Shopkeepers give discounts (perhaps treating you as if you had a higher Charisma than normal, to avoid the issue of selling items for less than they would buy them for) on Black Friday.
When you engrave with a wand of polymorph and mutate a preexisting engraving into a rumor, the rumor should always be true if the wand is blessed, false if it’s cursed, and random if it’s uncursed.
Rework roles entirely. You start out as a generic adventurer with no special skills, and as you gain levels you choose a path - allowing the progression of your character to follow a branch in a tree structure rather than a single line of progression determined by your role.
The Quest could be tricky to handle in this system, because it has to generate the home level when you first arrive in the branch. After gaining a few levels, your path would be set enough to generate a particular role-like quest, but it’s possible to reach the Quest branch without gaining any levels. One possibility could be if you reach the Quest before choosing enough of your path to specialize, you get a unique “pacifist quest”.
Cursed carried sacks and oilskin sacks should occasionally spill out an object at random times. Not specified if this should produce a message so you know about it, or it should be silent.
Ring of wizardry: doesn’t technically provide any extrinsics, but wearing one cuts down on your spellcasting penalties, the same as wearing a robe does (and not stacking with a robe if you also wear that).
A zombie killed with a blessed weapon should have a lower chance of reviving.
When you attack the inside of an engulfer with Cleaver, it should do triple damage because you’re still attacking in an arc and hitting the engulfer at each point in the arc.
Potion of vorpality: consuming it grants you a short duration of a new “vorpal” intrinsic. While you are vorpal, any melee attack you make with a bladed weapon acts like Vorpal Blade in that you may decapitate a monster you hit with it.
When you sacrifice and your god decides to give you a gift, they should take into account how high-level and in favor with them you are, and if you’re sufficiently beloved, they may offer you your choice of multiple artifacts in a menu. How beloved you are dictates how many artifacts will be randomly drawn from the pool of artifacts they could give you at that time, possibly up to a maximum of 4.
When this number is 1, or if you are receiving a designated first sacrifice gift, the god just gifts you the artifact normally.
It’s unspecified if you should be given the option to decline getting any artifact at all.
This change is intended to cut down sharply on altar farming in the hopes of getting a certain artifact, presuming that if the hero can farm for one artifact they can probably farm indefinitely until they get the one they want.
When you formally complete your Quest, there should be some form of “minor abuse reset” that forgives some of your alignment abuse, or all of it if it’s small. This basically allows you to proceed with a clean record if you only messed up one time, for example by angering a bunch of peaceful monsters.
Artifact pair of lenses that temporarily increases Intelligence when worn, but permanently decreases Intelligence each time you remove them.
Fog clouds and water and air elementals should be immune to dying from drawbridges. (If the drawbridge is destroyed when they are over the moat, the water elemental should fall into the water but the other two can remain flying.)
If a gremlin steals an intrinsic that is one of the intrinsics monsters can have, they should gain that intrinsic.
Several potential additions for the clerical spell school:
Animated topiary, which disguises itself as a hedge (this idea might be best when paired with hedge terrain; #2137) until you approach it and it attacks.
Hermit: an always-generated-peaceful, sessile human monster. Possibly only one can generate per game. He or she collects books and will ask for books when chatted to. In exchange for each book, they dispense a rumor which is false if the book was cursed and true otherwise.
A more complicated extension is that rather than simply taking the books, they could instead stash them into a magic-chest-like extradimensional space, the contents of which show up in an identical chest in the Wizard’s Tower. The significance of this is left up to the player’s interpretation.
In variants with a vampire race, slow digestion should not affect their nutrition clock, in order to prevent them from using it to practically ignore the hunger mechanics as soon as they find a ring.
This could be flavorfully justified as them being undead and therefore not having a digestion process to slow down.
Geckos and spiders should be capable of clinging to ceilings, since they can do this in real life. Spiders, in particular, should prefer a strategy of spinning a web and waiting on the nearby ceiling (possibly hiding on the ceiling, though that probably isn’t feasible for giant spiders) rather than roaming around.
Saddlebags: kind of a fusion between a saddle and a container, which allow you to transport more items around than you can carry yourself. The saddlebags can be applied to any pet which can ordinarily be saddled, occupying the same slot. A pet wearing one can be directionally looted, which moves items in and out of the container. Possibly, they cannot be used to hold any bulky items, and there may be a cap on the overall weight they can contain, determined by the pet’s carrying capacity.
Not specified if they contain a saddle as part of the item, enabling you to also ride your saddled pet while also carrying objects in the saddlebags.
While you’re asleep, you should recover HP and energy faster than normal, possibly even at the 1 per turn rate that the extrinsics give you.
You should be able to wish for a “shattered” potion, which gives you a potion which immediately splashes all over you. This is primarily so if you inconveniently get a djinni from a potion like full healing, you can still use the wish to get the effects of full healing.
Casting spells should not train the skill of the spell if they do not accomplish anything. Examples include: casting healing at yourself when you already are at full HP, casting wizard lock in a direction where the beam doesn’t lock anything, or casting an attack spell that fails to hit any monsters.
In variants that have vulnerability to elements, especially as a temporary debuff that the player can be inflicted with, you should be able to remove the debuff by doing something that would give you intrinsic resistance to that element (such as eating a corpse or tin).
Another possibility, not mutually exclusive, is that you should be able to stack multiple sources of the resistance to negate or reduce the severity of the vulnerability - i.e. two extrinsic sources of the resistance, or intrinsic resistance paired with an extrinsic.
Cavemen should be able to ride certain thematic species of tame monsters, or possibly all tame monsters of appropriate size, without a saddle.
A bag of traps, a chargeable magic tool which creates a random trap on your space. Alternatively, have it be a wand of trap creation, which would be nondirectional.
There could be some way to force creation of a specific trap, perhaps by wielding a component which gets consumed, such as arrows for an arrow trap, or a potion of water for a rust trap.
You should be able to #ride hostile monsters to climb atop them, which lets you have a much better chance at hitting it and possible higher damage when you hit it, but the monster also gets a much higher chance of hitting you and can try to throw you off.
There should be some common-sense limitations, like the monster should be big enough to climb on and capable of being climbed, and you should be in a form capable of climbing. Also possibly it should be harder, not easier, to hit the monster with certain types of objects, like cockatrice corpses.
In variants that implement monster lookup, there should be a “Grows into:” field for monsters that can grow up into something else.
Whenever a player dies, whether or not they leave bones, one random object should be selected from their inventory and have its object details written into a persistent file. When this file has some minimum amount of entries in it, subsequent games may generate a new shop type named “trading post” or “rag and bone shop”, which pulls its inventory from the objects in this file. The items could be labeled with the name of the player they came from, e.g. “potion of healing named left behind by Bob”.
There should be some “too strong” objects which aren’t eligible for this, including wands of wishing and quest artifacts (or all artifacts).
The items should be sold at a markup, which could be 2-3 times their ordinary cost or more like 10 times. Highly enchanted items (which are unlikely to be found in a regular store) could be sold with an additional markup.
Possibly, in order to minimize the player’s ability to steal the most valuable items, the shop floor should be small (around 3x3) and the shopkeeper should personally hold the highest-priced items, requiring you #chat to them to get the offers. To signal this, when you enter the shop, they say an additional message: “Ask me about special deals!”
It’s also possible to just have the occasional general store use this mechanic, or to use the “itinerant merchant” idea (#1635) as a dealer of the items.
If you get crowned while having held to pacifist conduct, and you would ordinarily get a weapon gift, your god should instead give you a figurine of a strong monster based on your alignment. Sample monsters might be an archon if you’re lawful or a master mind flayer if you’re chaotic.
Cavemen should be exempt from the small chance that a thrown aklys fails to return.
Priests should be guaranteed to begin the game with at least one “defensive” spell such as healing or protection, because those make the early game much more enjoyable than a fully random spellbook which may be situational or useless.
Sharply reduce the chance of thrown potions (and only potions) missing monsters, in order to make throwing them a more viable strategy; currently most thrown potions miss and shatter at the target monster’s feet.
It should be possible to combine or merge a certain amount of crysknives into a powerful weapon called a “crysword” or “crysblade”.
Eating the corpse of a monster that gained intrinsic resistances its species doesn’t normally have by eating things should also have a chance of conveying those intrinsics to you.
Werecreatures should not step onto object piles that contain silver objects.
Kicking a tree that has no fruit or bees left in it should occasionally give a message that indicates “there is nothing left to get here, move along” to the player.
There should be some ritual way to destroy an unwanted artifact that also reduces the amount of artifacts that exist, so that you are more likely to get given another by your god. Destroying artifacts via other methods like a cursed bag of holding shouldn’t do this; only the special ritual way should do it.
Druids’ mistletoe requirement for maintaining good energy regeneration should scale up as they gain more levels rather than being a fixed amount, because as soon as you have that fixed amount there’s no reason to find any more.
One proposed formula is: energy regeneration is halved if you possess less mistletoe than your XL, regular if you have mistletoe equal to your XL, and increased if you have more mistletoe than your XL, possibly with some exception for very low level Druids.
Add skill unrestricting or skill cap raising as a prayer boon or sacrifice gift.
There should be some mechanic that makes roles more likely to get spellbooks that they can get skill in, possibly biasing random generation for spellbooks towards such spells.
There should be a way to feed your mount a treat without getting off; currently it is only possible by dismounting and throwing it the treat. Possibly this could be handled by dropping a comestible the steed regards as a treat while mounted, or else by throwing a treat downwards.
Cavemen should be able to make cave paintings on the ground with blood (possibly their own blood, dealing damage to them, if they have a sharp object with which to draw blood). The available paintings are selectable from a menu, and each type grants a unique buff to Cavemen who stand on it, sort of like wards in dNetHack except not necessarily focused on warding off monsters. You learn more powerful paintings as you level up.
Spell of elemental fist: after casting it, your next barehanded melee attack that connects causes an elemental explosion centered on the target. This could take over as the special spell for Monks.
Not specified how the element gets chosen, whether there should be multiple different spells each of a different elemental fist type, or whether it should use an alternate set of elements (stones/waters/metals/winds/fire like the Monk rank progression) versus basic NetHack elements like fire, cold, and shock.
If you die as a Druid while polymorphed via wildshape (probably not polymorphed via other means), you should simply die outright, rather than reverting to your ordinary form. This is based on the idea that the regular polymorph “second health bar” in NetHack is a guard against randomly turning into a weak monster and having no other option than to die, but that doesn’t apply to Druids who chose to turn into something.
To compensate for this, Druids should be allowed to use wildshape without any limit or cooldown.
If you are polymorphed into something that is not omnivorous, you should be affected by those dietary restrictions - for instance, if you are polymorphed into a herbivorous horse, you should only be capable of eating non-meat food; if you are polymorphed into an obligate carnivore like a tiger, you should only be capable of eating meat; and if you are polymorphed into an inediate form, you not only don’t need to eat, you can’t.
Permafood is explicitly inedible in a polyform unless your polyform is flagged as omnivorous.
If you cast the spell of create grass while underwater, it should create kelp fronds in surrounding water squares.
Polymorph should use the 3.7.0 system of tracking monsters you’ve seen, and only allow you to turn into monsters the hero has encountered rather than any monster the player knows about out-of-game. Possibly only for controlled polymorphs; uncontrolled polymorphs could still be able to turn you into a completely random monster you haven’t seen before (and presumably, turning into a random monster would inform you that it exists and allow you to turn into it on subsequent controlled polymorphs even if you never encountered one randomly).
For variants implementing a druid role with wildshape, this would follow the same rule.
A monster species that has a mayfly-like lifespan compared to regular creatures: it will grow up on its own given some hundreds or thousands of turns, can’t grow up from leveling, and after some hundreds or thousands of turns in its final growth stage, it dies of old age.
There should be a fixed alchemy recipe that produces a potion of enlightenment.
Meat objects created from stone to flesh should rot away (and give food poisoning if eaten before rotting away), the same as corpses, rather than acting as permafood.
Possibly the meat stick should be exempt from this, if it is interpreted to be like a stick of jerky that will not rot easily.
If you are sufficiently skilled in martial arts and you jump into a monster, you shouldn’t simply stop moving; you instead perform a flying kick that does extra damage or knockback.
Skills that you have enhanced in the past, but haven’t used for a long time, slowly lose their training points and, eventually, revert back to lower skill levels and require you to practice the skill again before you can re-enhance it, similar to how amnesia works.
The spell of knock, if cast at a container while Skilled or Expert, should disarm any trap on the container. However, this breaks the consumable-renewable principle (a spell that costs 5 Pw being a free untrap for containers is powerful), so maybe it should be given to the wand of opening instead, and to avoid it being better than the invoke power of the Master Key of Thievery, it should still set off the container trap.
Make untrapping deterministic based on a hash of the object ID (for containers) or xyz coordinates (for doors), so that you only ever need to search for traps once and there is no benefit to repeating the command.
The computation should amount to finding a number representing how hard the trap, if present, is to find. Any bonuses from your role and experience level can raise the threshold of traps you are able to find.
An alternative way to do it is to define a third outcome: you are skilled enough to find the trap given enough time, but it will take longer than is usual for #untrap to find it. This would be better if untrapping were first turned into an occupation.
The damage bonus for using a blessed weapon against undead should increase for Priests, proportionally to their experience level. To make the change more visible, there should be messages for getting a higher than normal amount of blessing damage.
All artifacts that have an invoke effect should have a corresponding confused effect which triggers if you invoke it while confused.
Define some monsters (not necessarily all monsters) as diurnal or nocturnal. During the daytime, monster generation biases slightly towards diurnal monsters and away from nocturnal ones, and nocturnal ones may generate asleep when they do generate. At night, this reverses.
Long worms should sometimes generate in areas of sand, carrying a “spice” comestible. If you eat spice, you are granted temporary telepathy, clairvoyance, or both.
Spellcasting should cost more nutrition for members of “non-primary caster” roles (which is determined by if the role starts with a spellbook or not).
Consider adding role spell lists like in D&D, in which your role dictates which specific spells you can learn. If you would successfully read a spellbook whose spell isn’t on your role’s list, you get told “[Your role] isn’t allowed to learn this spell”, similar to the message for twoweaponing. This could be extended to races and alignments, but extending it to genders would probably be too silly.
A simple initial way to do this would be to make each role’s special spell exclusive to that role.
Roc, a bird so huge it can swoop you up and drop you onto nearby hazardous terrain or a trap, or if neither is around, just drop you for some minor fall damage. To avoid the difficulty of adding a “you are being carried by a monster” game state, this should happen in a single turn.
Possibly it should only generate only on outdoor levels, or else be unable to use its pick-up attack on a normal dungeon floor.
Spell of sunray, a level 7 attack or evocation spell that effectively focuses the power of the sun on its target (despite being in a dungeon), dealing either very powerful fire damage or simply instantly disintegrating the target. (A compromise could be powerful fire damage in most cases, with the target disintegrated if it reduces their HP to 0, but with undead always being disintegrated).
It could shoot a ray, but might be better off if it used smite targeting like a blessed scroll of fire to strike a single square you don’t have to be lined up with, effectively trading the ability to hit multiple targets for increased lethality.
Spell of control winds, a matter or evocation spell that fires a beam of wind that pushes monsters and objects away from the caster.
Antlion, an a-class monster which has a strong bite, has a holding attack, can hide on sand terrain, and can “drown” you by dragging you into the sand.
Rather than wood materials being described as “wooden” all the time, wooden objects should have the material adjective randomized among like “oaken, ashwood, blackthorn”, etc, deterministically based on the object ID. The type of wood does not change anything mechanically about the item, it’s purely cosmetic.
If a druid role exists in the game, this should possibly only be shown to them; all other roles would still just see “wooden”.
Druids should have some of their spells influenced by moon phase. As a simple example, their attack spells could do more damage during a new moon, and their healing spells could do more damage during a full moon. But a full implementation would probably provide special effects for all 8 phases.
Rogues should be awarded experience points for directly robbing shopkeepers (in a way that angers them, not via a pet, which would be difficult to track and the rogue isn’t doing most of the work there anyway).
Paranoid swim and paranoid trap should not be 100% reliable, but should have a chance of failing to prompt you based on your Intelligence and Wisdom. Or possibly Dexterity instead.
Cap all roles’ skill for clubs at Basic. There is no such thing as being skilled in a weapon whose essential use is “swing at opponent hard”.
If you chop down a tree, any dog named Idefix who saw you do it should become hostile, in reference to how Idefix in the Asterix comics is distressed whenever a tree is damaged.
When you’re hallucinating, your money display on the status bar should be prefixed with a pound sign, £ instead of a dollar sign $. It could also cycle through a bunch of different currency symbols.
In order to preserve role differentiation via different skill distributions, gifted artifacts shouldn’t unrestrict their weapon’s skill; the only way to unrestrict a skill should be crowning. To compensate, your god will somewhat favor giving you artifacts you aren’t restricted in.
You should be able to wield a spellbook when you get crowned to either unrestrict its spell skill if you were restricted in it (the same as it works for weapons), or raise your role’s skill cap in its spell skill by one level, to a maximum of Expert.
When you get crowned, the crowning artifact already exists, and you are not indicating you would like a weapon skill unrestricted by wielding an appropriate weapon, your skill cap in the crowning weapon’s skill should be increased by one, up to Expert. For instance, if you are Lawful but your role normally can only advance long sword to Basic, you will then be able to advance it to Skilled.
Any themed room design that contains a prisoner NPC should also contain a strong, nasty monster who is guarding them.
Revamp the sacrifice and artifact-obtaining rules as follows:
Reading a cursed scroll of gold detection while confused should punish you, but create a gold ball and chain instead of an iron one.
Remove scrolls and potions from dragons’ starting inventory, because they are incapable of using them and it’s odd that they get offensive and defensive items they can’t use.
Remove or greatly reduce the chance of monsters to get a wand of teleportation, on the basis that the vast majority of the zaps that monsters are given with these wands end up in the player’s hands, allowing them to bring a pile of them to the Astral Plane and use them to make that level significantly easier. If they do not generate in monster inventories, a full game might see about 3 or 4 wands appear on average.
There should be a Dexterity saving throw against taking fall damage when you fall through a hole or trap door and land on a different floor.
Boots that act like the Hover Boots in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. They do not actually make you levitate like boots of levitation will, but will instead delay falling for a turn or two, so you can cross holes, pits, and 1 or 2-square wide liquids like water. If you stay still on the space without support and let the timer run out, you will fall. In order to mislead the player into thinking they might be water walking boots, they may give no special message when activating.
Not specified if this should be an ordinary random piece of magical armor, or a minor artifact.
Add two new magical shields: a shield of drain resistance and a shield of shock resistance. They are intended to make a sword-and-shield endgame build more competitive compared to twoweaponing.
Most characteristics of them are unspecified, such as if they should be light or heavy, bulky, conferring 1 or 2 AC, have randomized appearances, or whether possibly they should just be added to existing shields rather than making new object types.
Wielding a beam or ray wand and hitting a monster with it should zap it for a distance of 1 in that direction (so the monster gets hit), and there should be a chance that it does not consume a charge.
Because giving Cavemen a way to get good weapons makes the role less differentiated, and because the roleplay experience of a Caveman is perceived to be best when using a club, they should be restricted in nearly all weapons except for the “caveman basics” such as club, spear, sling, and boomerang.
It might be necessary to make them exempt from getting their skill unrestricted by their god, because if they could still do that, most players would probably just use the same old artifacts at Basic skill, again hurting the role’s differentiation.
Forcing them into using primitive weapons might make them interesting by virtue of incentivizing using attack wands much more to deal with threats; an interesting gameplay change would be for cavemen to get more uses out of attack wands than other roles, but that would make little flavor sense.
Of course, this would require their quest artifact to be changed to either a non-weapon or to one of the types of weapons they are allowed to use.
Cavemen being illiterate makes a lot of sense, but forcing them to be illiterate is unlikely to make them fun to play when they’re already one of the least fun roles to play. So instead, the role should have mechanics that make them compatible with illiterate and a good choice if one is trying to win an illiterate game in particular. But they can also be prodded towards being illiterate by having them abuse alignment every time they read something (possibly only scrolls and books, not things like fortune cookies).
Cavemen should be able to wear corpses like a pelt, or else be able to obtain an actual pelt object from a corpse which won’t rot away. The effects of wearing one or more of them are unspecified.
Cavemen should be able to use flint stones to “enchant” clubs, and maybe spears, by embedding them in the club to make it spiky. Their starting flint stones would have to be removed, though, to stop them from immediately getting a club at +7 or whatever the limit of adding flint to it would be. Alternatively, don’t remove it, and make the starting club +7.
Another option is to use obsidian stones for turning a club into a higher-damaging “spiked club” or macuahuitl, and to avoid the issue of obsidian simply not randomly generating in some games, it could be guaranteed to appear at Mines’ End or certain other points in the Mines.
Cavemen should be able to tame baluchitheria, and possibly other “ancient” q-class monsters, by throwing food at them like how it currently works with domestic animals.
Add a crafting system, but only Cavemen can use it since in real life no one was manufacturing gear and they had to make things themselves. Examples of this include:
If the problem of differentiating cavemen as a role, both in flavor (e.g. having no clear inspiration from outside the game that is realized in the game) and in gameplay (e.g. not being good at anything that some other role isn’t already better at) proves intractable, the role should simply be removed.
Cavemen should have enhanced hearing compared to other roles: non-silent monsters you can’t see appear on the map with a warning-style symbol showing not their severity, but the amount of volume they are making. Possibly, having too many monsters in one place would confuse this system.
Cavemen should be particularly good at tracking monsters to eat them, so they should get one of the following:
A role, intrinsic, or other mechanism that gives you a stone to flesh aura: any stone objects that come into your inventory (or possibly even near you) get stone-to-fleshed. Originally conceived as a gimmick for Caveman but it doesn’t really make thematic sense.
Buff Cavemen by making them especially good at taming monsters, possibly giving them an exclusive mechanism to tame animals without a scroll or spell, in reference to how early humans domesticated many animal species.
This probably works best as ordinary taming, but a wackier take on it would be turning monsters into a domestic form, such as taming a jackal and it becoming a dog.
Buff Cavemen by giving them “natural magic” or “primordial magic” - while keeping their existing low Intelligence, they could have the best growth rate of maximum Pw and the best base spellcasting success rate among roles. They could also possibly start the game with knowledge of some spells, or have a mechanism of learning certain early-game spells without needing to find a book for them.
Cavemen could be buffed in the early game by starting with a dog or large dog instead of a little dog. Or, to make the buff significantly stronger, they could start with a pet mastodon.
Cavemen should be able to see in the dark, because they’re accustomed to caves and are used to darkness.
The gameplay effects of this are: if they’re moving around in a darkened area, they will still accurately see and map all the floor in that area, all the walls and other terrain at the edge of that area, all the monsters and objects, etc, but the area won’t actually be lit up - floor will still render as dark room.
Cavemen should have “intrinsic cave awareness” - meaning that they “just know” the layout of the floor they’re on. This could be implemented a couple ways: auto-mapping the rooms on the level but not the corridors when you get within a certain distance; giving you a sort of persistent, limited clairvoyance which maps any walls within a certain radius of you (but not any floors, corridors, or other terrain) every turn, or being able to see walls in line of sight at any distance - but not the floor between you and the wall, if it’s dark.
Cavemen should be able to enhance club skill to Grand Master.
Take the “Caveman’s role strength should be having stats through the roof” idea to an extended version: not only should they have higher physical stat maximums than pretty much everyone else, but they should also get an increased melee damage bonus, a higher HP maximum, and a higher carrying capacity.
To compensate for this, they could be made illiterate by being incapable of reading anything.
Cavemen should have a mugh higher natural Strength cap, perhaps all the way up to 25.
A monster that has a passive area-of-effect power that works like the wizard-mode monpolycontrol option: if you (or other creatures, possibly) polymorph around it, it controls what you turn into, possibly overriding any polymorph control you have.
When an item is auto-added to the discoveries list by you seeing it for the first time, also mark on the list which level you first saw it.
A monster with a wand (or wand-like attack that requires being lined up with it) that always kills you - no matter what extrinsics or intrinsics you have, like a souped-up wand of death - but cannot or will not use it until you have seen it for a turn, to make it not an unavoidable instadeath.
Orcus is a possible candidate for this, if his wand of death is either turned into a special “Wand of Orcus” artifact or it’s just more powerful when he’s the one zapping it.
The Longbow of Diana should create arrows on-the-fly as a passive effect when it is fired, rather than creating a stock of +0 arrows as an invoke ability. The arrows could be ordinary arrows with an enchantment equal to the Longbow’s, but it’s probably more interesting to clone arrows from your quiver (assuming the thing you have quivered is suitable to be fired from a bow), as this lets you keep multishot bonuses from using same-race ammo or use silver arrows and preserves the incentive to have well-enchanted ammo. Cloned arrows should always be destroyed when they hit the ground, so you can’t use it to create hundreds of highly-enchanted arrows.
A slightly different way to take this idea would be that arrows don’t get created on the fly, but automatically return to your quiver when they hit the floor. This means that any arrows that get eroded by hitting a rust monster or something will return to you eroded, and any arrows that get mulched will still be lost, preserving the ammo management aspect of the ranged combat game. On the other hand, it could be argued that removing ammo management for the player is a great benefit for a quest artifact to have.
Make the prize for Sokoban a guaranteed amulet of reflection, and guarantee a bag of holding to generate elsewhere. It could be in any of:
However, guaranteeing the existence of a reward item like the amulet of reflection risks funneling players into a single standard strategy.
You should be able to throw food at Watch members to pacify them, since they regularly complain that “The food’s not fit for Orcs!” The odds of pacification could increase with increased nutrition of the food (making food rations effective), increased quality of the food (making e.g. candy bars effective and possibly a 0% chance of pacification for corpses or any food that is “bland”), or some combination of the two.
If you do not talk to your quest leader by a certain turn count, a peaceful same-role player monster NPC named Chad, Stacey, Kevin, or Jennifer should appear on the quest start level, with the implication that they already did the quest.
In general, interesting and dangerous behaviors should be spread over more monsters rather than crowded onto a smaller set. For example, mind flayers have 3 unique things: a long-range psychic blast, a stat-reducing attack that causes instadeath (that uniquely ignores life saving) if it reduces the stat too much, and amnesia; any 1 of these things would make a monster species interesting by itself, but packing them all into mind flayers just makes them a genocide target.
Vorpal Blade should always decapitate Medusa. When this happens, it produces a “Medusa head” comestible, which is a unique, unwishable item which could either confer stoning resistance when carried or, like in the myth, be used to stone monsters at range.
An alternative, to make it more broadly accessible, is to allow any bladed weapon used in melee to decapitate Medusa, and only her, on a critical hit (while Vorpal Blade will decapitate on any hit that lands).
A game mode that makes you play a Wizard and guarantees you start with a “polyrunner” kit - wand and ring of polymorph and ring of polymorph control. (Maybe also potions of polymorph). This can be startscummed for, but of course takes many games to get this exact kit, so the game mode circumvents this. To balance it out, random objects don’t generate, or generate at a very reduced rate.
You should be able to wield amulets to get the same extrinsic as you would get wearing them. Not specified if they should weld to your hand when cursed, as this would otherwise let you identify them easily. It’s also not clear how an amulet of strangulation would strangle you while you wield it.
New role whose unique game mechanic is that it can dip magical items into corpses to change them into other magical items.
When a bones file gets loaded, a copy of it should get made and stored somewhere which will prevent it from being loaded in another game - until Halloween. On Halloween, any level that is eligible to generate bones and for which a bones file exists will generate one from this special pool.
Wearing fumble boots and gauntlets at the same time should result in them canceling each other out, and removing fumbling.
It should be possible to define anti-spawn regions in a level, like how monsters will not generate in the Sokoban hole corridors but more general. It should still be possible for monsters to appear in specific places within such regions that are specified in the level definition, but monsters specified to appear in random places won’t, nor will any monster that generates after the level is created. This could be done by checking the anti-spawn regions in the makemon_rnd_goodpos function.
Hallucination should block touches of death (via an out-of-body experience) even if it’s being suppressed by wielding Grayswandir.
An artifact, possibly a polearm, which induces (rather than blocks) hallucination while equipped. It should have some unspecified great benefit to using it which makes it worth the hallucination.
If a vampire in a non-normal form sees that you are helpless, it should shift back into its normal form, because it’s much more powerful in that form.
If you totally destroy a container by forcing it with a blunt weapon, and one or more potions shatter as a result, they should cause vapor effects around the chest’s area (which will always affect you, of course).
If a potionless conduct is implemented, this should break the conduct.
Casting knock at a tree should behave as though you kicked the tree. Not specified whether a wand of opening should also do this, since it doesn’t have “knock” in the name.
Write a Lua script that involves orcs spawning en masse and sacking Minetown - after an ordinary Minetown has already generated, so the attack happens during the game rather than before it. The neat thing about it is that it would be generic enough to be used in any Minetown, rather than being limited to the existing Orcish Town.
A potion of magic resistance, which conveys magic resistance intrinsically for some temporary, but fairly long-lasting, duration.
A shop type, or occasional lower-level shop, that is guarded by a drawbridge over a 1-square moat rather than by a regular door.
Don’t have an open 2x2 space in the Gnome King’s Wine Cellar where all the gems and luckstone are stored. Leave the gems where they are, but embedded in solid rock. Possibly, there should be an engraving or two on the ground saying something like “we have almost reached the mother lode”, to compensate for the lack of an obvious reason to mine into that area when magic mapping will not show anything. Also, guarantee a pick-axe on the level, possibly only if no dwarf generated there with a digging tool.
This is intended to replace the current solution of guaranteeing a teleport scroll in the 2x2 space, which is intended to prevent the hero getting stuck there with no way out, but isn’t a perfect guarantee. (A monster could spawn there before the hero arrives, pick up the scroll, and use it after the hero arrives, or the hero’s teleport could be incredibly unlucky and randomly pick one of the spaces in the 2x2 area as its destination).
On critical hits, there should be a chance of dealing double damage. This chance increases with higher skill in whatever you are attacking with.
Rocky terrain, which is difficult enough to walk on that you must go around it or levitate or fly over it, but permits magic and items to pass over it.
All the Bane artifacts should have the same invoke power: it powers up the weapon, causing it to instakill the next monster it hits that its bane effect applies to.
An option that causes the game to show you a test screen before going into character selection options. This test screen should have your default terminal background and show monsters of every possible color, so you can see if any particular color is unreadable on the background (dark blue and dark gray are common culprits for this) and adjust your settings as necessary.
The menu for putting items into containers should mention which container you are putting items into rather than just saying “Put in what?” because in cases where you are trying to put bag-of-holding-dangerous items into a stash chest, you want to be really sure you are putting them into the chest.
If you try to equip armor that is too big for you, the game shouldn’t just tell you “it is too big for you to wear”; instead, it should allow you to wear the armor piece, but it falls off after a turn or two. If the armor is boots, when you move, you should leave the boots on the square where you started.
Shorten the time-to-instadeath of digestion attacks significantly, in order to make monsters that have those attacks a significant threat to the player and not a non-threat where the player can weather the HP damage and attack the monster’s stomach repeatedly until it dies.
Alternatively, remove it as an instadeath on the principle that the instadeath does not make for fun gameplay, and have the “timer” be HP, with a large amount of acid damage dealt each turn. The flaw with this is that acid resistance would nullify it, so if you’re not afraid of a couple turns’ worth of acid damage you can just carry an alchemy smock and equip it. It would also mean that, logically, digesters should not be able to instakill anything that’s acid resistant.
An artifact flail that is chaotic and has some decent unspecified offensive ability. If Yeenoghu is generated and this flail has not yet generated, Yeenoghu gets this artifact instead of the ordinary flail he currently gets.
Shimmering dragons’ breath attack should be a “tractor beam” sort of thing, which pulls you towards the dragon most of the time, but occasionally pushes you back. This can pull or push you over dangerous terrain.
There should be some way for the player to get a warning that a monster has a wand of death before it zaps it at the player and kills them.
Prevent wands of death from generating before a certain level difficulty in order to prevent unfair instadeaths for early-game characters from them. This could be implemented so they only don’t generate in monster inventories and can still be found randomly on the ground, or not anywhere at all.
Chupacabra, a canine-class monster that is vampiric, with some sort of draining bite. In a reference to how some real-life sightings of it have turned out to be mangy canids, it may appear at first as a coyote.
Wendigo, a high-level Z-class monster which normally hits using cold damage, but if the target is resistant to cold damage, it instead hits with Famine’s hunger-inducing damage type. If you commit cannibalism, you may polymorph into one (permanently?) as a side effect.
Memril, a fantastic insect (so in the x class rather than the a class) which has two bite attacks, each with a chance to decapitate the target. It never generates randomly until the Wizard of Yendor starts harassing the player. It may be a valid target for summon nasties.
Firefly, an insect which emits light and has at least one attack that deals fire damage.
Executioner beetle: an insect whose bite has a chance of decapitating its target.
Vorpal bunny, a magenta r monster with a deadly bite: it decapitates you if your HP is at 50% or less, and bisects you otherwise. Probably a reference to the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
It should probably only generate in Gehennom, or be unique and generate in a specific area or off-branch of Gehennom, or be psuedo-unique by giving it a birth limit of 1.
It should be possible to build up a resistance to a potion by drinking or inhaling fumes from it too frequently, making it work less effectively on you or not at all. This goes for both negative potions, which is good because monsters can’t use them as effectively against you, but also positive ones, which is bad because you will stop getting as much benefit out of them.
Temples should always be lit up.
Remove bag of holding explosions when a wand of cancellation is put into them. (Keep the explosion mechanic if a second bag of holding is put inside.) In exchange, make it so that whenever the hero is carrying a charged wand of cancellation, either in open inventory or in a container, it interferes with any bags of holding and prevents them from reducing the weight of items.
There should be some way to use the corpse of a disenchanter which had in life stolen some enchantment points from gear to “recycle” the magic. Possibly a ritual that recharges or reenchants items, or simply dipping it in a potion to turn it into a potion of gain energy.
Replace the scrolls of enchant armor and weapon with a potion of enchantment. You enchant weapons and armor the same way, by dipping them into the potion. The existing confused effects of the scrolls to erodeproof could probably be replaced by using a cursed potion of enchantment.
You should be able to wish for demon lords, which will instantly summon that demon lord.
Shopping cart, a mobile container that can be used to hold and transport other objects. When it contains at least 1 object, attempting to move onto its square instead pushes it as if it were a boulder. If you m-move onto it or attempt to push it into an obstacle, you instead move on top of it. Since you are not personally carrying the objects in the cart, they do not add to your carry cap.
The main drawback is that it’s unsuitable for taking down stairs. If you push it onto a downstairs, it will fall down the stairs, spilling its contents on the floor below and possibly breaking fragile ones. It can be carried down or up stairs, but this will of course be impractical if you’re trying to move a lot of items.
If you are polymorphed into a fire elemental, there should be a way to burn through a closed door. Probably via force-fighting the door while bare-handed.
The reason for this is since a fire elemental lacks arms and legs to open or kick the door with, a closed door is an impassible obstacle.
When you read a scroll of mail, you should be prompted to “reply?” and enter a message that will somehow be delivered back to the original sender.
When your only reflection source is silver dragon scale mail, the fire beam is passing through the cloak slot, reflecting from your body armor, and passing back through the cloak slot again, so having reflection should not protect your cloak from being burnt, and in fact it should get 2 chances to burn the cloak.
If you are riding a silver dragon (or any mount that has reflection), you should also get reflection. At least for incoming rays; it’s not clear things like gaze attacks should reflect if you don’t have your own source of reflection.
Add a “misfortunate” conduct, enabled with a roleplay option that must be set before the game starts. When this is set, your base luck is negative and it can never be 0 or higher.
A system in which dwarf heroes gain experience by carrying a lot of gold, or lose experience by carrying little gold. More specifically, if your total number of experience points is less than the amount of gold pieces you are currently carrying, you gain 1 experience point per turn, and if greater, you lose 1 experience point per turn. You gain or lose an experience level as normal whenever this brings you across a threshold for one.
Lead shield: when equipped by a monster, it prevents you from using probing or a stethoscope on them.
Cooking system in which you apply a knife to corpses to turn them into raw ingredients, then combine them over a hot surface such as a campfire or lava to turn them into food items that are superior to raw corpses, whether that’s by having increased nutrition, conferring temporary slow digestion, boosted intrinsic odds, raising attributes, or other benefits. One specific recipe mentioned is combining a cockatrice’s heart and potion of acid to produce a food that cures stoning and gives temporary stoning resistance.
The lack of cooking gear in the game (other than dented pots) means there might have to be some sort of fixed “cookpot” dungeon feature found at various places which acts like the ones in Zelda: Breath of the Wild; a specific place to combine food items together.
If the cooking system uses fixed recipes, there should be cookbooks containing various recipes so they don’t require spoilers to find out.
One major flaw pointed out with a cooking system is that it has to somehow establish itself as better than merely eating corpses, so it either has to deliver amazing benefits from eating the food or nerf corpse-eating, while still allowing it to be practical to play vegan or foodless. One possibility is to remove most roles’ ability to eat raw corpses (Barbarians and Cavemen could retain this ability as a role benefit).
Archeologists should be able to do experimental archaeology with any artifact weapon to unrestrict its skill. Effectively, this would allow them to train the skill up from restricted to unskilled, which takes as long as going from unskilled to basic does.
On Halloween, ghosts should be able to generate randomly.
Lava demons, which are based on water demons, but are always hostile. Instead of giving you a wish, they have a nonstandard ranged attack in which they wish for one of your items each time they see you. The wish attempts to pick the highest-value item out of your inventory.
The intended balance for the sight requirement is that you can sneak up on or blind them before they can wish for anything, but it’s not feasible to hide around a corner and wait for them to approach, because then they will get more wishes.
If you fall asleep in Vlad’s Tower, a vampire should get generated who will try to drink your blood.
A trap that, when it’s triggered, makes the wall or ceiling crush together over a few turns to squish the target. Ceiling might be more ideal since it wouldn’t involve terrain moving around.
Clean up a potential continuity error in most quest texts - the message for acquiring the artifact usually says you have to return it to the quest leader, but the quest leader may be dead by the time you see the message.
Fix this by defining two additional messages: an alternate artifact-pickup message that prints if your leader is dead and which doesn’t mention returning the artifact to the leader, and a message that always shows when the leader dies about how your telepathic connection to them was suddenly severed.
You should be able to fill an empty bottle with water by wielding it and triggering a rust trap until your wield slot gets splashed. Or, more generally, any time an empty bottle would take water damage, it should become a potion of water.
The Rogue level should exclusively generate monsters from Rogue which don’t otherwise appear in NetHack.
Cyclops smiths, who can (for pay?) create weapons with object properties and, in variants that implement differently-sized objects, large sizes. They should probably not be able to make artifacts.
It should be possible to trigger some types of traps by throwing or shooting an object onto them. This does open up the possibility of chain reactions, such as triggering a land mine and objects flying around and landing on other traps, so care should be taken when implementing it.
Whether each trap type should be triggerable by object requires deciding what the triggering mechanism is. For most of them, “pressure plate” would work.
Shuffle trap: randomly relocates all the traps on the level.
Not specified whether traps with a specific position defined in the level (such as the Castle trapdoors or Valley dart traps) should remain fixed in place and only randomly-placed traps get shuffled. Also not specified if rolling boulder traps should have their boulder move to an appropriate place or not.
New “Kobold Caves” branch based on Tucker’s Kobolds. The branch is populated with ordinary weak kobolds, but the main challenge is in their deviousness, not their fighting strength. It contains lots of nasty traps such as cockatrice corpses atop pits. The kobolds themselves frequently carry nasty items such as potions of paralysis and cockatrice eggs.
Implement antimagic fields as a region. They are a static, possibly invisible region inside which magical effects cannot function, including all of the following effects:
The anti-magic field trap could be repurposed into casting one of these rather than draining energy, which could be split off into a different trap type.
Region of reverse gravity: while inside the region you gain levitation if you don’t have it, or lose levitation if you do have it. This means if you want to pick something up off the floor, you would quaff a potion of levitation. If implemented as a separate effect on top of levitation, you might have no control over your movements, as you do on the Plane of Air - magical sources of levitation give you control over your movements there, but in order to be levitating in a reversed-gravity area you cannot have any levitation magic.
Not specified what effect would create the region.
Replace the wand of teleportation with a potion of teleportation (leave the ring and scroll, and possibly the spell of teleport away, as-is). You could still teleport monsters, but possibly not objects any more, by throwing the potion of teleportation which would then randomly teleport everything that it gets on or which breathes its vapors.
This also is intended to make the Astral Plane more difficult by removing easy zaps and snaps of the wand, making it a much more limited resource.
Rework or create a lightning bolt spell that interacts with an electrical or conductive coating on the floor that makes it easier to zap monsters. Either it creates this coating, or it spreads along the coating, or both.
Archeologists should get experience points for using their touchstone to identify gems.
Archeologists of any alignment should get experience for digging up graves, rather than penalizing Lawfuls.
In variants that have differently-sized objects and inability to use items of the wrong size: An artifact armor piece, possibly gloves, that allows you to wield things that are one size larger than your current limit.
Add “collapsed corridor” and “cracked wall” terrain types. These act mostly like solid rock and solid wall, except that if you attempt to move onto it you can, if you would be capable of squeezing past a boulder. Would be more useful if a light, stealth-based character build that ordinarily carries little enough stuff to squeeze past boulders were viable.
Not specified which characters these would use in text-based windowports.
Level flags and level-flag-like things such as Sokoban rules should be tied to wardstones, a new type of gray stone. If there is no wardstone providing a level rule anywhere on the level, those rules no longer exist on that level.
Removing the gray stone from the level where it generated shatters it. However, the player can also cancel a wardstone, in which case moving it will not shatter; there should also possibly be a way for the player to reapply the same or different “enchantment” on a wardstone which will then start enforcing that level rule on whatever level it’s activated on.
Make the Castle chest protected by a magical lock that is connected to one of the gems in the storeroom. The chest can only be opened by having the gemstone no longer be on the level (throwing it down a trapdoor, carrying it off-level, destroying it, etc) or by having the gem in your inventory when you try to open the chest.
If your god attempts to gift you your role’s first sacrifice gift and can’t because it already generated, they should tell you where and how it generated so you can go find it.
Add more alternate Medusa level variants with unique monster threats: Echo and Synesthesia. Both monsters should be equally as threatening as Medusa, with a corresponding weakness to something fairly common by late midgame (as Medusa is weak to reflection and blinded heroes).
One proposed effect (for either Echo or Synesthesia) is to be stunned or damaged by loud noises like drums. Another proposal is that noise is Echo’s strength: she is alerted by noise and turns any noise around her into damage thrown at the hero.
A Quest where instead of finding your nemesis on the last level, you kill them at the start or very early in the quest, but they repeatedly respawn like the Wizard of Yendor until you fulfill the quest which stops them from respawning.
Address the problem of the hero having most or all of the resistances they need before ever entering Gehennom, by adding a new tier of resistance that you need in Gehennom and can only get inside it.
A monster which creates anti-magic fields around itself.
When you level up as a Binder and gain access to new spirits, you should be shown a message indicating which spirits you now have access to.
When you make a wish, the item should not appear directly in your inventory, but it should instead get delivered to you some turns later by a mail daemon.
Restructure elemental resistances so it’s no longer possible to have a full 100% resistance to any element.
