matters, in which case the potion changes its species to the keyed type, which can be useful for changing a figurine to something specific.

If in a variant that has potions of specific monsters’ blood, this can also be created by dipping polymorph into monster blood or vice versa.

Zapping a wand of locking or casting wizard lock at a pile of rocks will turn it into a wall, or possibly a boulder if creating walls is too powerful.

Since crystal chests are difficult to open compared to regular containers, random ones should generate with commensurately good contents.

In the owned artifacts patch, wishing for dragon scales or scale mail may instead spawn a dragon of the requested color, who is still wearing the scales.

A demon lord who occasionally summons demons (or some other sort of minion) and, when killed, will possess the body of one of his minions, so you need to kill all of the summons before he can be finally killed.

When a player is killed by a giant spider and leaves bones, there will be a web trap placed on their square, and occasionally one or two giant spider eggs.

Gas spore explosions should knock back any creature caught in them.

The first delicatessen generated in the game will always stock food aligned with whatever food-related conducts you have kept up until that point, except for foodless, in which case it stocks only decadent food to tempt you into breaking it.

Priests tending an altar should repair the walls and doors of their temples if they are damaged, like shopkeepers do. (In NetHack 3.7, peaceful monsters avoid digging temple walls, but the temple can still be damaged by other monsters or the player.)

Artifact bronze plate mail The Pact Eternal. Autocurses when worn. When invoked, it summons a tame copy of you, with copies of your armor and wielded weapon (which only works on a wielded weapon), drains 1 level from you, and reduces your maximum HP by half.

If you die while the summoned copy lives, you get lifesaved, the max HP penalty becomes permanent, the copy is unsummoned and you are relocated in its place (to produce an overall effect of it becoming the “real” you.)

If you take off the armor, the copy is unsummoned.

If the copy dies or gets unsummoned by any means, its gear vanishes along with it, and your missing max HP is restored (though your current HP does not get restored).

Artifact chaotic helm Helm of the Underworld, modeled after Hades’ helm. Grants drain resistance, invisibility, magic resistance, and passive detection of buried objects (or phasing, if this is too difficult to implement) when worn. When invoked, it does a stronger version of the chaotic turn undead effect (rebuke or tame undead).

Artifact cloak of invisibility Death’s Embrace, which grants phasing, immunity to death effects, and half physical damage, but reduces speed.

Artifact quarterstaff Staff of Battle. Deals double damage to everything and grants very fast speed when wielded.

Rings of regeneration should drain your Pw instead of your nutrition. When you’re at 0Pw, you stop regenerating.

Buff the axe, because its damage is fairly low for its weight, in one of two ways:

• Treat the axe as a normal wood-chopping axe, and reduce its weight.
• Treat the axe as a designed weapon, and keep its weight but raise its damage.

Your god will not give you random prayer boons until after you have received a sacrifice gift from them. (They will still fix troubles when you pray.)

When a leprechaun teleports after taking gold so they can bury it, if there is a leprechaun hall on the level, they will always pick a random unoccupied space in that room to teleport to. (If no space is unoccupied, they will teleport randomly as normal.)

If you are illiterate and receive some mail, the mail daemon will offer to read it to you.

If you chat to a straw golem, it will say a random strawman argument, e.g. “If the priests give two bits to every beggar, nobody will want to work anymore.” or “The straw golem completely misrepresents your argument.”

Any randomly generated large box in the dungeon may become named “Pandora’s Box”. It works like Schroedinger’s Box in that it’s a normal non-artifact box which is never trapped, and the special behavior when it’s opened is to spawn a bunch of nasty monsters around the player and subtract 2 Luck (and interrupt the normal box-opening process). However, there is something good for the player inside.

Throwing gold into a fountain (by standing on it and throwing it downwards) makes the gold vanish, and has a (gold/1,000,000) chance of giving you a wish.

Solve the problem of pets wasting their hard-trained apport by picking up and dropping objects randomly all over the dungeon, by triggering them only to use it when the hero plays any instrument (or maybe any non-magical instrument). Bonus points if the player can train the pet by playing an arbitrary sequence of notes (chosen by the player) on tonal instruments.

Make enchantments on launchers relevant without making them overpowered by adding their enchantment to damage (because projectiles already add their enchantment to damage): the enchantment determines the likelihood of getting +1 to multishot, unaffected by role or skill. This chance is given as either enchantment/(enchantment + 1), or enchantment/8.

If the enchantment is negative, the same formula is used on the absolute value of the enchantment to determine if multishot should be decreased by 1. If it is decreased to 0, you fail to shoot anything and waste your action.

Monks are given some benefit or ability that enables them to get more benefit out of the ring of increase damage. This could be:

• Letting them multishoot projectiles
• Multiple attacks for martial arts at high levels
• Other rings of increase damage and accuracy are doubled

The line-editing functionality currently provided by compiling in EDIT_GETLIN should be moved to a boolean option on all platforms it is supported, because about half of all players will not like it whether it is forced on or forced off.

Artifact tooled horn Horn of the Wild that summons a number of difficulty-appropriate tame animals to fight for you. (They might untame or despawn after a while.)

Artifact ring of searching that protects you completely from triggering a trap you didn’t already know about.

Wearing the Mitre of Holiness removes the spellcasting penalty from wearing a shield.

Cursed potions of invisibility remove any permanent intrinsic invisibility you have, but still give you the normal cursed duration of temporary intrinsic invisibility, so after that duration you will become visible again. Thus, they are a controllable way to remove the permanent intrinsic and are also still useful for characters without invisibility yet.

Artifact dart that has a 100% break rate when thrown, but if it’s carried in main inventory, it will periodically replicate itself and increase its stack size, to a maximum of 50.

In the options menu, the player can select something which forces a reload of all non-birth options from the config file, in order to refresh annoying options which are saved with the game and do not pick up on when someone fixes them in their config file.

A spellbook will teaches you one of 4 ways to cast the spell, randomly chosen and deterministic per-spellbook:

• Verbal and somatic
• Verbal but not somatic
• Somatic but not verbal
• Neither verbal nor somatic (fully at will).

Various conditions prevent you from casting a spell if you are limited in how you can cast it: choking and being polymorphed into a form incapable of speech (etc) prevent you from casting a spell you only know how to cast verbally, and being held or stuck to a monster or having both hands welded to cursed gear (etc) prevents you from casting a spell you only know how to cast somatically.

You can read additional spellbooks to “upgrade” your casting ability in addition to refreshing your memory: e.g. if you can cast force bolt somatically but don’t need to speak, and you read a spellbook of force bolt that teaches how to cast it verbally but not somatically, you become able to cast it fully at will.

The motivation for this is to make large quantities of obtained spellbooks containing many duplicates of already known spells more interesting.

Not specified how the hero knows how to cast their starting spells; obvious options are:

• Always fully at-will
• Always requires verbal and somatic components
• Randomly chosen from among the four options

Ice devils have a “hellfrost” attack that can damage you even when you have cold resistance (though possibly not if you have extrinsic cold resistance).

Ice devils should have a slowing attack, like they do in D&D. Most likely, this should be like a lichen’s temporary slow in EvilHack, rather than a permanent speed-loss like a shade or skeleton has. Free action could reduce or negate this.

Getting amnesia can strip your knowledge of (and therefore ability to write) Elbereth.

The scroll of gold detection, if read when confused (and cursed, possibly), detects silver items instead of gold pieces.

It’s probably desirable to keep the existing effect of trap detection in some form, so it’s a bit tricky to decide exactly which combinations of cursed and confused should keep that and which should detect silver.

The Longbow of Diana should still provide reflection when it is in the offhand slot and not actively wielded.

When a mind flayer removes the grease from your helm, its round immediately ends because it has to clean off its tentacles before attacking again.

A potion of growth (or “embiggening”), which lets you temporarily lift boulders, and a potion of shrinkage, which lets you get through narrow diagonal gaps if you would normally be unable to.

Some monster (a boss? The Wizard of Yendor? Imps?) will use custom taunts against you that are taken from checking the logfile for the last three or four ways you died.

This could also be implemented as non-verbal taunts where the monster uses the way you died against you - e.g. if you died to a zombie, they will summon zombies; if you fell into a pit, they will create a pit underneath you, etc.

Throwing “attack” potions (sleep, paralysis, blindness, etc) should either always hit the target, or hit the floor at the target’s feet (causing vapor effects) if it fails the to-hit roll.

If you kill an enemy on a coaligned altar, you get a small alignment bonus and a message “Shimmering droplets of blood ascend into the realm of [deity]!” (Not specified what it should say if the dying monster doesn’t have blood.)

If in a variant that has Secespita, making the killing blow with that also decreases prayer timeout by a few turns.

There are adverse effects if you swim within a certain amount of time after your last meal, because of the traditional advice that it’s dangerous to swim less than an hour after eating.

Greasing an item slightly increases its weight. If the grease wears off, it reverts to normal weight.

Attacking a dead tree with a weapon of fire, or an artifact with fire damage, will burn up the tree.

Even if they have a headache, foocubi should interact with rings of adornment (the typical way; succubi take it and incubi put it on your finger). When they have a headache, they will do this “petulantly”.

Mind flayers (or possibly only master ones) can use telekinesis to drag you a space or two closer to them so they can eat your brain.