Instead of having gradual percentage-based resistances that you can build up over time, classify resistances into 4 discrete steps:
A possible fifth step is immunity to the element, at which 100% of damage is negated and your items are shielded. This should either not exist at all, or if it is, it should only come from very rare sources, like a few artifacts.
There should be a way for the player to throw a potion in such a way that it deliberately smashes on the ground at a monster’s feet, rather than hitting the monster.
A spellcasting buff system for Wizards, in which learning a new spell grants you a point on a metamagic skill tree. Most options available on this tree provide incremental buffs to spells you cast with each point invested, with a maximum of 5 points. There are also capstone buffs that are binary.
The exact shape of the tree is not determined, but a list of potential incremental buffs is:
Possible capstone buffs include:
While wearing the Mitre of Holiness, you should be able to sacrifice anywhere (not just on altars, though doing it on an altar may still boost the odds of good effects), and/or when you get a reward for sacrificing or a prayer boon, you should be presented with a menu allowing you to choose from available options. (In the case of sacrificing, this may not allow you to select a specific artifact; it could be implemented as choosing between getting some gift that your god chooses, getting a point of luck, or other rewards).
Add a generic monster, which at the start of each game is assigned a species name randomly from the list of hallucinatory monster names.
If you get seduced while standing on a square that would be dark if not for a light source you are carrying, the foocubus should make the same Charisma-based check to either extinguish it or ask you to.
There should be a guaranteed spellbook of change metal to wood in the Druid quest somewhere, because it’s a cool spell for them but it’s hard to find as a random spawn.
A challenge game mode called “Midnight Run” in which the time of day according to the game is permanently locked to midnight.
Dungeon levels should “restock” when you’re not on them. During the process of arriving on a previously visited level, the game should check to see if you’ve been gone a long time, and spawn monsters in if so, adding more the longer it’s been (but with some sort of limit so the level can’t become crammed full of monsters).
The Nazgul should each have a name and personality that slightly affects its behavior, sort of like the ghosts in Pac-Man.
Incantifiers attempting to drain magic items should get better at it as they level up. That is, the odds of the item resisting the drain should decrease as experience level increases.
Scroll of fusion, which allow you to combine charged items of the same type together, summing their charges (for instance, two 0:7 wands of digging will fuse into a 0:14 wand of digging). They can only generate in Gehennom to keep them a decidedly late-game object. Not specified if they should bypass ordinary rules around items that explode when overcharged.
Add a griffin monster with the following statblock:
Potions of phasing should themselves phase, and therefore should only be able to be handled by magic. Any that generate or get dropped should immediately phase through the floor and fall to a lower level, unless the current level has an undiggable floor. (This means they would keep falling down from level to level until finally arriving at one with an undiggable floor).
Make it so that a standard key cannot open chests and large boxes. Instead, any time either container is generated, a key should be generated that will open it somewhere else on the level or on a nearby level, possibly in a monster’s inventory.
You should be able to wear only one of a pair of gloves, getting half of its benefit, but allowing you to wear a different type of glove on the other hand for half of its benefit.
Kicking towards a pit while standing on dirt floor should fill the pit.
Engraving with a bladed weapon in a dirt floor should degrade it more slowly than in a stone floor, requiring 6 characters to lose 1 enchantment point instead of 2 characters.
Divide the artifacts into two tiers, endgame quality and non-endgame quality. There is some milestone in the game, possibly receiving or completing the Quest, before which you are much more likely to get non-endgame-quality artifacts and after which you are much more likely to get endgame-quality artifacts.
Alternatively, rather than making it a fixed milestone, allow the player to expend some sort of midgame-level resource to “bless” or “consecrate” a coaligned altar which guarantees that the next gift you get from it will come from the endgame-quality tier. There should be some limit on the amount of times this can happen, though. The resource is unspecified, but could be some sort of non-randomly-generated “ancient holy water” that appears in a few guaranteed places.
Artifact piece of armor (the exact slot is unspecified) which, when worn, ensures you have at minimum 10 points of AC. So for instance, if the artifact’s base type grants 1 AC, and it’s +0 and you wear only it, your AC is 0. If you put on 9 AC more worth of armor, your AC will still be 0. But if you subsequently put on 1 additional AC worth of armor so you have 11 total points, your AC will become -1 and the artifact will have no further effect.
This is intended explicitly as an early-game artifact.
Gauntlets of corpse lugging: with them on, any corpses you pick up have their weight reduced by 90% or 99%.
Provide “organic” lighting to dark rooms via a luminescent fungus:
Create a pool of unique “miniboss” monsters who do not randomly generate, but are eligible to spawn on the throne in throne rooms of sufficiently high level difficulty. The throne room audience could possibly also consist of monsters themed to whichever of the uniques generates in it.
When a god smites you, the pool of possible smites should vary according to the god’s alignment. Some examples:
Artifact camera that can somehow trap and hold monsters that you use it to take pictures of.
Mincer role: the core mechanic is you grind corpses into mincemeat and bake it into mince pies or put it in tins; sapient monsters are frequently or always peaceful because they want to buy these from you, but if you can’t provide them with what they want they will get hostile.
Marathon mode should use an automatically-adjusting Elo system: initially, all marathon mode games start with, say, 10,000 HP, but it shifts down as players win games with that amount of HP, and shifts up (probably more slowly) as players lose games with that amount of HP.
If playing a Caveman, the dungeon should generate according to rules from previous versions of the game, with any attendant bugs and features.
In variants that allow dragon-scaled body armor: Cavemen should have the ability to add dragon scales to other pieces of armor, so they can get a lot of powerful extrinsics. However, few slots besides body armor itself should provide any secondary extrinsics when dragon-scaled.
The game should encourage certain character combinations over other ones until the player reaches certain in-game milestones, without actually locking players out of playing the discouraged ones.
You should be able to craft or apply dragon scales to a body armor piece, which gives it a partial resistance to whatever the scales protect from, but only 1% partial resistance per set of scales. However, different types of scales can be mixed and matched, allowing you to get quite a good piece of armor if you kill enough dragons.
If you would get no benefit from using Elbereth because you are a vampire or otherwise evil, you should be prevented from engraving it.
Add a “coil of rope” object, a tool which can be used to act like a snare, and is dropped by rope golems.
Picking up objects manually should be a free, repeatable action. This is because autopickup is a free action, so it is optimal and tedious (but relevant if you are trying for a low-turncount game) to look at what’s on the square you’re about to move to, go into the options menu and adjust pickup_types and autopickup exceptions so you will pick up the things you want on that square, and repeat constantly every time you would have used the manual pickup command.
However, this does not fix the issue where autopickup will still allow you to pick up objects on squares you are going to be forced off, such as the gray stones on levelporters in Mines’ End.
Wizards should never forget spells over time. Amnesia would still reduce their spell retention, but nothing would otherwise do that.
Make it so that you never forget spells, but you have a hard limit on the number of spells you can know at any time (except possibly for Wizards; the limit could vary from role to role). Not specified if you could still learn new spells and forget old ones to make room like move sets in Pokemon, or if you’re locked into knowing the first N spells you learn in the game. It’s also OK for amnesia effects to cause spells to be forgotten.
Overhaul the dungeon as follows:
The idea is to create different choices and tradeoffs, and to force the player to take uncomfortable or unanticipated routes.
Vary the list of prayer boons by alignment. For instance:
This list is very incomplete. Another idea is to vary the list of boons according to the individual gods and their mythologies, but that would require an even bigger list of boons.
Allow the Oracle to tell you where certain unique monsters are currently located. Internally, this works by setting a variable that represents the floor the monster was last sighted on, which gets set when you leave a level with that monster on it and the monster does not follow you. When the Oracle is asked to find a monster, the code first scans through the migrating monsters list to see if the monster is heading to a specific floor, and if it appears on the list she just tells you that level. But if it’s not on the list, the code checks the last-seen variable for that monster, and if it has been set, she tells you that level. If it has not been set, you have never been on the same level with the monster and can’t have encountered it yet.
Disenchanters should have a non-zero monster magic resistance, because it’s weird that they’re a magic-draining tough enemy to beat… unless you have a wand of polymorph or cancellation, in which case they become trivial.
If you put too many wands in the same place (inventory, bag, stash, floor pile, etc), there should be a risk that the magic in them will reach a critical mass that sets them off and blows some of them up. This would destroy only wands, not any other type of objects stored with them.
The intent is to address a balance issue with wands where the player steadily accumulates them over the game and has a huge arsenal of them, many of which aren’t even that useful, by the late game.
If you turn to stone by hitting a cockatrice with a bare-handed attack, the death reason should not be “petrified by a cockatrice” which makes it sound like the cockatrice’s attack did you in, but should instead be “petrified by punching a cockatrice bare-handed”.
Wand of jumping. When you zap it in a direction, the beam finds the first square in that direction you can’t occupy because a monster, boulder, wall, or edge of the map is blocking it, and moves you to the square right before it. There is no maximum range, meaning the “jumps” could be very long and might be better off flavored as teleports at a certain distance. Liquids count as a square you can occupy, so zapping it at e.g. a wall on Medusa’s level with water preceding it would result in you falling into the water and possibly drowning. Not specified what the behavior would be if you tried to zap it diagonally through an open door.
There is the potential issue of using this wand on the Astral Plane to zip around much faster than usual and without needing to spend resources on jumping boots or the spell. One possible solution is to make this wand very rare, about as rare as the wand of enlightenment, so you find about 0-2 of them per game.
You should be able to wish for “identified” on an object, which makes the object arrive identified. For instance, wishing for an identified magic marker would mean you already know its charges and don’t need to spend some other identification resource on them.
This is intended to accompany #4914, so that the player doesn’t always just wish for identification because they sometimes have more important things to put on the wish.
Using too many adjectives on a wish (e.g. “fixed”, “blessed”, “greased”) should have a risk that only some of them, selected randomly, will be respected. This is intended to encourage choosing only the most important adjectives rather than wishing for everything that could possibly matter.
Not specified whether adjectives that are part of an item appearance (i.e. the “red” in “red potion”) should count.
Poison gas trap, which creates a cloud of poison gas around its space. It has a short life, only triggering a few times before it runs out of supply. You might be able to untrap it to get a scroll of stinking cloud or potion of sickness.
This is a narrower version of #4453 which doesn’t require any refactoring or new types of gas clouds.
Cockatrice corpses when eaten should have a chance of conveying permanent stoning resistance.
When a container explodes due to a trap, its contents should be scattered around similar to how an exploded bag of holding scatters its contents.
Add the following events on Halloween:
Huge and Gigantic monsters should be able to travel more than one space per action during their turn. Rather than basing it entirely on monster size though, there should be a “long strides” permonst flag, applied to monsters with legs such as giants. Only monsters with this flag would be able to travel extra spaces.
Mimics that are awake and moving about should be able to ooze past boulders and occupy their space, since they can change shape enough to squeeze through openings.
It should be possible to push a boulder over a mimic imitating an object or dungeon feature. The mimic should not react in any way until the player tries to occupy the space themselves.
The only exception is if the mimic is imitating a boulder, which would then be large enough to stop you from pushing another boulder into its space.
Every floor of the Gnomish Mines should have a small chance of generating a “mining accident”: a smallish area containing scattered rocks and boulders, at least 1 dwarf corpse with regular starting inventory, and 50% chance each of a digging tool and a potion of booze. Ideally, this will be near or against a wall rather than out in the middle of an open area.
If you turn into a monkey as a monk, you get a YAFM: “You feel especially monky.”
In variants that have multiple sources of life saving: Avoid the problem of the code’s assumptions that if you get lifesaved multiple times it means you are in wizard mode, by burning up all of your active life saving sources upon the first thing that kills you, so getting lifesaved twice does still mean you’re in wizard mode.
One potential fix for resolving a connection hangup when a player is being prompted for a wish (a surprisingly common problem): there should be a variable in program_state which is set to true when the player is prompted for a wish, and set to false when they receive the item from the wish. If the game is restored and this flag is true, the player should immediately be prompted for a wish.
To avoid confusion, the “Ghost of an Adventurer” themed room with a realistic fake bones pile should not generate if you have the bones option turned on.
The game should only contain a few polearm objects, but there should be about 100 possible polearm names, a few of which get randomly assigned to the base polearm stat blocks in each game.
If a potion of booze shatters in a sufficiently hot circumstance (hitting a fiery enemy, landing on lava or on the ground in Gehennom), it creates a fireball expplosion on its space.
A potion that is not primarily intended to be quaffed, but rather to be hurled at enemies to make a guaranteed explosion. The potion of oil already behaves like this, but it is fairly weak; this potion should be a solid option for area-of-effect damage.
Potion of hazardous waste: never randomly generated, but can be created as a possible byproduct of random alchemy. Its effects are unspecified.
Shattering a luckstone (presumably by rubbing it on a cursed touchstone, which should currently be the only way to bring this about) should bring seven years of bad luck, represented in-game by setting luck to -10.
Monsters should never read scrolls of earth in Sokoban, given the high chance of messing up the puzzle. Possibly, they could be allowed to read it after the puzzle is solved and the penalties go away.
Add a “classical mechanic” monster as a counterpart to the quantum mechanic. It has a unique attack strategy; if it’s not in melee, it will rush towards you all at once and send you flying when it collides. This is an elastic collision that conserves momentum, so how far you are sent flying depends on how far it traveled to reach you and your relative masses.
If it is in melee range, it has a melee attack that drains your magic energy to make itself stronger, but if you subsequently kill it and eat its corpse, you regain exactly as much energy as you lost (conservation of energy). They also mutually grudge quantum mechanics.
There should be more birds in NetHack, particularly weird ones which could have nonstandard AI, such as peacocks, birds of paradise, and Canadian geese.
If you have high enough natural to-hit (i.e. not considering Luck), you should be able to consistently shoot small ammo through iron bars.
Frost Brand instakills water elementals it hits by flash-freezing them.
Change the message for branchporting to something other than “You are surrounded by a shimmering sphere”, which sounds more like some sort of protection spell.
Boost the sacrifice value of hill orcs, so that when you conquer Orctown you can get better artifacts from sacrificing them.
Objects that you kick loose from being embedded in a wall should actually hit the floor, which means that non-gem glass objects should break.
The Longbow of Diana should put a floor on the amount of multishot arrows fired from it, so you always get a good multishot. The floor should maybe even just be set to the maximum possible multishot you can achieve.
The Longbow of Diana should be usable for firing arrows without actually wielding it, but this reduces the amount of multishot you can get out of it. This could be flavored as the bow hovering on its own and magically pulling the arrows from your quiver. The main motivation for this is to bring the Longbow to parity with throwing darts, which require no launcher.
Spell of dimension door, a level 2 or 3 escape spell that is intended as a weaker version of teleport away: it randomly teleports you, possibly suppressing your teleport control, and if you do successfully teleport, two bidirectional teleport traps are created on your starting and ending position. The traps last only a few turns before disappearing, but monsters will be able to follow you through it until then.
Spell of flash: upon casting it, you are prompted to choose a direction in which to hurl a “ball of light” object.
It’s not clear which spell school this should be in:
When polyformed into a vampire, or when playing as a vampire in variants that implement that: Engraving on the ground in a scrawl of blood should expend nutrition proportional to the number of characters engraved, probably just 1 nutrition point per character.
New monster spell that gives the player intrinsic levitation for a few dozen turns. The levitation can’t be canceled (possibly unless the player drinks a blessed potion of levitation or casts levitation at Skilled or Expert to gain control over when they land). The spell possibly would not require being cast at melee range, and could occur at a distance. The intent here is to create more tactically interesting situations where the player is prevented from getting anything on the ground.
When you quit, you should be offered a prompt to enter the reason why, which will either be livelogged or appended to the “quit” death in the xlogfile.
If a monster generates on the level while you are asleep, you dream of it. Possibly only if you have telepathy, and if the monster can be seen via telepathy.
Add giant ravens, a stronger and more threatening counterpart to the raven, primarily so the raven-pacifying side effect of wielding a bec de corbin will be more relevant.
Vampires should not be able to enter rooms they did not generate in unless someone invites them in.
Pets should never hide, whether that’s on the ceiling, under an object, in water, whatever.
Do not make the hitpointbar blink uncontrollably when the hero is at critical HP. Instead, do one of the following:
Limit vault guard farming by making sure they don’t get any consumable potions, scrolls, or wands; or limit the amount of guards per vault that will appear to some low number like 3 - if you tell a guard you’re Croesus 3 times and have no other way out of the vault, too bad.
Triggering an anti-magic field with a wand of cancellation in open inventory makes both the wand and the trap explode.
Rogues should get experience points for robbing shops, possibly not by pets since that’s hard to track and isn’t a “direct” theft, possibly proportional to the zorkmid cost of the stolen goods.
Invert the behavior of the “context.nopick” flag for better pacifist play, which basically makes the game act as if you are prefacing every movement you make with the m prefix. It’s not perfect, as there are some odd corner cases with digging, but it works great at preventing you from accidentally attacking monsters.
If you anger a peaceful monster, then change into a different form (either polymorphing into something else, reverting to your normal form, or undergoing a stat-shuffle polymorph) while the monster can’t see you, the monster should revert to being peaceful because it doesn’t know you are the same creature.
The Minetown Watch should grudge orc-class monsters, in order to both give them an opportunity to actually do something in some games and to hint at enmities between Minetown and orcs that in some universes led the orcs to pillage Frontier Town and take it over. They should probably not be hostile to the player; it would makes for more consistent flavor if they did, but in practice this would probably make Minetown and the lower Mines inaccessible to early game orc players and would therefore be too mean.
Wearing gauntlets of power should allow you to wield a two-handed weapon in one hand. This does remove a big downside of two-handed weapons - the danger of them becoming cursed - though; most late-game characters wielding a two-handed weapon are probably wearing gauntlets of power already.
A role that starts with a wand of wishing that can provide exactly 2 wishes, and nothing else in terms of spells, skills, or equipment. The flavor background is you had 3 wishes and used the first to go on an adventure.
Amulet of contingency:
If you quit while on the Astral Plane, your game creates a special type of bones file which only contains the details of your character and their possessions (minus a real Amulet of Yendor, with a fake one added).
When other players reach Astral, their games can load this file to create an NPC of your character replacing one of the generic player monsters on Astral.
There is a problem when examining the circumstances of someone’s death in a dumplog: when the player does something that prompts for a direction, the action they are trying to do does not appear in any messages except those that result from the action, so if it doesn’t produce any useful messages, this remains unclear.
To resolve this, the getdir prompt should take an optional prefix string, changing from “In what direction?” to “[Cast/zap/apply X] in what direction?”
One potential issue with this is that if X is an object, it could contain a user-supplied name which has a higher character limit than for prompts. The object name could be truncated if it’s really long.
The dumplog should contain your spell list. Unlike many of the other things in the dumplog, though, it isn’t necessary to offer to show the spell list to the player since there’s no hidden information in it. So it should be left out of the end-of-game disclosure, but appear in the dumplog.
It should be possible for Gehennom levels other than the one above the Sanctum to contain vibrating squares; you would be able to perform the invocation on any vibrating square, but all it does is give you an alternative route to the level beneath it. The uinvoked and demigod flags are not set unless you do actually open the stairs to the Sanctum.
There should be a way to command your pets to leave a specific item on the floor alone so they stop picking it up. Possibly if the item is a treat, they will not obey this command, or will only obey if they are sufficiently tame.
If you find a bones file with a ghost and corpse and successfully resurrect the dead player by drawing the ghost back into its body, the game should save its current state with the NPC and hero swapped so the player character is now the one who had died, change the “owner” of the save to the previous player, and make the save file available for the previous player to continue on in. The save is not made available to the finder of the bones, who can keep playing their game as normal.
Add a means of enchanting terrain features to work to the player’s benefit. For instance, enchanted doors could open automatically as you approach them, then lock themselves behind you to stop monsters who are chasing you. Enchanted altars, meanwhile, could move nearby corpses onto themselves so there is no need to carry them or finagle killing very heavy monsters exactly on the altar.
Cavemen should start the game with an aklys instead of a club.
In order to improve the usefulness of quest artifacts that are weapons, monsters’ theft attacks should not be capable of stealing wielded weapons, and perhaps not any equipped items.
Give Cavemen a benefit to how nutrition works. Since they are used to a “feast or famine” lifestyle, they should never choke on food, and just stop eating at their upper limit. Possibly, the upper limit is even increased so if they eat a lot, they can go for longer without getting hungry (or, conversely, slow the nutrition clock when they are hungry so they take longer to get to Weak/Fainting status). Also, they should never get “Blecch!” rotten food effects since they are adapted to eat food that isn’t in the best condition.
There should be a scroll of charging in the Castle chest accompanying the wand of wishing.
A worn apron should grant sickness resistance as well as poison and acid.
You should be able to wield a disenchanter corpse and hit monsters with it to cancel them.
Touching a disenchanter’s body or corpse should be risky like a cockatrice is: it will cause you to lose a random intrinsic, the same as if you ate the disenchanter.
This should also happen if a disenchanter touches you and randomly picks an armor slot to disenchant that you aren’t currently wearing anything in.
Boomerangs should fly in a straight out-and-back line so they are more practically usable than they are now.
An amulet or a ring of sickness resistance. It would likely be better balanced as an amulet, but more convenient as a ring.
Nazgul should exhale actual clouds of sleep gas that cover an area, rather than a reflectable ray of sleep.
An artifact rock of detect ants, which conveys warning of all a-class monsters (or possibly only ants) when carried. If it enters your inventory and there are ants on the level, or you enter a new level containing ants when the previous level had none, you get a message “You feel antsy”. There are corresponding messages “You feel less antsy” for when you no longer detect any ants.
A new conduct that prevents you from using digestion instakills, either personally or by using pets. In-game, the feedback from #conduct would be “You have never willingly allowed a creature to be digested”.
Add a wand of roll boulder, which if zapped at a boulder will cause it to roll away in the direction of the zap.
To balance the 3.7.0 rule change in which monsters don’t death-drop comestibles, add a new monster, gingerbread man.
Turn the #dip command into a more general #craft command, which allows you to craft items together - not necessarily to produce items that have magical properties greater than the sum of their parts, but more for things like affixing a blade to a bow so you can get better damage for hitting monsters with it.
Monsters which are monarchs (gnome king, Elvenking, etc) should be able to use thrones as summon engines. Such monsters would be able to, and would prefer to, spend their turn to “use” a throne on their current space instead of moving. This has a 2/3 chance of doing nothing, but a 1/3 chance of summoning d10 throne room monsters around the throne. This should never have the chance of making the throne vanish, but there should be some sort of limit on it so it can’t be abused for farming, possibly a cooldown similar to the one casters have for summon insects.
Their AI should be changed to make maximal use of this behavior: if they are already on a throne, awake, and hostile, they should attempt it at every opportunity to summon more allies. If they are not on a throne but there is one on the level unoccupied by another monarch, they should avoid engaging the player in combat and try to pathfind to the throne. Possibly they should still attempt to find and occupy thrones even if they won’t use them because they’re peaceful; that could create interesting interactions.
With sufficiently high pet handling skill, you should be able to make a monster eat something it wouldn’t normally want to eat - for instance, making a herbivore eat meat. However, no matter how high your skill is, you can’t get an inediate pet to eat anything.
It should be possible to use a scroll of destroy armor to remove dragon scales from a piece of armor without outright destroying the whole armor piece, so the piece can then be used in a forging recipe.
Tree blights that are hiding and motionless should actually use the game’s “appear as furniture” system to appear fully as dead trees, so that even if you farlook them they just show up as “dead tree”. Currently they have the same ASCII glyph but appear as “tree blight” in farlook, allowing you to trivially scan the map and confirm any suspicious-looking dead trees to be blights or not. This would also enable the tree blight tile to be distinct from the dead tree tile.
After you kill Vecna, you can wish for whichever of the Hand and Eye of Vecna didn’t have a chance of being dropped by him.
The Blacksmith’s Hammer should be able to downgrade superior and exceptional weapons at a forge to just ordinary quality, presumably without expending any charges. The benefit of this is that it will allow them to stack with the more common regular weapons.
There should be at least a chance, if not a certainty, that your original god disintegrates you when they notice you attempting to ascend with a helm of opposite alignment, instead of merely zapping the helm off your head.
Unarmed attacks made as a Draugr should have a chance of dealing a small amount of poison damage.
When you deal a spinning back kick with martial arts, it should have an increased chance of knocking back the opponent.
A monster that’s an evil blacksmith (cyclops?) with a special attack that applies harmful object properties to your equipment. They may also do this to items they find while roaming around the level, but leaving them on the floor rather than picking them up so it looks like nothing has been done to them.
Applying a negative object property could also be a monster spell, but this may not work as well as long as all arcane spellcasters use the same spell list; it would probably result in this effect being too abundant.
Once you get a sacrifice gift and your god cracks the altar, you should not be able to get another artifact from another altar until you are at least 2 experience levels higher than you currently are. This is intended to cut down on altar farming, but might encourage drain-for-gain (though perhaps not; it could be a bit tough without an ice box since you don’t know which sacrifice will result in a gift and staying at a low level to altar farm is dangerous).
You would still be able to get non-artifact gifts from other altars without raising your level; it’s only artifacts that would be restricted. There would be some indication either from the altar or from your god to indicate that you are too low level to get another artifact.
If the requisite experience level for the next artifact would be raised above level 30, it is instead set to 30 so it remains achievable.
Orcs should be capable of riding wargs without a saddle. This averts the issue of either having lots of saddles available in the early game, or restricting the amount of warg-riding orcs in the early game to avoid having lots of saddles around.
Forging a shield of light and saddle together should produce a barding of light, which works the same as the shield except it gets applied to a steed like barding.
There should be a monster in the U class that is sessile, but spawns other U monsters like umber hulks and shambling horrors around it. Probably should appear deep in Gehennom, perhaps with one guaranteed in the Sanctum.
You should be able to sacrifice an artifact on a broken altar for a 1/3 chance at repairing the altar.
Gnolls should be able to generate riding leocrottas.
Druids (including NPC druids) and leocrottas should grudge each other, because D&D portrays them as nasty and mutually loathing.
Deaths in Goblin Town should produce a bones file, but one that just consists of a partial bones pile (not a full pile; the implication is that the Goblin King removes some of the best items from it) that is supposed to load somewhere in the early regular dungeon as a warning to other adventurers. These piles should contain a corpse, but since the former hero did not die on that space, there is no ghost. The corpse could possibly also uniquely render as “mutilated”.
Drow rangers should either always or sometimes start with a dark elven hand crossbow and a stack of bolts for it rather than a bow and arrows.
Fall damage from falling through a trap door or hole should be significantly reduced if you happen to land on grass.
Scroll of nature, which creates grass, trees, and shallow water in a radius around the player (larger if the scroll is blessed). If cursed, it summons blights. Druids should start with one or two of these so they will still be able to employ grass tactically even if they don’t start with the spell of create grass.
Kathryn the Enchantress should grudge undead monsters.
The Rat King Mines’ End level should be changed so that obtaining the luckstone doesn’t rely on getting into a sealed chamber by teleportation; it’s a challenge that is either completely trivialized if you happen to have teleport control or requires you to tediously step on a teleportation trap many times until you happen to be teleported into the sealed chamber.
Spell of deconstruction, a matter spell that either shoots a beam that can hit multiple objects on the ground or acts on a single item you’re carrying. Any affected items that could have been created via forging are turned into components that could have been used to forge it.
Zapping undead turning at a dead tree should turn it into a living tree, or an ent (for the occasional dead tree that is actually a dead ent). If it’s a tree blight, it could either do nothing or harm the blight, depending on whether one considers the blight to be an undead tree.
Wielding Angelslayer, or alternatively wearing the Mitre of Holiness, should protect fully against hellfire.
If a hostile monster applies a figurine and hits the random chance of getting a tame monster (for the hero), it should not actually create a tame monster, but instead it should create a peaceful monster which specifically grudges the monster that used the figurine.
The menu of druid shapechange options for #wildshape should be sorted by tiers rather than the game’s internal order of monsters.
To solve the issue where an optimal melee combat configuration is to wear bracers and twoweapon, bracers should prevent you from twoweaponing, but not wielding a two-handed weapon.
There should be a way to combine a quarterstaff with various magical components to turn it into a spell staff. For example, a quarterstaff combined with mistletoe could turn it into a staff of evocation.
Themed room filled with sand which contains either a couple long worms, or baby long worms if regular ones are not appropriate depth yet.
Since a black dragon disintegrates you if you touch it, you should also disintegrate if you try to do anything with its corpse, like eating, kicking, or tinning it. If you interact with the corpse by doing something where gloves or boots would logically touch it, those disintegrate first instead.
If you somehow manage to acquire a tin of black dragon meat, you can eat it safely to get disintegration resistance, on the general principle of tins that the dangerous part has been removed from the food.
Elementals created from the spell of summon elemental should have intrinsic telepathy so if you also have telepathy, you can always find them.
Fire starter: a charged tool about as frequent as a tin opener that is primarily used not to create fires (because of the lack of firewood) but for getting released by plant monsters. It can also be used to burn grass off your current square.
Druids should be able to farlook a nearby tree to determine what its contents are:
Spell staves should have active or passive effects that scale up with your skill in the stave’s spell school. For instance:
Casting the spell of change metal to wood at a drawbridge should destroy it, by turning the chains to wood, which can no longer hold up the weight of the drawbridge. Any chains scattered from the resulting explosion should be made of wood and not iron.
The spell of change metal to wood should work on rings and wands: it turns any metal ring or wand into a randomly selected wooden type of ring or wand. (Note that there is currently only 1 wooden ring). If the wand of wishing happens to be made of wood in the current game, it can’t be randomly chosen.
For wands, it works the same as polymorphing, so the resulting wand will keep its charge count, but of course unlike polymorphing it can’t be repeated since the wand will no longer be metal.
Dirge should have a 1% chance to instakill anything it hits that lacks acid resistance.
Druids’ buffs to HP regeneration and damage with wooden weapons should scale up with their experience level rather than being flat, since otherwise they decline in usefulness as the game goes on.
Druids should be able to chat to a tree to persuade it to peacefully give up its fruit, because them kicking the tree for fruit doesn’t make much flavor sense. Alternatively, there could be a spell to do this to all trees within a certain area.
Druids should get intrinsic polymorph control when they are at XL 30.
Druids should be able to wildshape at will and for free while in their Quest branch, possibly only after Baba Yaga is dead.
Because wildshaping as a Druid is fun and many of its possible polyforms are situational, the cooldown for entering a new form should be short in most cases, but there should still be a penalty for using a form just as a source of bonus HP. Therefore, it should follow these rules:
You might also be able to ignore the cooldown and force a shape change, at the cost of magic power and/or nutrition proportional to either the remaining cooldown amount or the strength of the form you want to take.
Add vultures, primarily to give druids a wildshape target that is a carrion-eater, meaning it can safely eat corpses of any age. Possibly, the druid or draugr starting pet could be replaced with a vulture, and if so it should have two additional growth stages: condor and giant condor.
Wood nymphs and forest centaurs should follow the same rules as wild woodland animals for Druids, meaning they should sometimes generate as peaceful and it should be possible to chat to them to pacify or tame them.
The Druid quest artifact should sharply reduce the cooldown timer for wildshape, or alternatively, make it easier to wildshape more often as you gain levels by adding extra “slots”, similar to how it works in most D&D editions.
You should be able to invoke the Blacksmith’s Hammer to expend one of its charges, which will put a random object property on the next weapon or armor piece you forge with it. This includes bad object properties.
The stairs out of Purgatory level 1 should not work unless you have killed all the player monsters on the level, so that you can’t just dodge them by teleporting them or phasing.
Dwarf monsters’ starting daggers should have a small chance of generating as crystal.
Druids should be penalized for wearing anything made of dragonhide, since they should be ideologically opposed to killing animals and wearing their skins.
Charon should generate with a wand of death.
If you have lycanthropy as a Druid, your shape-changing ability should be disabled. Or, alternatively, if your god is angry at you.
Druids should gain access to additional shapechange forms by some in-game process particular to the monster, rather than simply gaining the forms by leveling up. Potential options for these include:
Neothelids should be able to spawn randomly, albeit rarely, for illithid players, rather than only appearing in a few guaranteed places.
Assassin vines should be able to grow or move into iron bar spaces. Possibly, being marked M1_SLITHY would suffice to allow this.
There should be conducts for never wearing bracers and never using a magic chest.
The confused scroll of fire effect (which currently burns your hands and does nothing else) should be upgraded to giving you a cast of burning hands even if you don’t know the spell, while still dealing a bit of fire damage to you since you are confused and did burn your hands.
Gulthias trees should have an attack that starts a timer where you gradually turn into a blight, which ends the game if you succumb to it (without life saving, at least) since you have been converted, similar to how turning to slime works. Also similar to sliming, if you become a blight, you should be one in any bones file that gets created.
Add two types of vine to the plant class: a thief vine, which steals items from you, and a warrior vine, which is only found in bones files near the pile, and which starts with some weapons taken from the bones pile, which it uses to attack you with. (It would generate just after loading the rest of the bones level).
Thief vines, if adjacent to other thief vines, should pass stolen items away from the player, playing keep-away with them.
Warning levels for monsters should be revised, because there are many low-level but seriously threatening monsters in EvilHack, and at the same time there are many mid-level monsters which can only deal physical HP damage and have nothing particularly special about them, so they are not particularly threatening.
Possibly, the warning score should be moved into a manually-assigned constant in the species definition, rather than being calculated.
Priests of Moloch should be able to be demonic, with either a demon monster type or racial monster template. There should still be some normal priests too; this merely suggests mixing in some demon ones.
Druids’ starting scimitar should be made of wood; the bonuses from using wood should mostly cancel out the penalties from a wooden bladed weapon, and using a wooden weapon would let you synergize better with grass and other environmental effects.
Sprigs of wolfsbane should be poisonous to eat, and cause the same effects as a poisonous corpse does, because the plant is poisonous in real life.
A power outlet dungeon feature, which you can put a brass lantern on to plug it in and recharge it for free, although this takes a fair amount of time.
Add another divine smite in the form of inflicting some duration of temporary intrinsic hunger. It’s a nice counterpart to your god filling your stomach when you pray (which is inaccessible if you get smited with hunger, since the god has to be angry).
This may be tricky to balance because either it happens early in the game and there is not sufficient food, making this a death sentence; or later in the game and there is so much food that this is a minor annoyance.
In the end-of-game disclosure and/or the dumplog, if you touched any artifacts during the game, you may choose to see a list of all artifacts that generated in the game and whether or not you obtained them, and all artifacts that existed in the game which you never touched.
Mimics should try to impersonate containers more frequently than they do. There are a few proposals for accomplishing this in the Dungeons of Doom:
Both of these only happen on levels where the mimic being generated is within its ordinary level difficulty range.
A new mimic-class monster that can imitate an object (such as a scroll, potion, or wand) so deeply that it actually exists as that object, and you can pick it up and move it around without it revealing itself. It will only reveal itself, which destroys the object and creates the monster in its place, when you or some other monster attempts to use it (or possibly when it would stack with some other object, because an object that is a mimic clearly should not stack with regular objects).
Alternatively, just give this feature to small mimics.
Internally, this would probably work by generating a mextra struct on the object to store the details of the mimic.
The light from a magic lamp should show any invisible creatures in its radius. This would probably be most easily achieved by iterating the squares in a radius of 3 around each magic lamp and mapping or unmapping any “I” glyphs, rather than tying it into the light source code.
The scroll, wand, and spellbook of light should all weigh less than other objects of those classes. This makes them trivially identifiable, but it isn’t considered game breaking to be able to tell these 3 objects.
There should be a cooldown on using Elbereth to discourage overusing it in situations where you’re in over your head. For example, after successfully engraving it, all attempts to engrave another for the next 30-50ish turns will fail, possibly even if it gets smudged.
Chatting to priests should produce a menu of the things they offer in exchange for donating. The menu clearly shows how much gold is required for each donation, and indicates ones that are too expensive given how much gold you currently have. Selecting an option donates that minimum amount.
One reason for doing this is that it’s very difficult for an unspoiled player to learn that you can even buy protection from priests, much less the formula for how much gold should be donated. This would also enable adding in other variables beyond simple experience level, which is currently infeasible because it would make knowing the right amount to donate too complicated.
The cost of buying divine protection should increase the more you have abused your alignment.
If you overenchant Stormbringer and it vaporizes, it should turn into an actual storm: a region of clouds that shoots paralyzing lightning, the same way as the storms on the Plane of Air work.
Corpses in the Valley of the Dead, or at least corpses created in the Valley of the Dead, should be preserved indefinitely without rotting away. This could be implemented either by simply keeping them fresh and unaging, or they could get completely rotten and bad to eat, halting just before they would have rotted away completely.
Not specified if this would have an effect on wraith corpses from the Valley’s graveyards, which instantly rot away if they produce a “Blecch!” message.
New type of lamp, lava lamp, which only randomly generates in Gehennom.
Muzzle: a tool that can be applied to an adjacent hostile monster to attempt to muzzle it. Success depends on your Strength and Dexterity, and if you do muzzle the monster, any bite attacks it has are prevented from happening.
If you are turning into stone or slime while hallucinating, the status bar should replace “Stone” and “Slime” with random other substances that you believe you’re turning into.
If you die to Schroedinger’s Cat, there should be a 50% chance that you do not actually die.
Generating Orcish Town guarantees that there will be a priest of Moloch tending an altar on a level below.
Archeologists should get a combat bonus for discovering artifacts. Flavored as studying and learning from the artifact to determine how it does what it does, either identifying or merely touching an artifact grants them a permanent bonus in line with whatever the artifact does. For instance, studying Demonbane could grant an additional d6 of damage to demons throughout the rest of the game. The less useful an artifact is, the better its bonus could be, in order to make it so that at least one role is happy about finding them.
(Not all artifacts may have a special permanent effect for Archeologists; in particular, other roles’ quest artifacts and any sort of non-weapon artifacts probably shouldn’t.)
Remove the blessed scroll of genocide’s whole-class genocide ability. Make it instead do what the uncursed scroll currently does, where you name a species and it gets genocided. The uncursed scroll of genocide is now the one that prompts for a monster class, but instead of genociding the entire class, it genocides one random, genocidable species from that class.
Weapon and armor shops of a certain size should contain plastic statues of various humanoid monsters. Either the statues generate underneath the shop’s items (in order to avoid not reducing the amount of items in the shop), or they replace the shop’s normal stock, but only in sufficiently large shops.
New monster, enchanted snowman, based on Frosty the Snowman.
It is never randomly generated, but is instead supposed to be assembled by the player as an ally. Assembling it requires the following:
The exact mechanism or commands required to assemble it are not specified.
Once assembled, it has the following properties:
When you wish for an artifact that already exists and fail to get it, the game should either hint at or outright tell you the location where the artifact was generated so you can go track it down.
Do this by saving the X, Y, and Z coordinates at which the artifact was created when it gets generated. If the artifact happens to get uncreated, like as part of level generation, the saved coordinates should be reset, because the artifact is then able to be generated again.
A quest that is filled with Chinese lore and new monsters from Chinese folklore. Possibly a variant of an alignment quest, or a straightforward implementation of the Monk quest, or a Noble quest for a race which doesn’t already have an overridden alternative Noble quest.
Beholder corpses have a chance of conveying a Charisma increase accompanied, if you are hallucinating, by the message “Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.” Alternatively, do not have a message, but add this line as a comment in the source explaining why a beholder would grant Charisma.
In variants that implement shambling horrors: When playing in a graphical windowport, the tile for shambling horror should be randomly generated each game.
Ring of shooting stars (more or less a straightforward port of the ring of the same name from D&D): a chargeable ring which can be applied or invoked and then prompts for a direction. Once entered, a “shooting star” object (in the venom class?) flies in that direction, with no range limit, and explodes when it stops or hits the floor, possibly creating multiple explosions like the skilled fireball or cone of cold spell, and the ring loses a charge.
The damage type could be any of the following:
How the ring should work with negative charges is not well-defined. It should probably never generate with negative charges anyway, but options here include special-casing the ring so it can’t have negative charges, doing nothing while applied with negative charges, or consuming a negative charge, but with some bad effect like a large chance of exploding on the hero’s space.
This ring is a bit of an oddity in that it has no effect when worn. It probably should have to be worn in order to use it, which makes it more tactically interesting.
You can assign names to the locks on the magic chest to help remember which compartment is which. The interface for this works by attempting to call the magic chest on the floor, which prompts “What do you want to name the currently open lock of the magic chest?”
An artifact bag into which you can only put worthless glass. Invoking the bag either summons a shield with a damage-reduction buffer, or grants you temporary HP, equal to the number of pieces of worthless glass in the bag (which get used up).
Hitting a monster with a headbutt attack while wearing the War-helm of the Dreaming causes that monster to be put to sleep.
Since EvilHack has lava gremlins and regular “water” gremlins, it should also have earth gremlins and air gremlins. Earth gremlins steal intrinsics at night, can phase through rock and eat gold, and split when they eat gold. Air gremlins are permanently displaced, like displacer beasts, and steal intrinsics during the day (it’s not specified what would prompt them to split).
In variants which allow weapons and armor to be different sizes: giants can use a gigantic-sized sling to fire boulders.
The game should play sounds (if on a supported platform) or at least provide the hook for playing sounds in several scenarios: wielding a cockatrice corpse, experiencing a psychic blast from a mind flayer, and one that plays constantly at low HP which is supposed to be annoying.
Artifact saddle that, when equipped on a pet, causes the pet to share your intrinsics while you are riding, and halves the tameness penalty for dismounting the pet.
Redesign the locate level of the Priest quest by removing the single temple and huge wall of undead and instead doing it as smaller copies: a complex of buildings with graveyards blocking the entrance of each, and randomizing the temple. To prevent the player easily finding out with telepathy where the correct temple is, either scatter some more hostile priests of Moloch in the other buildings, or add other peaceful priests of Moloch who are not tending altars, just milling around in their buildings.
Make paranoid trap not a universal option, but tied to gear: certain “careful” pieces of gear such as elven boots passively warn you of known traps before you step into them.
Alternatively, add a ring of paranoia which enables the paranoid warnings for traps and liquids. Or simply add this functionality to the ring of warning.
A blessed ring of sustain ability will protect you from getting level drained, but only once. This could possibly be achieved by removing the blessing, so you could protect against another level drain by re-blessing the ring; or it could be implemented by setting a flag on the ring, so once a ring protects you, it can’t ever be used again; you would need a different ring to get the benefit again.
Knights should be given a tame ki-rin from their god when they get crowned. Possibly only if they have enhanced their riding skill; a knight who hasn’t enhanced it probably wants some other gift. Since ki-rin are lawful, a knight who has converted to some other alignment and is being crowned by a non-lawful god probably should not be granted one.
Artifact pair of scimitars (probably with slightly different names) that grant bonuses of some sort when used in two-weapon combat.
Valkyries should be able to guarantee Mjollnir auto-returns safely (with no chance of hitting you) either by being piously aligned or having maximum Luck.
Add an artifact spear of Odin that grants flying when wielded, and replaces Mjollnir as the first sacrifice gift for Valkyries. This is intended to give them a reason to use their starting spear and reduce the inevitability of Excalibur, while being flavorful towards both Odin with the spear, and towards Valkyries with their mythological power of flight.
Crystal plate mail should confer reflection if you wear it as the outermost layer of body armor, with no cloak.
Being sufficiently close to a shrieker when it shrieks, maybe directly adjacent or within a radius of 2, should make you temporarily deaf.
The game should follow the D&D rules of what happens when a bag of holding is placed inside another bag of holding, and send items that “vanish” to the Astral Plane, where they get placed randomly.
As a side effect, this change would create a weird way to send items to the Astral Plane without carrying them, but of course you wouldn’t be able to rely on them being in any particular spot.
Armor that becomes cursed should have its enchantment effectively reversed; e.g. a piece of armor will still be +3 but it will make armor class worse by 3 points instead of better. If the armor is negatively enchanted, it still makes armor class worse by that amount.
Elves can ride bareback, not needing a saddle to do it.
When you save the game you are given the opportunity to write a message which will be shown to you when you restore the game, to be used for reminding yourself of important things.
Holes and trapdoors should be made determinstic, by doing the following: Any time something uses a hole or trapdoor, seed a special RNG with the x, y, and z coordinates of the hole or trapdoor, and use it to generate the destination level. Store the RNG state with the migrating monster or object (or player), and use it again when that level is loaded to select a landing spot.
There should be a way to combine different colors of dragon scales or scale mail into new colors, according to color theory; i.e. red dragon scales plus yellow dragon scales equals orange dragon scales.
If a beam from a wand of opening (but not the spell of knock) hits a wall, it will open any doors within 2 squares of the wall spot it hit, including secret doors if there are any.
Ideas for a leprechaun race:
The Wizard of Yendor, in his first appearance, should generate with a cloak of magic resistance, so you must fight him at least once without being able to simply zap him with a wand of death. He would not have any elevated chance for the cloak in his subsequent appearances.
Add a “Light” on the status line that shows up when you have a lighted object in inventory, in order to help players who forget they are using up a light source when they don’t need it.
Items that get thoroughly eroded become unusable until they are repaired, with some message like “Your shield is so burnt that it can no longer stay on your arm. It falls to the ground.” or “Your sword is so thoroughly rusted that you can’t wield it.” This is intended as a better alternative to the system in several variants where items that erode 1 stage past thoroughly get destroyed entirely. An alternative implementation is that thoroughly eroded armor is still wearable but provides no AC benefit anymore, and thoroughly eroded weapons can still be wielded but do no damage, or minimal “improvised object” damage.
This probably requires a secondary change in providing an easier way to repair eroded gear than the existing confused enchant weapon/armor behavior, especially since you won’t be able to wear armor to get enchant armor scrolls to affect it.
Whenever you use a cursed key to unlock a container, there is a chance that another item in your inventory gets cursed.
Potionless conduct, which prohibits the hero from using or breaking a potion (i.e. quaffing them, dipping things into them, throwing them; also breaking them with a force bolt). Monsters throwing potions at you or breaking potions with force bolts do not break the conduct even if you breathe the vapors, which does mean there’s some possibility for abuse in putting a potion on the ground and giving a nearby intelligent monster a wand of striking, but the alternative is too strict.
Zapless conduct, which bans any zapping of wands and casting of spells, or more specifically anything in which you use the ‘z’ or ‘Z’ command and don’t immediately decline to select a wand or spell. Cursed wands exploding, selecting a directional or spell to zap then escaping out of the direction prompt (“The wand glows then fades” / “The magical energy is released”), or casting a forgotten spell to become confused all break the conduct. The feedback in #conduct is “You have never attempted to zap a wand or cast a spell.”
The intent of the conduct is to create a game without magic that can be used repeatedly or spammed. There is one important repeatable use of magic via wands that is not covered above: engraving with wands, which allows using all the charges in nondirectional wands and burning or carving Elbereth in the ground. In particular, banning wand engraving would mean a follower of the conduct cannot use wands of wishing. If the implementation of the game does not already have an Elberethless conduct, banning wand engraving could be a good addition to this conduct.
A containerless conduct, which prohibits you from applying containers in inventory and picking up containers not in inventory.
It does not prohibit merely having a container in inventory (which would make Rogues and Archeologists break the conduct immediately), nor does it prohibit looting containers you find in the dungeon. The point of the conduct is to play without being able to ever have more than 52 non-loadstone items at one time, protect your carried items from elemental or water damage, or get weight reduction from a bag of holding. Allowing looting of containers means that players don’t have to resort to bad workarounds for random chests such as locking and bashing them until they break apart.
Heroes that start with sacks still get a small benefit from them, in that they can choose where to place a container as an early stash and put items into it rather than leaving them in piles on the ground.
The feedback in #conduct is “You have never picked up nor applied a container.”
Eating a charged ray wand gives you the ability to breathe or shoot that kind of ray for a few turns. The UI for this would be either zapping “-“ or using #monster since no form that can eat wands currently has a defined #monster command.
Putting a disenchanter corpse into a bag of holding should make it explode.
New artifact with an invoke power of identification, which is interesting because it is useful in the early game and gets less important later on.
The base item type could be a blank spellbook or a scroll of identify (not a spellbook of identify, because then you just have the spell).
If implemented as a scroll, reading the scroll would either be special-cased not to disappear (possibly giving the same effect as invoking it, subject to the same invoke timeout), or it would give a powerful one-time identification effect such as a full inventory ID and then disappear.
In variants that implement object lookup: looking up an object should show that object’s relative probability within its own class.
Statistics that might be more useful to players, but harder to estimate, include the overall generation percentage for an object per level in each branch and per deathdrop, and whether or not monsters can generate carrying it. The overall percentages are tricky because object class distributions vary per branch, and it’s hard to estimate the amount of rooms in a level. Which items generate with monsters is less tricky but would need significant refactoring to avoid coupling the object lookup code to the monster generation code.
Statue traps should not depend on there being a statue on the same space as the trap. Instead, a statue trap should internally store a coordinate as its “launch point”, ideally a point within line of sight, and when the trap is triggered it will animate a statue at that coordinate, if one still exists. (Statue traps will still generate a statue upon creation, just at the launch point).
New type of potion “unstable potion”, which is a possible result from alchemy. After a certain timeout, it “stabilizes” into some other potion type. Not specified what happens if you drink it while it’s unstable.
In variants that have randomized alchemy recipes (rather than fixed, as is the case in vanilla): Randomly generated potions can sometimes be “labeled”, and labeled potions can be read. The label will say one of three things, albeit the text will be garbled like graffiti:
Labeled potions never stack with unlabeled potions, even if they are otherwise identical and would merge into one stack.
Water damage will always remove the label from a potion. Possibly there should be some way to non-damagingly get rid of the label, such as using the #rub command to rub your hands on the potion.
There are a couple possibilities for the internal implementation of the label:
A chest of holding, which has the same weight-reduction properties as a bag of holding has, except it’s a chest.
Since cartomancers can get mail daemons as pets from randomly dropped summon cards, but the mail daemon is a useless pet because it has no attacks, there should be a new monster either as a grown-up form or replacing mail daemons entirely, called a “postmaster”, which is a useful and capable pet.
There should be a role, possibly Priest for flavor, that starts out with a few candles as a light source instead of an oil lamp.
Add an office into Fort Ludios containing administrative staff - a captain of the vault guards, a secretary or treasurer who has a stash of money implied in some way to be derived from taxes on shopkeepers, and a nurse who is there to tend soldiers’ injuries.
Nonograms as an alternate puzzle branch or Sokoban replacement. This consists of a map area where items are to be placed, and burned engravings in the rows and columns to the top and left specifying the amounts of rocks to place in contiguous blobs in that row or column. There is a “stock” of some low-value item (probably rocks) that can be placed in the spots, but the puzzle will accept any item dropped on the floor.
Whenever an item is dropped or picked up from the floor, the game checks the presence or absence of an item on the floor in each square of the nonogram map, and considers the puzzle solved if the number of squares containing any amount of objects in each contiguous blob in each row and column matches its specifications.
The puzzles could be drawn from a set of stock specified puzzles, or completely randomized.
Ideas for a Sudoku puzzle system that could coexist with or replace Sokoban:
Since Barbarians are thematically supposed to be wary of magic use, they should get an alignment penalty whenever they use magic. This could just be for casting spells, or it could be made harder (but more relevant since Barbarians tend to do very little spellcasting anyway) by also assessing the penalty when using obviously magic items like wands or scrolls.
If you specify a wish that has 2 contradicting terms, “rustproof”/”fixed” etc alongside a specific object type that doesn’t suffer from erosion, there should be a chance that the wish parser resolves the contradiction by respecting the erodeproof part and not the object type part, so you end up getting an erodable but erodeproof object that wasn’t the type you asked for.
Potion of dragon breath: when quaffed, it enables you to use the breath attacks of a specific type of dragon without being polymorphed into that dragon, either for a limited time or for a limited amount of uses or both.
The potion can be crafted by dipping any type of dragon scales in a potion of acid, which destroys the scales and turns the potion into dragon breath. It could be randomly generated, or never generate and rely on the player to make it.
If you eat Ogresmasher, there is a 5% chance that you digest the magic of the artifact and raise your maximum (but not current) Constitution to 25.
If you a destroy a quest leader’s throne, there is a 1 in (Luck + 1) chance that they become angry, but they won’t expel you from the quest until you attack them.
If you zap locking or wizard lock at an open doorway containing a boulder, it rebuilds a wall in that space.
A “can of mortar” tool, which has charges and can be applied at a stack of rocks to construct a wall or boulder.
If you kick a wall (or stone terrain), there is a small chance that a rock comes loose from the wall and drops at your feet, or sometimes from the ceiling, in which case it hits you on the head.
A drum of earthquake also causes rocks to randomly be shaken loose from the ceiling in their radius of effect and hit any monster that happens to be on their square.
You should be able to create a sack from a crocodile corpse, similar to how you can turn it into a pair of low boots.
The priest of Moloch in the Valley of the Dead should always have a cloak of magic resistance, to guarantee that there is a source of magic resistance in the game even if the player is playing wishless.
Remove the ring of levitation from the game, because it trivializes too many interesting problems - crossing water and lava, fighting monsters that can drown with impunity, avoiding trap doors and holes, freely crossing the Planes of Air and Fire - for the fairly low “cost” of one ring slot. Other gear alternatives to the ring such as levitation boots and the amulet of flying occupy more valuable slots and therefore aren’t as big of an issue.
A few extra roles, such as valkyrie and barbarian, should start with Basic riding skill, even though they don’t start with a steed.
Gigantic monsters such as dragons cannot be crushed by a drawbridge. They will take a fair amount of damage, but it will destroy the drawbridge instead of them.
You can configure a “list for Santa” or “wishlist” in your configuration file which specifies which gifts you would like your god to give you, and they will try to respect this wish.
A negatively enchanted ring or cloak of protection reduces your magic cancellation by its enchantment amount rather than increasing it. Your magic cancellation stat is also allowed to go negative, rather than being floored at 0.
After you get the Amulet of Yendor, priests of Moloch turn hostile or always generate hostile. (This would mainly affect the one in the Valley of the Dead, and ones on Astral, since there are no peaceful priests in the Sanctum.)
In variants that implement shambling horrors: The attacks and special properties of shambling horrors in a game should be printed to that game’s dumplog (but not shown in the in-game disclosure).
If you die and are not life-saved, any nearby intelligent pets should be able to zap a wand of undead turning at you in the next few turns to resurrect you, with the message “But wait… You are revived by your faithful [pet]!”
Cursed scrolls of genocide should have a 50% chance of prompting for a monster class instead of a single species. If it does, the monsters that get reverse-genocided come from various species in that class.
It should be possible for Priests to start the game with a pantheon composed of a lawful, neutral, and chaotic player from the high score list.
Make the game aware of when there is a solar or lunar eclipse happening (either anywhere on Earth, or specifically where the game is being played or where the server running the game is located). During this time, monsters that ordinarily are restricted to spawn in Gehennom can spawn outside it.
There should be shops that generate in Gehennom; they have amazing items, but only take payment in gems, with better gems buying better items. There are a couple issues to resolve, though: first, the shopkeeper has to be buffed enough that you can’t just kill them; and second, by Gehennom most randomly generatable items aren’t super useful to the average player.
One way to address the first issue could have these not appear as a traditional shop, but as some sort of wandering peaceful demon species (or randomly peaceful members of existing demon species), each of who offers a single item in exchange for a set list of gems. When paid, they summon the item out of a globe of darkness, so they can’t be killed to get it for free. If you decline the offer, they will turn hostile.
The second issue could be addressed by any of the following methods:
Wearing white dragon scale armor prevents corpses in your inventory from rotting, which enables you to wield a cockatrice corpse indefinitely.
Skeletons should only have partial stoning resistance. If they would become petrified, their bones do petrify, which leaves them still mobile but slowed down, and unable to be cured by speed monster. (This does raise the question of what happens if you cast stone to flesh at the petrified skeleton - does it create a “meat skeleton” or just restore its ordinary bones?)
The messages “You feel less concerned about becoming petrified” and “You no longer feel secure from petrification” should be tweaked, since they don’t really read stylistically like other NetHack messages.
New object, a fishing rod. It can be applied to adjacent water squares to possibly catch piranhas or snag small items from the bottom of the water.
You can apply a shackle to a monster’s corpse. In most cases this does nothing, but if the corpse happens to get revived before it rots away, it will still be shackled.
Slumber hulks should have a small chance of dropping a blindfold upon death.
Kicking a tree should sometimes knock off dead branches (represented in-game as a few clubs). It should be implemented as a third type of tree looting, with its own looted flag, making it non-repeatable on the same tree.
Werebane slows or stops the HP regeneration of monsters it hits. (Most monsters regenerate HP pretty slowly, but it could be nice on ones that regenerate 1 HP per turn.)
If a monster is decapitated by Vorpal Blade and you are not deaf but can’t see the monster for whatever reason (whether or not you were the one wielding it, or it happened out of your sight elsewhere on the level), you should get the message “You hear a snicker-snack!” or just “Snicker-snack!”
Any animal with “rabid” in its name should stay away from water (even things like fountains).
When a monster drinks a cursed potion of invisibility and you feel aggravated at it, you should additionally gain detection of that specific monster for some time (or just permanently, since monster invisibility doesn’t wear off).
Wearing boots with the description “riding boots” or gloves with the description “riding gloves” should have a minor beneficial effect related to riding, though what effect this could be is unspecified.
Tortles should regenerate more quickly when in water.
There is some special message or behavior or feeling you get from your god to convey “I can give you no more artifacts” after you receive your first non-artifact gift and there are no artifacts left that they can give you. This saves you from altar farming indefinitely and waiting for a gift that will never come because it already randomly generated somewhere. (Granted, exhausting the artifact gift pool means you have already done quite a lot of altar farming already.)
In variants with partial resistances: crowning confers only up to 50% for all the resistances it grants, to prevent it from making the resistance-acquiring metagame obsolete.
There should be some additional types of wolves (white wolf, black wolf, giant wolf, direwolf, maned wolf, etc) added to flesh out the canine monster class, mainly because in Druid games so many regular wolves will generate that they go extinct and random monsters start generating instead, which hurts the flavor of places in the game designed for wolves.
A new “insult” attack type, which is sort of like Vicious Mockery in D&D: it deals psychic damage, but you have a chance of resisting or reducing its damage based on your Charisma.
Wielding Giantslayer should enable you to pick up and throw boulders like giants can.
The Staff of Aesculapius’s base type should be changed to a staff of healing. Ironically, this would mostly affect non-healers using it, since healers already get expert in healing spells, but it’s more flavorful to be this rather than a quarterstaff.
The healing invoke effect from the Staff of Aesculapius should be made into a directional beam, so you can heal your pets with it. Directing it at yourself would produce the same effects it currently has.
Dragon egg alchemy: Dipping dragon eggs in potions causes them to turn into the potion of the closest color to the dragon’s color.
Every time a forge blesses a metallic item dipped in it, it should have a small chance of drying up afterwards. Currently this is infinitely repeatable to bless any quantity of metal items since it has no chance of drying up afterwards.
Add a “magic forge” which is like a magic fountain but with forges. It can generate wherever forges generate randomly. Dipping a nonartifact metal weapon in it always grants it 1 random object property, and then the forge either becomes nonmagic or disappears.
Convicts should have a 10% chance of starting the game wearing walking shoes, as a reference to The Shawshank Redemption.
Gods should use a wider array of solutions to fixing troubles. For instance, a god might give you a pile of corpses or food items that respect conducts you have kept rather than magically filling your stomach.
An ideal implementation would respect the gods’ personalities - e.g. if you’re low on HP and facing a lot of monsters, a “war god” could blast everything near you (but not you) with wide angle disintegration beams, while a “peace god” might pacify everything near you.
Add a monster spell that makes a nearby other monster berserk. The behavior for a berserking monster is unspecified, but presumably involves it attacking anyone (besides the caster?), or attacking the player, with no regard to whether it was previously peaceful or tame and no concern for its own health.
If you are at low HP and transformed due to lycanthropy, praying to your god should fix the lycanthropy rather than fixing the low HP, which is nearly useless since it’s polyform HP. If they decide to fix multiple troubles, and your regular form is then at low HP, they should consider that as another trouble to fix.
Monsters that can phase should be able to escape bear traps without resistance. If they are solid like xorns, they should still take damage, but they should logically be able to just phase out of the trap.
Occasionally, large groups of monsters with a mutual grudge, such as orcs and elves, should spawn on the same level near each other so that the hero might walk in on a skirmish.
The Priest forbiddance on using edged weapons should not apply if the weapons are negatively enchanted, because the edges of those are dull.
When a mimic generates on a dungeon feature, they currently choose a random feature to mimic. They should instead always choose the feature on their square.
Jar of honey. This would be either a food item or a potion, and can be applied to smear it on yourself or on your armor like grease. You can also remove it like grease, unless the jar was cursed.
While you are honeyed, monsters generate more frequently, and bees and bears are especially likely to generate. It might also automatically steal noncursed weapons you are hit with in melee, flavored as them getting stuck in the honey.
Since the encyclopedia entry on psuedodragons says they change color to blend in with their surroundings, they should do this in the game too: whatever color the walls of the branch are, psuedodragons should be that color.
Unicorns should be able to attack you from a knight’s move away without moving from their spot, to make them more tactically challenging to face.
When something has debuffed you to be vulnerable to a certain type of elemental damage, you should be able to eat a corpse or tin of a monster that conveys resistance to that type of elemental damage to cancel out the debuff.
Some priests, not all, should be able to speak sign language so you can purchase protection from them even if you are playing the game permadeaf.
When your god decides to gift a non-artifact, they should actively avoid gifting any object type the player is already carrying in their inventory or, even more in depth, in any containers in their inventory. Though this raises the possibility of abuse (carrying lots of different candidate gear to make the god pick something else) and the possibility that a player will be sacrificing and hoping to get a certain thing, not remembering that they do already have one of that so they will never get gifted it.
In variants where gods give non-artifact gifts for sacrifices: There should be some sort of scale, or defined thresholds, of the various object properties, materials, and minimum enchantments available from a non-artifact gift. The idea is that having them be completely random is too swingy and incentivizes early altar farming (if you can get an amazing property/material/both off a newt sacrifice as easily as a minotaur, why not just sacrifice all the newts you can?) and allows for possibly early-game-breaking gifts.
It’s not specified what exactly the scale should be based on - your own experience level, the monster difficulty of the sacrifice, the level difficulty or depth of the altar, or something else.
Shops should pay more for older objects than new ones, using the existing age field on the object. Items from bones files would have the previous game’s age added to their age in the current game and therefore would be highly valuable relics.
Extend the weapon wielding system to have a third slot for “alternate weapon, not wielded” when already twoweaponing, and provide a way to switch between the two sets. This would allow you to keep a launcher ready and switch to and from it with minimal friction.
Gently discourage Rangers from heavily using daggers by limiting them to Basic skill in dagger.
If you are attempting to ascend on the altar of a god to whom you permanently converted alignment, you sense a conflict between that god and your original god. There is a 1/3 chance that the original god prevails; in this case you feel their power increase and their voice booms: “You were destined from birth to deliver the amulet to me!” This forcibly converts you (but not the high altar) back to your original alignment. You retain the Amulet of Yendor, and now must make your way to your original god’s altar in order to ascend properly.
Draugr (and any undead playable race) should deal double damage at midnight.
A new object that creates a magic chest on any ordinary floor square you want. Proposed as a seed that you plant in the ground, which grows into the chest and whose roots are implied to stretch to the other magic chests.
If you get crowned while wielding a saddle or while mounted, your god should unrestrict riding skill.
After an milestone that is achieved around early Gehennom, such as killing Cerberus, your god will no longer give you mundane items as sacrifice gifts if there are artifacts available for them to give you.
Items sucked up from the floor into an antimatter vortex (or given to them by #loot, if the vortex is tame) should be disintegrated, rather than held in the vortex’s inventory.
Portable black hole, a type of bag that automatically destroys any item put into it (except unique items, which “cannot be confined in such trappings” like any other container). The intended use is dungeon cleanup - getting rid of altar farming junk, corpses that will auto-revive, and keeping weapons off the floor that the player doesn’t want to use but doesn’t want monsters to get either.
There should be a penalty for reading scrolls with an Intelligence score of less than 8, probably in the form of messing up the reading and getting some undesirable chaotic effect, or possibly just blowing up the scroll and dealing damage.
Charges have physical weight in wands. Not a huge amount, perhaps only 2 aum per charge, but enough to make a difference in carrying around tons of loaded wands.
If you have a melee combat buff that causes a visual effect, such as from a
confuse monster effect (or other ones in variants, such as the burning hands
spell) it should be readily visible in either the #seeweapon ()) command if
you are non-blind as e.g. “a - a dagger (weapon in hand). Your hands are glowing
red.” or in the #attributes (ctrl-x) command as e.g. “You are able to confuse
monsters that you hit.”, or both. Possibly, if implementing both, the effect
should not be provided in #attributes, but only in feedback from enlightenment.
An identification-less conduct - you are prohibited from identifying any items. There are three possible implementations of this, in ascending order of strictness:
There should be more types of skeletal monsters in the game beyond the one-level-wonder ordinary skeletons (and technically liches). Particularly, there should be skeleton dragons, whose scale mail makes you inediate (not just slow digesting).
More types of skeletons appearing in more places would also allow for a “bone” item to be dropped, which various interesting things could be done with.
A draugr Infidel should have their starting fire horn replaced with a frost horn, since they’re undead.
Scrolls of magic detection should work on the contents of a magic chest, if you read the scroll while there is a magic chest on the level. This would treat magic chests the same as in other containers rather than as a weird exception.
The Mitre of Holiness should, when worn, passively provide a damage bonus against undead and demons you attack.
Draugr should be shown either in #conduct or in #attributes how many times they have resurrected after being killed.
Draugrs should be able to bite trees to turn them into dead trees.
In variants with both menuglyphs and object materials, the glyph shown in the menu should match the object’s material.
This could be done relatively easily with a hacky solution in ASCII windowports, but a proper implementation for tiles-based windowports would be challenging since it amounts to adding new tiles for every object-material combination.
If you use Ogresmasher as your hammer at a forge, the resulting forged object should have a small chance of being imbued with an object property.
Draugr should be able to scare non-undead monsters by chatting to them.
A player turned into a zombie permanently via dying to one and continuing their game as a zombie can no longer cast spells. (A player temporarily polymorphed into a zombie retains their mind and can still cast spells.)
Monks should start the game knowing the burning hands spell instead of confuse monster, as they’re both melee-focused enchantment spells, but burning hands lets them situationally increase their direct damage rather than indirectly debuffing the opponents.
Draugr should have a chance of failing to revive on graveyard levels.
Since giants cannot wear chromatic dragon scales, it should be possible to combine 3 sets of each dragon’s colored scales into a giant-sized chromatic dragon scale cloak.
Remove centaurs’ ability to wear body armor, but allow them to wear barding instead.
Every time you genocide something, all shambling horrors gain another new ability.
A new spell called “forceful palms” that grants you a temporary buff. This buff increases the damage of your unarmed attacks, and either increases the chances of or guarantees the monster you hit will be knocked back.
Monsters that spellcast should get assigned (or deterministically hashed based on their monster ID) a randomized spell list when they’re created, and are capable of casting only the spells from that list. It would add diversity to spellcasters of the same monster type.
Wizards should have be restricted in all weapons. To compensate, Magicbane should have its base type changed to a wand, and its specialty should be that it has a random wand effect when zapped, with infinite charges.
Drow get more nutrition when eating fungi and mold, since they come from a culture which has spent generations cultivating them underground.
The interface for interacting with containers should replace ‘A’ as the key for “insert all” with a harder-to-hit key such as “`”, because most bag of holding explosions come from fatfingering “A” instead of “a”.
The spell of light has an advanced form that makes you a light source for some temporary length of time, flavored as summoning an incorporeal globe of light that follows you around.
Reading a scroll of scare monster teaches you about Elbereth.
Drow knights should start with a baby cave lizard, which they can ride.
One of the dragon armors should confer energy regeneration as its primary or secondary extrinsic. The problem is there aren’t any obvious candidates which would be appropriately flavorful, other than gray dragon armor, and that is unsuitable because it would be overpowered.
Replace monsters’ “ice bolt” spell with a spell of freezing and/or flaming sphere. The intention of this is to make it more tactical to fight early-game spellcasters who currently cast ice bolt.
There should be a method of fixing the speed of pets which have been permanently slowed and which have a high monster magic resistance. Either the wand of speed monster should ignore monster MR on tame monsters, or it should be possible to break a potion of speed on the pet to remove the slowness.
Change Sunsword to Sunshield, a shield of light (or shield of reflection in variants that lack a shield of light) which does not impede spellcasting when worn.
When you push a boulder onto a polymorph trap, it should get polymorphed into a statue or, possibly, another boulder.
Various proposals for things to happen on St. Patrick’s Day:
Quaffing a potion of unholy water as an Infidel should cure any deathly illness you are suffering, as an inverse of how quaffing holy water works for everyone else.
To make them more accurate to D&D lore, all beholders should grudge all other beholders.
If you are wielding Dragonbane, dragons should not like eating it. So they should either not try to eat you at all, or regurgitate you after eating you as if you were wearing slow digestion.
It should be possible to forge spell staves, possibly by combining a quarterstaff with multiple spellbooks of the appropriate school. The only problem is this is not very flavorful with a red-hot forge, which might suggest that there should be some alternate crafting method that can be used to create them.
Hobbits should get a bonus for remaining barefoot (or alternatively, should get a penalty for wearing boots).
A new game mode or role that allows the player to play as the Wizard of Yendor. The goal of the game is not to get the Amulet of Yendor, but to get down into Gehennom, find the Book of the Dead, and establish themselves in the Wizard’s Tower.
There should be a “black glow” message for when items get cursed by a fountain (either by quaffing or dipping).
If you are a chaotic Knight, Excalibur should evade your grasp, being impossible to pick up as if it were a crossaligned quest artifact.
(Additional rule for EvilHack: Dirge should evade the grasp of lawful knights.)
If you cast flame sphere or freeze sphere, and there is already a tame sphere on the level that you summoned with the spell, the first one should explode. This would allow you to get them to “attack” monsters that they currently won’t attack.
Infidels are the opposite of priests, so they should only be allowed to use edged weapons and be banned from using just-piercing or blunt weapons, as an inverse of priests’ weapon restrictions.
An artifact magic whistle that can find your pets on any levels they have wandered to and summon them to your side, the same as a regular magic whistle can do for any pets on your level.
Allow a random set of player monsters to not know about blowing up bags of holding. Ones that do know about it will avoid storing items in a bag of holding they’re carrying that would blow it up; ones that don’t will store anything, and may blow up the bag if they insert a dangerous item.
Modify iron balls so that they become a viable weapon to use. This means they need to be enchantable, much lighter than now (possibly the two can be combined and enchanting makes them lighter without reducing the ball’s damage), and still attached to the chain while the other end is not attached to the hero’s leg.
Dramborleg and Ashmar should have an invoke effect that only dwarves can use, or alternatively should synergize and give a buff when both wielded by a dwarf.
Zombies should be able to pick up and put on mummy wrappings they find on the ground, which instantly turns them into their corresponding mummy.
A new branch, probably in Gehennom, consisting of an underground mind flayer city. There are some neothelids attacking the city and mind flayers are trying to kill them, but everyone involved still wants to eat the player’s brain.
Genociding a type of dragon destroys all dragon scales and dragon scale mail (or dragon-scaled armor in certain variants) that exist in the game, and makes them impossible to wish for in the future.
Limit over-genociding in some way. The exact mechanism is unspecified, but the general idea is the more things you genocide, it either becomes harder (i.e. genocides may randomly fail) or each additional species genocided carries an increasing penalty of some sort.
If you have 25 Charisma, you become capable of declining Graz’zt’s attempts at seducing you.
If Kathryn the Ice Queen misses with a spell or fails to cast a spell, she should pout or stamp her foot (or something else appropriately childish) rather than cursing.
Certain races should be able to forge using materials other races can’t:
Add a second Quest portal to a random quest that is not your own role somewhere in the dungeon. The other role’s quest leader and guardians are hostile. You can kill their nemesis but under existing rules, will only be able to pick up the foreign quest artifact if coaligned - which might mean you have an incentive to convert your alignment.
A special case may be needed so that the Rogue and Tourist quests cannot appear in the same game, which would mean it tries to create the Master of Thieves twice.
It should be possible to combine chromatic dragon scales with a shield of reflection at a forge to make a “chromatic shield” which provides the same benefits but in shield form. This is so tortles who get chromatic scales can get some use out of them.
Orcish Town should have a peaceful orcish priest of Moloch in its temple, to make it less of a bad level. Depending on perspective, this could be at odds with the inital reason for adding Orcish Town, which was to make the protection racket an unreliable strategy, but since it would be very hard to get to the orcish priest successfully it might not be.
Archeologist player monsters have a chance of starting with some gems in their inventory, like giants.
An optional one-level side branch in Gehennom whose reward is a guaranteed magic marker.
An auction special level, where players can go to sell items like magic lamps and artifacts that are considered too powerful to go in the swap chest. Over the next 24 or 48 hours, the item is up for auction and then goes to the highest bidder. Bids start at 20,000 zorkmids and the minimum increase is 500.
Alternatively, this could be on a very short time limit of 30 minutes to an hour, which would prevent people from having to park their games for days but would probably result in a lot of stuff being auctioned off cheaply.
Make it impossible for worthless glass to generate in the Castle gem storeroom. Additionally, 10% of the time, have the storeroom generate entirely random gray stones, and 10% of the time that happens (overall 1%), the gray stones are all of the same type.
Death reasons should better format the “while” reason to always refer to the specific monster, possibly with a pronoun if relevant. I.e. “killed by a priest of Blind Io, while paralyzed by him” instead of the generic “paralyzed by a monster”.
Wearing a dwarvish cloak protects a worn helm from eroding, since the cloak is hooded.
Add a selfie-related hallucinatory YAFM for taking a picture of yourself with an expensive camera, like “#DungeonLife!” or “#HackerStyle!” Of course, you still get blinded.
Bags of holding can be charged, increasing their weight savings.
An uncharged bag of tricks can be used as a sack, as in UnNetHack, but every so often (every few hundred turns or so) it has a 10% chance of consuming some organic items inside it and generating a monster with difficulty equal to or around the number of items consumed.
New artifact dagger that, when thrown, teleports you to wherever it lands. Some attributes it might have:
A new game mode in which you can play Astral in other players’ shoes. This could be accomplished by having the game back up an extra copy of its save file when you first enter the Astral Plane, which is then available for any other player to load as if it were theirs. Obviously, this would be a non-scoring mode.
The spell of create familiar should summon more powerful monsters when cast at higher skill; since it’s a clerical spell, the monsters could be drawn from the list of minions your god is capable of summoning.
Unicorns’ headbutt attack is presumably hitting you with its horn, so it should apply the regular effects of a unicorn horn.
Rogues should have exclusive access to an “assassin” combat skill: putting points in this skill makes poisoned weapons deal more damage and poison their targets more frequently.
Rogues should get bonus AC, using some formula that scales with increasing Dexterity and XL.
When you are expelled from the Samurai quest for failing the alignment test enough times, Lord Sato tells you you should go become a monk. That should happen literally - once you are kicked out of the level, your role changes to Monk and your quest is replaced with the Monk quest.
You can quiver a wand; firing with the “f” command will then zap your quivered wand instead of throwing the wand.
Make it possible for flame and ice mages to have complete resistance to their opposite element, but only via their quest artifact.
Elder minotaurs can create earthquakes.
Searching (whether manually requested via the “s” command or automatic from the intrinsic) should automatically search any chests or large boxes on your current square for traps in addition to searching the 8 squares around you.
Corridor generation should sometimes prioritize connecting a room to an existing corridor which connects two other rooms, instead of always having to terminate at a room and ignoring corridors that already exist. This would reduce or eliminate “wide corridors” in dungeon levels formed by two nearly parallel corridors generating on top of each other, and promote more interesting level shapes where corridors have neat 3 or 4-way intersections.
All bane-type artifacts which don’t already give warning of the monster type they are a bane of, should give warning of those monsters.
Werebane confers extrinsic protection from shape changers when wielded.
Guarantee a pick-axe or dwarvish mattock to be either generated on one of the Mines levels above Minetown, or in a shop in Minetown (though part of the motivation for this idea was guaranteeing a way to get into Orcish Town, and a pick spawning inside that town doesn’t really help much, so maybe it can spawn near the upstairs.)
Address the infinite reproducibility of holy water by making it so that dipping uncursed water in holy water produces “diluted holy water” - the water isn’t what’s diluted, but the holiness is. Potions of diluted holy water are still good for blessing other items (or possibly, a tougher approach in which they sometimes bless an item and sometimes do nothing), but can never be used to bless more uncursed water.
It would also of course be possible to get diluted unholy water, with the same behaviors.
Add a themed room that contains an engraving explaining a random one of the game’s predefined alchemy recipes, and possibly one of the potion ingredients. The idea of this is to provide unspoiled players (or spoiled players who are out of date on alchemy changes) with an in-game means of learning the recipes.
Having an angry god should make monsters of higher difficulty generate, so that you aren’t stuck delving deeper into the dungeon in the hopes of finding an altar where sufficiently strong monsters to pacify the god will generate.
If you try to teleport or kick the swap chest too many times, it changes from an object to a hostile monster (a green m) that is super strong, but if you somehow manage to kill it, it drops 2 random items that were inside the swap chest.
Free action should prevent monsters from grabbing or sticking to you.
When you disarm an arrow trap, it may produce a crossbow or normal bow in addition to the unspent arrows.
Cursed fortune cookies will occasionally be “misfortune cookies”, which draw on a unique (probably small) set of sinister messages. Breaking them (whether to eat or just to read) subtracts 1 Luck.
If alignment abuse is tracked and a relevant stat separate from alignment record, the blessed scroll of punishment should give you an indication of how badly abused your alignment is, in the form of an adjective inserted into the “You feel guilty” message.
When you genocide something, you receive a -1 alignment penalty for every peaceful monster that got killed in the process (i.e. when genociding the h class and wiping out a lot of peaceful dwarves).
Snakes (the specific monster, not the class in general) should not be poisonous to eat, since most snakes in real life are venomous, not poisonous.
Archeologists see value indicators on weapons and armor that are not fully identified to get a vague idea of what they are. Examples given are “an extraordinary [weapon]” for a +4 weapon or “an average [weapon]” for a +0 weapon. At higher experience levels they may be able to identify the exact enchantment automatically. This is flavored as appraising the age and quality of antiques.
A slightly different implementation may make it non-guaranteed to see this, with the odds dependent partly on experience level but also on intelligence and luck.
A third proposal is that it doesn’t happen automatically, but they can get this indicator or identify the enchantment of a weapon by rubbing their touchstone on it.
The occasional stun from a shield bash should work like a joust - it leaves monsters impaired or paralyzed enough to be unable to cast spells.
Dragons should still cast spells at you and use their roars after they have eaten you. They could also digest you with their own elemental damage type rather than ordinary digestion.
It should be impossible to polymorph any unique monster; there are too many of them that can be trivially cheesed by turning them into something weaker.
Add ice skates, which provide double movement speed and prevent fumbling while traveling across ice tiles. You can also wield them as a slashing weapon.
If you zap a cursed wand and it backfires, zapping you, the death is currently given as “zapped him/herself with a wand”. This should be changed to “killed by a wand backfire” to indicate it wasn’t deliberate.
Randomly spawned bear traps should have a random level of rust applied (which can be no rust). This rust should be present in messages and affect the rustiness of the beartrap item if you untrap it, but should not have any effect on its damage.
Genetic engineers either generate with a potion of polymorph, or have a chance of dropping one when killed. If they generate with it, monster AI should be changed so monsters are capable of throwing polymorph potions at the player, and possibly so that genetic engineers always throw it rather than drinking it.
Add getting crowned by your god as a possible effect for thrones.
Tourists may receive stacks of darts as a weapon gift from their god.
Dichotomy, as its name suggests, has a small chance of bisecting creatures it hits.
Ancient dragons, if ever implemented, should have gaze and roar attacks. These were not fully enumerated, but shimmering dragons should have a stunning gaze, gold should have a blinding gaze, etc.
The roar attacks both add some much needed use to the AT_SCRE attack type and prevent you from overcoming the ancient dragons’ additional threat over regular dragons with a simple blindfold.
Gold and shadow dragons should have a passive blinding attack, because they currently have none and are safe to attack in melee. Gold dragons’ passive could be flavored as a flash of light which hurts drow and gremlins, but this might be annoying for anyone with a pet gold dragon and getting blinded all the time as it fights monsters.
Carrying a bag made of leather rather than cloth should increase Charisma by 1 (not stackable with other leather bags), since it’s a fancy and nice-looking bag.
The spells of healing and extra healing are not useful past the mid-game, so make them heal more HP if you cast them at skill levels beyond Basic.
Golems will either pick up or consume objects made of their material.
If you are Satiated, your body is so bloated that you can’t be engulfed.
Some bosses (nemeses, demon lords, etc - but not all of them) should be able to cause an earthquake if they’ve been on the same level as you for a while but have not been able to attack you, presuming that you have a boulder fort that the earthquake can help remove.
Allow dragons (possibly/especially baby dragons) to hide under piles of gold, but only gold, and possibly only of a certain quantity - an adult dragon hiding under 2 gold pieces doesn’t make much sense.
A themed room that is a dragon’s hoard: a big pile of money and gems (and possibly a couple chests) spanning multiple spaces with a single sleeping (or waiting) dragon on top of it all.
Healers start the game knowing the identity of the potion of sickness.
Force-fighting a monster always suppresses any sort of extra attacks you would get (whether from polyform, monk kick attacks, etc), and results in a simple melee attack with your arms or arm-equivalents. This is intended to provide a simple way to fight cockatrices and other dangerous monsters while giving the player responsibility over it: they are not coddled with auto-suppressing of dangerous attacks, but also aren’t required to find some alternate way to fight such monsters. It also resolves the flavor problem of why the hero can’t simply decide not to eat the cockatrice’s brain.
This does not define what force-fighting should do if you are in a form that lacks any claw or weapon attacks.
When a shimmering dragon’s stun breath is reflected, you become confused.
Spiked pits should sometimes have spikes made of other materials besides iron, such as silver (to affect silver haters), glass (for higher damage), and copper.
Beholder and magical eye corpses should give, or have a chance of giving, +1 to Intelligence when consumed.
The game should track how many monsters you sacrificed and disclose it when the game ends. The intention here is to have an indicator for games that used heavy altar farming.
Newly spawned shambling horrors gain a number of extra abilities based on how many shambling horrors have already been killed in the game.
If you are polymorphed into a troll and then killed, the game immediately checks the random chance of whether you will automatically revive. If you would not, you simply return to your normal form (or die if you’re wearing unchanging). If you would, you lie dead for a little while until you do revive. This could work via the mechanism that lets you mimic a pile of gold, except you are mimicking a troll corpse instead. If a monster disturbs your corpse prior to your revival, you “die” - for real if you had unchanging, or returning you to your normal form if not.
Tortles should be allowed to wear rigid external armor pieces: gloves, hats, and boots. Wearing any will either prevent them from retreating into their shell, or will fall off if they try to. (Possibly both - if the ordinary behavior is for them to fall off, a cursed piece of armor would presumably prevent them from retreating into the shell.)
Kandra race, based on the Mistborn books: a shapeless or shapeshifting invertebrate that can eat and imitate creatures with skeletons by “wearing” their bones. Would have the following properties:
A “slotlocks” option, taking a string which specifies the inventory letter slots you really do not want newly-acquired items to go into, such as the ones you usually reserve for key pieces of gear.
As an example, if you have OPTIONS=slotlocks:aGHsdy, no inventory items will
be placed on any of those letters until they are the only remaining open slots.
Once that happens, the first open slot in the string, “a”, will be filled,
unless you already put something in that slot, in which case “G” will be
attempted, and so on.
Adjusting items to different slots is not affected by slotlocks since it’s presumed you are deliberately putting an item in that slot.
Special armor that some role starts with, either magical or very good stats-wise, but once you remove it either suffers serious damage and requires requires resource-expensive repair to put back on, or simply disintegrates. The flavor would probably be something like spiritual armor gifted to you by your god. The armor would have to be not so good that one would never want to take it off; decent mundane early-game armor would be a general improvement over it, perhaps suggesting that the special armor should be magical in a very situationally useful way.
Inspired by a bug in which a giant character could start wearing body armor, which was too small for them and which, being a giant, they could never put back on once taken off.
Aligned priests that have cursed gear can cast remove curse on themselves to get rid of the curse. It would be one of their clerical spells that can be cast when idle, such as healing. Possibly only if they have a spellbook of remove curse in their inventory.
Intrinsic teleportitis gained from eating corpses is temporary if you don’t already have it. Eating additional corpses while having the temporary intrinsic has a chance (less than 100%) of providing the intrinsic permanently.
Eating a ring of teleportation should probably be unchanged: if you digest the magic in the ring, you always get the permanent intrinsic.
Replace the amulet in the portal-less fake Wizard’s Tower with a magic marker.
If you manage to avoid dying by sinking in lava by freezing it solid, you are stuck to the spot for a few turns and when you escape, you leave your boots behind (probably either destroyed, since they cannot be recovered from the solid stone, or buried, and recoverable by digging a pit on the spot).
The game doesn’t adequately signal that sinking in lava while fire resistant will become fatal given time. There are a few possible solutions depending on how much the model of “dissolved in molten lava” is changed:
Themed room named “Home Sweet Home” - one that a former adventurer has retired in and made their own. There is a peaceful player monster inside, and some trappings of home life such as a sink, a chest, food, and so on. If beds as a dungeon feature exist, there is also one of these.
Add a themed room commemorating the long-lived tactic of pudding farming. It has the following properties:
Bones are only loaded when the experience level (or highest experience level reached) of the dead player is less than or equal to the current player’s experience level.
You can tip a potion of levitation onto the ground, which in addition to its normal vapor effects, causes any objects buried there to float to the surface.
Not specified on if this would have an effect when over a liquid; perhaps the items would temporarily float to the surface and immediately sink back down.
A sort of marker that has non-water-soluble ink, and produces books and scrolls that are immune to blanking in water.
If you are in a form that has a headbutt attack and are wearing a helmet, the helmet’s enchantment should be added to your to-hit and damage calculations.
Clockwork dwarves you encounter should occasionally drop their own form of “booze” (i.e. oil) instead of regular booze.