Knights who have never consorted with a foocubus have a permanent +1 intrinsic increase damage bonus, which they lose when they do consort with one, with the goal of it being something that is not a huge difference to lose, but does add up over the long run, and which will not stop pacifist knights from using foocubi to achieve the Quest level. This is based on Lancelot and Galahad in Arthurian legend.

Add “royal blue” as one of the randomized potion descriptions, for two reasons: 1) so that the monarch of a throne room can be given a royal blue potion as a pun, 2) so that there can be a potion that uses the “blue” color, which currently none do.

New room-joining algorithm for regular Dungeons levels and levels which use des.random_corridors:

• Pick one random room and consider this room to be “the set of connected rooms”.
• Repeat the following until every room is in the set of connected rooms:
  • Pick 2 random rooms, one from the set of connected rooms and one from the set of not-yet-connected rooms, and pick a random point in each room.
  • Draw a straight line between those two points. Route the line around intervening rooms if necessary.
  • If the line intersects with an existing corridor, dig only the part of the line from that intersection up to the unconnected room. Otherwise, dig the whole line out.
  • Identify the points where the line crosses the outer walls of the rooms, and make doors. If it enters or exits at a corner, shift it to an adjacent wall space.
  • Add the unconnected room to the set of connected rooms.

Allow downstairs to be marked as “secret” so that they don’t show up unless searched for or by stumbling onto them (in which case you fall down them). Use this specifically for early hidden branches, like Goblin Town in EvilHack.

Allow for gas clouds of different types (confusion gas, hallucination gas, etc) by passing an additional argument to create_gas_cloud.

On the Plane of Fire, run a rudimentary cellular automaton to make the lava slosh around, with a couple rules like “won’t encroach on radius 1 or 2 from the portal” and “there should be no net gain or loss of lava across the whole level”. It being static and the same every time except for the portal location is rather boring.

New artifact The Golden Knight, a gold small shield that has the following properties:

• Sets strength to 25 when worn like gauntlets of power.
• Cannot be invoked directly, but if you fall below 25% of your HP maximum when your invoke timeout is good, it automatically invokes itself to take half of your current Pw points and heal you for that much HP.

If this doesn’t seem powerful enough, remove its strength effect and make the base item a shield of reflection instead.

New artifact Staff of Agni, a quarterstaff with the following fire-based properties:

• Can be zapped if its enchantment is positive for the same effect as casting a spell of fireball.
• Invoking it sets its enchantment to 3 + your skill in attack spells. (No effect if the enchantment is already higher than this.)
• Grants fire resistance when wielded.
• Deals double fire damage in melee like Fire Brand.
• Acts like a robe for reducing spellcasting failure, but only for the spell of fireball (and fire storm, if that is a separate spell).

Mjollnir will evade your grasp and refuse to be picked up if your alignment record is less than pious, similar to how it can only be wielded by the worthy in the Marvel universe. (Though this might mean it should be changed to a lawful artifact rather than a neutral one.)

New artifact Bolt Boots, jumping boots made out of copper or metal. Conveys shock resistance when worn. Does double damage on kicks, which is treated as shock damage that may destroy rings and wands in a monster’s inventory.

When jumping with the boots, you may pass through monster’s squares (but still have to land on an open square); any monsters passed through will take damage as if hit by a wand of lightning.

You can apply the Master Key of Thievery to an iron chain you are shackled to, which unlocks it and unpunishes you. Possibly, if your god is smiting you while you have the Key, they will avoid choosing punishment since you can easily escape from it.

Add a unique lich or demon lord enemy who may appear as a side effect of raising the dead with the Book of the Dead. Not specified if this is the only way this monster can ever appear, or whether other mechanics like demon gating could bring them in as well.

Strangulation protects you from drowning, since you cannot inhale water if you can’t inhale at all. It also prevents potion vapor inhalation effects and the inhalation effects of gas clouds. Basically it works like magical breathing except you die in 6 turns.

When a nasty is summoned by a lich, and its monster type has a zombie counterpart, it will instead be replaced by that zombie counterpart.

When wielding Sting, you should be able to untrap adjacent webs and monsters stuck in those webs with 100% success.

Drinking an identified potion of hallucination or eating a corpse or tin of a hallucinogenic monster as a Knight carries an alignment penalty.

Divine speech by Offler (the Tourist chaotic god) should contain lisping on all ‘s’ sounds.

Human (and possibly humanoid) monsters killed by a vampire’s drain attack (not its weapon or physical bite damage) should have a long timeout set on their corpses to revive them as a vampire. If the player or a pet was the one that killed them, they should revive tame.

If a monster that is capable of summoning nasties has successfully rolled to avert conflict, it will avoid summoning nasties for a little while if conflict remains active (even if it succumbs to conflict itself later on).

When you pass out from eating rotten food while standing on a staircase, you fall down the stairs (likely petrifying you if you are carrying a cockatrice corpse) and “find yourself at the bottom of the stairs” when you come to.

Add a throne effect which either copies the confused noncursed effect of a scroll of taming, or mass-tames monsters in the current room. Either of these gives the player an incentive to sit on the throne without killing everything in the room first.

Make hunting the wumpus into an actual step in the progression of the Ranger quest, rather than just having a level inspired by it. For instance, the wumpus that appears in the quest is much more powerful and can kill the player in one hit, and must be slain in order to progress beyond its level (even if the justification is as flimsy as “It isn’t safe to proceed while the threat of the Wumpus remains”).

“Bowling alley” themed room, a fixed size (either 5 in width or height, longer in the other dimension) with six statues arranged in a triangle at one end of the room as “pins” and one or more rolling boulder traps for the “ball”.

If you have telepathy, you should hear the quest leader’s telepathic summons message more clearly than its current garbled state (perhaps “m..ic transporter”), and if you have extrinsic telepathy, you should hear it with perfect clarity.

Water elementals’ HP (and Pw, if applicable) regeneration is boosted when they are on a water-containing space such as a moat or a fountain. Possibly, they can also suck up the water to regain a large quantity of hit points at once, which removes the water terrain if it is expendable (a fountain or pool or puddle of shallow water will dry up).

In order to make them more interesting in combat, their AI may favor hanging around sources of water and trying to find a path to the nearest water when they are injured.

Hitting a tree with sufficient cold damage makes it explode. The explosion type could be either physical, like a gas spore, or cold itself (which could possibly set off a chain reaction causing other trees to explode).

If you eat a lizard’s brain while turning to stone, it cures your stoning.

You should be able to jump to the location of a saddled pet, which causes you to attempt to mount it. If you fail the mount check, you fall off to a random adjacent square and may take extra damage on top of the normal amount for failing to mount a steed.

Fortune cookies will occasionally generate in gold vaults, containing money-based rumors.

Magic bookshelf dungeon feature, which is heavily inspired by and is functionally similar to the TNNT swap chest, but only involves spellbooks instead of all items (and is not itself an object).

Looting while standing on it gives you a feeling you should put a book on the empty shelf, and if you do, you magically find other books on the shelf. You can see the identities of these books but do not permanently learn them if you didn’t previously know them. Once you take a book from the shelf, it vanishes.

Left up to the implementor whether the books would actually come from other players like the TNNT swap chest does (in which case it might end up filled with low-value or common books; if so, there are various ways this could be mitigated such as the shelf not accepting a book type it already has, or adding in randomly generated books) or whether the books would just be a pool of random ones selected at the start of the game.

An additional possible detail is that you can only see books on the shelf of equal or lower level than the total level of books you yourself have put in. So if you put in a level 1 book, you will only see other level 1 books, but if you then add a level 3 book, you will see books of up to level 4. Or, you always see all books, but only books below this threshold show you the spell and others appear as “a spellbook”. identities

Variant of Fort Ludios that contains Midas instead of Croesus. Midas has a petrification touch, but instead of turning you to stone slowly, it turns you to gold and creates a gold statue of you. Midas uses gold golems for his forces instead of dragons.

A “repulsion” intrinsic. This prevents monsters that fail a resistance check from moving next to you (specifically, where they believe is next to you) on their turn by making their AI consider it an invalid position. However, if you are in melee range, it does not make them step away from you or refuse to fight you, nor does it prevent them from making ranged attacks.

This intrinsic could come from some new artifact or spell, but two possible sources for it that already exist are reading the scroll of scare monster and casting the spell of cause fear.

Sometimes, if there is space and there is no intersection with another corridor, a closet will extend 2 more spaces back (for a total length of 3). The middle space will be a secret corridor (or sometimes plain stone), and the second space will be a regular corridor with a chest with random contents.

Occasionally when fighting in melee with a weapon you are Expert in, not twoweaponing, and there is no special artifact effect already in play, you get some special benefit of that weapon type. ( Ideas:

• Some of the longer swords allow parrying monsters’ attacks.
• Mace or flail or morning star could stun or confuse targets
• Stiletto gives you automatic counterattacks sometimes.
• Spears can skewer through an enemy and hit another one directly behind it.