A cloak which, if worn by a light-emitting monster, blocks them from emitting light. Also applies to the player if they are carrying a light source or polymorphed into a light-emitting monster.
New role based on a “loup du noir” archetype, possibly called the Lycanthrope - you start with a pelt, a new sort of cloak-slot armor that polymorphs you into a specific type of monster when you wear it. You also are inflicted with some sort of delayed lycanthropy - you won’t randomly polymorph into a monster like with standard lycanthropy, but after not using a pelt for a while, you do start feeling the urge to put one on, and if you still refuse, you are eventually compelled to put one on. (It isn’t specified what happens if you get rid of your pelt(s) by the time you would be compelled to wear one; possibly you just die from insanity, or else the addiction is implemented in some other way like continuous worsening HP damage.)
The form you get from wearing a pelt has some boosted stats from the base form - in particular, your carrying capacity and damage would be better than the stat blocks for the monsters suggest.
You could start with either a “default” pelt which is not very good, but can be turned into an ideal one later, or start with a specific animal’s pelt, which you can control with the pettype option. This role never starts with a pet.
Pelts might also work as a standalone concept or one that works with a druid, ranger, or caveman role, or a hypothetical new shaman role:
Artifact helm of telepathy, neutral aligned, that either enhances or blocks telepathy level-wide based on whether you have it from some source other than the helm (or alternatively, it’s not a helm of telepathy, and just bases things on whether you are telepathic), and grants a Charisma-based bonus to your armor class.
If you do have telepathy, all other monsters get telepathy too and you can sense them, and they will be affected by telepathy-targeting effects, including yours if you have any psionic abilities.
If you don’t have telepathy, all other monsters will be treated as if they are not telepathic, even if they are; they will also be blocked from using any mind blasts or other psychic powers.
Rework figurines to behave sort of like dNetHack crystal skulls. Applying them summons a tame monster of the figurine’s type, but produces a message “You call forth the spirit in the figurine”. The figurine does not get used up, and remains linked to the monster; reapplying it while the monster exists will recall it; it can then be resummoned again right away. If it dies while summoned, the figurine cracks and becomes unusable. Possibly there is some way to restore it, such as dipping it in a potion of restore ability.
In order to avoid tricky cases such as the summoned monster dying when the figurine is not on the current level, it might automatically unsummon the monster when the figurine and the monster stop being on the same level.
A new object either inspired by, or literally, a Pokeball. It allows you to “pick up” pets by putting them into the ball (probably not along with any items), carry them around, and re-release them at a later point.
On Easter, eggs appear in various bright colors instead of plain white.
Certain monsters with heavy tails (possibly defined as all slithy monsters, but there could be non-slithy monsters as well) can use tail slam attacks. This could be implemented as a new attack type, but more likely should just be implemented with the regular AT_KICK attack with the messages changed to reflect the tail doing it.
You can use a wielded saber to parry attacks from other monsters made with bladed weapons. There are a few proposals for how this would work:
If a pet attempts to attack a monster a certain amount of times and misses every time, it will give up and stop trying to attack that specific monster.
A new role (or possibly just a new mechanic attached to something like Infidel) flavored on being a cultist. The key feature is being able to create a summoning circle on the ground and somehow expend corpses inside that circle to summon a pet; better pets can be gained at higher levels or with more powerful monsters’ corpses.
Add a new Researcher role to SLASHTHEM, based on its Drunk role, but based on scrolls instead of potions: they start with a bunch of random scrolls but not much else, and have a technique that creates identify scrolls but stuns you in the process (which might be redundant with the existing research technique).
Crystal balls can be used to find which level any of the unique items is currently on. Unspecified how it would show different branches or if this works on items you have never seen (if it did, you could use it to look for the Amulet and figure out how deep the dungeon is).
Further nerf drain-for-gain tactics by having the game remember what you spent each new experience level’s skill slot on and automatically restore those skill slots when you regain levels you lost. If you want to reskill, you can use amnesia.
When a unique monster is removed from a bones file and the bones file is subsequently loaded, a special message is produced that hints at what the monster would have been.
If a monster is both covetous and has the ability to break boulders, allow them to warp onto the same space as a boulder next to the hero if there is no free space to land, and destroy the boulder with a message like “[Mon] materializes in the same space as the boulder, shattering it to bits!”
Expose some additional information to Lua special level files in order to let level designers put sanity checks and impossibles into their code which won’t be hit in the course of “normal” gameplay. This could be any combination of the following:
nh.is_sanity_check_on(), which exposes the sanity_check flag.nh.in_wizard_mode(), which is true if the game is in wizard mode and is
therefore being debugged.nh.devel_status() which returns a string version of NH_DEVEL_STATUS -
“released”, “beta”, “work-in-progress”, etc.nh.iflags("xyz") which returns the value of the boolean “xyz” in iflags;
especially useful for the debug_fuzzer flag.Give a paranoid confirmation prompt when the player is levitating or flying over a liquid and attempts to remove an item that would result in them losing that levitation or flying and falling in.
Disarming all the land mines in Fort Ludios without any of them exploding increases Luck by 1.
A game mode that allows you to keep playing after death. There are two ways this could go:
Remove the recharge counter from objects. Most tools can be infinitely recharged, so they don’t need one. For wands, replace the recharge count with a chance of a wand becoming eroded when the wand is recharged, or of exploding if recharged when already eroded.
Not specified what happens for the few items that don’t follow this pattern, such as magic markers and the wand of wishing. For the wand, it will likely work to make the erosion guaranteed the first time, and the explosion guaranteed when it’s already eroded. Magic markers could possibly just be un-rechargeable.
New conduct, permaconflict, which must be enabled by setting an option. If you play the game with this, you constantly generate conflict, which likely makes some aspects of the game much easier and some much more difficult.
Not specified whether the permanent conflict would cause extra hunger like the ring does, or not cause any like artifacts do.
Zapping a wand of polymorph at Master skill gives you control over the form the target monsters polymorph into, whether that is yourself or others. Other monsters still get their chance to resist the polymorph entirely.
It would not give you control over what an object would polymorph into, for obvious reasons.
However, if there are monsters that can use the wand of polymorph at master skill, this has the potential to become very annoying very fast, since they would be able to turn the player into a sessile monster, make them break their armor, or turn themselves into something very threatening and out of depth.
When you unpolymorph, you temporarily keep any intrinsics you had from that form and which you no longer have. How long it is before these intrinsics time out isn’t specified, but probably contains some random component so you can’t plan around when the intrinsic will lapse.
This was suggested for a hypothetical druid role, but noted that it doesn’t have to be a role-specific mechanic and could apply to other roles as well.
Have a small visual element on the screen like a border or a 2x2 area in the corner. When NetHack completes a screen redraw or is otherwise ready for input, update this element with a symbol crawling around the border or bouncing around the corner to provide a visual indication to the player. This is intended for laggy connections, so you can tell whether your input was processed or not.
Baluchitheria should eat (and thus destroy) trees they happen to encounter, since they did this in real life.
If you are wearing crystal plate mail over a shirt, you can still read the shirt, because the mail is transparent.
When a monster or the player levelports or branchports, it leaves a magic portal behind which lasts for 5 turns. Other creatures can enter this portal to appear on the same level in the same spot as the initial creature did. The portal is probably one-way, and can’t take you back to the original spot.
Aligned priests can use turn undead against undead monsters they want to attack. “Want to attack” is not currently well-defined for priests vs undead in NetHack, but it would probably follow these rules:
Amulet of protect inventory: negates any erosion, destruction, disintegration, or theft of your items, but every time it does, you take damage.
Insects on Baalzebub’s level have double speed and deal double damage. Baalzebub can cast summon insects (or otherwise has that as a special ability that isn’t actually spellcasting).
Implement “special abilities” for each role that behave like (or simply are) techniques, but which would probably use the #monster command. These include:
The other half of this idea is to give other unique abilities to each demon boss, but these aren’t specified.
Interestingly, using the #monster command implies that you can only use these abilities when in your normal non-polymorphed form.
Allow some Gehennom filler levels to be non-persistent in a limited manner. They will generate new maps and terrain upon being re-entered, but will retain all the monsters and objects they had, which will be placed in random spots. Since this compensates for the mysterious force by delaying the ascension run and offering more time for harassment and monster spawns, remove the mysterious force as well.
Add some way for the player to spawn a sleeping, non-mindless monster on the magic portal in the Elemental Planes. This provides an alternate method of portal detection, and additionally allows the player to track the moving location of the portal on the Plane of Water.
Conflict should cause monsters to prioritize moving toward and attacking targets they would attack anyway (like the player) over targets they wouldn’t (like other monsters), instead of it being fully random.
The purpose of this is to maintain the offensive use of conflict (monsters deal damage to each other) while nerfing the defensive use of conflict (monsters are too busy attacking each other to worry about or even approach the player), and so make conflict overall not quite as powerful for trivializing tough areas of the game like the Sanctum and Astral.
Remove the ring of levitation. This is because it is too good at solving interesting problems from the player: for the low cost of a ring slot used only situationally, the player can bypass water, lava, most traps, and wield cockatrices with almost total immunity. It can then be taken off when not wanted and put back on whenever situationally needed again.
As an alternative to removing the ring, add some cost to using it, such as requiring them to be invoked to get levitation, subject to a cooldown to use them again, although that is strange and unprecedented for non-artifact items.
The boots of levitation have more or less the same problems as the ring, only slightly less so because they are heavier and swapping out boots takes a little longer. These could also be removed, and replaced with an artifact pair of boots that confers levitation, themed after the talaria winged boots Perseus borrowed from Hermes. (This also has some potential for strangeness, because Perseus’s statue appears in the game and sometimes contains levitation boots; would the boots always be this artifact if it doesn’t exist already?)
Orctown generating should force a temple to be generated somewhere else in the main dungeon, possibly around level 15. Without this, there is a possibility the player’s first opportunity to buy divine protection will be late in the game at the Valley of the Dead.
A ramification of this change is that the game would have to know it is generating Orctown at the beginning of the game, rather than deciding it when Minetown generates by picking among its variants randomly.
An uncursed scroll of enchant armor that targets a +0 (or below?) piece of armor will raise its enchantment the same amount as it would if it were blessed (1 to 3 points).
The purpose of this is to incentivize players using them earlier in the game, and therefore smoothing out the gain in AC over time, rather than hoarding them and only ever using them when blessed and on ascension kit items, which tends to mean a huge gain in AC all at once. This isn’t intended to make using them earlier the clearly best strategy, just to make it a more balanced choice.
If the player is about to be hit with a death ray and has not yet expended their saving grace, the saving grace protects them from the instadeath. Probably by converting the ray hit (and any reflections from the same ray?) into a miss; otherwise the game would have to explain why a non-resistant character got hit by a death ray and failed to die.
Mirrors carried openly in your inventory act as a weak source of reflection: if you have no other source of reflection, they will block an incoming ray (possibly only a death ray), at the expense of breaking and costing you 2 points of luck as breaking a mirror usually does, except if your luck is already negative it won’t be penalized further. Arguably it shouldn’t apply a luck penalty at all unless the player caused the ray; after all, you aren’t punished for a monster zapping a wand of striking and breaking a mirror on the ground.
This would allow better protection against random attack wands early in the game, when mirrors can be found but a permanent reflection source is rare.
Add more monsters, probably additional types of eyes, which have various area-of-effect “auras”: not attacks, but things which inflict both good and bad statuses on everything around them. Effects could range from slowing down, to conflict, to confusion, and various other things.
The potion of wonder gives both a positive and negative intrinsic when quaffed, and both a positive and negative object property when something is dipped into it.
Archeologists never get charged an unidentified markup in shops, because they know when a shopkeeper is trying to cheat and take advantage of their lack of knowledge.
Eating an amulet of reflection (which doesn’t provide any intrinsic) causes you to “reflect on your inner self”, providing enlightenment.
In variants with a playable giant race which has a faster hunger rate, heroes of other races who polymorph into giants should also experience this faster hunger rate.
Amulets of life saving only generate when a lich generates, either in its inventory or somewhere else on the level where it first generated. Each amulet is tied to its lich, and the lich can only be permanently killed when its amulet is destroyed (including by the player using it up to save their own life, but not limited to that; any method of destroying it such as looting it from a cursed bag of holding would work). If the amulet remains intact, the lich will eventually resurrect.
If a lich is genocided, any amulets connected to liches of that type aren’t destroyed, but stop being effective to save lives. Possibly there should be some visible indicator of this, such as the amulet being cracked. If all liches are genocided, then no amulets of life saving will work.
Not specified what would happen if an amulet of life saving is wished for; probably either the amulet doesn’t work, or it spawns a random lich it’s connected to somewhere on the level.
Replace the random markup on only some unidentified items sold by a shop with a multiplier that is always between 1.0 and 2.0, but is always the same within the same shop, and is applied to all unidentified items in it. The multiplier is biased towards the lower end of that range by taking the square root of a random number from 1 to 4 (or mathematically equivalent constructions that minimize reliance on floating point calculations in the code, such as taking the square root of a number from 25 to 100 then dividing the result by 5).
Reduce the ability of holy water to bless large objects and stacks, by telling the player “Your [item(s)] is too large to dip into one bottle”. From there, it could either prompt “Use X bottles instead?”, tell you you don’t currently have enough potions, or suggest you apply multiple potions instead of dipping.
Small and single objects would still be blessable by using one potion.
Armor enchantments should slowly time out and reduce to a lower state. The rate could be either linear, i.e. a point of enchantment expires every 2000 turns, or it could be faster at higher amounts of enchantment, i.e. a +1 armor is pretty stable but a +5 will decay to +4 fairly fast.
Make unicorns capable of healing only fatal illness, in order to stop it from rendering every other status recovery item pointless.
If you have maintained the pacifist conduct, any Healer player monsters that generate will be peaceful.
Add Sokoban levels with a pinball-inspired mechanic: some of the walls are a new “bumper” terrain type. An object or creature that moves into a bumper will be hurled away from the bumper in a non-random direction (which could be straight back in the direction it came, always at a 90 degree angle, or vary based on the particular bumper). The puzzles involve moving boulders into the bumpers to propel them in ways regular pushing can’t accomplish.
HP recovery is faster when your HP is at a lower percentage than it is at a higher percentage (i.e. you heal fast, but it gradually slows as you heal). This would mean it’s an advantage in terms of turns spent to rest only when injured.
When the player is polymorphed into a gelatinous cube, their carrying capacity should be infinite or otherwise maximized, similar to if they polymorphed into a nymph. This is because gelatinous cubes can “carry” everything inside their body without it encumbering them.
There should be some way to enter the Valley of the Dead without requiring fighting through or looping around the Castle, in order to allow a player struggling to get up to the Quest experience level threshold to access the resources in the Valley.
The ring of sustain ability also protects you from level drain, though to be consistent it also prevents you from gaining any levels.
On the vibrating square level, there is a small (perhaps 5% or 1%) chance that a death drop will produce one or a few candles instead of the random item it would be otherwise, meaning that even if you have used up all the other candles in the game, you don’t have to resort to either wishing or grinding for the much lower odds of naturally getting candles from a death drop.
In Cocytus (or possibly any levels with a “cold” temperature), corpses rot more slowly.
Wielding Stormbringer cuts the failure rate of the drain life spell, and only that spell, in half.
Chatting to a quantum mechanic can result in them talking to you about physics, causing you to become confused, subject to a roll against your Intelligence (lower being more likely to result in confusion).
If you do not have fire resistance, lava is too hot to levitate or fly over due to the enormous amount of heat it produces. Doing so anyway will burn you up as if you had stepped into the lava.
You should be able to #tip potions onto your own square or onto an adjacent square. When tipped, it causes vapor effects to all monsters in the 3x3 area around that square, including yourself, and also causes “potion on skin” effects to the monster it was tipped onto. Some potions may not have such an effect beyond their vapors, but ones like polymorph, acid, and healing ought to.
Among other things, this provides a way to administer polymorph or healing potions to a pet without attacking it with a wielded potion.
Shops run by drow shopkeepers should always be unlit rooms.
Alternate design of Fort Ludios that has a bigger, three-part fort containing a room with multiple copies of “Croesus”, one of which is the real one and the others are different monsters in disguise.
The idea here is to reinforce the implication that he regularly uses different guises to guard his riches, which explains why you can so easily lie to guards that you are Croesus in a better way than them just being super gullible.
On April 15 (tax filing day in the United States), you are charged a sales tax in shops.
On April 20, all petrifying attacks of monsters have the same effects they do on a new moon, i.e. making stoning more likely.
Rangers have a lower chance of triggering a trap they created themselves, since they are supposed to be pretty experienced in laying traps for creatures and not triggering them.
Chaotic artifact weapon that has a 10 or 20 percent chance of randomly teleporting its target somewhere else on the level, assuming the level isn’t non-teleport. Possibly, enchanting it increases the chance of the teleport happening.
If the Minetown Watch are hostile and subdue you (reducing you to 0 or low HP, or possibly only if you chat to them to surrender), they throw you in jail instead of simply killing you. This probably takes the form of a special jail level where you start out having regained your HP but have lost most or all of your possessions. The jail level is staffed with more watchmen (it could also be guards, but those are specifically guarding vaults).
There could be a variety of ways to escape:
Energy recovery rate should be leveraged more as a role differentiator - basically, roles that are intended to cast frequently should regenerate power faster than roles that aren’t.
One way to do this is tie energy recovery strongly to Wisdom, and then bias starting stats so that caster roles usually have high Wisdom.
Standing on a magic trap’s space causes your magic energy to regenerate faster than normal; not incredibly so as if you had the energy regeneration extrinsic, but a noticeable boost.
Pleather armor, an object that is mostly identical to leather armor, but is made out of plastic.
New ‘Soldier’ role. You start with various gear typically issued to soldiers: a basic weapon or two, basic armor, some K-rations etc. The quest involves working with other soldiers to defend a castle (probably not THE Castle?) from adventurers. Other army members would be generated peaceful.
Another take on this is a “Defector” role in which you have defected or escaped from the Yendorian Army. The starting gear would be the same, but the quest would probably involve sabotaging the army somehow.
An option that only triggers at the start of the game and adjusts objects into certain letter slots, so players can start the game with items in familiar locations. It would probably be regex-based.
Also mentioned was full lua scripting support similar to what DCSS allows, but that is potentially overkill for this feature.
You can hit monsters with a spellbook of cancellation to cancel them.
Support blood splatters with no particular associated monster type (NON_PM). Such splatters will render as nondescript blood.
When saving a bones file, go through all the blood splatters on the level and set them to this nonspecific type. This avoids a bit of weirdness where a new adventurer enters the bones file, sees the splatters, and can immediately identify what type of monster each one came from.
If you are a gnome and encounter a monster wearing stomping boots, they can stomp on you to instantly kill you, just like the hero is able to do to small monsters while wearing those boots.
Getting crowned as a lawful character should unlock the ability to dip for Excalibur if you are currently unable to, or raise the odds for successfully dipping to what Knights get.
Add an artifact crysknife, which is nameable. Add a obj_resists call in the crysknife reversion process to make it so that artifact crysknives either never revert to worm teeth or do so very rarely.
The other properties of such an artifact are unspecified.
Quaffing from a toilet cures you of a brood wasp infestation (or any other sort of infestation of parasites in your body).
There is some mechanism by which scrolls of consecration can be used to “ordain” (transform) certain types of monsters into aligned priests.
A unicorn (possibly “red unicorn”) that is unaligned - i.e. aligned to evil/Moloch. Unspecified if it would behave differently with respect to gems thrown at it.
Potions of booze in a liquor emporium should be automatically identified. If you observe one inside a potion shop, it should formally discover that potion.
Change Werebane’s base item to a ring of protection from shape changers. Confer the same sort of properties as it currently has now: while wearing the ring, you will deal double damage to and possibly even sear werecreatures even if your weapon is not silver, and possibly even instakill them on a critical hit.
An object property that confers slow digestion.
If you are playing a dwarf, monsters pick a random gender pronoun when referring to you in their dialogue (random but consistent for each separate monster) because they can’t tell which one you are.
When an Angel or Archon spawns, the area in a light radius of 2 centered on its starting spot becomes permanently lit up.
If you have a resistance extrinsically, taking (and negating) damage from that elemental source gives you a small 1 or 2 point recovery of your magic energy, in order to give some benefit to having extrinsic resistances you will almost certainly have intrinsically for most of the time it matters.
If you die to a bag of tricks (“carnivorous bag”) and produce a bones file, neither your ghost nor any of your possessions will appear in the file… just the bag on the floor. Someone who subsequently finds and applies the bag will cause a hostile player monster with all the “dead” player’s gear to pop out of it.
When you enhance a skill, the message should be “You now have [level] skill in [skill name]”, instead of simply “You are now more skilled”.
The prison sections of Goblin Town should contain some item in there that incentivizes the player to open up the prison, such as a small amount of food. Better yet would be to have the prisoners themselves give such a reward to the player upon being freed.
To be more true to their source material, jabberwocks should randomly whiffle and burble when you are close enough to see/hear them doing it. Additionally, when Vorpal Blade is used to kill a jabberwock, it should go “snicker-snack!”
Drow characters get a luck bonus during the new moon instead of the full moon.
Every time Sunsword hits a monster, it should cause temporary blindness to the tune of several turns.
Alternatively, since that type of blindness may be tricky to implement, have it induce regular monster blindness upon a “critical hit”, with the same frequency as other artifacts like Vorpal Blade.
Energy vortices should emit radius 0 light, so that when they are in a dark area and you have clear line of sight to them, you can see them (made of whirling energy, they are obviously visible but don’t really throw light on anything else).
Reading a blessed scroll of punishment should give you a clue towards how much you have abused your alignment record.
Remove the ability of speed potions to always, reliably confer the speed intrinsic. Instead, you need to already have a lot (at least 100 turns) of temporary very fast speed before drinking a potion of speed will give you the intrinsic.
For every demon lord you kill (not just bribe), the chance of the Magic 8-Ball giving a wish increases from its very low baseline, up to a reasonable amount where it won’t take too much spamming to get the wish after you kill them all.
Wielding Tempest, in addition to its existing effects, protects you from being paralyzed by lightning on the Plane of Air. Also, when its area-of-effect lightning effect triggers, fog clouds and gas clouds around the center of the effect are destroyed or blown away, “clearing the air”.
Artifact horn of plenty that gives slow digestion when carried and never needs to be recharged; however, it never dispenses potions because allowing the player to get infinite potions is obviously not a great idea.
It’s been noted that an artifact such as this makes it so you never need food again, removes that aspect of gameplay, and should therefore probably only appear very late in the game.
Artifact polearm of unspecified type The Ten-Foot Polearm. When wielded, it confers immunity to stoning from c corpses, artifact blasts, and special damage from bane artifacts that hate you, because “you don’t touch them with a ten-foot pole”.
Fake Amulets of Yendor can generate with the same name as whatever you’ve named the real one, e.g. ‘REAL’, to keep you on your toes.
If you use an artifact hammer in forging, it should have some special effects, perhaps dependent on which artifact it is. For instance, using Hammer of the Gods should always result in a blessed item.
Food can have object properties which convey some special magical effect that it normally doesn’t. For example, a “food ration of fire” is spicy chili flavored and confers fire resistance for a few hundred turns.
If enlightenment tells you something like “You have [intrinsic] from your [piece of gear you didn’t know the property of], that object property becomes identified on that piece of gear.
You should be able to give a potion of see invisible to a shopkeeper while you are invisible. They will then quaff it, and stop blocking their shop door. Depending on implementation, if the shopkeeper’s see invisible is temporary and later times out, once they can no longer see you, they will again block the door.
Lawful-aligned characters should feel guilty and incur an alignment record penalty in addition to the normal Luck penalty when they cheat in Sokoban.
Tourist trap: a trap that vanishes all of your gold, but only if you are a tourist.
When you identify a piece of worthless glass that belongs to a shopkeeper, they get angry and attack you because you have exposed their fraudulent business practice.
When the player is on a water space, track whether they are submerged or swimming on top of the water. By default, entering water without the risk of drowning still puts you at the bottom, but you can use < to ascend to the top.
A primary effect of this is to establish consistency with what you can and can’t interact with while in water - it doesn’t make much sense that monsters standing on an adjacent land square, or monsters flying on an adjacent water square, can hit you in melee when you’re underwater, nor the other way around. If being on top or bottom of the water is tracked, these cases can be prevented, but care would have to be taken so that the hero can’t dive underwater and be completely safe and able to recover with impunity.
One possible mitigation (in addition to blocking an underwater hero from using melee attacks on adjacent monsters that aren’t in the water themselves) would be to make monsters that can’t currently attack the swimming hero avoid getting into melee range. Though this still wouldn’t deal with zapping them with spells from a safe distance.
Eating a wraith’s brain when polymorphed into a mind flayer should give you some experience points.
It is possible to get a scroll of genocide both blessed and cursed at the same time. The effect of this is that it prompts for a single monster, genocides most of that monster, and sends in the remaining several monsters who are now looking for revenge.
Alternatively, make this a confused effect instead of opening the can of worms of allowing items to be simultaneously blessed and cursed.
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 light gray j or white 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.”
When a non-unique warper (and possibly some unique warpers, like non-magical quest nemeses) is cancelled, they cease to be able to warp. This means that levels in Gehennom can contain caged liches that are cancelled and thus incapable of warping out, or of spellcasting for that matter.
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 severe 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 should become permanently lit up. Conversely, when a black light explodes, the same area should become permanently darkened.
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 (perhaps the easiest way to do this is via half physical damage, since it doesn’t make much sense for armor to protect against e.g. poison damage from drinking a potion of sickness). 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, and it ceases to reduce or negate damage.
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 very fast 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.
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:
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.
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:
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 (other than being much harder / impossible to mulch because it’s an artifact), 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 (or Lenses to avoid oddity), from Zelda, which grants see invisible when worn. Also, while wearing them, you must tell the truth, which primarily affects interacting with vault guards and could be implemented as any of the following:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
All foocubi should pick up rings of adornment that they happen to find on the ground. Incubi should be capable of putting on your finger a ring of adornment they are carrying.
When they have a headache, succubi should steal adornment rings and incubi should put them on your finger, but 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:
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, sleep gas, hallucination gas, etc) by passing an additional argument to create_gas_cloud.
Clouds of sleep gas would immediately have a use in Nazgul and orange dragon breath attacks, which are already described as such. They might also be useful for sleeping gas traps, which would emit an actual cloud of sleep gas. Depending on implementation, the sleep gas cloud could have only a chance of inducing sleep rather than always knocking you out, which could make it tactically interesting to navigate/teleport/etc rather than just getting put to sleep and having the cloud gone by the time you wake up.
Potions that boil or shatter (but not freeze) should release a cloud of gas that causes the potion’s vapor effects to creatures caught in the cloud, replacing the existing system where vapor effects can happen at an unclear distance from the site of the potion.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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 Plane of Negative Energy:
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:
Additional YAFMs that may replace the “You hear your heart beat” message for applying a cursed stethoscope at yourself:
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:
Gloves of skill (or “gauntlets of weapon mastery”): magical gloves which raise your effective skill level in your wielded weapon by 1.
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:
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”:
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.
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.
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:
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:
| Roll | Effect | Message |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | You are hit by a death ray that ignores reflection and possibly magic resistance and possibly even life saving. | “The die blasts you with a death ray!” |
| 2 | You are stunned, confused, blinded, and deafened for 200 turns, paralyzed for 15 turns, and inflicted with deadly illness. | “You stagger and your vision blurs…” |
| 3 | You lose a random intrinsic as if a gremlin stole it. | Usual intrinsic loss message |
| 4 | You suffer amnesia as if you had read a cursed scroll, and lose a point of Intelligence; this can kill you via brainlessness if it’s at 3. | “You feel like your brain is getting sucked out…” |
| 5 | You suffer a standard curse items effect. | “You feel as if you need some help.” |
| 6 | You lose one point in d3 different attributes that are not equal to 3, and abuse all other attributes. | Usual attribute loss message |
| 7 | You gain one point of Luck, unless Luck is already +10. | “You feel lucky!” |
| 8 | You take d20 physical damage (half damage does not help). | “You feel excruciating pain all over your body!” |
| 9-10 | Nothing happens. | |
| 11 | A random item is generated on your square. Unspecified what happens if you are not on solid ground. | “Suddenly, you see an object at your feet!” |
| 12 | You get the effect of a blessed potion of full healing. | Usual full healing message |
| 13 | You lose one point of Luck, unless Luck is already -10. | “You feel unlucky!” |
| 14 | You gain one point in d3 different attributes that are not at their maximum, and exercise the rest. | Usual attribute gain message |
| 15 | You identify all your possessions. | |
| 16 | You gain an experience level. | Usual level gain message |
| 17 | You get enlightenment. | “You feel self-knowledgeable…” |
| 18 | You gain a random intrinsic that you don’t already have that could have come from a corpse. | Usual intrinsic gain message |
| 19 | Your inventory is randomly blessed. | “The die emits a light blue aura.” |
| 20 | You get a wish. | “You may wish for an object.” |
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 (traffic) lights in real life making you stop.
(There could also be green lights whose explosion gives a temporary speed boost, and yellow lights’ explosion could be expanded to slow the target as well as blinding it, 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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
Magic markers are made more common of a tool, but they hold fewer charges to compensate.
Bags of holding should cost 500 zorkmids; this makes them trivially price-identifiable, but it’s not hard to identify one in a shop anyways.
On Friday the 13th, kittens, housecats, and large cats are referred to as “black kitten/housecat/large cat”.
Artifact towel that acts as a magic carpet: invoke it to start flying on it. Doesn’t work if you’re currently wearing the towel, and trying to wear the towel either doesn’t work or ends any flight.
Cloth golem, which can be created by polypiling too many cloth objects.
Monsters shouldn’t be able to hide under the iron chain attached to you when you’re punished.
If a dwarf sees you eating a dwarf corpse, he grows enraged and gains to-hit and damage bonuses. This may also extend to other races seeing you eat their fellow kin, though orcs might just laugh instead.
Applying an athame to an item with an object property magically severs the property, which then “falls” and attaches to the topmost eligible item on the floor beneath it.
A way to permanently mount a spell staff on a square. This makes it unremovable but it permanently provides its casting benefits to you while you are standing on that square, without having to wield it.
When you convert a cross-aligned temple’s altar, there is a Cha/100 chance that you also convert the priest along with it, and they become coaligned rather than angry.
Bones of tortle players contain a tortle shell, which is useless except as an indicator the dead player was a tortle, or as polyfodder.
Shopkeepers in delicatessens who are sold corpses should magically turn the corpses into tins of that monster with a random beatitude. As well, delicatessen shopkeepers rarely generate carrying a tinning kit.
The livelog for making a wish also includes the source of the wish, whether a wand, a djinni (from a lamp or a bottle), a throne, etc.
Pits created by freezing water and then digging out the ice gradually and randomly fill back in with water. But if you then try to frost walk on them (with water walking boots and white dragon scale mail), you get the following: “The water crackles and freezes under your weight. The ice breaks under your weight! You fall into your pit!” creating the pit anew on the space.
Tortles who have cold resistance don’t stumble when walking on ice, because their feet have claws to give them a good grip.
While hallucinating, the entire map (or at least the parts you can see) should be rendered in rainbow colors. If your terminal supports 256-bit color, it uses a very fine-grained rainbow rather than the simple 16 colors.
When riding, a lance will count for much less weight than it will normally, because your saddle is presumed to have its own stirrup for the lance. When wielding the lance, it reverts to its full weight.
Applying Cleaver makes it not attack in an arc, for the rare occasions you know you don’t want to attack in an arc.
You can tame (or at least pacify) hostile dwarves by throwing potions of booze at them, which they catch.
The type of shop that sells mainly scrolls should be called something other than “second-hand bookstore”, because scrolls are single use so second-hand scrolls don’t make sense.
Giant spiders currently just use the generic encyclopedia entry for all spiders. It should be replaced with a quote from The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings (or Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) which involve actual giant spiders.
Artifact lock pick Doorbane, which mostly works like a regular one but prevents doors from resisting when it’s carried.
This functionality should also probability extend to the Master Key of Thievery.
Gelatinous ice cubes, which work mostly like gelatinous cubes but also have a cold attack.
Dart traps eventually shoot “big darts” instead of little darts, which do more damage than the little darts, although internally it’s still shooting a regular dart object.
Ammo shot from launchers (but not thrown ones) should receive a damage bonus based either on Dexterity or on the launcher’s enchantment to compensate for the Strength-based damage bonus for thrown missiles or melee weapons.
A greased bag of holding prevents corpses inside it from spoiling like an icebox will.
You can attune pets to the Lyre of Orpheus (possibly only if you are a bard and it’s your own quest artifact). Attuned pets that die near the harp leave no corpse (so they can’t be resurrected twice via undead turning), but can be resurrected later by invoking it. This replaces its current invoke power.
For a more balanced implementation (so you can’t let multiple pets die over thousands of turns and then invoke it to get an instant army), it will only resurrect one pet, possibly allowing the player to pick which.
For a simpler implementation, only the last attuned pet to have died near the Lyre gets resurrected.
Zapping a cursed wand of make invisible turns invisible things it hits visible. (Or possibly transfer this effect to the cursed potion, since wand effects generally do not vary with beatitude).
Replace the whole speed system with the one from Tales of Maj’Eyal, another roguelike. This has a strict concept of a “global speed”, i.e. a number of movement points you are given every global turn. Every possible action has an associated movement point cost, which allows for things like zapping a wand to take less time and be done more frequently than making a melee attack. This gets rid of the weird existing system where, in ToME terms, your most recent action defines how much global speed you get, particularly if riding is involved.
One way to start implementing this is to have all the action functions that currently return 0 for no time taken or 1 for time taken to instead return a bitmask of all types of actions taken: “moved”, “attacked”, “cast a spell”, etc. Then the main loop code that handles these return values deducts movement points corresponding to the slowest action in this bitmask.
Extrinsic sources of acid resistance should protect your weapon from passive corrosion attacks, and extrinsic sources of fire resistance should protect your armor from taking fire damage.
Add a way to show nearby unseen pets and possibly also peacefuls. Using a warning-like system, they render as green 1-5 (pets) and blue 1-5 (peacefuls) using the same scale as warning does.
Initial idea was to tie this to intrinsic warning or when wearing a blessed ring of warning, but this has flavor problems since warning exists to alert you to threats, which pets and peacefuls aren’t. Plus, a lot of roles get intrinsic warning anyway, and rings don’t generally change behavior based on beatitude. It might be better off coming from some other source.
Resolve the quirkiness of statue traps - they are a silent trap on which a real statue potentially containing spellbooks can generate, which you can teleport off the trap to smash for its spellbooks (indicating it’s a true statue) and do not show up with telepathy or monster detection (indicating it’s a true statue), but reveal themselves as “You find a foo posing as a statue” (indicating it’s been a living monster all along). There are two basic options:
Make more artifacts creatable by naming, with reasonable restrictions based on your role, experience level, alignment, and preexisting enchantment of the weapon, if it is a weapon.
Example: A lawful Priest who is XL 20 can create Demonbane by naming it, provided the mace being named is +5. The enchantment turns to +0 as the magic flows into its new anti-demon powers.
If you talk to King Arthur after receiving the Quest from him, he will tell you to seek the blessing of the Lady of the Lake. (Or just have him tell you this as part of giving you the quest.) After this, your next fountain dip is guaranteed to produce Excalibur, if it does not already exist.
If you pray while there are hostile monsters near you, your god may decide to answer the prayer by frying all the monsters around you with lightning (sparing pets and peacefuls). This would work best when there are a bunch of hostiles right near you but none a medium distance away. Possibly it should be suppressed when your HP is low, but then again restoring your health while leaving you surrounded by monsters often doesn’t give you high odds of surviving.
The hero is not credited with killing the monsters, and gains no experience or penalties.
Change the Master Key of Thievery’s invoke power, since it already gives you guaranteed untrapping passively. The new invoke power is to magic map a moderate radius around you (maybe 10) and then teleport you (which will be controlled because the Key gives you teleport control), but you must pick a space within the mapped radius to teleport to.
Something to prevent autounlock from automatically forcing a chest you want to open. This probably takes the form of a new option, either an “autoforce” boolean option or a new paranoid confirmation flag which would add a prompt (or turn the existing prompt into a “yes” confirmation) before you force a chest with autounlock.
If you give your pet a scroll, and it is a scroll that monsters can normally read, it reads it on its next turn.
Artifact ring that provides a cocktail of basic resistances all at once (fire, cold, shock, poison, maybe sleep, maybe acid). This is interesting primarily because it is very useful early in the game and then becomes progressively less useful later on as the hero gets intrinsic resistances.
Could be named “The Ring of Everything Resistance” or “The Chromatic Ring”.
Give Thoth Amon sleep resistance or higher monster MR, because right now it’s too easy to just zap him with sleep and finish him off trivially.
YAFM when you are hallucinating and would hear one of the “sink on the level” noises: “You have a sinking feeling”, or “You hear something that gives you a sinking feeling”.
Becoming hungry or weak does not interrupt opening a tin, though it continues to interrupt all other occupations.
You can pay the Oracle to ask what level Fort Ludios can be reached from, if you have already visited the level containing its portal. (If not, there are technical issues with how the dungeon generates preventing her from telling you.)
Your chance of sucking an opponent’s brain increases the hungrier you get.
If the Wizard of Yendor has magic resistance and is immune to death rays, he will never cast Double Trouble.
If you cast the spell of reflection while already having reflection from the spell but after you’ve gotten a message indicating it’s running out, you get the full duration of the spell rather than the reduced one.
Cavemen receive a spellbook of fireball as their crowning gift, which they can always cast with 100% success rate. Flavor-wise, this ties into “discovering fire”.
Allow more monsters to summon monsters friendly to them, but make them have to do a signaled multi-round behavior that can be interrupted by damaging them. E.g. printing a message that a monster is going into a summoning trance, or moving in a certain pattern.
A statue-like object which should be fairly destroyable (should probably be breakable by force bolts and maybe even attacking it with a weapon enough times) which provides a level-wide buff to certain monsters.
If the chain of your iron ball is rusty, you have a low chance of destroying it with a force bolt, from either the spell or wand.
Your god may give you useful non-artifact items as sacrifice gifts, such as a stethoscope or bag of holding, so long as you aren’t carrying one of them already.
A slightly more advanced system that wouldn’t require carrying a bunch of items to avoid getting duplicates would be to track the last time you picked up or put down each type of object, and if you have never touched one or it’s been a sufficiently long time, you are eligible to get that item as a gift.
Tortles can wear hard helmets and gloves and a cloak, but as long as they wear any of these they are unable to hide in their shell.
A non-magical book like a novel that describes how to do the invocation.
Mithril items cannot be forged. It’s too good of a material to apply to arbitrary items, and there is lore which would back up it not being a material an amateur is capable of smithing.
Zombies get weaker every time they revive, and possibly eventually get to a point where they just stop reviving.
Wearing a mummy wrapping makes you immune to withering.
Jumping boots auto-identify once you have used them to jump (though this doesn’t actually solve the problem of trying #jump with every new pair of boots you try on).
Non-coaligned priests require more money in donations than coaligned priests do to get the same benefits.
Make the Longbow of Diana able to change shape between the different types of launchers (bow, crossbow, sling), either by invoking it or simply by applying it. This allows Rangers to play with whatever type of ranged combat style they prefer, and allows gnomish Rangers to use a crossbow without being coerced into switching to bow later.
You can only ascend if your alignment record is pious. Otherwise, you either escape in celestial disgrace, or less evilly, your god just rejects the sacrifice until such time as you are pious.
Iron golems rust in multiple stages, like iron items, rather than all at once. Each stage cuts its maximum HP by 20 (so a rusty golem has 60 max HP, etc.) Applying a can of grease will remove the rust and restore its max HP to normal, and may prevent further water damage for a little while. The golem may also quaff a potion of oil, which has a similar effect, except it also restores current HP as well as maximum by the amount of erosion removed.
Iron golems that rust to death may rarely leave behind a statue (ideally made of iron material) which is implied to be its rusted husk.
Puffer fish, a monster with a non-poisonous bite but a passive poison attack. Its corpse conveys poison resistance pretty reliably but is always poisonous to eat, even if it’s been tinned.
When monks are weak from hunger, they don’t lose any Strength, due to being experienced with fasting.
Occasionally, if a Mines filler level generates where there is a sufficiently large space of empty stone, a little separate walled-off area may generate disconnected from the main map, containing a few gnomes and dwarves, and some more gems and gold, possibly in a chest. This area won’t get the stairs generated in it, and should probably contain a hole so that a randomly teleporting player won’t get stuck there (other types of escape items could get picked up by the gnomes and dwarves).
Magic markers are susceptible to water damage, getting their charges reduced when they get wet. This could be either a few charges, or could possibly go up to the level of halving the remaining charges.
Getting lifesaved (for the first time, probably not subsequent times) gives you some experience points, because now you have experienced what death is like.
Variants that give Croesus armor made of gold should also have a small chance that his body armor is replaced with gold dragon scale mail.
Unicorn horn skill should factor into, or even be the primary factor in, whether using a unicorn horn cures you of an affliction.
Arcane monster spell that reduces your memory of a single spell by a few thousand turns.
The number of turns you can remember a spell is directly dependent on your Intelligence, and possibly Wisdom (at the time of reading the book). The default 20000 turns is a baseline for maybe 12 Int and 12 Wis; more of those means you get more turns when you learn the spell or refresh your memory, and less of those means you get fewer turns.
Polymorphing a dragon corpse creates a random object made of dragonhide.
Lemures have some sort of debuff that they give you such as sapping your nutrition when nearby. This stacks with other lemures, so it is insignificant if you are facing only one or two, but can get perilous if you are surrounded by a lot of them, as may happen in Gehennom.
Piranhabane, an artifact rod that instakills piranhas (and possibly, turns them into tins of piranha meat in your inventory or at least out of the water).
Intrinsics that you can gain from eating that do not give you some increment of a percentage (for instance, teleport control) are impossible to gain as a permanent intrinsic. Instead it will always time out.
If an aklys slips out of your hands because your fingers are slippery, it winds up unwielded in your inventory rather than on the floor, because it’s still attached to you by the strap.
You can throw cursed aklyses, because the tether is still welded to your hand. Because of this, they always return – which means there actually might be some circumstances where it’s beneficial to wield one versus a non-cursed one, for example attacking monsters in water or lava.
To compensate for this a bit, the cursed aklys could have an increased chance of hitting you when it returns.
Seperately track every different source of exercising an ability score, with diminishing returns for repeated use of the same exercise source until that ability score changes value, which resets it. This prevents you from spamming an easy-to-do exercise source such as pushing boulders around or writing Elbereth, and makes you diversify your sources of exercise.
Possibly weight the different exercise sources (e.g. successfully finishing studying a spellbook should be worth more for Wisdom exercise than successfully casting that spell is).
Artificer role themed around turning items into different or differently powered items.
A new take on a Bard role, generally themed around leading a party of other adventurers through the dungeon, with some other additional ideas:
See also: Bard implementations.
Spell of collect arrows: it magically retrieves all objects on the current level that you’ve thrown or fired at some point in the past. (Possibly limited to weapon class objects).