Track all alignment violations according to their source, which means when you anger a peaceful you tick up an “angered a peaceful” counter, when you rob a grave you increment “grave robbed”, etc. Enough incrementing in any counter (which may vary based on your role and alignment) starts to make your god angry and priests unfriendly. The idea is that if you have a large number of alignment violations but they’re spread out across multiple causes, you might skate by, but repeatedly and happily doing a bad thing will get you punished (and will allow your god to actually vocalize what you’ve been doing wrong). It would also be nice to show in the dumplog what your worst sins were.

Have Zeus’s lightning bolts as an item or artifact you can throw. If an artifact weapon, it should automatically return like Mjollnir; otherwise, it could be an item that vanishes after striking a target but deals immense shock damage to that target.

Trollsbane should be the second artifact gift for the Geek role.

Gifts from your god (including gifts not from sacrifice, such as spellbooks) should have their blessedness identified, since your god is very explicitly blessing them.

Alternative Necromancer role, because its implementation in SLASH’EM winds up being a rather halfhearted version of Wizard with some elements of Priest and Archeologist. Note: This was written for a hypothetical variant that does not have a Necromancer role, rather than as an update to SLASH’EM’s.

• When playing as a Necromancer, dying monsters may drop “soul” objects, which can then be collected by the player.
  • Souls only exist as an object for the purpose of occupying a space on the map before being picked up. They are weightless and do not actually occupy space in inventory, nor can they be stolen after being collected. A Necromancer can have an unlimited amount of them.
  • If a soul drops adjacent to the player, it is automatically collected.
  • Souls drop 100% of the time from monsters the player kills, less for monsters that die otherwise. Never for monsters that kill themselves.
  • Monsters ignore souls and cannot pick them up. (There is room for an extension where certain undead like a barrow wight or a lich can collect souls to become more powerful, but that is not required for this.)
  • Souls vanish after being on the floor for around 10 turns or being moved off level, preventing the player from sitting back while pets or conflict mop up a large crowd of monsters and then obtaining all their souls with no effort.
  • Souls can also be offered on an altar to gain alignment points.
• Souls are used to fuel the casting of necromancy spells, an entirely new spell school. Necromancy spells consume some Pw like normal spells, but also consume souls, and generally are more powerful than non-necromancy spells of the same level. Various spell ideas:
  • Reanimate creature: which consumes a soul of some creature and reanimates a corpse of that same creature, bringing it back as a pet. (It may be flagged as undead, if the variant supports this).
  • Soul blast: Consumes multiple souls and produces an attack whose power is proportionate to the total monster difficulty of the expended souls.
  • Empower undead: Temporarily buffs all nearby pets, scaling up with the more souls you expend. This is intended to be one of the primary ways a Necromancer takes care of enemies, so it should be a pretty good boost.
  • Spell which consumes 5-10 souls of one monster type and create a tame monster of that type without needing a corpse.
  • Spell which consumes souls to regain HP or Pw.
  • Spell which infuses your weapon, armor, or other gear with souls, making it more effective for a time.
  • Spell which consumes souls of one species and polymorphs you into that monster.
  • Charm undead: Tames undead. Low cost compared to general charm monster.
  • Create wight: Works like reanimate creature but the resulting creature gains level-drain abilities.
• A good guaranteed starting combination of spells for the Necromancer might be reanimate creature and empower undead, since this will enable them to kill monsters, bring them back as pets, and boost them with the souls from more kills.
• Most undead (at least the mindless undead) generate peaceful to Necromancers.
• If desired, there could also be an “amulet of necromancy” which, when worn by non-Necromancers, causes souls to drop (less frequently than they do for Necromancers) and enables the hero to cast necromancy spells. However, not many other roles would be non-Restricted in necromancy spells, and any Lawful hero would be harshly penalized for casting them.
  • In order to avoid this being a useless item for Necromancers, it could improve soul drop chances for them.
  • Non-Necromancers wearing the amulet might also be limited in the amount of souls they could have at one time.
• If desired, Valkyries could be able to collect souls natively, but the only thing they can do with them without penalty would be to offer them on altars for alignment points.

The system may want some simplification since it may be clunky to have the player navigate through menus to choose souls from all the different ones they have accumulated. Possibly, souls from a given species just combine, so you would be shown something like “souls of gnome kings (12 total monster levels)”. An extreme simplification would cut out the entire soul-storage system and just replenish Pw when you collect one.

Dynamite in SLASH’EM should be changed so that it uses a digging explosion, and carves out tiles in its blast radius, rather than just a really powerful fiery explosion that doesn’t affect terrain. It should probably also create pits randomly in the blast radius.

Also, Archeologists should start with some dynamite (though perhaps they, or at least Lawful ones, ought to get alignment.penalties for using it, since blowing up your dig site is poor archeological practice).

Stun grenades, which work similarly to regular grenades except they explode for zero or a token amount of damage, and inflict stunning and other types of status effects on things in the blast radius. For instance, there could be a flashbang grenade which stuns and blinds its targets.

Magic traps can toggle much more types of intrinsics than just invisibility or see invisible. Probably not all intrinsics but at least many types of resistances.

The Iron Ball of Liberation should smash iron bars that it is thrown at or dragged into the square of.

Physical explosions (those from a gas spore) should blow away doors that are in the blast radius.

When a python is resurrected, it gets a special message “The python stops pining for the fjords” as a Monty Python reference.

Occasionally when you try to attack a python in melee, you instead swap places with it and get the message: “It slithers around you; S, @ = @, S.” (replacing the @ with the hero’s glyph if they are different). This is a reference to multiple variable assignment in the Python language.

If the hero can be represented by S themselves, the displacement never happens, because S, S = S, S is not syntactically correct in some versions of Python (though it is in current versions).

Mithril dragon, a dragon which spawns only if you (or possibly any creature on the level) is carrying over 75 aum of mithril in open inventory. It eats mithril items (and only mithril items, rather than being generally metallivorous).

Rust dragon, a type of dragon which breathes and makes melee rust attacks. It eats all types of metals. As with other metallic dragons, it is lawful.

An object property “of rust”, applicable to weapons, which causes its target’s gear to rust and, eventually, get destroyed.

If the iron chain connecting you to your ball is corroded or rusted, it is easier for you to break with a hammer.

Tortles have a Dex-based chance of avoiding getting decapitated by ducking their head back into their shell.

Add two new elemental planes, those of Positive Energy and Negative Energy.

The Plane of Positive Energy:

• The full level is lit.
• Has lots of yellow lights, trees, and whatever plant-based monsters exist in the game.
• Everything is treated as if it has regeneration. The player can regenerate current HP past its maximum, but if this gets too far past the maximum, they instantly die from being unable to contain the energy (there are warning messages to this effect as you approach this point).
• Items in the player’s and monsters’ inventories can randomly get blessed, enchanted, or charged - even if this runs the risk of overenchanting and destroying them.
• Eating any food restores HP as well as nutrition.
• All exercisable attributes are exercised at regular intervals.
• All sleep effects are negated.

The Plane of Negative Energy:

• The full level is dark.
• Contains lots of undead.
• Everything constantly loses hit points. If you have regeneration, it either nullifies or only partly nullifies this effect.
• Items in the player’s and monsters’ inventories can randomly get cursed or lose enchantment or charges (going negative on things which are capable of being negative).
• You lose several times as much nutrition per turn as normal.
• All abusable attributes are abused at regular intervals.

Rogues wearing the randomized “fencing gloves” should be able to sell items to shopkeepers which they have stolen from somewhere else at full price, as a pun on “fencing” stolen goods.

Telepathy currently sees things with minds. Change it (or perhaps change only the amulet of ESP, leaving other telepathy the same) so that it sees things with souls instead of minds. Mostly this corresponds with the same monsters (with a few exceptions such as mummies which are animated by the soul of the dead person), but if a monster with a soul is polymorphed into a form that normally doesn’t, it retains its original soul, and shows up as its original form to ESP.

Additionally, ESP shows the spirit of a humanoid with a soul just after you kill it if you’re blind, making some angry or resigned gestures before fading away.

Ravens are always generated peaceful for Valkyries (or maybe only neutral Valkyries, since they follow Odin).

Rogues automatically see rings as “low value”, “moderate value”, or “high value”, roughly (but not exactly) corresponding to their base price.

Knights get an additional Wisdom-based saving throw against foocubi removing their clothing, flavored as keeping their virtue.

Archeologists automatically see a semi-randomized description of the quality of any mummy wrapping that comes into their inventory (“excellent specimen”, “wretchedly poor”, “slightly damaged”, etc). This gives them a clue as to its enchantment and beatitude.

Monsters carrying a potion of acid as well as some other potion that they would normally drink may accidentally drink the acid by mistake.

Various effects for armor pieces based on their randomized description:

• Buckled boots and old gloves: cost (and sell for) twice as much in a shop.
• Hiking boots: prompt before walking into known pits or holes.
• Mud boots: autocurse when worn.
• Padded gloves and visored helmet: +1 to AC.
• Tattered cape: -1 to Charisma.
• Ornamental cope: +1 to Charisma.
• Opera cloak: some sort of bonus when using musical instruments.
• Plumed helmet: +1 to Charisma, -1 to Dexterity (or have these adjustments multiplied by its enchantment).

Additional YAFMs that may replace the “You hear your heart beat” message for applying a cursed stethoscope at yourself:

• If hallucinating, “You hear a soothsayer with the weather forecast.” This is followed by either “Gehennom will get a rain of burning pitch later today.” or “The dungeon will be cool, with a stony gray overcast.”
• Otherwise, if undead, “You hear the ocean’s roar.”
• Otherwise, if a Wizard, “You hear yourself mumbling curses.”
• Otherwise, the usual heartbeat message.

Hallucinatory alternative to the typical you’re-about-to-die messages: “You hear the fat lady warming up.”

2% of the time after getting the “Blecch! Rotten food!” message as a Tourist, you get one of the following YAFMs:

• “This is not as the travel agency described it!”
• “The native cuisine is not entirely to your liking.”
• “Definitely authentic native cuisine.”
• “Ugh! The local food explains the dispositions of the locals.”
• “This must be that ‘hate cuisine’ you read about.”
• “Where’s the garlic and steaks you heard about?”

Gloves of skill (or “gauntlets of weapon mastery”): magical gloves which raise your effective skill level in your wielded weapon by 1.

• If you’re Restricted in your weapon, this only treats you as Unskilled, not Basic.
• If you’re Expert in your weapon, they do nothing.
• If the gloves are cursed, they instead reduce skill level by 1, and if they become cursed while wearing them and wielding a weapon, you get a message about how you find it more awkward to wield your weapon.
• Also, you get a message about holding your weapon more confidently when you put them on and your effective skill is raised. This automatically identifies them as well.

Attacking Famine with food should produce some slight effect, like minimal damage, the food disintegrating, or possibly no more than a YAFM about Famine looking offended.

Eating healthy foods (fruits, vegetables, royal jelly?) should exercise Constitution, and eating unhealthy foods (candy bar, cream pie, etc) should abuse it.

Celery, a comestible which uniquely has negative nutrition (because in real life, it takes a human body more calories to digest the celery than are in the celery.) The main use of this negative nutrition is to unsatiate yourself so you can continue eating other food.

It should be a large amount of negative nutrition in order to be worthwhile, but at the same time shouldn’t be instadeath for unsuspecting new players by immediately starving them. To that end, special case it so that it does not harm you if you are Hungry or worse, is worth -30 nutrition if “not hungry”, and is worth more negative nutrition if Satiated, possibly scaling up the more satiated you are.

Depending on implemenetation, it could either be safe or unsafe to eat when oversatiated - realism dictates it should be unsafe to eat, but gameplay dictates it would be useful in fewer situations unless it is always safe to eat. Or have it count as a small positive nutritional value assessed before maybe choking, followed by a large negative nutritional value assessed after you didn’t choke.

Knights still incur alignment penalties for eating celery while satiated.

The celery also crunches loudly whenever eating it, so it wakes up nearby sleeping monsters.

Bribeable humans may refuse an initial sum of money you throw at them, with 50% chance. Usually they say “It would take [some number of] zorkmids for me to abandon my duty!” which you can then provide if you wish.

You can dip oil into booze or vice versa to create a new type of potion (“potion of firebomb” or “potion of molotov cocktail”) that is never randomly generated, which is primarily intended to be lit and thrown like oil, but results in a much more powerful fireball than oil alone would produce.

Effects when drinking this potion are unspecified. Since oil has minimal effect when you drink it, it likely just works like booze or diluted booze.

Enhance Minetown with a bunch of new NPC denizens:

• Dwarven trainer: found in a largish room.
  • Chatting to him makes him ask if you want to train, for a fee. If you say yes and pay it, he shouts “Defend yourself!” and begins to fight with you. This lasts until you chat with him again. While you are in this training fight, neither of you deal damage to the other one, though you can still deal damage normally to other things.
  • If you don’t want to train, he offers to teach you how to disarm for a large sum of money. Disarming is a technique you can use with the #disarm command after you have learned it from him. Possibly, it unlocks a “disarming” skill that you can’t get elsewhere. When you use the disarm command, you are prompted for a direction to pick an adjacent monster. The monster must be wielding a weapon, and you must have some minimum amount of skill in your weapon (which can be martial arts). The chance of success is 20% base, +1% per point of Luck (or -1% per negative Luck), +5% for every skill level above Unskilled you are in either your weapon skill, or the disarm skill, +2% per level you have over the monster, and -2% per level the monster has over you.
• Elven enchantress: Mutually exclusive with the trainer. Chatting with her prompts you for an item to enchant.
  • Items that are not naturally enchantable with enchant scrolls get refused.
  • Artifacts or items at their maximum enchantment get refused; she gives a line about how it is already surrounded by powerful magic and she dares not attempt it.
  • If the item is damaged, it gets repaired, for a modest amount of money per level of damage.
  • If the item is undamaged but not blessed, it gets blessed, charging a slightly higher amount of money.
  • If the item is blessed and undamaged, its enchantment is increased by 1, charging a larger amount of money that scales in direct proportion to the preexisting enchantment on that item.
  • She possibly fooproofs the item if it’s at maximum enchantment.
• Dwarven innkeeper: also found in a large room.
  • Chatting to him has him offer you an ale, for either 5 zorkmids or the appropriate buy cost of a potion of booze, and accepting produces the effects of an uncursed potion of booze, as well as identifying the potion of booze. 50% of the time, he also gives you a random rumor as if from an uncursed fortune cookie. (Criticism of this is that on-demand confusion makes several early-game challenges involving confused effects of scrolls trivial.)
  • He will also offer you a room to stay the night if the Watch is not angry at you, for either $50 or the cost of a potion of full healing. Accepting fully heals you (or produces the effects of an uncursed potion of full healing, without identifying the potion since one wasn’t involved). Not specified how it should deal with the time you are sleeping, whether that means literally putting you to sleep or something else.
• Old gladiator: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn; chatting to him produces some old battle stories and a request for an ale (same price as if you were buying it yourself). The first time you buy him an ale, he will teach you a random weapon skill. Subsequent times he only thanks you drunkenly for the drink.
• Aged traveler: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn, mutually exclusive with the gladiator; chatting to him has him offer to tell you the depth of the Oracle level for 50 zorkmids, or offer to “teach you some things he’s learned in his travels” for 1000 zorkmids, which acts like a blessed potion of gain level, but is not available after you get it once. Alternatively, he could teach you several random item identities.
• Dirty drunk: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn, mutually exclusive with the gladiator and traveler.
• Bar brawler: found in the inn, interacting with him in any way will make him angry and start a fight. You’re allowed to fight but not kill him (which would anger the Watch), and you can pacify him by putting him to sleep, paying him off, beating him close enough to death to make him give up, or whatever. If the fight breaks out in the inn you owe the innkeeper money for broken furniture.
• Criminal or mugger: chatting to them makes them aware of you and they will try to steal from you later.
• Merchant: Wanders around Minetown, slightly weaker than a shopkeeper. Will sell you food rations at the standard price. Criticism of this is that an unlimited source of food rations is unbalancing and makes a delicatessen obsolete. To add balance, he might have a limited quantity of them to sell, but then he is still kind of pointless.
• Beggar: Has one randomly generated item, which he will sell at either its standard price or a discount. Most of the time this won’t be useful, but occasionally it could be something good.
• Bureaucrat: sits alone in a small room. Chatting with him makes him sneer at you, “I’m busy”. However, if the Watch is angry, he will offer to take a large amount of gold from you to pacify them.

A secondary proposal is to make some of the denizens who teach you things actually useless a random amount of the time. For instance, the gladiator is a liar who’s good at spinning stories and not much else, or the aged traveler is a charlatan who gives misinformation, abusing Wisdom or sapping your experience points.

Two new objects, spiked gauntlets and spiked boots. Both are nonmagical and made of iron. Spiked gauntlets give a large damage bonus to unarmed combat and also give more AC than standard gloves. Spiked boots give a large damage bonus to kick attacks, and allow you to walk on ice without slipping, the same as snow boots do.

The “Construction Patch”:

• When digging out stone (not necessarily walls) with a pick, rocks may fall on your head with a lowish chance, about 10% per dug square. These deal the least damage if you are wearing a dwarven helm, and a little less than normal if you are wearing some other hard helm. Dwarvish characters have a high chance of dodging the falling debris entirely. Possibly also allow a boulder falling on your head from digging similar to when monsters tunnel.
• You can apply rocks at an adjacent floor square to build a wall. It takes 50 rocks, or 25 if there is a boulder in that square. (If the space is marked as being wall-nondiggable, this either doesn’t work, or flips the space to being diggable.) It takes 1 turn per rock to build it. In the process it creates an immovable object or dungeon feature called “partially-built wall” on that space, which tracks how many rocks are part of it. If you move onto the space, you can dismantle the wall and retrieve the rocks.
• You can apply rocks at an adjacent pool or moat to attempt to fill it. The more rocks, the higher the chance of filling it. This takes only 1 turn.
• Stone to fleshing diggable wall turns it into huge chunks of meat.
• Force bolts from striking wands or the spell scatter rocks off diggable walls they hit, and in roughly 5 shots the wall is destroyed.
• Digging a pit or hole puts a pile of rocks on a random adjacent square.
• When you dig a hole and fall down to the next level, you are usually accompanied by a shower of rocks falling on and around you. Dwarves are more adept at dodging and getting hit by fewer rocks.
• When using a pick to dig a square of natural stone where the four orthogonally adjacent squares are all dug out already, you are asked if you want to carve out a boulder. If you say yes, a boulder is deposited on the new space.