Allow wielding some types of traditional magical implements to reduce spell failure rates:
Add a system for casting ritual spells: more powerful and more expensive spells which have some esoteric effects you can’t get otherwise. The main differences between ritual and normal spellcasting are that they consume valuable, hopefully non-renewable components, take a number of turns to cast instead of taking effect instantly, and may require you to be in or set up certain circumstances.
Various ritual spells that have been proposed:
Ritual spells come in spellbooks like usual, but aren’t stored in your spell list. Instead, reading the spellbook prompts you if you want to begin its ritual and tells you the necessary ingredients and circumstances you need to satisfy as preconditions. If you meet all the conditions and answer yes, you initiate the ritual. (For simplicity, this should probably burn up / expend all the components instantly.) You cannot begin a ritual while in the process of casting another ritual; this should probably be implemented as a precondition.
Apart from the component cost, rituals act as a constant drain on your Pw until the ritual is complete. If something distracts you in the middle of the ritual, you can go take care of it and then resume the ritual as long as you have the Pw left to finish it. (You could also drink gain energy during the ritual.) The only way for a ritual to fail, possibly backfiring with bad effects, is for you to run out of Pw while it is incomplete.
In addition to its preconditions, each ritual also has some postconditions: common to all rituals is that you have been casting the ritual for at least some length of time, but there may be others, such as standing on the square where you began the ritual, or have another item, or kill a monster, or something. There may also be other conditions such as “moving off the space where the ritual started breaks and halts the ritual”.
Every time you stop casting a ritual (whether it succeeded or failed), it increments the spellbook’s spestudied field; the book will eventually disintegrate after casting it a certain number of times.
Charm monster is generally considered too powerful and too low-level, and should probably be nerfed. Ideas:
Add a Druid role: intended to be a more balanced form of SLASH’EM’s doppelganger race, druids are highly attuned to nature and possess innate shapeshifting abilities.
Grass terrain, rendered as a green period or comma. It could have the following properties:
Ideas to change terrain symbols to reduce overcrowding of the # symbol:
Slope terrain, which is a terrain that appears like walls but does not block line-of-sight. It blocks movement unless levitating or flying, and cannot be dug down on or into. If you somehow get onto slope terrain (such as by stopping levitation while on it), you can move off it in any unblocked direction. This would allow interesting level designs like pyramids and switchbacks. Is still a bit problematic without implementing actual height values for the terrain, since for things like a large pyramid, you would be able to see straight over the top of the pyramid and down the back side.
A new type of “fence” terrain that is like wooden iron bars: it cannot normally be moved onto but it can be burnt or kicked down, and it does not block line of sight.
New type of terrain, “fire terrain”, a square that is on fire. It displays as an orange period. (If this will be too nasty to people who play with color off, the glyph should perhaps be changed.)
A plan for magic traps to scale according to the depth they appear on. All these effects are still triggered just with the same magic trap - this isn’t adding new trap types.
Possibly remove polymorph traps as an independent trap type since it’s one of the options here.
| Effect | Dungeon level or branch |
|---|---|
| Magical explosion: HP damage, Pw increased to full, maxPw increase | Any (with fixed 25% chance) |
| Odd feeling (using standard odd feeling messages, no effect) | Any (with fixed 25% chance) |
| Grateful djinni, wish | 1 (with fixed 5% chance) |
| Remove curse (like uncursed scroll) | Outside Gehennom |
| Curse items (like harassment) | Within Gehennom |
| Horizontal teleport | 1-6 |
| Blinds for 1d5+10 turns | 3-8 |
| Hostile magic whistle; summons monsters that already exist on the level to appear around the player | 5-10 |
| Gain 1 charisma and charm surrounding monsters | 7-12 |
| Create a stinking cloud on the space | 9-14 |
| Polymorph | 11-16 |
| Randomly bless and curse inventory (like confused blessed remove curse) | 13-18 |
| Do both the blinding and hostile whistling effects above | 15-20 |
| Level teleport | 17-22 |
| Surround the player with Z that are buffed by having intrinsic monster detection, being blinded so Elbereth won’t work, and being hasted | 19+ |
| Surround the player with & that are buffed in the same way | Gehennom |
| Surround with nasties (like harassment) | Gehennom |
| Surround with nasties that are buffed as above | Gehennom |
Container traps’ effects scale based on dungeon level (ideally on the level a container generated, not on the current level, so a player can’t bring a chest up to level 1 to make it use the weakest possible trap.)
In addition to adding some more effects, also add some effects which cosmetically are the same as other ones, but are more or less damaging. This would, however, make untrapping containers even more useless than it is now; perhaps a trap should stay armed even after you set it off. Another idea is to give certain traps an arming item, like a potion of oil for the fire effect and a land mine for the explosion effect. Successfully untrapping it will deposit the arming item into the container.
Also, make container traps independent of Luck, because currently they encourage the player to ignore containers until Luck is maximized.
Instead of making all trapped doors explode and stun the player, add more varied door traps. The trap should be determined based on depth. It should also be selected deterministically based on the coordinates of the door (a convenience so that a trapped door will always have the same trap effect without having to store which trap it is.)
Additionally, new traps can also be used with more door states, rather than have all traps trigger by trying to open the door. Nondestructive traps could also remain on the door until the door is untrapped, rather than vanishing.
An interesting addition would be if doors were made restrictedly or completely untrappable, in order to prevent optimal strategy from being attempting to untrap every door that the player comes across. Or possibly an attempt to open or close a door should do a cursory trap check.
List of door traps in rough order of minimum depth necessary to generate them:
Anti-magic fields in Gehennom can attempt to cancel you or your gear, and apply the cancelled status effect.
Various types of floor traps trigger based on your weight. This makes the trap more likely to trigger on a heavily armored character or one who has collected a lot of loot. Would work nicely in the Gnomish Mines, since gnomes are light and don’t tend to carry much stuff. Certain traps could also trigger to a lesser degree if you weigh enough to trigger it but not a whole ton.
Deeper in the dungeon, rust traps might target your pack instead of your armor or gear, and could possibly be renamed to “water trap”. On deeper levels and particularly in Gehennom, rust traps phase out to be replaced by acid traps. These deal corrosion and acid damage (and quite a bit of it, like having multiple potions of acid dumped on your head).
Pits get deeper the further down in the dungeon you are, which makes them deal more damage, might cause wounded legs with a chance that increases with depth, and take longer to escape from (or are so deep you can’t climb out at all). In Gehennom, they might deal extra damage on account of being designed and put there by demons. The extra depth could be conveyed to the player by “You fall into a [very] deep pit!”
Falling rock traps can dump multiple rocks onto you at once, up to (depth/4). Damage is taken for each rock. If a trap would drop 4 or more rocks on you, it may instead drop (rocks/4) boulders on your head instead. Helms should be less effective at reducing damage from falling rocks, and almost useless at reducing damage from falling houlders.
If multiple boulders are dropped, they might be dropped on nearby spaces as well, so that a pathway might end up blocked.
Magic traps’ blinding and summoning monsters effects should be split up, since both at once tends to make them much more fatal, especially to early players. Alternatively, make the summoned monster selection with a lower-difficulty pool of monsters.
Statue traps generate monsters with a +5 difficulty modifier (though this might be too high). This is because a statue that surprisingly turns into a level-appropriate monster isn’t usually very threatening.
New role, the Artificer:
Also see dtsund’s proposed Tinker role.
Advanced spell forms are slightly problematic. Certain spells (fireball and cone of cold) which have advanced versions automatically kick in when the player is Skilled or above, and can’t be cast using the lesser form even if the player wants to.
It’s a problem that utility spells with a high failure rate, such as identify at 95% fail, is a mere inconvenience to players, since they can sit in a closet with a stack of food and wait for their Pw to recharge until they succeed. This is not really a problem with combat spells, since the penalty for failing to cast the spell correctly is a disadvantage in combat, where time and Pw matter. Some possible ways to address it:
real Pw = base Pw / success
rate. Under this formula, a 15 Pw spell at 95% fail becomes a 300 Pw
spell at 0% fail. This means the Pw cost should be exposed in the spellcasting
menu rather than failure rate, even though failure rate still needs to be
calculated. Maybe use different colors in the spellcasting menu to denote
spells you can cast now, spells you can cast by waiting to recover more Pw,
spells you can’t cast even at your current maximum Pw, and forgotten spells.Instead of books having spestudied charges which leads to a lot of issues with polypiling, you read them once and they disappear, but you get 3 times the spell memory. This is intended to remove tedious spellbook micromanagement.
The wield slot is fairly underused among object classes, and there are a number of interesting bonuses we can add to spells if the corresponding spellbook is wielded.
In a lot of folklore, iron wards away elves. This could be implemented in the game in several ways:
Gold is a metal associated with the sun, so weapons made of it should deal extra damage against undead. Additionally, blunt gold weapons get a d2 damage bonus versus everything due to being heavier.
Mithril body armor prevents the Tsurugi of Muaramasa from bisecting you (or a monster wearing it, for that matter).
The current resistance system is unsatisfying, because most resistances separate the effects of something into a binary outcome: worse effects with no resistance, totally ignorable effects with it. Most resistances also are get-once-and-be-protected-forever, which is uninteresting in the long term.
Proposed solutions to this generally assume that there will be some distinction between resistance and immunity, which offers better (or total) protection but is not normally obtainable as a permanent intrinsic effect. This also enables partial resistances (as found in SporkHack) to be used, though some ideas still treat them as binary - either you have it or you don’t.
An Alchemist role, revolving around potions and alchemy, and likely requiring overhauls of several systems.
The invoke effect of the Philosopher’s Stone is heavily debated.
A really great Alchemist implementation would probably involve a full alchemy overhaul which adds herbs and fungi, harvesting ingredients from corpses, cooking, and interesting ways to combine everything. The challenge with making this is how to make the other stuff useful for other roles and not just the alchemist, and at the same time not overcomplicating the game with the new additions.
Define several generic monster strategies, which a monster will follow to the best of its ability, and can be swapped out for other strategies given certain triggers:
Monsters that exist in groups are currently completely individualistic and try nothing more complex than charging towards the player and hitting in melee once they get there. This makes it easy for the player to cheese what would otherwise be tough battles, e.g. by standing in a doorway and killing them one by one, or by kiting them. There are some proposals for smarter AI:
Monsters have different degrees of intelligence, which changes their strategy for doing certain actions like fleeing (do they flee intelligently like monkeys do, or in a random direction?) and using items (a dumb monster might try to read a scroll of fire and burn itself to death). At any rate, more intelligent than the current definition of “having hands and neither mindless nor animal”.
Special monster AIs/strategies for golems. Likely requiring a general AI overhaul. The strategy for an individual golem could be selected from a set of possible directives when the monster is created. They follow this directive completely and literally, which may result in some interesting behaviors. The player can #chat to the golem to have it mumble its directive.
“Leaders” of a group of monsters (loosely defined as a M2_LORD or M2_PRINCE monster, when several monsters of the same monster class are nearby) will try to put the group between them and the player. The presence of a leader could also buff the strategy or intelligence of the group it is in.
Very intelligent monsters calculate whether it is more advantageous in terms of damaging the enemy versus taking damage themselves to pursue a target in melee, keep a safe distance and attack from range, or flee. Complex solutions would involve the monster storing lots of data about which attacks it has seen its opponents perform; however, this might get memory-intensive and expand save files quite a bit. A possible algorithm that relies only on game state and is based on FIQhack’s dragon AI algorithm is as follows:
If able to attack at range (spit/breathe/shoot missiles/use items/etc):
If the target is in range but not adjacent:
Attack at range.
Else if the target is adjacent, and is at least as fast as the monster:
Attack in melee, or use ranged attacks point blank.
Otherwise:
Try to move somewhere aligned with the target, as far away as possible while still being in range.
Else if the monster is unable to attack at range but will be able to soon (dragon):
Stay out of line with the target.
Otherwise:
Close to melee range.
Items (perhaps only heavily randomized object classes, so NOT armor) can be inspected somehow, or else come pre-inspected, and your character is able to conclude that the item is one of a small set of possible things from that object class. The number of these possible things can depend on role, and the “fakes” are randomized every game. This approach is very similar to the one used in the roguelike Golden Krone Hotel.
Example: a character inspects a potion and confirms that it is either healing, acid, or sleeping. All potions with this appearance will provide the same three possibilities. It’s actually acid, but without other identification methods, or ruling out healing and sleeping, it can’t be discerned which of the three it is.
Has some problems with the interface; a character shouldn’t inspect everything and then have to type-name it. Perhaps this could be automated somehow.
Make the identification game less regimented. Currently, a rational spoiled player (who will not take the risks associated with direct use-ID) is restricted to indirect use-ID (and monster use-ID) of most objects until such time as they can find a general, book, or scroll shop, at which point they can price-ID the scroll of identify and other items. Once identify is known (and could be blessed), the good items (as determined by price ID) can be fully identified. This is problematic because it’s not at all a gradual process, and it feels like it should be.
Some ideas have been floated to remove price ID outright (presumably, a shopkeeper would pay the same amount for each item of an object class as they currently do with amulets). This has some advantages; price ID is tedious, encourages stashing to some extent (because stashing near a shop where you can ID new things is good), and roguelike players who don’t primarily play NetHack tend to hate its price ID system. In this case, either the scroll of identify should start out identified for all characters, so that identification doesn’t take forever to get off the ground, or some other mechanic should be added so identify is easy to pick out for spoiled players (such as retaining price-ID for only that scroll).
A designer may not want to get rid of the price identification system entirely. But there are some options for amending it. Overall, it should become less regimented and predictable, and less necessary of a strategy. NetHack’s entire idea of price tiers doesn’t appear to be based on much of anything, and having items organized into tiers makes it easy to disregard entire sets of items once their base prices are known. Ideas include:
In an effort to make use-testing spellbooks less of a terrible idea, all characters should get a warning when reading a spellbook that’s way out of their comfort zone and they have very little chance of successfully studying it.
Make scrolls and spellbooks in particular partially identifiable outside of a shop without having to formally identify them or guess based on frequency (which are currently the ‘‘only’’ ways to identify them outside of a shop). Ideas:
With respect to other proposals about crafting (involving a craftsmen’s guild or even scattered craftsmen), the process of traveling back and forth to and from it might become busywork. So if players could craft things on their own, that might be better.
Add a Craftsmen’s Guild to the game, as a method of advanced crafting (unlike the player’s simplified crafting such as alchemy crafting potions into other potions, or combining a blank scroll with a magic marker to make magic scrolls). The guild either has its own dedicated special level, or occupies part of a preexisting special level.
Metalworkers are probably the most important sort of craftsman for many characters. There could be multiple types, each specializing in one type of metal, or just one type that does everything.
Cantrips are level 0 spells that cost d2 or d3 power to cast. In order not to let them be unbalancing, they don’t train skill and are mostly useless, except in certain circumstances or for low-Pw spellcasters who can’t do much of the bigger stuff yet. ais523 suggests that good candidates for cantrips might be things that have little combat use, and whose effects could be duplicated by backtracking or other tedious things, but would be useful to avoid boredom. Given their cheapness, they should probably not train skills, and may not even need spell schools.
Most ideas for cantrips seem to be a little too powerful and would do better off as normal spells (and may be listed as independent YANIs for normal spells); however, those that seem like they would fit are listed here.
Address startscumming by introducing a point buy system for starting characters: unrandomizing starting stats and inventory and letting the user spend points on stats and equipment however they like. (Note: dtsund’s class overhaul proposal also addresses unrandomization of starting inventory by simply removing all the random chances to get items, but it doesn’t involve point buy.)
This was migrated from the summary of the “Alchemy” mega-idea following its breakup into smaller independent ones. It is not an idea in and of itself, but is rather design notes on the present state of the alchemy system as a whole which may still be useful.
NetHack’s alchemy system is balanced around the assumption that the player will not hold onto nearly every potion in the game, turn them to water, and polypile them into alchemy ingredients; however, this is not hard to do. Should the player do this, they can amass hundreds of hit points worth of full healing potions, or all the gain ability potions required to max out every stat, or get dozens of potions of holy water.
For most potions in the game, diluting for holy water or alchemizing/polypiling for alchemizing is their ultimate fate, and there are enough potions so that the player never really has to agonize over what to do with a potion. One solution to this would be to make more potions than just acid effective for throwing at monsters.
The color alchemy and gem alchemy patches are unsatisfactory, as is any system that ties alchemy recipes to the random appearance of potions. This is because it makes the game choose at the beginning whether powerful potions can be produced out of junk potions/gems, or out of expensive potions/gems, or not at all — all before the player gets a chance to learn how alchemy will work in this game. It has a large impact on overall strategy that the player can’t discover until probably the midgame. At the same time, having hardcoded alchemy rules is unsatisfactory because it’s inflexible and carries a heavy spoiler requirement.
Random alchemy is also odd: dipping the same potions in the same way can yield different potion results.
Several new objects for aiding in alchemy:
Non-weapon skill that has various effects on alchemy: make alchemical blasts less common (or zero at high skill), and increase the probability that mixing certain potions yields the right result.
Allow sinks to be catalysts for alchemizing things. (Or possibly add a “cauldron” as a new piece of dungeon furniture, but that’s iffier.)
A radically different system from how alchemy currently works, known as “1 + 1 = 2”: no matter how many potions are in the stacks being dipped, only one from each stack is consumed, and two alchemized potions are always produced (unless they explode).
Give all roles permanent knowledge of their role’s special spell starting right at the beginning of the game. The expectation is that a starting character probably can’t cast it, but will be able to given time.
Priests cannot convert aligned altars, because they respect those other religions. However, they can convert Moloch’s altars, including the ones in Gehennom.
In variants with percentage-based intrinsics, see invisible is no longer a binary attribute. Eating invisible stalkers now gives you various percentages of the intrinsic. While extrinsic see invisible still works like it does now, allowing you to see any invisible monster in line of sight, intrinsic see invisible shows you invisible monsters in line of sight within a certain radius from you. The radius increases with the percentage, possibly the square root of the percentage (so 64% see invisible is a radius of 8, and 100% is a radius of 10 - note that 100% still is less powerful than extrinsic see invisible’s unlimited range).
In variants with percentage intrinsics, intrinsics granted by one’s role need not be binary. For instance, monks tend to gain a lot of elemental resistances by leveling up, so rather than having those be all-or-nothing cutoffs at fixed levels, spread it out so that they gain a decent percentage of the resistance with each level near the original cutoff.
This would complicate the enlightenment display, since now it would have to disclose something like “You have 76% fire resistance: 45% from corpses and 31% from your priest levels”.
Lightning doesn’t pass through iron bars. Instead, it electrifies the bars and any bars contiguously connected to them (possibly within some range), causing any creature occupying one of the electrified iron bars squares to be zapped as if the lightning ray hit them.
Cursed arrows fired from a blessed bow or vice versa do not misfire.
Martial artists should be able to use martial arts weapons to use extra abilities, such as:
Scale spellbook generation rates by level and dungeon depth, making lower-level books much more frequent higher in the dungeon, and higher-level books more frequent lower in it.
Differentiate spellcasting greatly for the different types of spellcasters:
You can use a crystal ball to search for an artifact. It will not tell you where it is, but it will show you a “cloudy” image of the artifact if it already exists, and an “empty” image if it does not yet exist. Maybe also tell the player explicitly “It means this artifact is/is not anywhere in the dungeon right now.”
Add a spell of telekinesis as a high level matter spell, which replicates some of the monster-shoving functionality you can get with #wiztelekinesis.
Beverage tins, which contain a potion instead of meat from a monster. Randomly generated ones always have potions with the “bubbly”, “fizzy” or “effervescent” appearance.
When you eat such a tin, it “opens with a loud hiss!”, making noise in some radius. It always takes 1 turn to open regardless of beatitude. Then you are shown its appearance. If you are not blind, you see it directly (“It contains a bubbly liquid”); if you are blind but have identified the potion, you recognize the potion by the smell; otherwise you get a generic “It feels like some liquid is inside”. Then you’re prompted to drink it, like with any other tin. If you do, you experience the same effects as you would from a potion of the corresponding beatitude.
Tinning kits could possibly convert potions into homemade beverage tins, but there needs to be some sort of downside which hasn’t yet been proposed. As it stands, you would be able to convert a 20-weight potion into a 10-weight unbreakable potion. The existing downsides are that it expends a tinning kit charge and the resulting potion can’t be dipped, alchemized with, or thrown, but for the sort of potions one would want to turn into tins, these aren’t really downsides.
Monsters with AT_EXPL kamikaze attacks are excluded from the regular is-this-foe-too-strong-for-me level checks. The point of those checks is to prevent a monster from attacking something too strong and getting hurt in retaliation, and if the attacker’s modus operandi is to blow itself up at the enemy, that isn’t relevant.
Flaming, freezing, and shocking spheres explode when killed like a gas spore does.
If you are not wearing gloves, greased rings slip off your fingers as if you had greasy fingers.
An artifact weapon that makes everything it kills explode (for not very much damage).
Assuming an implementation containing multiple puzzle branches (to offer players an alternative to Sokoban), have all the branches start from an “antechamber” level off the main dungeon. This is a small unpopulated level, and contains terrain clues around each puzzle branch staircase in it, such as boulders and strangely shaped walls for Sokoban, ice if there is an ice sliding puzzle, etc.
When you use a magic whistle, if you have more than a certain number (3 or so) pets teleporting to your side, condense it into a single message saying “Your pets appear around you.”
If you are Skilled or above in divination spells, you can passively sense when an item is magical like a Wizard can. (Wizards keep this benefit and don’t need to have Skilled divination for it.)
Dragonbane starts off as just a weapon with a damage bonus versus dragons, but it gains properties corresponding to every type of adult dragon you have killed with it. So when you kill a red dragon with it, it now gives you fire resistance and/or does fire damage, then you kill a black dragon and it now gives you fire and disintegration resistance and/or does fire and disintegration damage, and so on.
This doesn’t have to be Dragonbane, the concept of an artifact that powers up by killing different monsters could apply to something else, but Dragonbane is a good example since dragons have a big diversity of obvious properties and resistances.
To keep it from becoming overpowered, it could stack up to 2 or 3 properties from the last 2 or 3 unique types of dragons killed so long as neither property is something powerful like reflection or magic resistance (which would clear all other properties).
Wizards receive a spellbook of magic missile as their first sacrifice gift if they don’t already have the spell in their spellbook (even if it’s completely forgotten). In this case, they get Magicbane as their second gift.
If you give an item-using pet an amulet of unchanging, they will recognize that you want them to wear it and put it on.
A carrion-eater conduct in which your only source of nutrition is allowed to be corpses. No permafood, juice, prayer or anything else.
Scavenger conduct: never take an item from a shop or a chest (notably, this means you cannot take the wand of wishing).
Killing a mindless pet does not incur any penalties to alignment record or Luck.
If you defeat a monster that generates with an artifact weapon, that weapon’s skill is unrestricted for you, so that you can actually use it. Possibly only do this for monsters that are guaranteed certain artifacts, like Kas in EvilHack, rather than extending it to any random monster.
Snow golems occasionally drop one or more of the following when killed:
Having both intrinsic and extrinsic reflection at the same time should make you fully reflect things as you would in vanilla, until the intrinsic times out.
Since Grimtooth is permanently poisoned, dipping it in an uncursed potion of water should turn it into a potion of sickness, and dipping it into a pool or moat should turn it into sewage.
On occasion, a small mimic poses as a spellbook so persuasively that it actually is a spellbook item, and you can pick it up and carry it around. Attempting to identify, read, throw or kick the book reveals it as a mimic. (If mimics have been genocided, this silently doesn’t happen.)
Internally this is stored using the book’s otrapped flag.
Some method of allowing the player to find out what the unselected two Sokoban prizes were, after picking up the chosen prize and the other two poof out of existence.
When spells are forgotten or retention is damaged when you suffer amnesia, the game prints a message informing you of such, akin to “You forget some of your training” for skills.
New monster “aballin”, from D&D. It is a mobile j-class monster that can appear as a pool of water when not actively moving, and can possibly appear as a water elemental when moving. They can eat organic items like gelatinous cubes, though perhaps not instantly like gelatinous cubes, instead dissolving them some time after engulfing them. They are incapable of climbing stairs, and typically sit dormant imitating a pool until a monster draws near, at which point they become active.
Allow the player to annotate levels they are not on, because it’s a common occurrence that the player forgets to write down an important reminder about a level while still physically on it.
Merge the clockwork automaton and gnome races: you are a gnome in a clockwork suit. You are able to leave the suit and wind it up instead of needing to find other people to do it. However, if the suit gets destroyed in any way, you have to play the rest of the game as a gnome (which is probably nerfed compared to the current gnome).
Some type of monster that lifesaves you when you die, instead dying itself. This might be a new monster or not, probably something angelic (but not an Angel since you can get one on Astral).
A Rogue-aligned artifact (either a first gift or a crowning gift) that is some sort of small blade whose invoke effect allows you to teleport behind nearby enemies and attack them, perhaps with bonus backstab damage for a short time. Or more powerfully, you instantaneously warp behind and backstab several different enemies within a radius of 10 or 12 from you all at once.
The start-of-game “Shall I pick character’s race, role…” screen is replaced with one that presents a random race/role/alignment/gender combo and asks if you want to play it. Answering yes starts the game, no rolls a new one, and quit brings you to the manual selection screen.
An option that automatically dismisses the “Where do you want to be teleported?” prompt if you have both teleportitis and teleport control.
Consolidate Fire and Frost Brand (or allow them to be combined in-game) into a new artifact named something like “Frostflame Brand”. This weapon deals either fire damage or cold damage alternately on every hit.
A boss that, when first angered, takes no moves for 10 turns, and is invulnerable, though any damage you decide to do to it is tracked. After the 10 turns expire, the boss is given a HP maximum and other stats directly proportional to how much damage you did while it was invulnerable. If you kill it, it gives rewards also proportional to this amount of damage.
Attempting to pick a lock with low Dexterity has a chance of jamming the lock, making it impossible to pick or use a key on. Opening magic and forcing the lock can still be used.
Probing will reveal the contents of tins it hits (and mark the tins as identified so they stay revealed).
Gold bugs have some interaction with graves if there is one on the level. Perhaps they are found hiding near graves, or will try to pathfind to a grave and dig it up.
An option to set the name of your juice potions, separate from the fruit, so that you can have your fruit being e.g. “pizza” without potions of juice tasting like “pizza juice”. If this option is unset, the juice name defaults to the configured fruit name.
Consistent with the Owned Artifacts Patch, wishing for dragon armor in EvilHack should instead summon a dragon of the wished-for color that you must fight for the scales. (It will be guaranteed to drop them, unlike a regular dragon.)
Pet dragons that eat mimic corpses should turn into large piles of gold, consistent with the stated reason that pets tend to mimic things they are thinking about.
You can record the location of a stash (or really whatever point you want), and then be able to travel back to it even if you’re on another level.
Potion of coffee, a nonmagical potion which confers some of the following variously proposed effects:
In-game achievements, especially role unlocks, should produce a clear message to the player.
Awake (and non-paralyzed, etc) queen bees periodically lay a killer bee egg if there is not already one on their square, and their square is walkable terrain.
When you are wearing the amulet of restful sleep, you are given sleep resistance whenever the amulet is not causing you to sleep; this is because you shouldn’t be tired in between frequent naps.
Stairs should show any annotation of the level they lead to. Probably not by default, instead when using the nearlook and/or farlook command.
E.g. “There is a staircase down to level 2 (MUMAK BY THE STAIRS!!) here.”
If you kick a boulder as a giant-race hero (or while polymorphed into one), it starts rolling across the ground as if it came from a rolling boulder trap.
New monster “Phantom of War”, a powerful player monster style @ that appears on either the Astral Plane or elsewhere on the ascension run, but only if the player has successfully maintained pacifist conduct up until that point.
Orange mold, an F monster which has a passive sleep attack, and a small chance (equal to the other molds) of conveying sleep resistance.
Any corpse which has touched sewage is automatically tainted if you try to eat it.
Having a copper weapon wielded while suffering shock damage has a lightning rod effect: it causes you to take extra damage, but completely protects all your rings and wands from being destroyed.
Track the highest-reached enchantment of enchantable weapons and armor. If it gets cancelled or disenchanted below this peak amount, you can dip it in a potion of restore ability to immediately raise it back to that peak.
“Teleport armor” monster spell, which is a close-range spell that takes one piece of your armor and teleports it somewhere else on the level (it could be limited to a short distance to be nice).
Foocubi could cast this (but not cast any other spells), since they want to get your armor off.
A paranoid cannibalism option, which prompts you to confirm when you are about to eat something that would be considered cannibalism (including dogs and cats if they would incur the same penalties).
“Saintly” conduct, which tracks that you have never abused your alignment.
After a pet removes a shop-owned item from a shop 5 times, the shopkeeper stops permitting pets in the shop.
Items generated in or sold to shops are marked as being property of that shop, and when you buy it properly, this marking is cleared. When you attempt to sell an item to a shop that is currently marked as the shop’s property (meaning it was not properly paid for), the shopkeeper just confiscates it without paying. This prevents you from directly or indirectly stealing the same item over and over again and getting paid for it every time.
When you play as a giant monk, Master Kaen should also be a giant, complete with giant-sized robe, so when you defeat him you can get a usable robe as well as the quest artifact.
Add a #notes command, which opens up a blank text editor window where you can type anything you want. The notes are saved along with the game and can be referenced anytime from within it.
To prevent this being a hugely complicated undertaking (basically implementing a text editor in the game, which won’t mesh particularly well with players used to other text editors), one suggestion is to use the shell’s default editor, but then this becomes akin to just using out-of-game notes anyway.
Another suggestion is to implement it using a system similar to autopickup exceptions: the player can add, edit, list, and delete one-line notes, which doesn’t require implementing any text editing capability the game doesn’t already have.
When you are riding and get engulfed, you should be “ripped from your mount”, because currently this behaves weirdly - you end up still riding your mount inside the engulfer, your steed is not adversely affected, and if you dismount you “float down” and the steed magically pops outside the engulfer. The size of your steed also doesn’t matter, so it also doesn’t make much sense if it’s something huge like a dragon.
In variants that have withering, add a ring of withering: causes extrinsic withering when worn, and is one of the rings which is usually generated cursed.
Replace poison instadeath with a system where poison sticks around in your system for a fairly long time, allowing multiple doses to build up and eventually kill you if you’re careless. This means when faced with a swarm of poisoning monsters or orcs with poisoned arrows, you still have incentive to flee, but won’t cheaply die to the first one or two.
A nonmagical ring called a “regimental ring”, which when worn makes soldiers peaceful (unspecified whether higher ranking officers should respect it or not). It possibly appears as rare loot in barracks or rarely generated in the inventory of high-ranking officers.
Ring of quick change, which decreases the amount of time needed to put on and take off gear.
This could be a chargeable ring, which makes the decrease proportional to its enchantment (and a negatively charged ring making gear changes take more time). If implemented as non-chargeable, gear changes would most likely take a constant 1 or 0 turns.
One side effect of wearing this is that nymphs that charm you into taking off armor get fewer or no turns to make additional thefts while you are disrobing.
Conceptually separate breath weapons from rays, making them not trivially reflectable. Make it possible to suffer reduced effects from a breath weapon, with the size of a worn shield a factor in that reduction.
Possibly make dragon armor of the same type as a given breath weapon (e.g. red dragon armor versus fire breath) reflect that breath weapon, and only that one.
If the showscore option is compiled in, allow the player to see the high score list and where they currently stand relative to the top entries or the entries around their current score.
A headless race, “Akephalos/oi”, which has no head and its face on its chest, so it is incapable of wearing helms, and is blinded (and cannot drink potions) if a shirt or body armor is worn.
Also a dullahan/cephalophore race which Knights can play as. They are also headless and cannot wear helms, but they carry their head as an item and can place/throw it elsewhere. Vision is based on where the head is, so it is possible to leave the head somewhere and have the body moving around blindly in a different area of the map.
A ring which gives you effective Basic skill in all weapons when you wear it. (Not specified exactly how the #enhance interface would display your skills when using the ring.)
Coaligned (or unaligned) intelligent artifact weapons let you use them as if you had Basic skill, even if you don’t have it. Flavored as the weapon helping you out.
Remove most specific skills for ranged weapons, reducing them to a set of bow, crossbow, sling, and “thrown” (including darts, boomerangs, thrown rocks, etc). When wielded, missiles are always treated as unskilled.
Attacking with a boomerang in melee should use the club skill rather than the boomerang skill.
Cartomancers can use monster cards (i.e. scrolls of create monster) by throwing them as well as reading them. If thrown, the monster is created on or adjacent to the space where the scroll hits the ground.
Cartomancers don’t spellcast using Pw. Instead, they read the book (which is instantaneous for them, and possibly subject to a failure chance like normal if the spell is not known) and the spell immediately takes effect. This increments the read counter for the book, so each book can be used to cast a spell 4 times before it blanks.
When an item-using monster rises from the dead, it automatically picks up any useful items on its square.
Ring of clarity, which makes you immune to confusion when wearing it. If you happen to eat it, it will cure any temporary confusion you have.
The $ command lists, in addition to your currently carried gold, any amounts of store credit you currently have at shops you have visited.
Horror Brand, an artifact weapon whose stats (including presumably its base item type) are randomly generated each game or even combines random aspects from various artifacts, like shambling horrors.
The scroll of identify’s confused effect allows you to pick any monster you can see and “identifies” them, giving either the same information as using a stethoscope on them, or the same information as probing, or possibly even more information (such as their resistances and status effects).
Make #polyself a non-wizard-mode-exclusive command. When used in regular play, it will:
If an artifact produces any kind of message which clearly identifies it, it should be automatically identified as such in the discoveries list as if it had been formally identified. (In practice, the artifact will be clearly named, as well, so this just saves the trouble of having to officially discover it.)
A couple quests for roles other than the hero’s are available to complete in the game, as extra side branches. These can be accessed from magic portals in Gehennom below the Valley of the Dead.
Attempting to put on an eye-slot item such as a towel, lenses, or a blindfold when one is already equipped autoremoves the worn one (if not cursed) before wearing the new gear.
Siren, a straightforward implementation of the ones in mythology. If you are within a certain range, you automatically move towards them at the end of your turn. You are protected if you are blind AND deaf AND not telepathic (telepathy overrides the protection of being blind and deaf, and in fact makes the pull even worse due to its heightened awareness).
The dunce cap inhibits spellcasting (on top of the low intelligence it provides; not specified if it should entirely block spellcasting or just make it very difficult) but also provides magic resistance when worn. This is to add diversity of non-artifact magic resistance builds for non-spellcasters, and also to allow people to give magic resistance to pets that are incapable of wearing cloaks.
Instead of spellbooks having 4 read charges, they store “400% memory” - enough magical power to give a reader full knowledge of the spell 4 times over, which is functionally identical to how many times they can be reread now but more granular. Reading a book to restore memory of a partially forgotten spell only consumes the missing fraction of memory required to bring you back up to 100% retention.
Example: The hero reads a spellbook of knock, bringing themselves to 100% memory and the spellbook down to 300% memory. 10000 turns later, the hero, now with 50% memory, rereads the book. This restores their memory to 100% but the spellbook is only decreased to 250%.
This would allow events that degrade spellbooks (reading it and polymorphing it) to degrade it by a randomized degree instead of a flat, predictable 1/4 of its use every time.
Sokoban puzzles that have no spare boulders by default can have a little attached room containing several easily retrieved spare boulders, but it incurs a Luck penalty to open the door to this room.
Greased items should be immune to getting stolen out of the inventory (except perhaps if it’s a greased armor piece and the stealer is a nymph that charmed you into taking it off).
Remove the scroll and spellbook of identify, and in place of them add in items that work like a touchstone: each such item is useful at identifying the type of items of a particular object class, like touchstones are for gems. Also like touchstones, certain roles and races have affinities or advantages with various of these identifier items.
Zapping a wand with no charges remaining, if it fails to wrest with the usual odds, will cancel it instead of letting it crumble to dust. This allows you to recharge the wand.
Dragonhide gear resists attempts to enchant it a significant percentage of the time, so it takes more resources overall to enchant it up to the same level as a non-dragonhide piece of gear.
A tinning kit for pets, or some other way to create tins that are not designed to be eaten by the player but instead opened with an adjacent pet that will always eat whatever it is in the tin, so you can give them resistances in a controlled manner.
When you look at a pet’s inventory via the #loot command and it is wearing armor, its AC is shown.
Dragonhide gear naturally deteriorates gradually over time, and the only way to prevent this is to rub large quantities of gold on it, which destroys the gold.
After killing certain type(s) of monsters (such as the monarch of a throne room), a timer may start that spawns an avenging posse of related monsters nearby.
To slightly encourage the use of underused types of dragon scale mail, have Fire Brand synergize with worn red dragon scale mail by allowing it to be invoked for a fireball, and have Frost Brand synergize with worn white dragon scale mail by allowing it to be invoked for a cone of cold.
Getting cancelled should end a bunch of magical effects:
A system termed “named non-artifact properties”. They are unique properties that never generate on more than one item per game, and confer some artifact-like qualities, but are not tied to a specific type of object, and can generate on multiple types of base item. This type of property cannot be wished for, even if properties can otherwise be wished for.
A couple examples:
The Helm of Terror: an artifact which is some unspecified type of helm, which automatically frightens all living creatures that have eyes.
Gray philosopher’s stone; a randomized gray stone that turns objects (possibly only of a certain material) rubbed on it into gold if non-cursed, and turns gold objects rubbed on it back into that same material if cursed.
“Psuedopacifist” conduct - you are allowed to kill monsters, but only in self-defense. This means you cannot kill a monster which generated peaceful, even if you anger it, and you cannot kill monsters which are incapable of taking action to harm you such as blue jellies.
Rather than having dragonhide items be generically “dragonhide”, let them each be a certain dragon color, which cannot be specified by wishing. This item does not confer the same extrinsic it would if it were body armor. Instead, when you are wearing dragon scales or mail and a dragonhide item of the same color in another slot, you gain a very powerful extrinsic which cannot be gained otherwise. E.g. cancellation immunity for gray dragon armor.
The idea is to discourage everyone continuing to wear gray or silver dragon scale mail: if you find or wish for dragonhide gear and get some other color, it may be attractive to wear dragon scale mail of that color instead in order to get the powerful extrinsic.
Spell staves should remove a much greater share of armor penalties for spells of their associated school than they currently do.
Another possible bonus they could have to make them more worthwhile is to treat any spell of their associated school as cast at one higher skill level than your current skill in it (does nothing if you are already Expert, since defining Master effects for spells is likely out of scope).
Some ways to scale some spell effects with skill. Generally, this consists of nerfing unskilled and basic casting rather than adding even more powerful high-skill effects.
Remove the Elbereth from the floor in Sokoban, since this means that anyone who finishes Sokoban automatically gains knowledge of Elbereth. Instead, place a burnt Elbereth somewhere random on the 9th to 14th levels of the dungeon.
Peaceful monsters casting spells do not interrupt multi-turn occupations.
Worn shields of mobility do not apply a shield-based penalty to spellcasting, since they are by design supposed to aid your mobility.
Using a cursed scroll of light to create darkness has some immediate effect that improves stealth in some way.
Applying a leash to a club creates an aklys.
Blowing a tin whistle makes any watchmen on the level converge on you. They won’t be angered, but may be slightly miffed about the false alarm and/or get angered if you keep abusing it.
Unenchanted pick-axes always miss when used as a weapon, so that you can be sure that you will not accidentally hit a monster with one and break weaponless conduct.
If silver dragon scale mail is your only reflection source, or more generally if your only reflection sources come from your shirt and/or body armor, wearing a mummy wrapping over this prevents Medusa from seeing her reflection (though you are still considered to have reflection in all other respects).
During Hanukkah, oil lamps should burn at a very slow rate (1/8 the rate, unless this is unbalanced) so that they last a lot longer than usual.
You can rub a towel on a greased item to remove the grease from it, just like wiping your face.
Whenever you use a shop-owned item to make a wish, the shopkeeper treats the wished-for item as theirs, in addition to the usage fee.
Because it’s a status effect with some downsides, make unicorn horns cure invisibility by removing it. Maybe temporary speed too.
Temples are always lit up; never dark.
A dead Keystone Kop should be referred to by the game as “Keystone Kop korpse” rather than “corpse”.
In addition to making Gehennom much more open, make the monster generation rate much higher, so that players are encouraged to traverse them quickly and avoid being overwhelmed rather than spending lots of time searching every cranny and becoming bored.
Allow all lawful devils (or a random set of lawful devils) to accept a bribe, not just Asmodeus and Baalzebub. They will not vanish completely, but they will turn peaceful.
A monster spell which does high area of effect damage, but clearly indicates what that area of effect will be a turn or two before it goes off, so the player can possibly get to safety.
When you pass out after drinking booze and “awake with a headache”, you lose 1 HP. If this kills you, your death is “killed by a hangover”.
Wearing the “fencing gloves” type of gloves gives you a +1 to-hit bonus in melee combat.
If an aklys is tethered to your hand when wielded, you shouldn’t be able to drop it due to slippery fingers or fumbling.
In order to incentivize bullwhip use or other creative problem solving, Vlad wields the Candelabrum in his offhand.
When an artifact wish fails due to the artifact already existing, communicate this clearly to the player, and then let them use the wish for something else.
Eating objects made of different metals should give different amounts of nutrition per unit of weight. Currently all metals give 1 nutrition per weight unit, but it could be that things such as copper or mithril would give less nutrition than iron, whereas gold could give more, for instance.
Demon cartographers (not specified if this would be a new monster species or just the occasional random peaceful monster of an existing species) who offer to sell you scrolls of magic mapping for exorbitant prices.
In an effort to remove the variance of randomly choosing the right or wrong altar on the Astral Plane: The first high altar you step on is always a wrong one, and the second one is always right.
An artifact amulet of magical breathing which also completely protects your inventory from water damage when worn.
An unaligned artifact amulet versus poison which also confers sickness resistance, half physical damage, and raises Constitution to 25 when worn. Tentatively named “The Eye of [something]”.
Make lycanthropic transformations non-instantaneous: you start to get messages 5-10 (or however many) turns before the transformation happens. For instance, “Your body itches all over.” This serves as a reminder if the player forgot or didn’t notice they had lycanthropy, and provides an opportunity for the player to remove armor to avoid it breaking.
If you controlled teleport to the same spot as an engulfing monster, there is a chance of teleporting inside it and being instantly engulfed instead of landing somewhere else.
When a thrown potion of acid hits a creature, it may corrode some corrodable armor of that creature.
Add an additional container trap effect which creates a stinking cloud centered on the container. If the player caused the cloud to be created, they are counted as responsible for anything killed by the cloud.
Getting hit with acid can decrease Charisma.
Shopkeepers remember when you have robbed their shop even after you pacify them, including in a bones file with a player of the same name who had robbed the shop. They treat former robbers as suspect, and enforce stricter rules on them and/or raise prices for them.
Gnome statues should generate in the “garden” themed room (or special room or random vault, depending on the variant).
The potion of water should always be identified from the start of the game, since “cursed/blessed clear potion” is annoying to read when it’s obvious what the potion is.
Certain drawbridges are made of steel rather than wood, which means they cannot be destroyed by force bolts and will not explode.
Scroll of census: when read, you are prompted to name a monster species. It then tells you how many have been generated and how many are left to extinct the species. When blessed, you are instead prompted to name a monster class, and you get this report for every species in that class.