Note that the two boulder-creation methods above run the risk of being exploited for abusable quantities of food if you have stone to flesh available, and the stone-to-flesh-walls method explicitly invokes this.

Leprechauns should sometimes wake up when someone is moving near them carrying a large sum of gold. Their awareness doesn’t extend to the precise location of the creature, it’s just enough to shake them awake.

The chance of this happening and/or the distance at which this happens should be dependent on the amount of gold carried.

Slipping on ice should carry a chance of uncontrollably stumbling onto an adjacent square, introducing the possibility that you slip and fall into water, or onto a trap, or something.

Weapons have a very small chance per hit of breaking, to make it a memorable event when it happens.

• Blessed, positive enchantment, or an artifact: never breaks.
• Uncursed and +0: 1/32000 or 1/32768 chance of breaking.
• Cursed or negative enchantment: 1/1000 chance of breaking.
• Chance is multiplied by 20 if the weapon is thrown and did not hit a monster.

There is a chance when setting a bear trap or arming a land mine that you mess up and trigger it on yourself. This is done by checking to see if you would fail had you been untrapping it. If you would fail, then there is a 1/5 chance you trigger the trap on yourself.

Blows that do 10 or more points of damage have a 1/1000 chance of knocking a worn helm off the target’s head (presumably onto the floor beneath them, but it could also be sent flying as well.)

Wizards can talk to the apprentices in their Quest home level to pay them for learning (possibly only low-level) spells. These are provisionally priced at 50 times the spell level times the player’s level, and is intended to serve as a dilemma for whether to buy spells or protection. (However, a single point of protection would cost the same as 8 total levels of spells, so the cost may need to be raised.)

Levitation and flying allow you to untrap falling rock traps.

If you throw food at a hostile animal, it may stop to eat the food even if it’s not possible to pacify or tame with that type of food or that species, allowing you to escape.

Eating a mimic corpse typically makes you mimic some object besides a pile of gold, giving you an opportunity to identify it if you don’t already know it. You get the message “You can’t resist the temptation to mimic a [object]” with that object’s randomized description being appended if it was previously unknown.

The odds of getting an object you haven’t discovered are controlled by your Luck.

• If Luck is 0, you mimic the first random object type the game picks.
• If Luck is positive, the game rerolls up to Luck times to try and find an unidentified object type.
• If Luck is negative, the game rerolls up to Luck times to try and find an identified object type.

Remove the ability of unicorn horns to cure hallucination, as otherwise it’s a trivial status effect to fix once you have one.

When digging a pit, there is a (10 - (Luck/2))% chance that you break through to the floor below, creating a hole instead and falling through.

New object type “boots of burden”, magical boots which increase your carrying capacity by 50% when worn.

A realistic implementation would mean the boots cease to work when you begin levitating or flying even if you are still wearing them, but this may be too tricky to implement given that the carry cap change may need to prevent the hero from leaving the ground in some circumstances, and the game needs to concisely tell them why.

Attempt to fix the broken alignment system by tracking positive and negative alignment incurred separately. Then, make all alignment checks based on the ratio of one to the other, rather than the difference. (So for instance if you pray, your god will check to see if you have e.g. 50 times as many positive points as negative, and if you don’t, they will not answer your prayer.)

Remove the ability to accidentally enter y or n on a confirmation prompt when trying to use those keys to move; instead, have all y/n confirmation prompts require you to input capital Y or N.

In an effort to reduce the number of low-importance y/n confirmation prompts in the game, make applying a lock pick or key scan the hero’s inventory, the floor underneath them, and 8 surrounding spaces for doors or containers that the tool can be used on. If there is only one such thing, automatically use the tool on that thing without prompting. If there are multiple, either prompt for each one in sequence or offer a menu of things to use the tool on.

This has a problem in that heroes may end up accidentally locking doors they want to go through. The problem may not be that important, since they can just unlock it again. Another suggestion is to make the map symbol for a locked door different from an unlocked one.

On the level below the Quest portal, there is another magic portal to part or a whole of another role’s Quest. Possibly this leaves off the home and goal levels, consisting of only the filler and locate levels, or only the locate level as a single-level branch, or else it removes the nemesis and artifact, removes the restriction on going past the home level, and gives the quest leader some insulting lines to offer to this competitor for the Amulet.

Vary the object class generation probabilities at the start of the game. Probably not too heavily, but adjusting the numbers so there is e.g. a greater than normal bias towards spellbooks, wands, and armor, and a lower than normal bias towards rings, weapons, and potions (and a different game might favor rings and potions at the expense of spellbooks and wands, etc). The idea is that this will lead to more replayability, since it will be interesting to play a game with shortages of certain items and surpluses of others.

In order to add variability between different games, at the start of every game, “theme” objects and monsters are selected, which are outsizedly likely to generate. For instance, one potion type becomes the “theme potion” of the game, and then 10% of all randomly generated potions are that potion, and a wand type becomes the “theme wand” and 10% of random wands will be that wand.

Three theme monsters are picked, one low level, one medium level, and one high level. The probability for them generating when a random monster generates should probably be lower than 10%.

In 10% of games, gremlins are capable of stealing intrinsics regardless of whether it’s night. This prevents you from classifying them as chaff that is unworthy of your attention.

Alternatively, do this for 10% of gremlins in any game, not 10% of games.

Vary the damage bonuses of the artifacts from game to game, in order to prevent there from being clearly defined top-tier artifacts that players should always try to obtain, and bottom-tier artifacts that players should ignore.

For instance, this means that in a given game, Mjollnir might deal only 1d6 bonus lightning damage, while Snickersnee deals 1d12. Or Mjollnir could deal 1d18 and Cleaver deals 1d7. The only way to get an idea would be to use a stethoscope to identify how much damage is being done.

This does not address artifacts whose bonuses only apply to a narrow set of monsters and are often considered inferior for that reason.

Stone shield, a magical shield made of stone that provides stoning resistance, but is quite heavy.

Wielding Mjollnir (or potentially any artifact) after it was gifted by your god requires the god to spend constant divine attention on powering it. In game terms, this means that your prayer timeout will never drop below some minimum of a few hundred turns, because the god will not take kindly to requests for more assistance after they are already constantly giving you it.

Fire Brand gives you extreme vulnerability to cold damage, making you take quadruple damage from it. If you have cold resistance, this only reduces it to triple damage.

Frost Brand works the same way with fire and fire resistance.

Adjust the AC values of dragon scale mail (or possibly, the maximum amount to which they can be enchanted) to even out their general utility to the player. Specifically:

• Ones that give powerful extrinsics such as silver and gray should have their AC substantially nerfed.
• Really underutilized ones that give redundant common extrinsics such as green and orange should have their AC raised.

Make it impossible to have fire and cold resistance intrinsically at the same time. If you eat a corpse that gains you one, you lose the other. Things like crowning that give you both now do not give either (unless perhaps you have neither, in which case you get a random one).

Extrinsic fire and cold resistance are not affected. This makes it valuable to have those extrinsics from a ring, underused colors of dragon armor, or an artifact.

All polymorphable monsters that currently resist both fire and cold must have one of those resistances taken away; otherwise you could have both at once by polymorphing into them.

Restructure Gehennom to be very short, containing the Valley, the three Wizard’s Tower floors, and a “nexus” floor at the bottom, containing the vibrating square and four magic portals, each leading to a randomly selected demon lair.

You can only enter each lair once: you must decide whether to attempt defeating the demon lord or not before leaving. The exit portal won’t work if invocation items are left behind. The demon lords are beefed up from vanilla, and are not bribeable since they’re not guarding access to the stairs to extort passage.

As incentive for defeating the demon lords, they apply debuffs on the ascension run, described in #3396.

Portal stones: gray stones which are only useful in pairs (and which only 2 may generate in the whole game). They are used by putting one stone at a location you want to return to later, then later on activating the other one by rubbing it on your hand or something, which opens a temporary magic portal to (or levelports you to) the first stone.

Add two dice objects: a magic die and a plastic die. Both appear as “game die” when unidentified, are made of plastic, and weigh 2. Dice can be rolled by applying them or throwing them (upward or downward).

Magic dice are chargeable. They start out with 3-5 charges; uncursed charging adds 1 and blessed adds d3, up to a maximum of 7. The die can only be recharged twice.

Rolling either type of die produces a message “The die spins around and lands on [number].” Plastic dice and non-cursed magic dice use a d20 with even probability; cursed magic dice bias the result towards lower numbers such that the probability of each possible roll is proportional to 20 minus that roll (so there is a 19/170 chance of a 1, an 18/170 chance of a 2, etc.)

The effects are:

One possible alteration is to do away with both the instadeath and the wish, because it’s been pointed out that nearly all the negative effects are recoverable. The player has an incentive to hold off on rolling the die until they have the wherewithal to recover from most of the negative effects, and then roll it as much as possible in hopes of getting a wish, while suffering few permanent issues. Giving the die a chance to just unavoidably end the game to compensate for wishing abuse may be unsatisfying.

A formula to provide diminishing returns on the HP growth you get from potions, which is currently unbounded.

In the formula, X represents the total amount of extra HP points you would have in vanilla (1 per blessed healing, 5 per blessed extra healing, etc), R represents the actual amount of extra HP points you will have under this formula, e is Euler’s number (a constant), and A represents the desired asymptotic upper bound of extra HP points you will approach:

R = (2A / (1 + e^(-2x/A))) - A

The value of A is up to the designer. If it’s selected as 100, for instance, total HP gains from potions will get closer and closer to 100 as more and more potions are consumed, but the hero will never quite reach it.

Angering peaceful monsters by casting an innocuous spell like light is very annoying, so split the spell up into a “light area” spell, which does not damage anything unless it’s a highly light-sensitive monster like a gremlin, and a “light blast” or “flash” attack spell, which may or may not light the area permanently and is designed to blind monsters.

Red light, a y that has an explosion attack that causes paralysis. This is a reference to red lights in real life making you stop.

(There could also be green lights whose explosion gives a temporary speed boost, but since this isn’t harmful to the target it’s a sillier idea.)

Chromatic light, whose explosion attack causes you to see all monsters in random or consistently incorrect colors for a while.

If you have a dented pot, you can pour a potion into it and have a pet drink the potion.

Cursed tonal instruments are incapable of playing notes, and instead just make noise.

The rate at which HP regenerates when resting on a bench isn’t constant. It starts out slow (less than 1 HP per turn), then speeds up gradually the longer you sit on it, eventually capping at 2-4 HP per turn.

Wielded wood and plastic weapons (and possibly glass) block passive shock attacks, since they are non-conductive. Plastic could block 100% of the time and other materials less so, mainly to give a fringe benefit to a material that’s normally pretty underpowered.

The passive attack only gets blocked if you actually used the weapon to make your attack: if you’re polymorphed into something with a weapon attack and a bite attack, for instance, the bite will still subject you to the passive shock.

Everlasting gobstopper, a food item that you start sucking on when you eat it, providing a constant d2 nutrition per turn. It never gets used up, but once you spit it out (by choosing to eat something else or by using “-“ with the eat command) it is no good anymore and gets used up. If you get oversatiated by not spitting it out, you can indeed choke and die on it.

Charging a wand of wishing adds 1-3 charges (if uncursed) or 3 charges (if blessed) regardless of how many charges are in it. This means you could turn a 0:3 wand into a 1:6 wand, but since the only-charge-once restriction still applies, this doesn’t grant you more wishes or anything.

Wielded, lit lightsabers should confer reflection, either partial or full, at a certain skill level. Not helpful against missiles or beams, but useful against rays.

You can’t be knocked back if you’re carrying a loadstone.

Carrying an amethyst makes you immune to all effects of quaffing booze.

If you open a door that turns out to be a mimic, it “falls on top of you” and deals damage in addition to sticking to you.

Keep a counter on each shopkeeper representing the number of times a pet has picked up a shop-owned item in their shop (or a shop-owned item inside containers they are carrying). Every time this increments, use it as an increasing chance that the shopkeeper will become aggressive towards pets picking up their wares, with messages like “Kabalebo shouts “Hey! Drop that!” at Fluffy. Fluffy drops [item].” Once they are past that point, you can’t use pets to take their items anymore.

The point on the counter at which the shopkeeper stops playing nice should be roughly some fraction of the area of the shop, to strike a balance between large shopkeepers being more lenient and not allowing you to clean out all the tiny shops in Minetown. A rumor could be added for this: “They say that mom-and-pop stores have lower tolerance for thieves.”

Unspecified whether the counter should increment when a non-pet picks up an item in the shop. Probably not, since this is a fairly rare case.

Create a new stat to track the maximum level a player has ever reached, named “u.ulevelpeak”, and use it when computing the difficulty monsters should generate at, so that the player has no incentive to drain levels from themself to get easier monsters.

ulevelpeak is used rather than the existing ulevelmax because ulevelmax represents the highest level it is possible for the player to return to via restore ability, and shrinks when doing things such as quaffing blessed full healing to restore lost levels and losing levels when polymorphing into one’s own race, so it’s unsuitable for the monster generation purpose.

Assign every scroll and spellbook a random “writing difficulty” value at the start of the game. Say it’s stored as a percentage chance (in reality, this is an implementation detail and could differ). Every time you attempt to write a scroll or book, it computes your own percentage chance to correctly write something unknown, which is deterministic and only depends on stats like Luck and Intelligence and your role. Whether you write the scroll successfully or not depends on whether your computed percentage beats the randomized percentage of that scroll.

For each scroll and spellbook you try to write in the game, resolve the random writing chance exactly once, the first time you try to write it when unknown. If that initial attempt fails, mark the scroll or spellbook as not knowing how to write it, so that subsequent attempts will fail with a message like “You don’t know how to write that, so you don’t even try to.” which means they won’t eat up ink either. If you subsequently learn the identity of the scroll or book, you become able to always write it successfully as normal.

Make container traps deterministic (either as a hash of their object ID, or stored as a field on the object) rather than computing the trap when it’s triggered based on Luck. Untrapping them successfully can then yield an item related to the trap, which then gets deposited inside the container. The items for each type of trap are:

• Hallucination gas = potion of hallucination
• Paralysis = potion of paralysis
• Electric shock = 0:1 wand of lightning
• Tower of flame = potion of oil
• Poisoned needle = nothing
• Poison gas = potion of sickness
• Explosion = land mine

Cave-in trap, which appears deep in the dungeon and/or in Gehennom. It causes the ceiling to collapse all around the target, turning the spaces into stone terrain, burying the target (potentially starting suffocating timers) and dumping a few boulders and rocks in the vicinity. It works somewhat like GruntHack cave-ins on the Plane of Earth, but in trap form.

Using genocide breaks pacifist conduct.

If you use #force when standing next to a closed door that you don’t know to be unlocked, the game will ask if you want to force the lock. If you say yes, you try to; if the door is actually unlocked, you’ll get a message indicating that and “You decide not to force the issue.” If it’s locked, you try to force the door with your weapon, which could involve prying with a bladed weapon (opens the door quietly and faster than kicking, but higher chance of breaking the weapon than forcing a container would) or bashing with a blunt weapon (much the same as kicking).

A monster, probably in the y or e class, with an attack that steals an item (or a few items, excluding equipped gear) from your inventory and randomly teleports it somewhere on the same level. This makes object detection and detect treasure nice to use even after a level is fully explored.

Make the ring of conflict chargeable, with the enchantment serving as a timer: when worn, the enchantment slowly ticks back towards +0, and the ring ceases to provide conflict when it’s +0. Negatively enchanted rings tick up in enchantment towards +0. Being cursed doesn’t affect this, it only prevents you from removing the ring as is standard.

Special (or themed) rooms in Gehennom containing priest and monk corpses, to correspond to the themed room that contains a bunch of dead bodies with no priests and monks because a comment notes “Moloch has a special fate reserved for members of those classes.”

Boots of fleeing: they give bonus movement points based on how many turns ago your last offensive action was (offensive actions are things that would fade an Elbereth underneath you). For the first several turns after combat they grant no speed bonus, then gradually scale up to full speed. This means that remaining in combat grants you no speed advantage but lets you travel very fast if you avoid it.

Eating a mummy corpse that gives deadly illness uses a different message than other too-old corpses, about it being contaminated with toxic embalming fluids.

Monsters should be able to activate statue traps. There’s no reason why they should only trigger for the player.

Hookshot, a tool that shoots a retractable point on a chain and then pulls things together when the chain retracts. In practice, this should probably be implemented as an invisible beam that gets shot in the player-chosen direction, with a short range of only 3 or 4 squares. It has various effects depending on what it hits:

• Wall or furniture: Player is dragged towards that space.
• Boulder or solid stone: Goes “Clink!” and does nothing. (Except maybe if the player is a giant, they can drag the boulder to themselves with it.)
• Monster: Either deals small damage, or yanks the player and monster together. The relative weights of the player and monster determine who gets yanked more (could be either or both).

In variants where you can cast cure sickness directionally as a beam, that beam damages monsters with a disease attack.

Make shopkeepers more susceptible to being paralyzed or put to sleep than they currently are, so it is easier to directly but non-lethally steal from them.

Pets treat the entrance space to shops, or shop-owned items in the shop, as cursed, as a measure against using them to easily steal items. The latter is more likely to be effective, since the first method can be defeated without too much difficulty with a magic whistle.

Alternate god smitings (to go alongside striking with lightning): chaotic gods or Moloch try to create lava around and underneath you, and neutral gods blast you in a magical explosion that instakills you if not magic resistant, curses all your items, strips any charges from charged items and disenchants gear to something highly negative.

Creatures you have sacrificed may appear on the Astral Plane. Possibly, give the player a means of summoning them there as pets.

Polymorphed monsters appear as “hazy [monster]” in messages, to indicate to the player they will time out and go back to their normal form eventually.

Turn the amulet of restful sleep into an amulet of sleep resistance, except it grants restful sleep (and no sleep resistance) instead while it’s cursed, and it still mostly generates cursed.

When you complete the Quest and get recognition from your leader, you get 5-10 points of Charisma, because now you have a great reputation as a hero.

The Heart of Ahriman should do instakill when it is slung and hits a monster with a head who is not wearing a hard helmet. To encourage this, Barbarians should get Basic skill in sling.