Remove holy/unholy water’s ability to bless/curse items. Instead, make blessed and cursed oil serve the same functions. Dipping a stack of uncursed oil in holy/unholy oil will bless or curse the stack, as currently works, but since oil is significantly less easy to get than water, this makes mass-blessing of items harder to accomplish.
Anointing an item with holy or unholy oil ignores effects that would normally happen because of the oil. For instance, dipping an oil lamp in holy oil will just bless it, or do nothing if it was blessed already.
Priests now start with a stack of 4 holy oil.
Water doesn’t get outright removed - other things still dilute to it and turn into it in random alchemy - but it’s not much use anymore except for on-the-go dilution.
Not specified whether you could pray to get a stack of oil potions on an altar blessed, or whether this wouldn’t work.
A sentient and always-peaceful monster that you can recruit as a powerful steed, but you need to pay it a large amount of money to ride on it.
If adding a new centaur designed to be a significant threat increase over the existing ones, they should generate with good (if non-magical) armor and a good weapon, which is frequently a lance. If they have a lance, they will use it to joust you.
If the hero gets decapitated, they don’t die, but their head falls into their inventory. Thereafter, they are permanently blind unless wielding the head in the offhand slot.
A system where your god grants you cool abilities, but only if you actively obey randomly generated edicts they put forth. Examples:
If your god orders you to do something that would make you suffer alignment, anger, murder, or Luck penalties, you are not punished for that.
Conceieved as a new race, or an extension of the angelic race, but could also apply to Priests or Infidels.
A SpliceHack spell to make splatters of blood have a use case. It causes blood splatters in a area scaling from 3x3 to 7x7 around the caster (depending on skill) explode, dealing physical damage to things caught in the explosions. Blood splatters on the floor are cleared, and new blood being caused by something dying might be suppressed if it becomes too easy to repeatedly cast this for lots of explosions.
As proposed, this would be a level 5 attack or matter spell.
Make it possible to specify blood splatters in the SpliceHack level parser. Then add it to Orcish Town, the “massacre” and “temple of the gods” themed rooms, and the bottom floor of the Convict quest and possibly graveyards.
Add another dig-up-a-gravestone effect that creates a bunch of maggots around the player with the message “The grave is full of maggots!” If maggots are genocided or extinct, either produce a YAFM or defer to one of the other effects.
Some Medusa buffs:
Body armor imbued with a monster’s soul in a forge can convey you some resistances of the monster.
You can wear a second towel on top of an existing one. This makes you deaf as well as blind.
The debug fuzzer, when it levelports, should pick a random level from the entire dungeon rather than using random levelportation logic, since this tends to lead to it bouncing around the upper levels of the Dungeons of Doom rather than actually going anywhere significant and into new branches.
Or to make this a bit more configurable, there should be an additional iflag added that controls this levelporting behavior which can be enabled in a debugger similar to how iflags.debug_fuzzer is.
Luckblade’s enchantment always equals your current Luck. (Enchanting it or engraving with it would then presumably do nothing since these do not affect Luck.)
Amulet of Storms, an artifact amulet of flying that additionally grants shock resistance when worn, and allows you to pacify true v monsters (i.e. not alternative forms of other monsters that happen to be turned into a vortex as a defined alternative form, such as vampires and the Wizard of Yendor, but counting shapechangers such as chameleons) when chatting to them.
Fast food shop, a type of comestible-containing shop in which no vegan food generates. All the food that does generate in the shop has a special flag set so that it is guaranteed to satiate you (or at least have its nutrition multiplied), gives you greasy fingers, and costs more than usual.
New command, #use. It is undocumented and hidden in the list of commands so that only experienced players or source divers will know about it. It translates into the typical command an experienced player would situationally use. E.g. on a throne with no items it turns into #sit, on a box it does #loot, on an altar it turns into #offer.
When a monster dies and leaves a corpse, they may make some noise that wakes up other monsters. The odds and radius of the sound increase with the size of the monster.
Once you have learned your role’s special spell, you never forget it.
You can quaff an adjacent water elemental, giving you a YAFM (“The water elemental looks deeply offended.”) and angering it if it was peaceful. Drinking it does not have any effect on you, but deals 1 HP damage to the elemental, killing it if it was at 1 HP (“As you drink the water elemental, it disintegrates into droplets.”)
You can also dip potions into a water elemental to dilute them, which also produces the offended message and angers it, but does not do any potion effect or damage to it.
Vow of poverty as a conduct. It is broken by ever having money in inventory (with a grace period of a few turns at the beginning of the game for roles that start with money, or define the conduct as never having money enter the inventory so you can spend initial gold, or a roleplay option similar to nudist that prevents you from generating with any money).
Speed boots can give you additional movement points equal to their enchantment. There are a couple non-mutually-exclusive options for doing this:
Dying while turning to slime (but not dying BY turning to slime) leaves behind a large glob of green slime instead of a corpse in your bones file.
Cursed bags of tricks create tame monsters instead of peaceful or hostile. This is a “bad effect” since you cannot use them for sacrificing.
Blessed jumping boots allow you to jump in the same radius as the Basic level spell, instead of Unskilled.
The potion of restore ability can be used to recover lost maximum Pw. It only restores maximum Pw, not current: if your Pw is 30/80 and you previously had 100 maximum Pw, these potions will only be able to get you to 30/100.
A bag of tricks occasionally spits out a candy bar instead of a monster (or perhaps along with / carried by a monster), but only on Halloween.
In the context of restoring the tension and strategizing created by encountering a mind flayer, which used to be a lot higher when their amnesia caused forgetting maps and discoveries:
The psychic blast of a mind flayer may make you hallucinate, to create short-term tension, and possibly create long-term strategic tension by counting as Intelligence abuse.
However, since mind blasts are a lot less avoidable and harder to strategize around than getting into melee with a mind flayer, it may be better to add these as additional things they can do in melee (but probably not Intelligence abuse, since they already directly drain Intelligence points).
If cast at Skilled or above, the spell of force bolt knocks back the first monster it hits (probably only 1 square like a monk’s staggering blow, or perhaps an Expert cast could provide additional knockback).
Wands of striking would not change since the Basic effects of the spell do not change.
Note that only two roles can cast force bolt at these levels: Knights (at Skilled) and Wizards (at Expert).
Canceling magical armor not only sets it to +0 but turns it into a nonmagical counterpart, which consists of new items such as “faded cloak”, “faded boots” etc. This would probably also rename “faded pall” to avoid confusion.
When a wand of cancellation is placed into a bag of holding, rather than blowing it up, it instead uses up (all of?) the wand’s charges and turns the bag into a sack.
For consistency, bags of holding should probably turn into sacks when zapped with cancellation as well.
This forces potentially interesting choices on cursed bags of holding in bones files, since now cancellation cannot safely be used to loot all the contents and get the bag too.
Fire damage is amplified for any creature who has greased fingers or equipment.
Non-Infidels can permanently convert to Moloch if they find one of his altars, effectively becoming a weaker Infidel, but they then somehow have to play out the rest of the game as an Infidel, which means finding the Idol of Moloch and getting to the Astral Plane with it.
Set the upper bound for the upper limit of nurse dancing at 3 times the amount of maximum HP you had when you first gained your current experience level (which is saved by the game in versions 3.6 and later), instead of having it be a flat 25 times your experience level. This is to remove the rubber-band effect where roles that naturally have less HP can mostly catch up to roles that have a lot of it.
A magic leash, which gives your pets enough speed to always stay by your side so that can move at your regular rate across a floor without constantly getting ahead of it and having to stop to wait for it.
5000 turns after you kill or get rid of the last guard in Minetown, orcs invade and transform it to Orcish Town.
Incantifiers should not be eligible to receive a spellbook of detect food at the beginning of the game, because it’s pretty much useless to them.
A #shove command, which allows you to shove a monster back one space, and will not anger most peacefuls, for the purpose of pushing peaceful monsters out of an altar room when they start crowding the altar you are trying to sacrifice things on. (Presumably, shoving a shopkeeper or priest or anything trying to stick to a specific location would not work the same.)
Because vomiting only costs 20 nutrition, which is a strangely fixed amount and not very much, make it instead cost a proportion (say half) of your current nutrition, with a minimum of 20 if half of your current nutrition is less than 20.
When you are sufficiently far along in the process of turning to slime (no more than a few turns away from converting completely), barehanded and barefooted attacks you make will be treated as sliming attacks and will turn enemies to slime as if you are already a green slime.
Add a quiver item, which is a lightweight container which can only store projectiles. The first projectile item placed inside determines what projectile is valid to put in after it (i.e. you cannot put arrows into a quiver followed by rocks for a sling). However, you can either empty the quiver, or put different types of projectiles into other ones. They can also hold stackable throwing weapons like darts or spears.
You can put a quiver in your quiver slot, and then using the #fire command will shoot ammo from the quiver in first-in-last-out order.
When examining a corpse in inventory, you are told whether it is vegetarian/vegan and whether it counts as the same race as you.
Allow the player to configure what warning level a given monster species will show up as. If they’re terrified of floating eyes, allow them to be warned of them as 5s on the map.
This has the disadvantage that the player can manipulate it to get warning of a few limited sets of monsters, giving them extra information about the identity of the monster they cannot yet see. In the worst case, if these values are allowed to change after the start of the game, a player could reassign warning numbers until a particular monster changes to find out what it is.
Change the game progression significantly so that the player cannot descend below the castle without all the invocation items; once they do, they must perform the invocation at the Castle and fall directly into Moloch’s Sanctum. Exploring Gehennom after that is therefore done for the first time and from the bottom up.
If you controlled levelport to level -10 or higher as an infidel, you don’t get admitted into heaven; they reject you and possibly shove you out to fall to your death on the ground.
A helm of darkness artifact, inspired by the one from Perseus’ myth; when worn it confers invisibility and produces darkness in a radius around the wearer.
A new artifact weapon (possibly wielded by a demon lord) that causes you to drop items when it hits you. Possibly it can even knock a couple items out of bags from time to time.
An artifact weapon (possibly wielded by a demon lord) that drains a charge from every chargeable item in your inventory when it hits you.
Rather than giving each demon lord a fixed weapon with a fixed set of artifact effects or object property, create a set of powerful weapons that each demon lord randomly gets one from when they generate.
This might not apply if a demon lord has a strong lore reason for a specific weapon, such as Yeenoghu wielding a flail.
A spell that grants temporary magical breathing. This could be used in lieu of the magical breathing amulet to go underwater for short durations, but would also be very useful in variants that have suffocating engulfers.
There should be a spell (probably on the player’s side, possibly on the monster’s side) that dispels magical buffs such as protection and reflection. Or else, if adding a new spell is unwanted, this effect could be folded into cancellation instead.
When you wish for anything made of dragonhide, there is a chance that an incensed Tiamat shows up to kill you over it. The more things you wish for that are dragonhide, the higher the odds of this happening.
A new magical gray stone provisionally called a “curse-eater”. If you are carrying one in your main inventory, every time you are hit with a curse items effect, the gray stone absorbs the curse instead and loses one level of beatitude. If it absorbs a curse while already cursed, it crumbles.
Carrying multiple stones will make a curse items effect hit only one of the stones, chosen randomly.
Using a spell staff allows you to cast spells of the associated school while not necessarily being able to speak (due to polyform or some other reason); it could also potentially suppress other impediments to spellcasting, such as confusion.
A silence spell for either players or monsters or both. Not specified whether it would be area-of-effect or targeted at specific creatures. The main function of silence effects would be to prevent spellcasting. Not specified whether this would also affect reading scrolls (though probably not since you can “cogitate” the formula on scrolls if polymorphed into a speechless form).
However, this may require defining certain existing spells as not requiring speech, because it does not seem entirely fair to take away all of someone’s escape or healing spells with fairly low level magic.
Certain deaths (i.e. most HP deaths, but not things like disintegration or sliming) should let you scrawl a bit of player-chosen text in the dirt with your finger which persists in the bones file. This engraving is of blood if your current form has blood, and dust otherwise.
This is slightly technically complicated because the bones file gravestone also stores an engraving and there cannot be two engravings on one space; one solution is to engrave the message on an adjacent square.
Whenever an antimatter vortex annihilates an object or monster, it should behave like actual antimatter would and produce an explosion, losing some HP in the process. This allows a player to defeat them by throwing junk at them to reduce their HP until they die, but if there is no junk available the player will have to sacrifice some valuable item.
Eating any kind of fish may increase your Intelligence, because of the popular wisdom that fish is “brain food”.
There should be a way to remove confusion from pets. One simple way to accomplish this would be giving you a way to directly feed a lizard corpse to your pet, by making pets prioritize eating a lizard corpse when confused. Though this would not work for herbivorous or inediate pets.
Confused sea monsters should sometimes randomly move out of the water and flop onto land. (E.g. it suppresses the behavior of treating non-water spaces as invalid.)
A pet dog named Huan will one-hit kill any lycanthrope, as a reference to the dog of the same name in The Silmarillion.
Sacrificing the Eye of Vecna zeroes any alignment abuse you have accumulated.
Artifact sapphire Ice-9. When it is dropped into water, it freezes the square and all adjacent squares into ice, and remains on top of the new ice.
When you read a scroll of fire inside an engulfing monster, the fire explosion hits it 8 or 9 times instead of just once.
Eating cursed rings or amulets gives the opposite of the normal effect (likely stripping an intrinsic instead of gaining it).
A player fear system should track the sources of fear and slow down the timeout for the fear the closer you remain to them, particularly if you remain in line of sight; and/or accelerate the timeout so it goes away faster if you are far away and not in line of sight.
Armor of life saving (unspecified whether it would be magical body armor or some other sort of armor like a helm, or even an object property on existing armor). When it saves your life, it crumbles to dust like the amulet does, as well as any other source of life saving you happened to have, to prevent double-life-saving exploits.
Extrinsic properties are stored as an int rather than a bitfield, so that the game can count how many sources of an extrinsic you have at once, allowing interesting things such as letting regeneration items stack with each other.
A rare type of mold that can be brewed into a healing potion via the Brewing Patch (assuming an implementation in which no existing molds are brewable into healing).
Jousting happens automatically when moving directly at a monster while riding and wielding a jousting weapon. You don’t have to be next to it to initiate the attack (and indeed, jousting will not happen if you start your turn next to the monster).
A system for martial arts users in which moving tactically and positioning yourself translates to combat bonuses. Not a flanking system where you get better positioned with allies in place, but things like:
The ideal balance to strike is that the game can be played without mastering this system, but if it is mastered the player becomes very effective in combat.
Elementals on their respective home Planes life-save and teleport away from you when you kill them. (Or, alternatively, another one just spawns somewhere on the edge of the map not near you.)
Some falling rock traps (particularly deeper in the dungeon) contain one or more boulders instead of rocks.
Artifact club The Pool Cue: it has the same damage as a regular club but causes several tiles of knockback to anything it hits.
MR should cut the duration of temporary elemental vulnerability that you get by having a monster cast it at you.
Spellcasters who have summoned insects or nasties can sometimes also cast a spell that makes the summoned monsters explode at you.
“The Amulet of Vitality”, an amulet of drain resistance that provides poison resistance and hungerless regeneration when worn and also increases your HP maximum by 20%.
Note: this could be implemented in a game that doesn’t have the amulet of drain resistance by instead making its base item the amulet versus poison and giving it drain resistance when worn.
To reduce the reliance on general stores and the tedium of throwing scrolls into shops to price-identify them, all shopkeepers will buy scrolls of identify, or at least look at them and go “ew that is a really cheap scroll” so you can figure out what the identify scroll looks like.
Randomly generated statues and figurines (and masks in variants that have them) should use a higher effective difficulty when choosing the associated monster species, because using low-level monsters is boring and typically useless to the hero.
This should probably also apply to statue traps, since they are not very threatening at the moment.
If you talk to the Oracle while still qualifying as a “beginner” score-wise, she gives you a fortune cookie for free.
Fireable ammo (that which is only capable of being used by launchers) cannot be enchanted. It instead uses the enchantment of its launcher as the enchantment.
Throwing an amulet of life saving at a statue may revive it, which uses up and identifies the amulet.
If you get a stack of 10 (or 5) identical scrolls that correspond to an existing spellbook, there is some ritual available which will let you convert them into the spellbook, possibly dropping them on an altar and praying.
New objects “scrolls of riches”, which serve as a means of storing large amounts of money without carrying around all the literal gold.
Blessed tinning kits have a chance of creating multiple tins from large, high-nutrition monsters. Specifically:
New monster “vapor cloud”, similar to the fog cloud, except it is made up of potion vapors and instead of doing damage, it causes the uncursed vapor effect of potions to happen to you when engulfed. (There probably has to be something preventing a vapor cloud of paralysis from paralyzing you eternally.)
When it moves over a potion, it consumes the (topmost if there are multiple) potion and changes. With 50% probability, it either switches to the potion consumed, or rolls for alchemy as if combining its existing potion cloud with the new potion (probably rerolling events like turning to water, evaporating, and blowing up in an alchemic blast, though it would be funny if it blew itself up).
Hostile vapor clouds will intentionally seek out harmful potions to consume and will avoid beneficial potions.
Split the blinding and summoning functions of a magic trap. Both still deafen, but no longer blind the player and surround them with monsters at once.
Remove Stormbringer’s automatic attacking of peaceful monsters and instead incentivize attacking peaceful monsters by giving the hero some benefit, such as lowering prayer timeout, whenever attacking a peaceful monster with it.
In variants where your god can gift non-artifacts, they should sometimes gift you a stack of projectiles (ideally they can match it to some ranged weapon you have if they are feeling nice). It would be useful even when the player already has a favored melee weapon.
There should be a way to tell what the acquired resistances of a monster are. This could be by zapping a wand of probing at it, by breaking a potion of enlightenment on it, feedback gained from a stethoscope, or (less likely) a new spell exclusively for pet diagnostics.
Note that it may not be considered “fair” for any of these methods to work on pets, but not work to tell the player’s resistances when they do it to themselves.
Barbarians who go into berserk mode should start attacking multiple targets in an arc as if wielding Cleaver. They should also randomly intersperse headbutts in with their attacks.
A random set of monsters, deterministic based on their ID number, will not throw a weapon that is usable for both melee and throwing (e.g. dagger, spear) if they have no other melee weapon. Probably over half of monsters should behave like this, but some monsters will indeed continue to throw their last dagger at you.
An artifact magic marker that can be used normally, but also allows you to engrave the name of a monster species on the ground and make a monster of that species appear as a pet. This is subject to an invoke-style cooldown so it can’t be used rapidly in quick succession.
Assuming a player fear system is implemented, Nazgul should passively cause fear in the player as an area of effect (or a gaze if this is too hard to implement).
Any monster that is somehow forced to stand on a scroll of scare monster while being affected by it is immediately scared to death.
When a nymph steals an armor item, she remains frozen for as long as it takes you to remove it, thereby preventing her from stealing all your other things while you are removing it.
Generate a single out-of-difficulty monster on every level, as an experiment to see how the game balance changes (not necessarily as a permanent feature). Or instead of picking something out of difficulty, generate a monster with the maximum permissible difficulty.
Dipping an item into any fountain may erodeproof it with low probability. (Or else have this only apply to magic fountains with somewhat higher probability.)
Several elaborations on a system for more reliable (and less tedious) gifts from altars:
Magically identifying an iron safe (if you manage to pick one up, that is) allows you to open it, because you identify the combination.
Scrolls of scare monster that have the “already picked up once” flag set are given some descriptor that can clue players into which of two stacks has been picked up or has not. However, this is only shown when scare monster is identified, so it can’t be used to trivially identify the scroll without letting one turn to dust.
You can buy indulgences from coaligned priests, which will remove or reduce god anger or negative alignment.
The wand of magic missile should scale somehow, but explicitly not with wand skill, which may not even exist in a given implementation. Instead, its baseline damage remains 2d6, but your magical stats such as maximum Pw or skill in attack spells can increase its damage output.
A reduced version of the Wands Balance Patch in which there is still a new wand-use skill, but not varying wand effects at different levels of skill (because the skill of the wielder shouldn’t affect the magic in the wand). Instead, increased wand skill gives you higher accuracy (no more/much less missing Rodney with a death ray, for instance) and perhaps other perks such as being able to zap a wand once per turn as a bonus action, as with a stethoscope.
You are only capable of regenerating health when you are standing still in one place, resting (or searching). Continuing to move around the level or fight things does not allow you to passively heal.
An invisible displacer beast that you can’t see should not be able to use its displacement abilities in combat with you. (If you have see invisible, it should still be able to use them.)
Croesus may generate disguised as another @, possibly hidden among his soldiers.
An alternative proposal rather than having a scroll of knowledge (which tells you the randomized appearance of an item type in your game) as its own item, or the same effect as something you can get with a confused identify scroll: have the Oracle sell reverse-identification as a service. This would require some cap on the amount of times to prevent you from learning every important item, perhaps 5 or 7 plus a small random factor per game.
Add 1-tile-wide corridors linking the rooms that contain the temples together in the Astral Plane, likely with secret doors so that monsters don’t start going through them. These give the player the ability to get around the Riders and go from the wrong temple to the correct one faster, but you run the risk of getting bogged down and surrounded if you use them.
It was pointed out that 1-tile-wide corridors may actually make things much easier on the player and would offer a much safer point to retreat to. Ideally they should be designed without long straight areas so the player can’t easily remove a bunch of monsters with a few well-placed teleportation zaps, but also be widened to avert the problem of being a refuge.
A variant monk role, or a “specialization” picked at some early level such as 3 or 5, which is a weapons-using monk. Has the same or a slightly reduced capacity for spellcasting and gains weapon skill caps at the expense of reducing martial arts’s cap to Skilled or Expert. Still has a body armor penalty.
In variants where your god can gift non-artifact items: Track which items have been gifted, and never gift “duplicates” - e.g. don’t gift a suit of armor if one has already been gifted in the current game, or a second battle-axe.
After gifting you an item, your god doesn’t give you anything else until you’ve used it to their satisfaction. Such as killing a certain amount of monsters with it if it’s a weapon, wearing armor for a certain number of combat turns, and so forth.
This sacrifices gameplay fun for improved flavor and balance, so tread carefully if implementing it.
It is possible to leave bones on Astral. If this happens, instead of a ghost, there will be a fourth resurrecting Rider, War, with all the equipment of the dead player, 100% of it cursed.
Make it possible to define a “retreat point”, or a set of retreat points, for a warping boss monster. They will warp to that point to retreat, rather than always picking the upstairs. Possibly, if they have multiple retreat points, they will only ever use the first one they randomly select.
A new object or, more likely, an artifact which is a ring of enlightenment. Wearing it increases Intelligence and Wisdom by 1. Additionally, when you perform the #attributes command, you are shown your fire, cold, shock, poison, and sleep resistance statuses. Possibly it can be invoked for full enlightenment.
Some mechanism, maybe a new object that you can place on the ground or a spell you can cast, that drives peaceful and tame monsters several spaces away from you.
Track the total number of potions, scrolls, wands etc generated over the game’s lifespan and report that number at the end of the game and/or in the dumplog. Or to go even more in depth, track the number of each individual object type generated.
You can apply Ogresmasher to an adjacent vacant space to smash it into the ground and create a pit there. This burns excess nutrition approximately in line with jumping.
If there’s a monster on the targeted square, this just attacks it normally.
New artifact Apiarist’s Veil, a cloth hat, perhaps an elven helm or fedora, that gives warning of all insects and pacifies nearby bees.
New artifact Regicider (or Regicide, Usurper or Royalbane): a sword of some type that isn’t already overrepresented in artifacts that has bonuses and warns to monsters with the M2_LORD and/or M2_PRINCE flags. Maybe it would also work on demon lords, depending on if they are considered nobility, or just overlords.
On a somewhat sillier note its attributes could also extend to queen bees and also have some ability to detect royal jelly on the map (invoke effect?)
A chaotic artifact axe (or battle-axe, not specified) The Executioner’s Axe: has a small chance of beheading on every successful hit like Vorpal Blade.
The hero gains levels twice as fast, for instance by putting a new level cutoff between each existing set of cutoffs (10 for level 1’s 0 to 20, 30 for level 2’s 20 to 40, etc). However, the player must choose with each level gained whether to take most of the effects of gaining an experience level - HP and Pw increases, etc, but NOT a skill slot - or a new skill slot.
The blessed effect of the scroll of amnesia allows you to choose the skills (and spells?) you want to forget, which allows you to reskill more efficiently.
Possibly only do this if your Intelligence is sufficiently high.
A fake Fire Brand artifact, which looks and acts like Fire Brand but burns out in a couple thousand turns and thereafter works like a regular sword. It could be generated with gnome royalty in the Mines.
Ghosts (and technically other player remnant monsters such as wraiths, ghouls, etc) found in bones levels are empowered with additional abilities that normal monsters don’t have.
Dowsing rod, an item that you can engrave the name of an item on. Assuming the engraved name is a real object, it glows when one of those objects is on the same level as you, getting brighter the closer you are to it. (It doesn’t actually emit light on the map.)
Greasy floor, a new type of terrain (or perhaps a trap?) that applies grease to any boots you are wearing and almost always makes you slip. Slipping on greasy floor (which can also happen by walking barefoot or with already-greased boots on) causes you to drop random items, some of which may get greased.
The player can create greasy floor by smashing a potion of oil or applying (multiple?) charges from a can of grease to the floor.
Creatures that move onto a greasy floor patch may “slip and slide and struggle to stay upright”, losing their next turn 70% of the time. This also happens to a creature standing on a greasy floor patch that tries to do something involving footwork (combat, moving off the square, etc) 30% of the time. Or for a more simplified implementation, the trap doesn’t have to cause loss of turn when moved onto (though it might still produce a message), but has a 70% chance of making the creature lose its next turn regardless of the action (still need to keep your balance to take out a scroll to read or zap a wand, for instance).
If implemented as a trap, it cannot be untrapped (except probably by the standard method of digging a pit on it), but will eventually wear out after a slightly randomized number of times it affects something. (This prevents you from setting a single one in Ludios and then standing back to watch the whole army get greased and fall over themselves.)
When you attempt to polymorph an item that has polymorph magic (wand/spell/potion of polymorph, tin of meat that may cause a polymorph when eaten, etc) it explodes and creates one or more monsters affiliated with polymorph magic, such as polymorph vortices (see YANI #3669), genetic engineers, or similar.
Polymorph vortices, a monster which has a passive polymorph attack (i.e. hitting it in melee polymorphs the attacker; hitting it with missiles polymorphs the missiles) and once per turn polymorphs either one random item from its inventory, a monster it has engulfed, or a random item from that monster’s inventory. Player-style magic resistance prevents the effects to a creature or its possessions that would otherwise be affected.
The player is able to do some sort of ritual that involves sacrificing 25,000 gold pieces to open a portal to Fort Ludios if one has not already been generated. Possibly this would have to be done in a vault. If a naturally generated portal does already exist, the gold is still expended but the attempt to make another one fails.
Add a “purple crayon” tool, which is used by engraving on the floor with it. If you engrave the name of a monster species, a single monster of that species is created, possibly ignoring reverse-genocide restrictions. This is a reference to the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon.
A cursed magic lamp may generate a demon lord (possibly pacified) instead of a djinni when rubbed. Possibly you could read the lamp to see the name of the demon lord it contains.
The potion of booze should appear as “potion of mead” to Valkyries, using the same system that makes it appear as “sake” to Samurai.
When polymorphed into a mind flayer (or playing an illithid in variants that have it as a race), you gain additional nutrition when you eat the brain of a spellcasting or telepathic monster.
Any item can be dipped into a potion of levitation to permanently reduce its weight by 20%. This uses up the potion, and it will only affect the item’s base weight, not the weight of any contents (i.e. a bag of holding thus dipped will weigh 12 + contents instead of 15 + contents). If the object is canceled at a later point, it loses this property and reverts to its normal weight.
The effect cannot be stacked; attempting to dip an already-levitated object into another levitation potion will have no effect and will not use up the potion.
A possible variation is to also confer this effect for potions of enlightenment, since “enlightening” the item could be interpreted as making it physically lighter.
Randomize the set of “critical” extrinsics and the base items that provide them in each game. I.e. instead of every game having a cloak of magic resistance, ring of free action, and amulet of reflection, the game could have a ring of reflection, a cloak of free action and an amulet of magic resistance.
An artifact cloak (the base type is unspecified, likely a normal nonmagic cloak) that you can apply towards an adjacent monster. If that monster has less HP than your current experience level, it dies and is consumed by the cloak, which can grant the cloak extrinsics it confers to the wearer. Every additional extrinsic added may remove out one or more existing extrinsics on the cloak.
Not specified whether you need to take the cloak off to apply it at things.
Spellcasting monsters have a lowish chance of receiving a quarterstaff in their starting inventory.
You can apply an equipped small shield (or possibly other types of shields) to attack a monster with a shield bash. This could be treated either like a blunt weapon attack, or more likely as a special effect which has a chance of stunning the target. Stunning odds could be higher for either more martial-based roles, or could use a shield skill and scale with that.
If you get hit by a cursed rock from a falling rock trap, you may become stunned for a few turns.
Vortex monsters can occasionally suck you a square in their direction when they’re not next to you, which can of course pull you onto dangerous terrain or a trap.
Balrogs could also do this if wielding a whip, at a closer range.
A monster passive ability (possibly for shambling horrors or beholders) that unmaps its surrounding. This would be most useful when the monster also has something that incentivizes blinding yourself when near it, such as gaze attacks.
However, this can be negated by player note-taking of the map before the monster wipes it, so care should be taken not to make that worth doing.
Rogues gain a backstab-related bonus when they and their target are in darkness. Possibly, just make many/most attacks in darkness deal backstab damage when they ordinarily wouldn’t.
A more complex implementation would be to differentiate monsters that aren’t susceptible to darkness because they spawned in a naturally dark area from monsters that are.
Gremlins generated not via cloning an existing one may spawn with a cursed scroll of light, and read it to create darkness when in the presence of brilliant light (Sunsword or gold dragon armor) or just randomly in lit areas when they sense an approaching player.
Freeing any hostile monster from a cage of iron bars has a chance of pacifying it.
Given that erinyes are a near-unique monster, they should be made far stronger than they currently are.
The drain life spell heals you with some of the HP you drained from your target, possibly even increasing maximum HP by one point if it is full (though this is probably too powerful).
The healing isn’t intended for anyone who can cast it; it would require you to have a certain amount of attack skill and possibly be chaotic.
The sleep spell has an advanced form, castable only at Expert, which creates area of effect sleep like a magic flute does.
When you are prompted for a direction to throw a boomerang, you can enter into some view-only mode which will show you the boomerang’s path in a given direction, before committing to throw it in any specific direction.
Place gear suitable for a wide variety of pets in the Healer quest (mostly in the home level), and an amulet of life saving in Hippocrates’ chest.
You can read the Staff of Aesculapius to read spells. (Not specified if this should be possible to fail like a spellbook could, with the same or different effects, or if it depends on whether or not the Staff dislikes you as a non-healer.)
A level 5 or 6 “mass healing” spell, which basically casts extra healing on yourself and all tame creatures within a certain radius.
Healers, who can see monster injury status, should see the injured status of a monster when it is healed from any source. E.g. instead of “The foo looks better” print “The bruised foo looks better.”
The enchantment on non-blessed weapons degrades by 1 point after a certain number of hits, roughly 100. Cursed weapons degrade in half the number of hits. Possibly, this auto-identifies the enchantment when it happens.
There could be some mechanism to prevent degradation by resetting the counter on a weapon, such as using a whetstone on it. (Not that this makes sense for non-slashing weapons.)
Take a page out of Brogue’s book for streamlining weapon identification: after a certain number of attacks, hits, or kills with a weapon, the weapon’s enchantment (but nothing else about it) becomes identified.
Possibly, it could take less time to identify a weapon the higher the absolute value of the enchantment. It should be pretty easy to tell that a weapon is really bad or good, compared to middling.
Behavior is undefined regarding stacking. E.g. if you drop 9 of your 10 daggers, use the other one a bunch, and come back to pick up the 9, should they still stack together? If not, it would make using stackable weapons very annoying. If you use the one dagger enough to identify it, should the others automatically become identified? Only if you try to stack them together? Not at all?
Weapons no longer stick to your hand when cursed, because that just makes the game less fun and strongly discourages experimenting with random weapons lying around (there are good weapons out there, but the risk of either ending up with a bad welded weapon, having to spend resources to get it unstuck, or spending identification resources on making sure it’s safe) means no one will give them a try. Instead, replace that behavior with a variety of other effects:
None of these are intended to be immediately obvious. While they are like object properties, they don’t necessarily have to be implemented like those: the curse behavior of a weapon could be deterministically computed from its object id hash.
New clerical monster spell (possibly also a player spell) that creates a region of black storm clouds between the caster and target and moves across the map towards the target. The clouds block vision, can strike anything in or near them with lightning (though not intelligently), wet items on the floor beneath them and in the inventories of monsters beneath them, hit things with gusts of wind if those are implemented, and can spawn temporary lightning monsters that vanish when the cloud does.
Another variant of this idea is as a static cloud that can be targeted like a stinking cloud, probably as a level 7 spell (depending on how bad the lightning is).
Every 5000 turns, the monster generation difficulty increases by 1. Effectively changing the formula to be (your XL + dungeon level) / 2 + (turns / 5000).
An artifact mask Mask of Many Faces, neutrally aligned. When invoked, you are prompted to target an adjacent creature. If that creature fails a monster magic resistance check, or a d(its maxHP) roll is lower than its current HP, it is instantly killed, dropping its possessions but no corpse or other special drops, and the mask changes to that creature’s form.
Subsequently donning the mask, or having it worn when invoking it, merges it into your skin and polymorphs you into that monster’s form, starting a timer (not the usual polymorph timer) after which the mask will turn blank and the polymorph ends. Lower level monsters than the player will produce a longer timer, and higher level monsters and uniques will produce a shorter timer. You can also invoke it again while wearing it to end the polymorph early.
New artifact The Stage Magician’s Gloves: some form of gloves, possibly special-cased to appear white. They allow you to use wands like a stethoscope, with one free zap per turn, and also confer magic resistance when worn. When invoked, if you are wearing a non-cursed hat or helm, you pull a random item or small or tiny monster out of your hat. If not wearing a hat you get YAFM.
Combine force bolts and digging beams. Specifically:
Uranium wands have a small but persistent chance of causing radiation-based effects: “[The wand] momentarily glows with a sinister green light!” or “The wand momentarily feels very warm!” When this happens, one of two effects happens, each with a 50% chance: the victim takes 2d6 points of damage unless poison resistant, or the victim polymorphs.
The chances are as follows:
Blade vortex (cyan v), which is a whirlwind of spinning blades. It has two engulf attacks that deal 2d4 physical damage each, and is difficulty 12. Apart from generating normally, it can be created by polypiling a sufficiently high number of blades at once similar to how golems are created. When killed, it drops an assortment of bladed weapons, mostly smaller ones like knives, daggers, and short swords, and possibly a chain or two. It can be harmed by thrown potions of water, rust traps, and rust attacks.
Another iteration of the proposal is to make its blades its inventory rather than just assumed to be part of the monster, with the following interesting implications:
Strip pick-axes of their weapon-tool status: they no longer deal damage as a weapon, and are not normally wielded. They’re just a tool that will dig in a specified direction. The purpose is to prevent people from accidentally attacking with the pick.
Displacer beasts could drop their hide, which can be enchanted or otherwise crafted into a cloak of displacement.
Leprechauns very rarely drop a four-leaf clover on death. This is a vegan comestible that provides 1d3 luck (or just acts as a luckstone) when carried and can be eaten to gain 1 Luck. (The four-leaf clover appearing from sacrifices is not this item and cannot be picked up, though that could become confusing.)
Scrolls can be “corrupted” or “misspelled”. This basically acts as a toggle on whether the confused behavior of the scroll activates: reading a corrupted scroll while not confused will produce the confused effect and reading it while confused will produce the regular effect. There is no way to restore a corrupted scroll to normal.
Possibly, an unidentified corrupted scroll will have its label deterministically garbled similar to engravings, e.g. “scroll labeled FO0B|E BLe7Ch”. If identified it would simply show as “corrupted scroll of X”.
Writing a scroll while confused will make the result corrupted. Also, scrolls hit by water damage or produced from polymorphing other scrolls may be corrupted.
You can get some rare intrinsics by eating artifacts that confer them. For instance, eating Excalibur could give level-drain resistance, or eating Grayswandir could give hallucination resistance.
The chance would be much less than 100%, possibly even lower than the standard odds of getting an intrinsic from eating jewelry.
Bags of holding give a flat reduction in weight (proposed amount is 150 aum) and only apply their usual halving or quartering to any weight in excess of that. This makes it beneficial to find and carry multiple bags of holding.
Rather than generating unnamed, the three erinyes in the game always generate with the names Megaera, Alecto and Tisiphone, which are their names in Greek mythology.
A #drag command, which enables you to transport items heavier than you can lift across the ground, such as corpses, stash chests, and ice boxes.
You can occasionally find flyers in the dungeon (especially on the earlier levels) advertising shops on certain levels. Or else the mail daemon will occasionally deliver you a scroll of mail which is one of these flyers.
Blessed loadstones boost your carrying capacity by more than their weight, allowing you to carry more than if you were not carrying the stone at all. The stone would probably still curse itself upon leaving inventory, however.
Eating a uranium wand as a metallivore should cause you to mutate (polymorph), either once immediately or by giving you some duration of polymorphitis.
Cursed wind instruments (bugle, whistle, most horns) stick to your face when used, preventing you from using #chat or making other forms of conversation (to shopkeepers, demon lords, priests, etc, though most of these are ambiguous on whether the hero needs to speak) and possibly also preventing eating.
Alternatively, using the cursed wind instrument could simply produce “You hurt your vocal cords!” and make you mute for some length of time.
If you sit down and a cream pie is the top of whatever stack of items is beneath you, it produces a “Splat! You sit on a cream pie!” message and destroys the pie.
If you die to overwhelming cold damage (on the order of 3-4 times your current HP, for instance from Asmodeus’s cold attack), you leave behind a frozen statue (made of ice?) instead of a corpse.
Dragonhide bags of tricks only spawn dragons. (Though this would include baby dragons, so it would probably at least approximate being level-appropriate).
When you save the game, you can enter a note to yourself which will be repeated to you when the game is restored. This can be useful for remembering your immediate goals or warnings when you don’t know how long it will be before resuming the game.
A race which is very strong, with great abilities and intrinsics including drain resistance from XL1, but with the caveat that they instantly die of old age upon reaching XL30.
Intended for variants whose XP curve doesn’t make reaching experience level 30 through pure combat nearly impossible. Also, a safeguard might have to be put in place so that you cannot intentionally get smited by a god or gamble on polymorphing into your own race to lose levels intentionally.
Vampires shouldn’t be able to harm any monsters with a bite attack if the victim is bloodless, not dealing any damage or level drain. (Also includes the player if polymorphed into a bloodless form.)
Track not buying protection from a priest as a conduct, as a weaker version of atheist.
Some monsters, when dealing what otherwise would have been a killing blow, instead leave you at 1 HP, strip you of some or all of your possessions, and possibly vanish/teleport. Shopkeepers in particular may decide to do this (but some may still decide to kill you).
Remove all ways of immediately acquiring a permanent intrinsic (potion, corpse, wand, whatever). Instead, at some unpredictable point after you’ve cumulatively had that intrinsic for a couple thousand turns, you gain it permanently.
Water demons should resist cold instead of (or in addition to) fire.
Eucalyptus leaves induce delayed vomiting like how tripe does, because they’re actually pretty poisonous to eat raw. They will still cure deathly sickness, though.
Ghosts can possess other monsters. When a possessed monster is killed, the ghost pops out again.
You can wish for armor with a greater than +5 enchantment and be guaranteed to receive that enchantment, but doing so causes the armor to do a possible vaporization roll immediately.
Quaffing a potion of speed should exercise dexterity. Possibly only if it is non-cursed.
Items in a bones pile, in addition to being cursed, could be subject to additional degradation such as erosion, loss of magical charges, or blanking. (Though since a new player will arrive in the bones level apparently immediately after the death, it could be a bit of a stretch to have the items degrade so much.)
New “pauper” conduct, in which you are not allowed to gain any gold pieces in your inventory (gold items like the gold ring and Candelabrum are fine, because they aren’t money).
An interesting side effect is that you can’t sell things in a shop since the shopkeeper will give you money directly for them, unless you manage to somehow remove all the shopkeeper’s gold, enabling you to sell and buy things for store credit.
Minesweeper implemented as a themed room: a certain fraction of spaces (probably 10% or less) have a land mine placed on them. Every space adjacent to a land mine bears an engraving of the number of adjacent mines; mines themselves are engraved with “X” or “BOOM”. Spaces with no mines adjacent have no engraving.
Brown puddings (or the player polymorphed into one) can cause trees to instantly rot and die by attacking them. If there are other monsters with a decay attack, this behavior should logically extend to them as well.
Scrolls of enchant armor should prompt the player to choose a piece of armor to enchant rather than picking randomly, since in nearly all cases they are used on a single specific piece of armor by removing all other armor anyway. It should also say “This is an enchant armor scroll.” and auto-identify itself if not previously identified.
Spellcasting monsters that want to go through a locked door can cast a monster-spell version of knock that unlocks it. Theoretically they should also be able to do this from a distance if lined up with the door, but monster decision-making does not decide to go through a non-adjacent door.
If polymorphed into a sufficiently strong monster, you can force-fight down or kick the ground to cause a shockwave that hits all immediately adjacent ground-bound monsters.
Shields of reflection can be applied in a direction which is equivalent to using a mirror in that direction.
Archeologists should have Skilled skill cap in either darts or spears to nod towards Mesoamerican atlatls and other throwing devices.
New “true vegan” conduct, which is broken by using any animal product whatsoever, such as leather-based armor, anything made of bone including unicorn horns, anything made of dragonhide, tallow candles, etc. Picking up the items is okay but applying or equipping them is not.
You can magically charge up a credit card, which when you take it into a shop makes it good for a certain amount of store credit. Alternatively, applying a credit card with charges just spits out some zorkmids and uses up a charge.
Since stone golems don’t actually drop anything except a statue of themselves upon death, clay golems should drop random items made of stone when they are killed, similar to how golems of other materials do.
You can use #monster while riding a steed with a breath weapon to make it use its breath weapon. You get prompted for the direction.
In games where Orcish Town generates, Izchak appears on the level above and wanders around (he will only appear there once the Minetown level generates, so can’t be found earlier). If you talk to him, he will offer a sidequest where once you slay all the orcs and liberate the town, he will go back there and reopen his shop, restocking it with items.
A new Mines’ End variant that contains a guaranteed scroll of earth, gold golems, and an earth elemental as a reference to some Swiss folklore involving gnomes. Possibly also add a healer statue named Paracelsus, who was one of the first to name gnomes as such.
If you fall downstairs while fumbling, you may land on a monster that was already occupying the upstairs of the level below, damaging them proportional to the weight of your armor and possibly reducing the damage you took from falling down the stairs.
If a monster kills your pet and then you personally kill that monster, you get a message about avenging the pet’s death.
Add a quiver item. Ostensibly in the tool class, could either take up a new equipment slot, or take up the shield slot to prevent you from wearing a shield at the same time the quiver is equipped. It’s not actually a container, and just “holds” whatever is in your existing in-game quiver. While equipped, it adds +1 to your multishot, possibly +2 if it is blessed but this may make it too powerul.
Also change the Ranger quest artifact to the Quiver of Diana, a quiver which gives telepathy and reflection when equipped and possibly also prevents ammo from breaking, though it can still erode. When invoked, all projectiles on the level that you threw or fired are magically returned to your inventory, even if they’re being carried by monsters or buried or whatever.
There should be some special effect, even just an acknowledging message, when trying to apply a mirror to a cockatrice, since the encyclopedia mentions its own reflection is fatal to it and the materials to make it look at its reflection exist in the game.
An artifact luckstone which increases or decreases Luck by 5 rather than the ordinary 3 for a luckstone when carried. (Luck might still be capped at -13 and +13 for technical reasons, rather than being allowed to go to +15 and -15.)
Zapping directional wands while stuck in a pit restricts the range of the wand to 1, basically shot at an angle to hit something right next to the pit.
When you wish for an object and leave certain fields (erosionproofing, enchantment, etc) unspecified, the game fills them in for you with the most useful and safe values.
If a pet drowns while not in view, the game gives a special message: “You have a sinking feeling for a moment, then it passes.”
A Priest in good standing with their god and standing on or near a coaligned altar sometimes has the ability to use a special spell or prayer to call a coaligned Angel to fight with them as a pet.
A “lignivorous” flag that can be specified on a monster species. Lignivorous monsters can eat wooden objects and doors like metallivores can eat metal objects.
A magic arrow spell, modeled off a similar spell in GnollHack. It is a level 1 spell that shoots a magic arrow at a single enemy for 1d6 damage and never misses. Possible variations include boosting the damage to 2d6 but allowing it to miss, or allowing it to be smite-targeted at any enemy in a radius with a direct unobstructed path.
A Minetown variant where Frontier Town is in the process of being invaded by orcs. Most denizens are still alive, but swarms of orcs are trying to destroy the town, and if you are an orc the leader will try to press you into service to join them in trashing it. If you decide to join them, all the normal Minetown inhabitants become hostile to you but murder penalties are removed.
Zapping a wand of digging sideways while you are in a pit creates a line of pits along the floor where it’s zapped. Not specified what happens when the beam hits a wall.
When polymorphed into a monster that has hooves, your kicks deal some extra damage, whether via the kick action or via the polyform’s kick attacks.
When priests attempt to throw edged weapons at something, the weapons/ammo often slips in the wrong direction as if they were cursed (even if they aren’t actually). Blunt weapons such as sling ammo or throwing Mjollnir might not have this restriction.
Armor and weapons are heavier when they are cursed than their normal weight.
A new spell that is primarily a healing spell, but is in the clerical school instead of healing and works by divine influence, which would make priests and knights good at casting it, but not healers and wizards.
The magic portal to the Ice Queen’s Realm should always be placed in a closet. Optionally, the closet could contain a cloak and the level could contain other references to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
An Infidel not carrying the Amulet can still cast spells (in contrast to the current setup where they cannot), but instead of casting the spells with Pw, they use blood magic and use HP instead. It doesn’t necessarily cost as much HP as it would Pw - there can be a scaling factor.
If trying to cast a spell that would cost more Pw than the hero has current HP, they die.
A cursed scroll of fire should create a pool of lava underneath your feet. Possibly only in certain circumstances like with negative Luck.
Scroll of training, which allows you to readjust your skill slots. Blessed it allows more readjustments than uncursed, whereas a cursed scroll could do something bad like make you choose 2 categories to lose skill in and choose only 1 to regain skill in.
You should be able to #loot your steed while riding it to get an item it picked up (or any item in its inventory besides items it has equipped such as its saddle). This requires you to have at least Basic riding skill.
The game should store the reason for your first alignment violation, so that when your quest leader tells you that you are not worthy to keep the quest artifact they can give a reason for it.
Add a side branch that can only be entered by dying in a certain place such as the Valley of the Dead, or by life saving not working. When you die, you appear there with no inventory and have to fight your way out to return to your body. Monsters are also subject to this and appear in that branch after dying to the same conditions. However, it only works once - if you die again you die for good, even if you successfully got back to your body in the process.
A horseshoe item that can be equipped on any equine creature (including player centaurs), in the boots slot. Horseshoes could deal a small amount of additional damage in kick attacks, and also deal damage based on their material, e.g. silver damage to silver-haters if the shoes are silver.
Rarely, a player monster will be generated as following a random conduct or conducts. This influences both their gear (e.g. a nudist player monster will not have armor, a zen player monster will wear a blindfold) as well as their behavior (a pacifist player monster will not attack).
You can wish for your god to be mollified, which has the same effect as doing it at an altar. Not specified if this should break atheist conduct, but it probably should, since you’re affirming there is a god that you want to placate.
The parser could look for “forgiveness” as the phrase to trigger this.
Hellfire from monster casting, being inspired by Ghost Rider, should in addition to ignoring fire resistance slow the player down, since it does spiritual damage that reduces the victim’s will to act.
Player monsters who spawn at a certain depth have a very low chance of generating carrying their quest’s artifact. This chance is highest when deeper than the Castle, but is still low.
For giant player characters, huge chunks of meat should weigh the same as boulders (i.e. light enough to pick them up easily).
Intelligent monsters will deliberately flash a camera at you to blind you if they come across one.
There should be more variety in the Wizard’s dialogue after he resurrects or levelports to you, rather than the same old “So thou thought thou couldst kill me fool” line every time.
Rock trolls are immune to stoning; not because they are made of rock, but because they already have an affinity with it.
Sometimes, when fighting, a monster not directly adjacent to you that wants to attack you but can’t because there is a monster directly adjacent to you can move through the combat and end up on your opposite side, as a way to make chokepointing less of a dominant tactic.
Wearing gauntlets of dexterity allows you to quick-draw a wand (zapping any wand in your inventory as a half action, similar to applying a stethoscope - it costs no time but can only be done once per action).
Also, they allow you to use a container in inventory as a half action. For balance, you should probably only be able to do one half-action thing per turn.
When you controlled levelport to level 0, Nowhere, monsters that normally follow you through a levelport will do the same here (because they don’t know where you’re going). This will kill all of them and make them cease to exist, the same as you, but you can survive as usual with an amulet of life saving. This effectively allows you to controlled levelport to 0 to dispose of any monsters that would follow you.
Note: because it depends on levelporting to level 0, it won’t work when carrying the Amulet or in the End Game.
To be more true to its source material, Grayswandir should deal double damage only to crossaligned targets rather than all targets (though this would not likely have a huge effect since most wielders of it are lawful and few monsters are lawful).
Gnome punting: all kicks delivered to gnomes send them flying a few squares. (This also applies if a monster kicks the hero and the hero is a gnome.)
All gods simultaneously exist in the game. Normally this has little effect, but bones files can contain an altar to a god that is not part of your normal pantheon, allowing you to convert to them (and in the process basically ejecting the role’s god of their same alignment and taking their place in the role’s pantheon).
Cancelled monsters have lower monster magic resistance.
A more in depth stealth mechanic. Involving hiding in containers, possibly on the ceiling if you can levitate, making monsters behave as if they can’t see you even in line of sight, creating illusions or using displacement to make diversions.
In the #attributes screen, show the time the game was started. This is useful mainly in tournaments to check to see if you started the game a few seconds too early to be eligible.
If you get crowned on an altar, it becomes a throne which will give you one guaranteed wish, and then has no effect other than to make you feel very comfortable there. Not specified what will happen if the altar is in a temple with a priest tending it.
Exploding pets should not count against you when you kill them. (Not stated if this should apply only to pets which explode upon death, or it should apply to pets that explode even not upon death.
New object property “of fear” or “of terror”, which is only valid on melee weapons. When a weapon of fear or terror hits a monster, it may scare that monster. If a player fear system is implemented, it also scares the player when they are hit with it.
Artifact sword Galatine, which is the sword of Gawaine in Arthurian stories. It has a damage increase depending on the time of day, after how Gawain’s strength waxed until the hour of noon and faded afterwards. +1 from 9 to 10 AM, then +2, +3, +3, +2, +1, +0, -1, -2, -1. Then from 7 PM to 9 AM, +0.
If you kill a pet while on the Astral Plane (or the Plane of Air for that matter), you hear the rumble of “nearby” thunder, not “distant”.
Chatting to a pet that is carrying an item picked up off the floor will command them to drop the item. The odds of them obeying depend on their tameness and apport.
Teleporting no longer checks to see if there is a monster present on the destination tile. Teleporting into a monster’s space has a chance of telefragging and instakilling it. (Though for fairness this should also happen to the player if a monster randomly teleports onto their space.)
Djinn role: the primary gimmick of it is that you are able to access three wishes, through #invoke or some other mechanism, one each at experience levels 10, 20, and 30. You are not able to get wishes from any other source; the wish fails (perhaps a friendly djinni from a lamp will make some comment about how you don’t need more wishes or they can’t grant wishes to fellow djinni).
When polymorphed into a form that has automatic bite or other melee-touching attack, if you are about to attack a cockatrice, make it subject to an Intelligence saving throw; if you pass this you avoid attacking the monster with your body.
Because Vorpal Blade delivering random, unpredictable instadeath is not fun to be on the receiving end of, replace it (or just replace its instadeath effect) with a “chaos blade” that has a bunch of random unpredictable effects, including some that may backfire on the user.
Such a new artifact would almost certainly be chaotic rather than neutral.
The material of an object affects its ammo breakage chance. For instance, mithril arrows hardly ever break, whereas wood breaks a bit more often than normal iron.
If there is a scroll of scare monster in a container, monsters will still open the container, but will not take any items out of it.
Breaking a wand of wind creates a stinking cloud centered on its space, because it’s “breaking wind”. Possibly only when cursed.
Make see invisible an instantaneous effect rather than an intrinsic. After seeing invisible for one turn, players must guess where invisible monsters are (or use something to get more see invisible effects).
Punching a mimic with a worn/wielded ring of protection from shape changers makes them die instantly.
Award some experience points when the hero discovers a trap door in a “Vlad was here” closet by searching for it (not by triggering it), because this demonstrates that they are learning that such closets contain trap doors.
Corpses dropped by zombies are always or often cursed. Removing the curse from them makes them less likely to revive. This could even be made as strict as every time a zombie drops a corpse and a revival timer is actually set on it (as opposed to a rotting-away timer), it is made cursed.
Livelog when a Caveperson player creates fire for the first time.
You can remove a cursed ring by greasing it.
Some way to do a giant mass-cancellation which cancels every monster on the level without a chance of resistance or a saving throw, but also uncontrollably cancels every item on the level, including the player’s inventory and items in containers.
Defeating the quest nemesis causes a “rout”. As a temporary effect, monsters that are part of the normal quest generation flee from you.
Allow playing Infidel as a gnoll. This specific combination does not serve Moloch; instead your goal is to restore Yeenoghu to godhood.
When you approach Mephisto and he is still peaceful, he does not demand tribute to pass like normal. Instead, he offers to buy your soul in exchange for powerful assistance on your quest to get the Amulet. If you agree, you are given amazing combat advantages (huge intrinsic damage boost, huge intrinsic AC boost, etc).
One of two bad things can happen as a result:
Alternatively he might appear on Astral, but that could be hard to explain flavor-wise. Or just create some test for if the player is in a sufficiently dire condition, and when they are he claims the player’s soul.
If you already have the Amulet the first time you meet Mephisto, he may not offer a bargain at all.
A new type of worm that has 2 tails instead of 1.
Unicorns are more likely to generate peaceful if you are celibate and have not yet dallied with a foocubus in your game. (Since coaligned unicorns are peaceful anyway, this would affect cross-aligned ones only.)
Roles with a randomized pantheon can sometimes get a pantheon using player names from the high score list. (For better realism, the players have to have ascended, and their godly alignment must match their character’s alignment.)
Allow the player to teleport directly onto a magic portal.
Establish two subclasses or sub-roles of Monk: weaponless (traditional) monk and weapon-using monk.
When a puddle of shallow water is trying to dry up, first check whether it’s part of a larger water body. Do a breadth-first search to find all connected water terrain and see if it either reaches the edge of the map, or if it connects up to a certain threshold amount of deep water squares. If either of these conditions is satisfied, the shallow water never dries up.
A form of monster species “almost grudge” - the two species will not attack each other on sight, but they are far more likely to attack each other when subject to conflict than two arbitrary monsters would. An example of such an almost-grudge would be elves and dwarves.
New erosion type “moldy”, which can be dealt to inventory items (or possibly only weapons) when meleeing fungi. The mold does not appear instantly and maybe does not even provoke a message when it appears. It does not have multiple erosion levels, only the one “moldy”, but at certain intervals of about a couple hundred turns, moldy items in main inventory or carried containers have a chance of turning another erodable item moldy as well.
It can be fixed by either standard methods of erosion removal, being subject to fire damage, or possibly by smashing a potion of booze on oneself.
Artifact pear that gives you +2 current and maximum Charisma when eaten.
Artifact whose main purpose is to soak up water and apply it to other things. It removes a pool or moat square or dries up a fountain when applied to one (moats may refill), gaining a charge each time. You can apply it to spend a charge blanking a scroll, erasing an engraving (any type, not just dust), cleaning your face or hands, and extinguish fiery monsters such as a flaming sphere (possibly instakilling them).
The initial idea was to create a “sponge” object as the base item type, but since it’s undesirable to make a new object just to be the base of an artifact, it could instead either be a “spongestone” gem, or just an artifact towel, since towels can already soak up water. (If implemented as a towel, the towel would only gain one charge of wetness when immersed in water, and could attempt to dry up that square immediately.)
A new magical candle object. Zombie corpses within its light radius will not revive.
Bearded axes can be used to strip enemies of other things besides their wielded weapons, such as wands and other utility items.
In variants that print messages such as “Foo’s [armor piece] deflects your attack”, extend this system to monsters that have relevant defensive body parts even if they’re not wearing armor. Do this by crediting them with an appropriate amount of fake AC when determining what string to use for “[armor piece]”. Then players that miss monsters instead get messages about the monster’s natural armor preventing them from doing any damage.
The inspiration for this is EvilHack’s giant turtle, whose AC of -8 prompted many inexplicable “miss” messages for such a large and slow creature.
Dwarvish shopkeepers never ask you to leave your pick-axe outside if you are also a dwarf, because they understand the deep cultural offensiveness of asking a dwarf to set aside their pick.
In regular dungeon levels, a certain engraving can occasionally generate which has treasure buried beneath it.
(Note: This idea predates the 3.7 themed room containing buried treasure and an engraving elsewhere on the level which points to it.)
Multi-turn occupations should be interrupted when the player gets a warning about levitation timing out soon.
A way to transfer charges from one ring to another, within reasonable limits (such as, probably, the ring gaining charges has to roll for an explosion the same way as if a charging scroll was used on it).
In variants with shallow water, pet cats will avoid it similar to how they avoid squares containing cursed items.
Disenchanters derive additional nutrition from enchanted objects they eat akin to dNetHack disenchanters.
There is some interaction you can do at an altar when you bring a zombie corpse there (not sacrificing it, since it will be too old) that sets the soul of the creature free, which will stop it from reviving.
Ring of opening, which unlocks locked doors and boxes instantly while you are wearing it and try to unlock them. If blessed, it additionally untraps doors and boxes when you try to interact with them, but there is a fixed chance it unblesses in the process every time it untraps something.
“Unstealable” object property, which makes an item with that property incapable of being stolen.
Object properties, one per spell school, which each give you a casting boost in their spell school when the item is equipped (it only generates on equippable items). Should be rare compared to other object properties, and unwishable.
Bag of homogenization, a magical bag that will convert the material of items placed into it to match the material of a stack of the same object type in the bag, if one exists, so that they can stack together. If this is unbalanced, or it’s desired to make it facilitate stacking even more, it can also remove enchantment and fooproofing from the items placed into it.
Monsters that generate in branches associated strongly with an element (e.g. Gehennom, and the Ice Queen’s Realm) should automatically be given resistance to that element, even if they wouldn’t get it normally.
Monks should receive a benefit for fasting. This could be in the form of giving them a point of alignment record every so often when they are Hungry or worse, and/or slowing down their hunger rate when they are Hungry.
Have a special hallucination message if Baalzebub gates something in: “Baalzebub has a devil put aside for you!”
A “spin attack” technique, a la The Legend of Zelda, that you can do if you are wielding a sword. It indiscriminately hits every space in a radius of 1 around you. Possibly if you take passive damage you stop spinning, but possibly not.
A status effect, probably caused by a potion, that removes all color from the game, but affecting more than just the map: color-based items cannot be differentiated, color-based monsters will not be distinguishable (e.g. a red naga and a black naga will just show up as “naga”, all dragons will just be “dragon”), and rays are reduced to some sort of generic ray effect (all dragon breath is just generic dragonbreath with no particular type, similar for all wand zaps).
When selecting top-10 names from the high score list (for player monster statues, etc), continue looking down the list until 10 unique player names have been found, rather than choosing from the top 10 scorers. So if the top 10 scorers are cluttered up with the same player in multiple runs, there will still be some name diversity.
Fix vampires shifting into fog clouds as an escape method because this doesn’t currently work with fog clouds being slow and easily killed.
Amulet versus magic, which gives magic resistance when worn but also makes it difficult for the wearer to use magic, translating to a sharp penalty in spellcasting rates and, depending on the implementation, reducing or nullifying the effects of magic items.
Wishing for a “mystery box” gives a large box containing 4 (or however many is balanced) completely random items. (Using just a regular mkobj() call; it won’t generate items which are not normally generatable because this is likely to cause bugs.)
Detect food sources additionally detect potions of fruit juice, and possibly potions of booze.
As a Peter Pan reference, produce “You hear a faint ticking noise” occasionally and prior to the normal output when stethoscoping a crocodile. Alternatively, produce this noise very rarely when a crocodile is anywhere on the level or near the player. Possibly only if the crocodile’s monster ID number matches a rare condition, like being a multiple of 100.
Noxious sphere, a sphere similar to its siblings in that it has an active explosion attack, but the explosion is of poison and creates a 3x3 (or larger) stinking cloud centered on the sphere.
If a digesting engulfer eats an e monster that explodes (either actively or upon death) or potentially any monster with an explosion attack, the monster is assumed to explode inside the engulfer, who takes double damage from that attack (or 8 times damage, if the explosion is considered to have hit them 8 times) and is stunned and immobilized for a few turns, unless they resisted the explosion’s damage type in which case they only suffer that for 1 turn.
This should also extend to other explosions inside engulfers (most of these would be player-created: e.g. reading a scroll of fire or breaking a wand while engulfed).
Aurochs, a “golden bull” like angelic creature that is similar to a ki-rin, but not quite as powerful. It is in the A monster class rather than q because the name sounds like “aura”.
Boxing glove trap, a trap that hits the victim with a boxing glove (for stunning, potentially?). When untrapped, it can produce a random pair of gloves, biased towards normal leather gloves and maybe away from fumble gloves.
If you polymorph uncontrolled while wielding a unicorn horn, you may become a unicorn corresponding to your alignment.
While you are in a tended shop, items in your inventory are automatically displayed with their sell price appended to them, so you don’t have to go dropping them to find out what they will sell for.
Reading create monster while confused has a small chance of creating a trapped large box, which when triggered will say “The box bursts open!” and create monsters like the scroll of the same beatitude would.
If you would receive your first sacrifice gift, but it already exists in the game somewhere, your god will inform you of where it is (or possibly that it no longer exists, if something destroyed it).
NetHack should contain something that turns you specifically into a newt.
“Organic” anthole themed room: instead of using a rectangular room, it disrupts its edges so as to not look manmade. Then the room type is specified as anthole to stock it with ants.
“Dragon hoard” themed room: containing a big pile of gold scattered within a radius of 2-3 tiles around its center point, with larger stacks of gold closer to the center of the pile. The pile may also contain a few additional items: random gems, a ring or amulet, (if in an object-materials-implementing variant) a gold version of an item that is eligible to be gold. Atop the center of the pile is a dragon, or possibly a few adult dragons all of the same species, either asleep or flagged as waiting, with possibly a few dragon eggs of the same species and/or a couple baby dragons.
Artifact luckstone Somebody Else’s Problem that confers invisibility and stealth while carried.
New branch named “The Ancient Library”. It is likely accessed by portal from the main dungeon rather than stairs. It contains some spellbooks and a smaller number of scrolls, which serve as the main loot of this branch, but there aren’t too many of them in order not to be unbalancing. The level design makes it still visibly a structure, but fairly ruined with collapsed walls and such.
The branch is populated by monsters of a new species that either serve as the guardians of the library, or have moved in to inhabit it after its decline. They make for a difficult fight, and compounding the problem, taking a book will awaken and anger all of them on the current level. (Or the books spawn embedded in the walls – bookshelves, and you need to kick the walls to get them out, which triggers this.) There is no singular boss monster in the branch, nor is there any singular reward item.
If bookworms (#1793) are implemented, they also appear in this branch.
Reading a noncursed scroll of amnesia while confused “clears your mind”, which cures the confusion and sometimes gives you enlightenment, but the regular amnesia effects still happen too.
Chatting with peacefuls with high Charisma can get them to tell you about what they’re carrying. The stated goal of this is so that the player can learn whether it’d be worth murdering them for their gear.
If you are a Ranger, your pets will specifically seek out missiles you have thrown which are lying on the floor, pick them up (perhaps even collecting multiple ones at a time) and bring them back to your side.
A statue that falls into a pit or hole fills it up like a boulder would.
Knights should not receive caitiff penalties against undead.
Make the Gnomish Sewers Mines’ End in EvilHack less aggravating for the player who lacks teleport control: instead of having to jump into teleport traps and teleport around the level randomly until winding up in the hidden luckstone room, make one specific teleport trap always direct to that room.
You can get at most 1 sacrifice gift from any given altar. It can still be used for sacrifices and everything else, but you will never again get a gift from it.
Create a new branch that contains the player’s role’s first sacrifice gift at the end of it; their god will no longer grant that artifact as a gift. Roles currently without first sacrifice gifts must have artifacts created to take this place.
Chaotic gods in FIQHack should sometimes grant potions of wonder as a sacrifice gift.
The ring of warning, and only that, should indicate the exact amount of turns you have left to live when afflicted by a timed instadeath such as sliming, stoning, or strangulation. (And drowning and other forms of suffocation in variants that have that.) This feedback is conveyed by the ring vibrating that number of times, e.g. “Your [ring] vibrates twice.” Possibly it should only happen when the amount of turns to live is low because it doesn’t make that much sense for it to vibrate 20 times in one turn and have the hero count that accurately.
If you have not killed any gnolls by the time Yeenoghu shows up in the game, there is a slight chance he will be peaceful.
Grimtooth can be used to engrave a special name, similar to Elbereth, that scares only elves and hobbits.
Wizards shouldn’t have a Skilled skill cap in polearms; they’re not supposed to be great with martial weapons like that.
As a potential Tsurugi of Muramasa buff, extend its bisection to Large monsters. Huge and Gigantic monsters still can’t be bisected, but Large ones (a fairly numerous set of monsters) become vulnerable to its main special attack.
Invoking the Tsurugi of Muramasa causes a fear effect similar to reading scare monsters and gives a temporary effect equivalent to increase damage (possibly only on hits made with the Tsurugi, possibly with any weapon).
It was also pointed out that triggering a temporary effect by invoking could get tedious. Another suggestion was to give it some sort of passive fear-causing effect when wielded (in addition to the one-time scare when invoking it).
When the game calls for a message to be shown based on its string id in the quest.lua data file, it also supports running a function that tests whether the hero is blind and/or deaf and returns different string messages accordingly. (E.g. a lot of quest messages describe the surroundings, which doesn’t make sense if you’re blind.)
Water walking boots do not sink in water. They stay on top of the surface and can be picked up by something else that has water walking.
Statues can generate made out of wax. If the player tries to apply a digging tool to a wax statue, “You hack the statue to pieces.” and it drops several candles in addition to any contents. If the statue is hit by fire, it melts and drops any contents.
Collection of vague ideas around a new “chef” role:
Loadstones operate more subtly: they increase their weight every time you pick up a new item (one that you haven’t touched yet in the game). At some weight threshold, it autocurses and becomes undroppable.
Carrying a loadstone makes all stone-type missiles (slung ammo, etc) deal double damage - increasing the payload of stones. Also, when blessed or uncursed, it doesn’t weigh as much as cursed.
When the player is Weak or Fainting and uses the eat command when they have nothing to eat, the game searches through any carried containers to see if they have any food stored away in them, and if so give them a hint to check those containers.
It’s intended as a parallel to the “Perhaps you have some gold stashed away?” hint given when attempting to pay in a shop with insufficient money but money stashed in containers.
If an invisible monster (or the player) is doused in a potion of see invisible from a thrown bottle breaking on them, they become visible again (unless extrinsically invisible which overrides this).
Create six new semi-elemental planes that each corresponds to a pair of Elemental Planes. These don’t have to behave exactly like the combination of the two elements (e.g. the Plane of Water and Plane of Earth intersection doesn’t have to be a Plane of Mud); the inspiration for them is levels like SpliceHack’s additional semi-elemental planes.
Randomize the order of the elemental planes, and insert the appropriate three semi-elemental planes between each pair of elemental planes. This leads to an End Game that is highly different from game to game, but has continuous transitions at the same time.
When the game detects a crash or some other event that an administrator should know about, it calls a hook for some possibly customizable alerting behavior like sending mail via the unix mail system. This would be a compile time option that defaults to being off.
Foocubi can switch gender either at will or after seducing someone.
Archons’ light radius should be a passive aura area-of-effect attack that causes strong light effects: potentially blinding normal monsters, hurting gremlins and undead, petrifying trolls, and so on.
The Tsurugi of Muramasa should allow Samurai to use additional “techniques” besides just bisection, with more becoming available with greater two-handed sword skill.
Upon reaching the Astral Plane while crowned and with very high alignment record, you are granted a free artifact pair of gloves that give you an additional touch or weapon attack when worn.
Saddle bags, a container that can be equipped on a saddled pet. Looting the pet from an adjacent square will ask if you want to open the saddlebag, and if you confirm it will give you the normal container prompts to put in and take out items.
You should be able to kick downwards, presuming you can reach the floor, to deliberately scuff an engraving beneath you. This will be most useful on semi-permanent engravings since a dust engraving can just be wiped out easily and a burnt engraving won’t scuff.
A foocubus generated by kicking a sink should have a small chance of wearing an apron (as it is the “dish washer”).
Minetown shopkeepers should be gnomes, and the priest and Watch should be dwarves, either by creating new racial variants of those monsters or via a monster race implementation. It doesn’t make any sense that everything in the town is run by humans.
Give a YAFM for attempting to apply a bullwhip towards an adjacent space containing a horse corpse: “Stop beating that dead horse!”
If an (unlit) potion of oil breaks on your head, you get slippery fingers.
The Staff of Aesculapius should be made out of copper, since that is the antibacterial effective-against-disease material.
Dipping Frost Brand into water potions (or possibly any freezing-eligible potion, which is most of them) should freeze and shatter the potion. Likewise for Fire Brand, which should boil potions and ignite (but not explode) oil it’s dipped into.
Force-fighting a monsterless pool of water or moat or perhaps even lava while wielding Frost Brand should freeze that square into ice (or ground if it was lava).
By wielding a floating eye corpse and either applying it at monsters or hitting monsters with it, you can paralyze the monsters, provided they can see you. As a potential downside, you might paralyze yourself if you stumble or fall into a pit while wielding it while non-blind.
The Wizard tracks how many times you have blundered into unseen traps, engraved Elbereth, been lifesaved, and had your god fix your HP, and he mixes insults about embarrassing amounts of these into his taunts.
Gehennom should have various ambient level sounds, less frequent than special room level sounds since there is more Gehennom area when the player will hear them. They could include screams, wails, tortured cries, sounds of evisceration, and evil chanting (and more).
Wishes that don’t directly match anything get passed through a Levenshtein distance algorithm to find the nearest thing to which it matches. Then ideally the game would ask “Nothing fitting that description exists; did you mean to enter [foo]?” and answering yes will wish for that instead.
When you throw a gem at a unicorn, it may vanish entirely, like a nurse does, instead of teleporting somewhere else on the level. This makes it unreliable to farm luck from them indefinitely and still have them around to kill later to get the horn and all the gems back.
The chance of vanishing could even be based on the number of gems it is already carrying, so that it won’t or is unlikely to vanish after throwing it a couple of gems but gets more likely after giving it lots of gems.
If you are a centaur (via polymorph or some variants’ centaur race), you can joust things without needing to ride another monster.
Hitting a statue trap with cancellation removes the trap, so that it is just a regular statue.
Artifact bow that acts like an infinity bow in Minecraft: if you have bow-compatible ammo in your quiver, it shoots a phantom copy of that ammo (never multishotting) without using up the real ammo. When this phantom missile hits the floor, it disappears.
Candy bars should be colored something besides brown, since there are already so many brown comestibles. The wrapper color could be anything really, but blue or bright blue might be a good choice since there is currently no food with that color.
Minor artifact ring of regeneration whose main ability is not making you hunger any faster than normal while wearing it.
A new type of trap called a “conduct trap” that spawns in Gehennom. Triggering one causes Moloch to enforce one of the in-game conducts on you for the rest of the game, or until you next break it, even if you have previously broken it. Breaking it after this happens makes Moloch mete out some sort of harsh punishment.
Bump the weight of towels up to 5; they have a lot more cloth than a blindfold and should not weigh the same as one.
When you do something to anger the Minetown Watch, they become hostile but will demand that you pay a fine when they come face to face with you, and will only attack after you refuse or are unable to pay the fine.
Any quest-artifact-stealing attack has to pass an additional roll to work successfully if you currently have the artifact equipped.
If you trigger a rolling boulder trap for which a boulder didn’t generate because there was no room to put it, a boulder may fall out of the ceiling instead (and the trap is removed) similar to a cursed scroll of earth. On early levels, it doesn’t have to fall on the same square as the trap.
Also, rolling boulder traps (beyond early levels) that do find appropriate launch locations may generate with no preexisting boulder on one of those positions. When triggering the trap for the first time, a boulder drops out of the ceiling on one of the launch positions and then begins rolling across the trap.
When zapping a wand when confused, one of the potential random directions to zap is at yourself. This could potentially apply to any directional prompt, not just wands.
A monster, possibly called a “maid”, that cleans up the dungeon. It will pick items lying around on the floor, move chests and boxes into corners, wipe out engravings it finds on the floor, and so forth.
A damage type that shuffles around the player’s intrinsics, never taking any away for a net loss, but always rearranging them, so you could lose fire resistance but gain teleport control, or lose telepathy in exchange for intrinsic protection from shape changers.
Rat corpses are treated as “treats” (highly desired food) for the purpose of feeding them to cats.
Artifact magic lamp that behaves like normal until after the djinni is released: then, it does not turn into an oil lamp, it remains as a “cancelled” magic lamp that will produce no more djinni but is still an infinite light source.
All of the healing potions heal a slightly variable fraction of your max HP, with some reasonable minimums and maximums, in order to keep healing and extra healing relevant beyond the early game. Proposed quantities are:
Engraving with a wand of probing should produce the same “You probe beneath the floor” effect that you get when zapping probing at the floor, and should likewise automatically identify the wand.
The player shows up as a 4 on warning whenever at least burdened, because they are a danger to their own self.
Anything that is carrying a cockatrice corpse, including the player, shows up as a 4 or 5 on warning due to its high threat level.
If you chat to a peaceful spellcaster creature who is carrying a spellbook while carrying or wielding a spellbook yourself, it may offer to trade.
This might be of limited utility since only aligned priests in vanilla normally carry spellbooks, or it might be well suited to a variant like FIQHack where spellcasters usually have a book or two.
If you are wielding a spellbook of force bolt, you can attempt to force the lock on a box with it (flavored as pulling a tiny bit of force power through the book and into the lock). There are risky side effects to attempting this such as burning out Pw, a backfire which deals damage, breaking potions, etc.
When you’re in an engulfer with a digestion attack, the digestion attack hits every turn regardless of the monster’s actual speed. This is because most digesting engulfers are slow, and it takes way too long for their digestion to become actually threatening.
If you are a werecreature in your were form, you can chat to monsters of the same form to tame them.
Split Gehennom into two different branches - Hell, which contains devils and the lawful “demon” lords like Asmodeus, and the Abyss, which contains demons and the chaotic demon lords. Either only one of these generates in a given game, or the player gets a choice of which one to go to in the Valley of the Dead. Alternatively, they’re sequential parts of Gehennom, with the Abyss being deeper.
Reduce the spell level of magic mapping, but also reduce its utility: instead of mapping the entire level at once, you choose a point to center your divination on and a circular or square area, with a radius dependent on your divination skill, gets mapped. After this change, it might be similar enough to clairvoyance to be merged with that spell (the difference with clairvoyance is that it currently always centers on the player; perhaps the new merged spell could instead scale with skill by having a fixed mapping area, but the distance you can target it at increases with skill level.)
This does not change the scroll of magic mapping behavior, which still maps the whole level.
Reading a mail scroll should take 0 actions.
An option to have your starting pet assigned a random name. The name pool would probably come from a hardcoded list (or even a text file like engrave.txt).
The “falconry gloves” random glove appearance has some side benefit involving training pet falcons (or possibly all birds) to attack your foes.
If you are polymorphed into a nymph and are lawful, you suffer an alignment penalty for stealing items from other monsters.
You can guarantee you won’t choke on a comestible by greasing it beforehand.
Luckstones, when wielded or thrown at a monster, have an inherent +3 to hit.
Displacer beasts may drop a hide, which can be enchanted or otherwise crafted into a cloak of displacement. (Or else this could just work with a displacer beast corpse which could be enchanted/polymorphed/crafted, without requiring a new object for the hide).
Pet cats lose 2 tameness when the player wakes them up. However, opening a tin wakes all nearby felines, and this will not cause cats to lose tameness when woken.
Revamp the Oracle: move it lower in the dungeon, add level variants that make it look like a real temple instead of a small room inside a big room, and make the Oracle act as a real priestess, providing consultations along with regular priest services.
Moth larvae trap, which destroys cloth items you are carrying such as bags, cloaks, blindfolds and towels.
A spell or other magic item or ability that can be used to apply an effect to a monster that prevents them from teleporting, levelporting, or warping.
Turn the wand of cold Asmodeus has into a special souped up artifact wand of cold, perhaps one that can cast cone of cold when zapped and does not lose charges if Asmodeus is the one zapping it.
Some Dungeons of Doom levels are corridorless - rooms directly adjoin, and do not all have to be rectangular, though most will. Rooms can have longish, nonlinear extensions - like corridors, but made of ordinary floor, walled, and anywhere between 1 to 3 spaces wide.
A shop type which is one of those magical shops that you only see once and isn’t there when you go back, in which you can buy only one item. One possible implementation is that after buying an item, you are teleported out of the shop or even levelported to a nearby level, and then the shopkeeper and the rest of the items in the shop are removed, as well as possibly the entire room. There may be some need to prevent normal methods of theft from the shop. Alternatively, you could be permitted to buy multiple items, but the shop disappears after you leave.
When falling down a hole or trap door, monsters’ spaces are considered valid locations to land. If you land on one, you instantly kill it.
Revamp Gehennom by making its main branch substantially shorter, a “hub” branch containing stairs or portals to a bunch of sub-branches containing demon lords’ lairs. Most of the lairs are optional, but at least some of them are required in order to enter the Sanctum. Each demon lord that you don’t kill, however, incurs a unique, harsh effect or debuff on you once you have the Amulet. Suggested ones include:
Sometimes Medusa’s Island is replaced by a new level Circe’s Island. Circe has a nasty polymorph touch attack (or perhaps can even cast it as a spell, at range), and may be accompanied by sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis.
Piercers can actively perform their falling attack from an adjacent space, rather than passively waiting for the player to step onto their space. After falling, they can only make a weak claw attack against the player, and instead of engaging will try to pathfind to a wall. Once they get adjacent to a wall, they return to the ceiling and become able to use their falling attack again.
A further change to make them more interesting than just discovering them and hitting them would be to make them too high to hit in melee while on the ceiling, unless the player is in a Huge form or larger.
Easter egg: a comestible that has very low weight and very high nutrition, thus a very good food to have. They generate very rarely, perhaps only 1-3 per game on average, and generate exclusively in hidden spots: in chests, closets, and vaults, the dead ends of mazes, beneath sinks (revealed when you step onto the sink), in trees (revealed either when you step next to the tree or kick it), etc. The glyph is brightly colored, perhaps purple.
Bottle of enchanted hot sauce, which you can dip corpses into. If the corpse is unsafe to eat, it will be refreshed for 10 turns.
Wielding Vorpal Blade in your offhand will never decapitate monsters; instead hits that would have decapitated will instead sever a limb, which can make the monster lose its weapon or permanently lose a claw attack.
Samurai who twoweapon a katana and wakizashi should get some small bonus to damage or alignment record or similar. Though since they start the game able to do this, it would have to be a small bonus.
Eating a bag of holding confers temporary intrinsic hunger, and eating a bag of tricks confers temporary intrinsic aggravate monster.
Elves sing while attacking, which automatically draws the attention of any other elves and orcs on the level.
You should be able to apply menucolors only to parts of a string, so you can have e.g. different colors set for “blessed”, “+1”, and “long sword”, and those colors all render in the appropriate places on the “blessed +1 long sword” in your inventory.
Dropping items onto a Moloch-aligned altar (or only his high altar?) can curse them.
Termite, a monster that eats wooden items it finds on the ground, and see them as treats if they are a pet.
Controlled polymorph does not allow you to become whichever polyable monster in the game you want. Instead, you are presented with a menu of several different random polyable monsters to choose one of.
When you are inside a tended shop, that shopkeeper’s sell prices of items in your open inventory are displayed along with the item names.
If you approach a demon lord with a low amount of gold, they automatically become hostile.
Wraith corpses should function as a potion of gain level does, of the same beatitude as the corpse. I.e. a blessed wraith corpse will gain a level and then some fraction of experience points towards the next level.
When you are hit by a digestion attack, any corpses you are carrying in open inventory may be instantly digested by the monster and disappear, or else become partially eaten. (If the corpse is a cockatrice corpse, it might stone itself, or maybe that wouldn’t happen because of all the stomach acid?)
Shambling horrors have randomly generated names, which give some clues about their stats and attacks.
A monster that can move any number of spaces in a straight line at once, but otherwise is only speed 16. It’s tough enough in combat to incentivize running out of its way or locking it behind a door.
The Chaos quest should be stocked with a number of chaotic, randomness-inviting things, such as chameleons and tins of tengu meat.
If the player permanently converts their alignment, they get Wizard-style harassment for the rest of the game by their original god. (This stacks with the Wizard’s harassment; after killing the player will begin to be double-harassed.) The only difference between god and Wizard harassment is that the Wizard won’t spawn. All the other effects remain the same.
A tree hit by a fire ray or explosion should instantly incinerate, provided it’s not marked non-diggable (petrified). Likewise, a tree hit by a disintegration blast should disintegrate.
Eating a wand of wishing polymorphs you into a djinni.
Eating a clove of garlic causes, or can cause (not necessarily a 100% chance), monsters on the level to flee from you for a little while, identical to the “bad breath” fountain quaff effect.
Turn the Rogue level into its own branch, all levels of the branch operating under the same rules as the Rogue level. At the end of the branch is one of the defunct NetHack bosses such as the Goblin King.
A monster (imagined exclusively as a pet) that acts like your shadow in lit places, always being right next to you and possibly dying if it can’t be next to you, but if you’re in a dark area it is free to wander off.
Eating the brains of a spellcasting monster should restore some magic energy, and perhaps even have a chance of learning a spell from its brain. (This latter part would work better in variants such as FIQHack where monsters have a list of player spells).
The game tracks players with the highest death counts, and ghosts sometimes pull their names from the top 10 of this list.
Monsters should be immune, or less likely, to turn to flee if you have aggravate monster. This should probably only affect monsters fleeing after being harmed in combat, rather than all forms of scaring.
The stated goal of this is so that Knights who are tired of taking caitiff penalties on fleeing monsters can give themselves aggravate monster to sidestep the penalty.
Have some water demons, moccasins and nymphs appear on the Plane of Water, in order to imply that this is the dimension from which they’re being summoned into fountains.
You can genocide the Wizard of Yendor (possibly only once, in his initial incarnation). This will leave the Book dropped in his tower, but since this counts as killing him, harassment begins immediately. When he returns after being genocided, he says “So… thou thought thou couldst genocide me, fool.”
Anthill: a dungeon feature found exclusively in antholes that acts as a monster spawner for ants. The ants produced will all be the same type as the anthole is, and ants will not spawn out of it when there are already a certain number of ants in the area. Eventually it stops spawning ants (perhaps with a system where it rolls every time it creates a new ant and if it fails the roll it increments an internal counter; the higher the counter gets the lower the chance of spawning more ants), or the player can prematurely destroy it by digging it.
To compensate for the extra ants spawned, antholes could no longer be packed full of ants.
Elves can read the runes on any elvish weapons (and probably also the runed wand). This doesn’t have to say anything important, it could just describe the item.
Werecreatures should show up on farlook as either “human” or “giant rat”/”jackal”/”wolf”, instead of being plainly visible as a werecreature, until you see them transform, at which point farlook begins describing them as werecreatures.
Make the sparkle animation not necessarily synchronous with its related messages. Instead, when the core game engine calls the sparkle function, it informs the windowport that it should display a sparkle, and then proceeds as normal. The windowport may decide to play them immediately (as is currently enforced) or it may decide to defer playing any sparkles until just before the next time the player is prompted for input.
The primary use case for this is with multi-line windowports such as the curses interface, in which one might be on the Plane of Fire and get several messages like “foo stepped on a fire trap but is unharmed”, each with its own sparkle. Under the current system, the game must wait until each sparkle is finished before printing the next message. This implementation would allow the game to print all the messages at once, and then display all the sparkles one by one, or even simultaneously if it wants to.
Fort Ludios has a constant level difficulty, of perhaps 20, not varying based on where the game internally decided to place its floating branch.
Dragons that generate at level creation time also spawn a hoard of gold beneath them, similar to how concealing monsters generate items to hide beneath. Possibly, their AI recognizes the hoard as theirs and they are reluctant to stray off of it or far from it as long as there is gold there.
Rather than placing random amounts of gold on each tile in a special room that generates gold on each tile (zoo, leprechaun hall, and any other that might get added), bias it so that there is more gold in the corners and along the walls, on the basis that things tend to accumulate in the corners of rooms. Should work on irregularly shaped rooms as well as rectangular ones.
One possible algorithm is that corners get 3 “helpings” of gold placed on them, walls 2, and every other space 1.
Another take is to instead put more gold into the center of the room and less further out, possibly guaranteeing some dragons on top of the biggest piles.
Paper golems can grow up into “paperback golems”, which are at least twice as strong. When defeated they drop a couple blank spellbooks. Note however that some objection has been raised over nonliving golems being able to “grow up” in the first place.
A new R-class monster (possibly “nullifier”) whose attack cancels monsters it hits. Possibly it does some sort of object cancellation as well.
Eating the corpses of mummies may cure terminal illness (though they may also still give terminal illness, being old corpses), because powdered mummy has been used as a healing agent.
Add an option that forces the hero to be rendered even when invisible and unable to see invisible; terminals may not reliably display a distinct cursor that allows the player to tell where they are.