To compensate for inevitable cheap deaths, any monsters that are too important to cheaply instakill via this method need to be given hard helms of some sort.

Shambling horrors can always engulf adjacent monsters (rather than it only happening some of the time) and add their special attacks. Though this works only for the shambler that engulfed the monster, it does not propagate to all the other ones.

Every time you kill a shambling horror, every other one in the game gains the same additional random ability or attack.

Make the spell of reflection a directional beam rather than always being directed at the caster. You can still hit yourself with it, but you also have the option of giving a monster temporary reflection. The beam stops at the first monster it hits so it can’t multiply the effects.

When you stethoscope or probe monsters that have names, they are referred to as “[Name] the [species]”, e.g. “Status of Fluffy the large dog:”

Shorten Gehennom drastically, paring it down to a few mandatory levels (the Valley, the Wizard’s Tower (containing Vlad’s Tower entrance), the vibrating square level containing the fake Wizard’s Tower to portal into the real one) with no demon lord lairs and no filler. In exchange, once you start escaping the Sanctum with the Amulet, any level you reenter for the first time gets partly overwritten with Gehennom elements – rivers of lava, twisted mazes, and in particular, the demon lords. However, enough areas of the map will be left in their original states so that it remains recognizable. In particular this is aimed at making sure any stash you have made may not survive the process.

There are several motivations for this:

• Reduce the common feeling of “the game is over after the Castle” by putting only a few things between the Castle and the ascension run.
• Put the main challenge of Gehennom on the way out of the dungeon, not on the way in.
• Make it uncertain that the player will be able to go back to a big stash of items after grabbing the Amulet and take whatever they need before entering the Planes.
• Reduce the number of situations where the player can simply levelport away from a hairy problem such as a tough demon lord, collect the appropriate gear to fight them, and return (dipping into and out of Gehennom).
• Remove a Gehennom-worth of items the player finds on the ground and in monster inventories (where “the difficulty is flat but the loot keeps coming”).
• Mitigate the tedium of knowing you’re as powerful as you’re ever going to get but still have to retrace 50 explored levels. Relatedly, remove the incentive – the ability, even – to go tunneling through mazes.

Some of the non-guaranteed demon lords (provided they aren’t prematurely summoned into the game) show up randomly in Gehennom on the ascension run.

A new race whose primary feature is that it eats minerals: gets nutrition mainly from rocks, may be able to eat metals, and gains limited spell-like abilities based on the last precious gem they consumed. A couple non-comprehensive examples:

• Eating a ruby grants the power to cast fireballs.
• Eating a jet stone grants the power to make clouds of darkness.

The abilities could be triggered using #monster, and would probably have a finite pool of uses, after which they can no longer be used. Eating another gem before this pool runs out would swap in new abilities and either give a fresh pool of uses or add to the existing one.

Each Rider has the ability to use their attack to destroy items you’re carrying that are antithetical to their purpose, which replaces their normal attack.

• Death destroys amulets of life saving.
• Pestilence destroys all types of healing potions.
• Famine destroys horns of plenty and food items.

The game should not assume heroes all carry an unlimited invisible box of matches to light candles and lamps with. Doing that should require a fire source, whether that is Fire Brand, lava, a fire trap, the wand of fire, the fireball spell, or an already lit candle, lamp, or potion of oil. There could also be a new “lighter” tool which enables you to light things, but can get lost or run out of charges.

Wearing rings that correspond in appearance to wands double, augment, or otherwise enhance those wands’ effects, including possibly turning a beam into a cone shaped blast.

This could also extend to drinking potions with matching appearances to worn rings, such as drinking a ruby or emerald potion while wearing a ruby or emerald ring.

Convicts can sometimes pacify the Rat King by chatting to him, similar to how they can tame rats by chatting.

Monks with Expert or Master level martial arts can force-fight walls to break them. (Possibly not uncarved rock though.)

If you attempt to move into a ghost’s space (either if it’s invisible and unseen by you, or by m-moving, not by moving normally towards it when you know something’s there which would still be an attack), you successfully move there, displace the ghost to an adjacent space, and take some damage from creepily passing through a ghost. If this is implemented in an extra evil way, this could be cold damage that destroys potions.

Make alchemy recipes randomized per-game and consistent with a game, by doing the following:

• Initialize a N by N matrix at the start of the game, where N is the number of different potions in the game besides water. The matrix provides a lookup for what the constituent potion types in the appropriate rows mix to combine.
• Basic alchemy practices don’t consult the matrix, for instance, dipping a cursed potion into something always causes a blast, and dipping a potion into another of the same does nothing.
• Nonmagical potions are possibly excluded from the reagent set, the result set, or both. Most likely the reagent set if both source potions are nonmagical - it doesn’t make sense to mix nonmagical juice with booze and wind up with a magical potion of enlightenment. But it may also not make enough sense if combining two magical potions produces a nonmagical one.
• The number of entries for a given potion type in the matrix are proportionate to the generation frequency of that potion. So there may only be one specific combination of potions which produces polymorph, whereas many things produce sickness or fruit juice.
• Hardcoded rules like could be enforced on the matrix if need be, but it’s probably better if players don’t have an easy known path to mass produce full healing or gain ability.

This system gets rid of random alchemy results entirely, but does not necessarily get rid of the chance of an alchemic blast or failing and turning into water or evaporating. Possibly these could be removed, so that the player is incentivized to try and mix together as many potion types as they can to discover what they produce and find interesting combinations.

A list of known alchemy recipes could be added to the discoveries list so the player can use it as a reference.

You can pour a potion of oil over yourself to temporarily block any invisibility for 200 turns. While oiled, you take double damage from any fire source, and you can slip through boulders diagonally without worrying about how much stuff you’re carrying.

New material “demonite”, a metal which causes silver-like searing to A-class monsters, white unicorns, and some other “good” monsters.

Force-fighting with Cleaver makes it attack in an arc to the space you are hitting and the two adjacent spaces regardless of what’s in that space, allowing you to hit two monsters at the ends of the arc even if there is nothing between them.

Random tins can contain beans as their contents, which make you emit a stinking cloud when or after eating them.

The Heart of Ahriman should provide extrinsic protection like a ring of protection or one of the other quest artifacts that provides protection.

Apples (may) cure illness when eaten when blessed. However, their doctor-repelling power is increased to the point that Healers take damage when eating them or suffer some other negative effects, and hitting a Healer player monster with an apple scares them.

Add a spell of insight, a level 2 divination spell which grants enlightenment.

Artifact crossbow Thunderclap, which fires either lightning or lightning-enhances the crossbow bolts it fires, and you can invoke it to create more bolts.

There should be silver crossbow bolts so people who want to use a crossbow can still get silver damage.

Demon lords should be made really powerful but each have their own particular weakness or Achilles heel that allows a prepared player to fight them effectively.

An alternate ending where you are a cultist of a god that has no place in your role’s pantheon, and instead of offering the Amulet of Yendor to that god, you offer the cult’s holy symbol on a high altar to kick that god out of the pantheon and replace it with yours.

Add a potion of milk, working along the same lines as milk in Minecraft, which cancels potion effects (or since not many potions have lasting effects that you’d want to cancel, it cancels various temporary good and bad status effects in general, like confusion, stunning, and invisibility, but not nausea since drinking milk usually makes nausea worse in real life.

Make the Plane of Fire more interesting by:

• Getting rid of the fire traps (which mostly serve to provide lots of message spam).
• Making the entire plane constantly deal damage if you aren’t extrinsically immune to fire, more if you lack both extrinsic and intrinsic resistance. Being close to or over lava hurts you even more, and can deal damage even if you are immune or “like fire”, possibly based on how many of the 9 squares immediately are you are lava.
• Lava can erupt randomly from lava, which does major damage for levitating over it.
• Ensure the portal cannot spawn right next to the arrival location.

Controlled polymorph does not ask you what you want to turn into. Instead, it picks a random monster and asks you whether you want to turn into that, and you can only say yes or no.

Parrying Dagger, an artifact dagger which when wielded may automatically counterattack an incoming melee weapon attack, deflecting it so it doesn’t hit and making an attack with itself that does sneak attack damage.

New artifact Gauntlets of Throwing: unspecified base type, adds +1 to the multishot cap for thrown missiles only (not ammo fired from a launcher). When multishooting, only one actual item is thrown; the rest are temporary summoned copies of the one thrown with the same stats, which vanish after their flight is complete.

Cursed boots that you have worn for at least 300 turns should emit a stinking cloud when finally removed.

On deeper levels, land mines cause a fiery explosion in addition to their existing effects. Player-placed land mines get a bit trickier; a simple implementation will just consider the depth of the level the trap is on, but a more correct one would track via a field on the land mine object (in case it is picked up and carried around to another level) whether or not it will produce an explosion when triggered.

If you have polymorph control, you can control what any item dipped into a potion of polymorph will become, respecting existing polymorph restrictions (i.e. not controlling the number of charges something will get, and incrementing the recharge count). This allows it to act basically like limited wishing, but it may be okay given the rarity of polymorph potions.

When someone gets out of a bear trap (or is killed while in it), it removes the trap and drops a beartrap item on the ground.

“Priest of Flame” conduct, only available to Priests: they start with a lit candle or other source of flame, and must keep a lit flame on them at all times to maintain the conduct.

Make untrapping containers an occupation: always takes 5 turns, you either find a trap or you don’t, and you can’t try again on that container. This avoids having to type out #untrap multiple times for no apparent results.

This could also extend to untrap attempts on doors.

Wielding a weapon while getting crowned either unrestricts it if you were Restricted in it, or otherwise raises your skill cap an additional level, up to Expert. Though this is obviously bad for inter-role balance.

When monsters levelport, they leave behind a magic portal which lasts one or a few turns, which you can use to follow them, to emulate how monsters can follow you when you levelport.

In order to penalize situations where the hero is partly or mostly surrounded without implemeting a complex flanking system: Every monster attack that incurs damage reduction due to subzero AC makes your effective AC worse by the amount of reduced damage for the duration of that turn. This means that a crowd of monsters hitting you all at once will whittle down your defense and do some damage rather than damage reduction being in full force for each individual attack.

In variants that have element-specific mages, the message for a sacrificed corpse disappearing is different if you are playing as one:

• Ice Mage: “The corpse is swept away in a blast of frost!”
• Acid Mage: “The corpse dissolves into thin air!”
• Fire Mages either use a standard burst of flame, or a message suggesting more powerful flame.

Eating a sprig of wolfsbane gives you temporary immunity to contracting lycanthropy.

Add a minetown variant called “Wine Town”. It would largely follow the regular Minetown precedents of having the Watch, a temple, a (high probability of a) general store, but would also have at least 2 potion stores, a couple random potions of booze lying around, and a large “drinking hall” room.

You can dip fruit into an uncursed potion of water to squeeze its juice out and turn it into a (maybe diluted) potion of fruit juice. However, this could be abused if fruit juice is smoky.

The message for getting engulfed should distinguish between monsters that swallow you whole / have solid bodies versus ones that aren’t. For these monsters it should print “The purple worm swallows you whole!” instead of “engulfs you!”

Hitting an earth elemental with a stone to flesh spell currently has no interaction, which is odd. The following possibilities have been proposed:

• It turns into a flesh golem. However, stone to fleshing a stone golem already does this, and if earth elementals are loose rock compared to the specifically built body of a golem, it doesn’t make as much sense.
• It instakills the elemental and turns it into a pile of meatballs. This may be a little too cheap.
• As above, but the elemental gets the standard chance to resist.
• It cuts the elemental’s HP and max HP and drops some meatballs, but only actually kills the elemental if this would bring its HP to zero.

Xorns hit by the stone to flesh spell are briefly paralyzed, and while paralyzed, either take increased/double damage or are treated as if they have a worse AC.

Every ogre that gets killed by Ogresmasher gives it a “charge”, which is separate from enchantment. Charges can either grant it damage bonuses, or there is something you can do by applying Ogresmasher to expend charges for a unique effect.

Make the Wizard of Yendor naturally magic-resistant, so that he cannot be defeated trivially by a death ray, but compensate by removing his Double Trouble ability. The current state of affairs is somewhat like a lottery in whether you will be facing him with magic resistance or get unlucky enough for him to duplicate, leading to a lot of variance in how hard the ascension run is.

Add a frustration counter to certain boss monsters, which increments every time they want to close to melee distance with you but are unable to. Once this gets sufficiently high, they become capable of dispatching or shoving aside monsters (even if they aren’t normally) and breaking boulders to get to you. Different bosses have different thresholds for when this happens.

This prevents you from trivially using a boulder fort to shut down bosses like Master Kaen while you slowly whittle them away with ranged attacks, but allows you to employ strategies like that for a limited period of time.

When you pray and get deadly sickness cured by your god, they also grant you a little temporary sickness resistance as a grace period against immediately needing it again.

Monsters that hatch from eggs should be specially flagged as being ineligible to death-drop items, since the only explanation would be that the item was with them in the egg, which makes no sense.

You can clean slippery fingers by rubbing a scroll on them, but this makes the scroll useless and destroys it.

Shop-owned items with positive enchantment (but not negative) have the enchantment identified, since the shopkeeper is, after all, trying to get you to buy them.

In variants with object properties, items with beneficial properties should also come identified in shops for the same reason.

Stone of pacification, which when you carry it in open inventory prevents your pets from attacking peaceful monsters. (It does not affect hostile monsters, nor does it stop pets from attacking hostile monsters.)

Pets should not attack coaligned priests.

Pets that know they have reflection (from an amulet, spell, etc) will freely attack floating eyes.

Track whether or not you have ever worn an armor piece in each slot. When you receive a non-artifact sacrifice gift, slightly bias towards slots for which you have never worn armor.

Add a #pour command, which allows you to pour a potion on your own or an adjacent space. This allows you to do things like pour healing potions on your pet rather than smashing them with it, possibly pouring acid and other harmful potions on adjacent monsters, pouring water on fire elementals and other fiery monsters, etc.

You can apply or otherwise dump a potion of acid into a sink to flush out the black pudding in the pipes, if the sink hasn’t yet produced one.

You should be able to use a forge to melt down gold items and turn them into gold pieces.

Add a bit to the monst struct that tracks whether the monster is hiding on the ceiling or not. (Only valid for things like wumpuses, piercers, and perhaps bats but not actually since bats don’t roost on the ceiling when inactive.)

Then, when polymorphed into a wumpus or piercer, you can use < when not on stairs to climb onto the ceiling and > to climb back onto the floor, but only when adjacent to a wall.

Based on some new code in 3.7 that tracks how an artifact was generated, allow the player to ask the Oracle about the existence of an artifact. The code isn’t in place for her to tell you where it actually is, but she will be able to tell you whether it generated randomly, in bones, from a gift, etc. Possible messages for some of these:

• Artifact came into the game via a bones file: “Another adventurer carried this to their grave, which thou hast already approached. Search around such an area.”
• Randomly generated: “It has lain somewhere in this dungeon for a long time, awaiting the next hero. Thou hast already passed near to it.”
• Via naming, wishing or dipping in a fountain: “I am confused. Thou thyself were present when this artifact came into existence.”
• Via a gift: “Did not the gods bestow this on thee personally?”

A command that enables you to mark a stash. When you die, the contents of any containers on such marked stashes are displayed.

For Infidels, sacrifices of baby monsters (those with a “baby” in their name) are treated as though the monster had a higher difficulty than it actually does, as a reward for sacrificing babies.

Chaos dragon: a dragon with polymorphing breath, and whose scales grant unchanging. The dragon also has unchanging naturally (which raises the question of what happens if you polymorph into it, then die).

Jousting is treated as a bonus action which does not cost the player anything, and does not strictly require making a melee attack. In order to joust, you must be 1) riding while wielding a lance, and 2) move in the same direction twice in a row with an enemy lined up at the end of the 2nd move. When this happens, the enemy is attacked automatically.

Tourists encounter a new shop, a gift shop, on dungeon level 1, possibly built around the entrance stairs. The gift shop stocks mostly useless items like fake Amulets of Yendor, juice and candy bars at high markups, plastic figurines of low-level monsters, and T-shirts (which are much less of a big deal to the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourist).

Only for Tourists, general stores occasionally stock unidentified fake Amulets of Yendor.

Tourists start the game with a fake Amulet of Yendor, or else have it pre-identified.

Antimagic lamps, which cast an magic-denying field in their light radius. Your magic doesn’t work, but neither does anyone else’s, with everything behaving as if cancelled.

Grease trap, which showers you with grease when triggered, greasing your wielded weapon and giving you slippery fingers and several turns of fumbling. Occasionally, your armor may get randomly greased.

May drop a can of grease with 0-2 charges when untrapped.

If #3671 (greasy floor) is implemented, the grease trap may automatically replace itself with the greasy floor trap or terrain as part of its effect.

You can apply an amulet to a pet to put it on that pet, assuming it has a neck.

Healers can use a stethoscope on a corpse to usually find out what its cause of death was.

Cursed stethoscopes cosmetically stick to your hand when used, but you rip off some skin to get it off when you’re finished using it, which deals 1 damage every time you use one.

Replace the current Basic-to-Expert skill system with a skill tree. Each role is given affinities for skills in this tree, which represent how easy it is to for them to enhance that skill. The baseline value for an affinity is 100. The lower an affinity number, the better it is for that role, because enhancing a skill costs (some base cost * affinity / 100) skill points. Skill points are awarded on each level up.

The end result is a system without arbitrary skill caps, where anyone can theoretically become expert in whatever they want, but if it’s something they’re unsuited for they’ll have rendered themselves unable to become skilled in much else.

Cornuthaums give a lesser reduced-hunger casting benefit to non-Wizards who wear them. They also improve reduced-hunger casting for Wizards.

When you are carrying a candy bar, ants are attracted to you, even if peaceful. Candy bars should also be a treat for pet ants.

Paper golems occasionally drop non-blank scrolls.

Dipping ammo in various potions can endow it with a permanent object property related to the potion.

Change the HP and/or Pw regeneration formulas (natural regeneration, not from external sources) so that it regenerates faster in the early game but more slowly in the late game.

This fixes existing balance problems – that the hero doesn’t regain them fast enough early on, and by later on they regain them so fast it trivializes problems – but would be very strange to justify flavor wise.