Increase the Charisma cap for elves to 21. Any Charisma score over 18 may automatically frighten monsters via being so unnaturally beautiful.
When you cause a monster’s mount to become scared, there is a chance that the rider gets thrown off, possibly taking some damage. This also happens to the player if their steed gets scared.
Spectres should have some method of stealing your spell knowledge, then gaining the ability to cast those spells themselves.
Camelot Castle, the Knight quest home level, should have a stable containing a couple of peaceful saddled ponies or horses, which the player is free to tame, take, and use as steeds if their original one has died.
Certain high level spells require some minimum amount of skill in their school in order to be able to cast them at all. For instance, create familiar should be impossible to cast if you are not at least Basic in clerical spells, perhaps even Skilled, no matter what you do to improve your spellcasting odds.
A potion or spell of free action, which gives it as a temporary intrinsic, and exists solely for the rare case where you are in a demonic or vampiric form and the ring of free action is silver.
Potion of acid resistance, which true to its name confers temporary intrinsic acid resistance.
Add a ‘configure’ shell script in NetHack’s root directory, which will send it through a rudimentary series of prompts about the user’s system that will get it to run the setup.sh script on the correct hints file. This allows NetHack to be built on unix-like systems from scratch with the conventional “./configure && make && make install” command.
The Oracle can under some circumstances give you information about the stats and attacks of a shambling horror in your game.
Hitting a shambling horror with polymorph should not polymorph it into something else; instead it should rerandomize its stats and attacks.
This would be better if shambling horrors were randomized per monster rather than per species; it doesn’t make much sense to polymorph a horror on dungeon level 20 and a preexisting horror on dungeon level 17, or new horrors that haven’t even generated yet, get rerandomized.
Zapping probing at a shambling horror should tell you information about its randomized stats and attacks.
Shapechanging monsters are cognizant of when they’ve turned into a form that’s much stronger than their usual; if they happen to have an amulet of unchanging, they will wear it when in such a form.
Quicksand, either as a trap or terrain type (they both have advantages and disadvantages); stepping in makes you start sinking in like with lava, and if you don’t find some way to get out in time, you suffocate to death.
Carrying a substantial number of cursed items in your inventory has some denigrating effect on you. One suggestion is that enough cursed items counts as a negative luckitem similar to a cursed luckstone.
Barbarians do not require a saddle to ride tame monsters.
Based on Dracula’s association with rats, Vlad’s Tower should have a horde of r monsters somewhere in it, and/or increase the spawn rate for r monsters.
New option ‘spoilers’ or ‘spoiled’. When on, the game is free to enable a bunch of quality-of-life enhancements that spoil various parts of the game, such as auto-identifying wands based on their messages and sorting items into price tiers from price identification. Defaults to off.
Evil librarian monster: it is peaceful at first, but considers every spell you know to be an overdue library book, and charges you a $100 late fee per book when it encounters you. If you don’t pay, it attacks. Possibly they carry some books, and if you manage to keep it peaceful, you can loan books from it. May generate with a magic marker.
The quest leader either sometimes or always asks for the quest artifact back when you return with it, to replace the weird flavor in most quests that the leader is desperate to get the artifact back but is then completely fine with you adventuring off with it after retrieving it.
If you refuse to give them the artifact back, they turn hostile. If it’s a chance-based system, the chance might be dependent on your alignment record, so a character that has misbehaved is less likely to be found worthy of keeping the artifact. However, since you must have +20 alignment to enter the quest and get a massive amount of alignment from killing the nemesis, it’s questionable whether anyone’s alignment will ever be in a bad enough state to increase the chances. Luck has also been suggested as a variable that influences the chance, but most players will already have maxed their luck by the end of the quest.
In order to keep the player from just dodging the quest leader on their way out of the quest so that they can keep the artifact, various enforcement mechanisms have been proposed:
Prevent giants from accidentally moving on top of a boulder in Sokoban, which incurs a luck penalty. This is probably most easily done by only allowing them to move on top of an unpushable boulder by prefixing the move with m.
Another possibility is just to prevent giants from stepping onto boulders in Sokoban at all, giving a message “The ceiling is too low for you to step over this boulder.”
When hallucinating, pass all messages through a thesaurizing routine, replacing most words with an offbeat synonym, before printing them.
Master Kaen should be able to smash boulders in his way, so that the player can’t easily defeat him with a boulder fort.
The Master Key of Thievery can be used to lock and unlock iron safes despite them not having a keyhole.
Copper items should generally be colored orange, not yellow, since copper is closer to orange than yellow. (Possibly an exception for explicitly brass items such as the brass lantern, but that might get confusing.)
All quest artifacts, even coaligned ones, will evade your grasp if you have not yet finished the quest. This is because they refuse to be handled by someone who hasn’t yet proven themselves.
Eating the corpse or tin of a jumping spider should (have a chance of?) conferring temporary intrinsic jumping on the player.
Some pieces of armor may actually be small mimics, but they don’t reveal themselves until you’ve been wearing them for a while (at which point they bite you for high damage).
Monster which is a shapeshifter, but regardless of what form it takes it always has an engulf attack. This is because it’s actually a variety of mimic in its normal form.
The Eyes of the Overworld (or perhaps anything that grants astral vision) allows you to see anything invisible within the astral vision radius.
Mimics can mimic corpses.
If a gold golem is hit by a gold-stealing attack, some gold pieces are put into the attacker’s inventory and the golem loses some of its maximum HP.
Spellcasting monsters, at least the mid to upper range ones, should be able to cast sleeping at the player.
Shambling mounds, a cousin of the shambling horror. Inspired by D&D shambling mounds, but with the key non-D&D characteristic of having a single shambling-horror-like randomized attack. Compared to shambling horrors, they are weaker and appear earlier in the game.
Shallow water shouldn’t be a free and easy method of diluting potions infinitely. Instead, it should have a chance of contaminating or polluting the potion (or turning it to a potion of sickness), where polluted potions can’t just be re-dipped to dilute them to water or cancelled back to water. Or instead of dealing with polluted potions, just have a chance of losing the potion entirely.
If you eat a corpse of a monster that drank a potion just before dying, you have a chance of getting some effect from the potion too.
There is some ritual you can do that allows you to manually create the portal to Fort Ludios. It requires the sacrifice of at least 10000 zorkmids, possibly some special item that is only generated somewhere below Medusa, and that you be in a vault. If the portal to Ludios already generated, this will always fail (it won’t make a second portal).
You can apply various rings to a wand of nothing to turn it into a wand of something related to the ring (e.g. polymorph ring makes a polymorph wand, increase damage becomes striking, see invisible becomes secret door detection, etc). Or instead of the ring identity, make it so that the wand becomes the corresponding material of the ring, e.g. a steel ring will produce a gold wand.
This gives a message, “As you thread the ring onto the [foo wand] it seems to twist in on itself. You now hold a [bar wand] in your hands.”
Possibly it should also work on any cancelled wand, in addition to nothing wands, which are rare and not always identified.
You can apply a scroll of fire to a greased item to ungrease it. This consumes the scroll.
You can apply a scroll of amnesia to an item to unidentify that one item. This consumes the scroll.
Tins dropped by / generated with hobbits are biased towards high-nutrition preparation methods. Additionally, there can be some high-nutrition preparation methods which only appear on hobbit tins: “wild mushroom foo”, “second breakfast of foo”, “foo for elevenses”, “luncheon foo”, “foo tart”, “foo porridge”, “foo stew”. If hobbit is a playable race, they are capable of making these tins with a tinning kit in addition to the regular “homemade”. And possibly an artifact tinning kit that allows anyone to produce hobbit-style tins.
Applying a cursed horn of plenty will cause it to vacuum up food items in your inventory or the surrounding area.
Monsters can zap wands of opening at you, which causes items to randomly fall out of containers you are carrying. (For symmetry, the hero should probably be able to do the same to monsters that are carrying containers.)
If Frost Brand falls onto lava, it instafreezes the lava rather than sinking into it.
Artifact key that creates a door in a wall wherever it’s applied. (Unless the wall is nondiggable?)
Using a weapon made of glass to force a lock should always end up with the weapon breaking.
More flavorful messages that get printed when you make a critical hit. Suggested ones include “You cut off foo’s arm!”, “You plunge your sword into the heart of foo!” “You cut off the head of foo!”, “You bash foo’s skull into pieces with your weapon!”
There may be some trickiness in implementing these, as most messages assume something about either the player’s weapon or the monster’s body.
Chlorate candles, which appear rarely. They provide immunity to stinking clouds when carried, and stay lit when the hero is engulfed.
Artifact blindfold Mask of Hypnos: provides sleep resistance and detection of sleeping monsters when worn, and can be invoked for a sleep ray.
You can use a forge to combine elemental wands with weapons, destroying the wand and conferring an object property of cold, fire, or shock on the weapon.
If you fall through a hole or trap door onto a level, and there is a trapper or lurker above in the area you are eligible to arrive in (because some levels constrain the region you can arrive in), you automatically land on its space and get instantly engulfed by it (with a message stating as much). This is flavored as the monster lurking by the shaft in order to catch easy prey.
Artifact wooden flute that makes humanoid monsters within range begin doing a multi-step dance when they hear it; they can’t escape from the dancing until it finishes, they are unable to take their next step (bad terrain, a trap they know about, etc) or they are hit by something.
Artifact tinning kit that makes special tins out of corpses; the tins when eaten polymorph you into that monster.
When faced with a pickup_burden prompt (“You have a little trouble lifting/removing a foo. Continue?”) deliberately ignore space, forcing the user to enter y, n or q. These prompts commonly come when removing a lot of items from a bag or picking up many items, and the player is spacing through all of them.
When a corpse (possibly only a fleshy, blood-bearing corpse?) falls into water, any nearby sharks and/or piranhas become “frenzied”, gaining bonuses, for some time. Possibly they could also try to converge on the space containing the corpse and maybe eat it.
Assuming the monster and player spell lists are unified so that monsters cast player spells: When a mind flayer sucks your brain and causes you to forget a spell, it may gain the ability to cast that spell.
Ogresmasher can knock back (possibly entire groups of) small monsters it hits.
Artifact can of grease, the power of which is to grease your entire open inventory when applied (consuming a charge like normal), in zero turns. Or for a slightly less greasy effect, allow the player to pick any subset of their inventory they want to grease in one go.
A cursed amulet of life saving, if saving you from HP-loss death, will restore a completely random amount of hit points.
Rather than having fixed rings and amulets in the game, randomly shuffle the properties conferred by them in one big pool at the start of the game. Opening up all sorts of possibilities such as a ring versus poison, a ring of reflection, an amulet of conflict, an amulet of adornment, etc.
Rather than being hardcoded as swords, Fire Brand and Frost Brand instead have a random base item type every game, chosen from the pool of melee weapons. Possibly the two Brands will always be the same type.
Show the number of available skill points in the #enhance menu.
Giantslayer gets its bonuses against any monster that is larger than you, rather than just giants specifically. (Possibly it still gets bonuses against giants specifically even if you are as big as one.)
Note that dNetHack has a similar feature in which Giantslayer gets bonuses against any monster that’s Huge or Gigantic. It’s also been suggested to drop that to any monster of size Large or larger.
Reaching Skilled in polearms allows you to use them in melee with no penalty.
5% of the time when Medusa is decapitated, she drops a “head of Medusa” item which can be wielded and used to petrify monsters, but only if the hero is blind (attempted use of it when not blind will petrify the hero).
5% of killing hits with Fire Brand, on a monster that can leave a corpse, never do leave a corpse. This is accompanied by the message “The [monster] freezes solid and shatters!” or “The [monster] burns to ash!”
Note that this idea is NOT for the Brands to instakill monsters 5% of the time. It just blocks a corpse drop 5% of the time.
Elbereth only protects you when the game considers you a beginner.
Rename the gauntlets of dexterity to gauntlets of accuracy. Similar to gauntlets of power, their enchantment doesn’t matter for anything beyond AC. Instead, they now grant a +5 to-hit bonus when equipped, which applies to all to-hit rolls (thrown objects, wand and spell zaps, etc).
Shimmering dragon scales or scale mail should grant half physical damage in addition to displacement because anything that hits you is likely a glancing blow due to the displacement.
Paralysis should halve your speed and give you a 30% chance of not moving on a given attempt, rather than just being “sleep but harder to resist and you can’t wake up”.
Add a monster spell, only cast at range 2 or 3 away from the player (not adjacent). A successful cast means the monster makes a single melee weapon attack against you. (Probably any passive attacks by the player should not happen.)
Artifact The Poisoner’s Chalice, a chalice that can be dipped into types of potions that form poisonous coatings on weapons. When this happens, it gains charges and additionally gains the ability to coat weapons in that type of poison indefinitely. When a weapon is dipped into the chalice, it expends a charge and coats the weapon in the current type of poison. Invoking it switches the poison type to any of the ones it already has.
A pokeball item that can be thrown at injured or status-inflicted monsters to capture them, after which they turn into pets.
Using #monster when polymorphed into a demon allows you to call for hell-p from other demons directly, without needing to hit an enemy in melee. This uses up some Pw. It may not work 100% of the time, but will cost Pw regardless of whether or not it works. Another possible restriction is that you need to be next to a known enemy for it to work.
Artifact gloves that allow you to shoot your fists in a direction when you F-attack in that direction, letting you do your normal barehanded melee attack at a distance. This does not harm you; they automatically return afterwards.
When you kill an auton, the auton that upgrades itself elsewhere on the map becomes hostile to you if it wasn’t already.
A new game ending where you can take an fake Amulet of Yendor into the Planes. This is only achievable by having your fake Amulet be unidentified, and have some combination of high Luck, being crowned, and high alignment record. The idea is that your god is so blinded by your excellence that they allow you into the Planes without checking that the Amulet is real.
In the Planes under this scenario, the Wizard’s harassment stops (if indeed he was harassing you at all; you don’t need to kill him or do the invocation to get into the Planes under these conditions).
When you get to Astral and offer the fake Amulet, you trigger a different ending in which your mistake is realized and you are condemned to become one of the player monsters roaming around on Astral until the hero with the real Amulet shows up.
Polymorph forms should give intrinsic magic cancellation corresponding to the monster magic resistance stat of that species: 1 MC for 25+ monster MR, 2 MC for 50+ monster MR, and 3 MC for 75+ monster MR.
Projectiles of any sort that pass over a web space may stop there and drop on the space, getting “caught in the web”.
When hallucinating and pushing a boulder, the word “boulder” should be replaced in the message with a random object. Possibly this should be extended to any message using xname() to format an object.
Remove the ability of non-blessed stethoscopes to tell you information about undead, so that only a blessed one will work on them. The message for trying to apply it to them is “Foo doesn’t seem to have any vital signs.”
All arrows created by the Longbow of Diana come pre-identified so you can readily see their enchantment.
Big rooms should use the ‘shortsighted’ level flag, which prevents monsters from homing in on the player from far away and would make it a bit more interesting than having all the monsters converge on the player once they arrive there.
Dropping a loadstone has a chance of producing the message “You drop the loadstone right on your foot!” and wounding your legs.
Any cursed object, not just weapons, welds to your hands if you wield it.
All food generated in Gehennom (including both food generated with the level and after creation time, and corpses) is rotten.
Elves sometimes carry lembas wafers, dwarves carry cram rations, and orcs carry tripe rations.
When you read a Hawaiian shirt, it should describe the pattern on the shirt. This has been implemented as a pull request, which may have been merged since this was posted.
Very rarely (perhaps 0.3% of the time), a soldier ant will generate in a barracks instead of a soldier.
New shop type “boutique”, which only generates in very small rooms (otherwise it’s converted to a general store) and sells not-very-useful items at highly inflated prices. Also, other sorts of shops that are suitably small and have no useful items in them may be converted to boutiques. They have unique level sounds, such as “You hear a watch ticking” and “You hear someone pouring a cup of coffee”.
Add YAFMs:
Deathly illness should produce warning messages at various points as it ticks down towards fatality, similar to how most other timed instadeaths work. This would, among other benefits, allow players to set those messages as MSGTYPE=stop.
Eating too much food can give you a ‘hiccuping’ intrinsic, where you sporadically hiccup and wake up monsters. Drinking more than two potions of booze in quick succession can also do this. You can cure the intrinsic by drinking a fizzy potion.
Some way to make riding effective in the endgame (mainly addressing the problem that no steed can wear an amulet of reflection and usually dies to too much HP damage from ray attacks). This could be an artifact saddle that either gives your steed reflection or makes monsters focus only on the rider, or simply have the player’s reflection extend to their steed similar to how magic resistance does.
If you chat to the Oracle while carrying invocation artifacts (or possibly just after you’ve triggered the game flags for having acquired them at some point) she offers you a special consultation which helps show an unspoiled player the next step to take to complete the game, given what you have so far.
Track the major consultations you receive from the Oracle; you will never get a consultation you already received in the current game unless you have received them all.
New artifact Dark Candle, of which there are seven in the game, carried by Medusa, the priest of Moloch in the Valley, Asmodeus, Baalzebub, Juiblex, Orcus, and the Wizard of Yendor. They are intended to be attached to the Candelabrum (and possibly don’t do anything when applied on their own), but attempting to do so warns the player “You feel cold and hollow”. When you attach the seventh one and complete the Dark Candelabrum, you are blasted, level drained, lose all divine protection and possibly crowning and a permanent intrinsic. When lit (requires an #invoke), it casts an “eerie shadow” but provides you “intense clarity of vision”, which is effectively a radius 4 light source. It never runs out of light on its own, but if you are targeted by curse magic, it is disrupted and shuts off.
Wands of light should light up when wielded (in a radius of perhaps 3 or 2). To give them some limiting factor, they either lose a charge each time they are wielded, or there is a fixed chance per turn it’s lit that it loses a charge. It’s been noted that this would provide an incentive to try wielding every wand in order to determine if it’s light, but this may not be a big problem.
Proposals to address the situation where all the candles needed for the invocation are guaranteed in Vlad’s Tower. The current situation removes frustration but many players feel that it’s trivialized, whereas the system in 3.4.3 was frustrating because it was a common occurrence to have to backtrack to the Mines for candles after forgetting they needed to be collected, or worse, having to wish for them because the game didn’t generate 7 of them.
When you attempt to jump to an unlit space while carrying the Candelabrum, it automatically comes alight (rapidly consuming the candles as usual) to light the destination space.
Shops occasionally generate in Gehennom. They are staffed by peaceful demons, stocked with dodgy goods, and priced outrageously.
Pets’ closeness to the player should correlate with higher tameness, so that if you’d prefer it stay a little farther away you can deliberately decrease its tameness or vice versa.
Exploding a bag of holding gives you a respectable amount of experience points (because you certainly learned something from that experience, and it would be hilarious to accidentally level up by doing this.)
Corpse traps, which act like statue traps but instead revive a corpse that is on that square when the player steps onto it or otherwise interacts with the corpse.
Worn rings are targeted last for destruction to electricity damage: they’ll only disintegrate if you’re not carrying any other rings to lose.
Allow lua files to specify a trap as “mapped”/”known”/”seen”/”premapped”/”visible”; when the trap is generated it will set its tseen value so that the player instantly sees it from a distance, like how most holes work.
Because lua scripts can be loaded after level creation time in NetHack 3.7, take advantage of this to make some of the quests be throwing a feast for the player after they return to the home level with the quest artifact or with the nemesis dead, with all hostile monsters killed, a bunch of food spread around, etc.
Add paraelemental planes to the ascension run, placed before or after their corresponding elemental plane:
Either a random one of these planes would be inserted along with the four regular planes, or they would all be inserted but there would be mini-quests or objectives in the Mazes of Menace that when completed would prevent those planes from generating or skip over them.
Troll statues, including those created by petrification, can spontaneously unpetrify and become living trolls again. Possibly, this should be restricted only to rock trolls.
Add a shadow monster, which is always next to you if you are on a lit square, including in walls (via limited phasing that allows it to be on wall spaces adjoining a walkable space but not on spaces not next to a walkable space). It is forced to the opposite side of you from nearby light sources. If you’re in a dark area, it will wander away, but it will immediately return to your side when you reenter a lit area.
The maximum distance you can jump decreases the more encumbered you are.
Intelligent artifact weapons reduce their damage (perhaps nullifying any bonus damage given by the artifact, or dealing half damage) if you are crossaligned, have negative alignment record, or your god is angry at you.
Quest guardians which match your own race.
Applying a stethoscope to a monster that has a rusting or corroding passive attack erodes it appropriately.
A moist towel in your inventory prevents scrolls from being burnt up.
When a giant deals you a crushing blow and knocks you back, it can propel you into water you are flying or levitating over, wetting your inventory.
When you enter Gehennom, the Sanctum is right there as one of the first couple of levels. But entering it transforms all the existing dungeon levels irreversibly into Gehennom levels, including demon lord lairs and the like. Everything in the Dungeons of Doom will be lost, and the player now has to work their way through the rest of Gehennom with the Amulet to enter the Planes.
Alternatively, and perhaps more straightforwardly, destroy the Dungeons of Doom when the player goes beneath the Valley of the Dead, and just have them enter the Planes directly from the Sanctum.
You can apply a wielded war hammer to smash a door down. If the hammer is an artifact, it gets a bonus to the speed or success rate.
A flask item that you can dip into a potion to fill it with that potion, protecting it from fire and cold damage while still allowing you to drink it at a moment’s notice. When you drink from it, it becomes empty and can be reused with more potions. It could be either in the tool object class or the potion object class.
Invoking Vorpal Blade gives some sort of message about its keen edge gleaming, indicating that its next hit will have a high critical ratio (perhaps 10% instead of 5%) for increased chance of decapitation.
Archons block teleportation on any level they’re on like demon lords do, because they’re otherwise too easy to avoid.
When a foocubus drains an experience level from you, it gains a level. (This doesn’t work the other way around because the hero doesn’t have level-draining powers).
Nazgul can innately see invisible.
When a thrown potion of oil lands on (or possibly even passes over) a furnace/forge, it ignites and explodes.
Track a “magic resistance-less” conduct. It’s not actually broken by obtaining magic resistance at any point; it is only broken when magic resistance changes or negates an effect such as a polymorph trap or touch of death.
In variants where a monster can grab the Amulet on Astral and attempt to ascend with it: they gain the ability to shove monsters out of their way while pathfinding towards their high altar, but they are grudged by all monsters who are crossaligned with them.
You can affix a ring to a suit of ring mail. This will make it part of the ring mail, and will raise its enchantment by 1 if it’s negative.
When you first open an ice box that generated cursed, it may spawn a gelatinous cube or a group of P monsters.
When you read a magic marker, instead of a single fixed string, it gives a monster-based pigment. E.g. “Cockatrice Yellow”, “Hell Hound Red”, “Gremlin Green”.
A blessed scroll of create monster will create monsters out of line-of-sight to make it safer for the player.
Artifact leash that always makes the pet it’s attached to slightly faster than the player so that it won’t lag behind.
An option that disables special level flipping.
The ring of sustain ability also confers level drain resistance.
You can twoweapon pick-axes to dig super fast.
Force bolt will dig one space if cast at skilled or expert and it hits a diggable wall.
If you feel worried about your pet or sad for a moment over their death while sleeping, you wake up immediately.
Instead of electricity blowing up your wands and rings, it makes you incapable of using rings (and potentially disables your rings’ extrinsics) for a few turns.
Cavepeople can safely sacrifice same-race monsters to “give them to the ancestors”, but only if the monster wasn’t killed by the player.
Doppelgangers that transform into player monsters may adopt a name from the top 10 list when they do so (but not always). When they transform into something else, they discard the name.
If you pray to your non-starting god while wearing opposite alignment, your original god may try to blast the helm off your head. This can have several possible outcomes:
Ring of increase range, which makes all beams, rays, and projectiles you fire travel farther than normal. Possibly chargeable.
A monster carrying a loadstone is slowed to half or 2/3 of its normal speed.
Eating a eucalyptus leaf always produces the message “You’re having a hard time getting it down” regardless of how satiated you are.
If you directly steal from a shop, even if you pacify the shopkeeper afterwards, the word goes out and other shopkeepers may then charge you higher markups. (Even if you killed the shopkeeper, but not if you killed them without actually stealing anything - perhaps the Kops are sharing this information around).
Dipping low boots into a potion of levitation turns them into levitation boots.
Vampire bats that are actually transformed vampires treat their bite attack as if it drains life (as with a regular vampire’s bite) rather than dealing physical damage.
If you are wearing kicking boots, you can kick even when your legs are wounded.
Don’t allow any single source of HP loss to kill you if you had full HP before the loss, unless your maximum HP is less than 10. (It would presumably leave you at 1 HP).
You can chat to the Minetown Watch to pacify them if they’re angry, but it requires high Charisma and Luck to pull off (and is never guaranteed). There probably also needs to be some limiting factor so that you can’t retry this.
Chatting to intelligent monsters gives you the opportunity to mock them, which will anger them without incurring an alignment penalty.
Add a flag for monsters indicating “has seen/encountered the player yet”, which is set to true when first coming in line of sight of the player or being next to them. This is used to possibly change their initial peaceful/hostile state when they see you; for instance, if you’re an orc polymorphed into an elf, any orcs that generated peaceful will turn hostile when they sight you for the first time, and vice versa for elves that generated hostile.
Artifact whistle Nightingale, based on the Nightingale Robber from Russian folklore. When blown, it causes various effects to monsters in a sizeable radius: stunning, confusion, scaring, possibly even instadeath if they are weak monsters or have low HP (or just HP damage). Any of those effects can also happen to the player. The player is guaranteed to become deaf for several dozen turns from blowing the whistle.
As a limiting factor, it will only cause these effects if blown when its invoke timer is ready, and blowing it will internally set its invoke timer as if you invoked it. If blown when its invoke timer is not ready, it will just behave like a regular whistle (and no “ignoring you” message will be shown).
Add multiple sub-branches of Gehennom, each containing a single demon lord’s lair. Killing them is optional, but each one that remains unkilled provides passive effects to thwart the player within Gehennom, especially on the ascension run. The mysterious force could be one such effect. The idea is that it’s not feasible to skip them all in a normal game because the combined effects are too difficult to overcome, but not necessary to kill them all either. You are able to choose which effects you want to put up with.
If a monster with an associated glob comes into contact with it (by moving onto it, or if someone hits it with the glob) it absorbs the glob and heals HP proportional to the glob’s weight. If this would heal it beyond its max HP, it gains a point of max HP.
Dart and arrow traps should shoot a consistent type of dart or arrow (i.e. not shooting a +1 dart and then a +0 silver dart), and if there is a stack of them pregenerated on the trap those should be consistent with it too.
Hobbit players should always start the game with a non-harmful ring.
If you attempt to push a boulder onto a space where a pet is, it will automatically move out of the way if there is an available space to move to. If not, it stays there and the boulder can’t be pushed. This may or may not cost the pet a move.
Lizard corpses should go tainted like any other corpse, though they will still never rot away completely.
Ring of criticality, a charged ring that has an (enchantment)% chance per hit of changing the result of the die roll for that hit into a critical hit that deals double damage (and will trigger effects such as Vorpal Blade decapitation). If negatively enchanted, it has the same chance of changing the die roll into a critical failure that deals zero or 1 damage.
Add a new game mode in which everything goes wrong for everyone. Some examples: wands explode 50% of the time when used, all thrown/fired weapons can fly off randomly as if cursed, critical misses happen a lot, etc.
An alternate ending where you gather a ton of all different kinds of items, dig out most or all of a level, and become the new black market.
Wizard mode command #wizforget, which unidentifies all carried items to the greatest extent possible.
Everything in wizkit.txt that the player gets in a wizard mode game is automatically identified at the game start.
Wishing for “identification” gives you a full inventory identification.
If polymorphed into a voluntarily exploding monster (e.g. a sphere or light), the player can #monster to explode without actually attacking anything. (You can already do this by forcefighting thin air, so this would just add an additional way to do it and a prompt when you polyself.)
Add an option that makes you begin the game with all weapons dropped on the floor. This is to prevent you ever wielding a weapon so you can’t break weaponless.
Every time a line is printed containing two adjacent spaces, the message is broken into two separate plines so that the (probably separate) statements can be broken up by the windowport better.
Assuming the Wounds Patch (which allows Healers only to see the injury status of monsters from a distance) is implemented: Add a head mirror tool, which is worn in the eye slot, or possibly the helm slot. When equipped, non-Healers can see wounds on monsters like Healers can.
Non-chaotic monks should suffer a Luck penalty for eating meat, not just an alignment penalty.
Enchanter, a monster that enchants your gear when it hits you or when you hit it with a weapon, the opposite of a disenchanter. (Not to be confused with the enchanter rank title.)
When a monster has multiple spears, it considers them as ranged weapons and will throw them. When it only has one left, it stops considering them as a ranged weapon and will only use it in melee.
Stethoscopes should be made of plastic and colored black, not iron and colored cyan.
Helms of opposite alignment don’t instantly change your alignment. They still autocurse, but they instead constantly drain your alignment record, until it hits some negative value (-1? -100?) which triggers your alignment to change. When this happens, your alignment record is reset to 0, and no longer drains as long as your alignment remains something other than your original one.
If you remove the helm, it works similarly, rather than immediately restoring your initial alignment: with no helm of opposite alignment on and with a non-starting alignment, your alignment record constantly drains. When it hits that same negative threshold, your alignment changes back to its starting value and alignment record is reset to 0.
Buff Cavepeople by giving them a direct boost to carrying capacity beyond what they get from their Str and Con, to the point that they can carry more weight than any other role.
If a boulder rolls over certain types of comestible, it becomes a pancake. (Which types of comestible isn’t specified; probably it should not be possible to turn corpses, tins, or lower-nutrition-than-pancake permafood into pancakes.)
A monster spell ‘curse weapon’ or ‘curse equipment’, a clerical spell that is a weaker version of curse items: it only curses one item, but selects from among worn and wielded objects. If the target isn’t wearing or wielding anything, it will target one piece of equippable gear from their inventory, or failing that a random item.
A ‘spoilers’ option that toggles on certain interface features that assume a player is spoiled. Defaults to off. An example of such a feature is FIQHack’s automatic identification of a wand of teleportation when the player makes an engraving vanish with it and has already identified the other wands that do so.
Zombie arm, which is occasionally dropped by zombies. It can be wielded directly as a club, or you can equip it with a weapon which gives you the ability to melee targets from a little farther away. Eventually rots away with the same timer as a corpse.
Artifact ring of warning that, in addition to providing warning, has some of the properties from UnNetHack’s Clarent. When worn, it shows all pets on the level, wherever they are, and can be invoked to increase tameness of all pets in line of sight.
Tulpas, a W-class monster that is exclusively summoned by casters, especially monk-types and Master Kaen, with several of Kaen’s appearing through the monk quest. They take on some of the properties of their caster, and leave no corpse.
Items that generate with an object property should be eligible for the chance of generating with a name even if they’re only +0.
If you fill an oil lamp with a smoky potion of oil, it will be transformed into a magic lamp with the usual djinni generation probability.
When opening a tin with a tin opener, the beatitude of the tin opener is added to the tin similar to how markers and scrolls work (e.g. a blessed tin opener opening an uncursed tin will treat it like a blessed tin).
If you throw a corpse at a pet that would normally eat it, they immediately eat it as if it were a treat food thrown to them. It does not increase apport, though. (This is particularly relevant in variants where pets can gain intrinsics from corpses and it’s desirable to make them eat something.)
Give a special message when you fail to tame a dragon as a knight (for whom it’s impossible to tame dragons under any circumstances).
Allow themed rooms to be specified as joined to the rest of the level, but only at preexisting doors on the edge of the room, and the level generator should not create new doors to connect it to the rest of the level. Internally, this means expanding a room’s ‘joined’ variable from a boolean to a larger type that can hold a third value. This would be useful for making themed rooms where it’s desirable to connect them to the map only at specific points.
Ghosts and djinni can emerge from any bottle, not just potions with the randomized smoky and milky appearance. The rate at which they emerge is cut accordingly.
Corpses dropped by mummies take much longer than other corpses to rot away, since they are all dried out. (They are still unsafe to eat and unable to be sacrificed from the moment they drop, though.)
Tourists can get Basic skill in club due to having played baseball and being familiar with bats, and Skilled in riding because riding is a popular tourist attraction.
Raise the instakill ratio of Vorpal Blade and the Tsurugi of Muramasa, but only make it work if the target has under 50% of its hit points. Thus, the player can’t be instakilled by it if they stay above that HP threshold.
Make fire giants (possibly only in the Valkyrie quest, possibly others) spellcasters who can only cast a fireball spell. Or, to avoid a flavor issue with giants being not very smart to be good at spells, flavor it as something other than a spell (it could also be implemented as a new attack type).
Add a game mode that spawns you in Sokoban on the stairs to the main dungeon. No monsters or items generate in this mode, it is just for practicing the solutions to the puzzles.
Aligned priests in a coaligned temple attempt to pick up corpses lying around and sacrifice them.
Candles of invocation have their effect trigger some smallish number of turns (maybe 5-20) after it’s lit, so that you can’t rely on having whatever their effect is available in a pinch and have to plan out its use beforehand. When the effect triggers before the candle is out of fuel, it is consumed anyway.
Artifact cloak Mantle of the Manta Ray, inspired by a similar D&D cloak. It confers magical breathing and swimming when worn.
Casting spells decreases your spell memory by a small amount but one that would be significant if you cast the spell heavily.
Elvish players start the game with knowledge of one low-level enchantment spell that is not sleep or charm monster. They do not start with a spellbook of that spell, though. (If they get the same spell in a spellbook as a Wizard, it could either choose a different one or just not count.)
Ghosts left behind by coaligned players are peaceful and grudge against hostile-to-the-player monsters. Ghosts killed by brainlessness do not behave like this, nor do ghosts not generated with bones.
Revamp luck so that it’s mostly permanent and tied to game milestones such as Oracle, Sokoban completion, clearing Medusa, passing the Castle, finishing the Quest, and getting crowned. All of these increase base luck by 1 (like the full moon benefit, only more so.) Carried luckitems adjust by -2 if they’re “net cursed”, +2 if net uncursed, and +4 if net blessed. All other things that affect luck still do, with no way to prevent them timing out back to the new base value.
Grant an experience level or two for completing Sokoban without penalties (or with an acceptably small number of penalties). Also maybe a permanent +1 luck that never decays, like with a full moon. Possibly remove the rings and wands or the prize to compensate, since they make the branch effectively non-optional and it should be optional.
Remove the air currents in Sokoban that prevent you from floating or flying over the pit and hole traps. Instead, apply the normal luck penalty. Though it’s been pointed out that this would allow a player to bypass the entire branch and then negate the whole luck penalty if they can find or create a coaligned unicorn and throw a few gems at it.
Make the ring of warning chargeable. A higher enchantment increases the radius in which you are warned, with a +0 ring giving around half to two-thirds of the radius it currently provides.
Add a new monster spell “grease” which inflicts you with slippery fingers.
Artifact wand of fire which casts fireballs instead of rays. (Where a normal wand would zap a ray, this instead casts the Basic form of the fireball spell without needing Pw or knowledge of the spell.)
Artifact magic candle (requires magic candles to have been implemented) which casts a version of the fireball spell (at Basic level, with a single explosion) when invoked.
Potion of astral vision, which confers temporary astral vision. To give this some use, also add some sort of being that appears on the Astral Plane and is only visible with astral vision.
Artifacts can always hit shades (and ghosts in variants which treat them similarly), even when non-blessed.
New artifact Pandora’s Box, a large box that, whenever it is opened, ungenocides all genocided monsters and spawns one of each genocided species somewhere on the level.
Taming attempts on sandestins, including things such as throwing food at them to eat if they are a domestic animal, are measured against the sandestin’s stats, not its current form’s stats, because they are intelligent.
You can tell shapechanger pets to change shape (but not what to turn into) via chatting to them.
You can’t name Sting until you have killed a spider. (This could be limited to after you kill a giant spider, but by that point most players probably don’t need Sting.)
When you would shatter an enemy’s weapon with a two-handed weapon, and the enemy’s weapon is a bow, replace the shattering message with one about cutting/snapping the bow string. If it’s not a bow, but it’s made out of a non-brittle material such as metal, change it to “Foo’s weapon is sundered from the force of your blow!”
The ability to specific-name objects you can see on the floor. (It is already possible to type-name them.)
Giants can catch moving boulders (whether rolling along the ground or thrown), putting it directly into their inventory.
Thrown boulders behave like boulder traps: they keep moving even after they hit something rather than stopping and falling to the floor at that location. Possibly this is flavored as the boulder hitting the ground on the first target and continuing to roll in the same direction.
The player (and probably all creatures Large size or smaller) gets knocked back 1 tile when hit by a boulder (thrown or rolling).
New artifact The Scorpion Carapace, a suit of scale mail (made of chitin in any variant that has that material) that grants a 1d4 poison sting to the wearer’s attack chain and confers poison resistance when worn. Enchantable to +7 safely.
You can’t levelport down past a demon lord lair if the demon lord is alive and well on that level. (If it hasn’t been generated yet, it’s assumed that they are.)
If you are wearing a greased cloak, it should not count as one of your carried items for purposes of determining if you can squeeze through a diagonal choke point.
The rings of the Nazgul generate with names corresponding to 1 through 9 in Elvish (Black Speech would be better but doesn’t have known words for most of the numbers).
There may be an extant patch for this somewhere, but it wasn’t able to be located.
Create an option that allows the player to specify a single particular set of potion types, then provide a fairly accessible thing in the game that allows potions to be distinguished as either in that set or not in that set.
In order to prevent nymphs stealing your entire inventory while you disrobe, make their charm-steal attack not steal anything if you are immobilized due to taking off armor. Or make their armor-removal immediate like a foocubus, or give you a chance per turn to resist the charm, based on a Wisdom save.
Make the game able to bind the arrow keys (and other escape sequences like home/pageup) to commands. These keys send an escape character plus some other characters following it. Since escape is currently a no-op, it would now instead go into “listening mode” for those character sequences, and be able to parse them.
The downside is that it would now be impossible to distinguish this from hitting Escape followed by the other characters sent afterwards.
When a foocubus is affected by conflict, it will not attempt to seduce the player, instead just hitting them in melee normally. (The balance ramification of this is that conflict is now able to prevent all seduction.)
When you hallucinate, you see phantom enemies that aren’t really there. They may or may not appear to move, but don’t actually exist and will disappear if interacted with.
One way to do this could be to make invisible I monster symbols affected by hallucination, and randomly place them around the player when they hallucinate.
An option that changes all the game’s messages to their hallucinatory counterparts, without requiring the player to be hallucinating, and without affecting the symbols displayed on the map. Messages that mention monsters turn them into fake hallucinatory monsters, but farlook will represent them accurately.
A minor artifact that turns water into booze. Potentially has an affinity to Priests and they receive it as a sacrifice gift somewhat more often.
Remove the Luck component of searching for secret doors and passages. Specifically, change the rnl() calls that allow a search to fail into rn2() calls, which have no Luck bias.
Having multiple sources of polymorph control reduces the chance of the controlled polymorph reverting you to your original form by 80% for each source. Thus, wearing one ring of polymorph control produces a 20% chance (as it does currently), and wearing two rings produces a 4% chance.
Angels (or other “blessed” monsters) that make bodily contact with undead monsters deal d4 bonus damage to them, just the same as if a blessed weapon hit them.
Augment struct mkroom with a short string (perhaps 3 or 8 characters). The purpose of this string is to store a unique identifier for non-special types of room, in particular different themed room types. This can then be used later in the game (e.g. for printing an entry message in certain themed rooms) without interfering with the actual room types as far as level generation is concerned.
This uses a string identifier mainly because that makes it straightforward to initialize the string in Lua, versus a numeric constant the name of which would not be exposed to Lua.
Giftless conduct, which is broken when receiving divine gifts from sacrificing. Possibly also when receiving an artifact via crowning.
Dungeons levels generate random, small Sokoban “rooms” - actually themed rooms, never on a path between the two stairs, possibly using “diagonaloban” rules which permit boulders to be rolled in any direction. There is a minor prize in each room at the end of the puzzle.
Internally, rooms like this should have their own room type, which will help with putting in anti-cheating measures:
It’s unclear what the methods to prevent the standard forms of cheating (breaking boulders, reading scrolls of earth, carrying boulders as a giant, etc) should be. Possibly they will just carry cheating penalties like normal.
Track the amount of time the player has spent on a given dungeon level. As it increases, random monster spawns gradually get less frequent (unless you have the demigod flag set, which overrules this) and more difficult, starting at one or two thousand turns spent on the level.
When the player does something that decreases the tameness of a pet, the amount of decrease should be doubled if the pet is intelligent and “weakly” cross-aligned (either the pet or the player is neutral and the other isn’t), and tripled if the pet is intelligent and “strongly” cross-aligned (the pet or player is lawful; the other is chaotic).
Unicorns always count as “intelligent” for these purposes (they’re not intelligent, but fundamentally understand alignment).
Track how often bones files from a player are loaded. Because multibones levels exist, this should probably be accomplished by exposing in the discoverer’s dumplog or xlogfile every instance of a struct cemetery existing in the game, specifically the name of the player associated with it.
Scroll of recall: a scroll that works like a magic whistle but with more varied effects.
Allow “numpad” and “num_pad” as acceptable aliases for the real option “number_pad” in the config file.
Archeologists should start the game recognizing mattocks.
Potion of marksmanship: grants a temporary +10 increase in accuracy, but only for ranged combat.
Because green slime is so flammable, there should be some way to use globs of it as lamp fuel.
A small fraction of Kops should generate with bananas, for slipping on.
Fuzz the turn on which Luck times out by hashing ubirthday together with (turns/300), and taking the result modulo 300. This means that Luck will still time out once every 300 turns, but the player can’t predict the exact turn on which it happens, and figuring out the exact turn it happens in one iteration is unhelpful for any future iterations.
If Luck is timing out once per 600 turns, still do the above, but do nothing on every other iteration. Determining which set of “every other” iterations to use could also be done by hashing ubirthday and seeing if the result is odd or even.
Assuming dtsund’s dragon scale mail proposal has been implemented: Confer extra dragon scale extrinsics (similar to those found in FIQHack: speed for blue scales, free action for orange scales, etc) if and only if the player is wearing dragon-scaled armor and a matching set of scales in their cloak slot.
The player’s natural HP regeneration rate is brought down to zero upon taking any damage or non-damaging hit, then gradually increases over time back to its full rate.
Scale the damage from an anti-magic field (caused by having MR so you don’t get drained of magic power) to your maximum HP, or possibly by your experience level, rather than a few d4s that are usually meaningless to any character with a few levels. Or have it be based on your Pw maximum, with a higher maximum incurring a larger amount of HP damage.
Remove the random element of artifact wishes. In each game, you can either wish for one quest artifact, or up to three non-quest artifacts, which you are guaranteed to get on the first attempt. Artifact wishes beyond that will always fail.
Artifact wand that causes monsters trying to zap wands at the wielder to drop them instead.
Give starting pets some form of protection against zombies’ instakill bite attacks, likely by having them start wearing a hard helm or allowing the player to put one on them.
New “doomed” intrinsic, which can be given by late-game things such as demon lords (via something like SpliceHack’s dark speech). This intrinsic causes your Luck to be counted as -10 as long as it is active, overriding your actual luck and any luck items you have, and not timing out back to 0, though the intrinsic itself may use a timeout. (It doesn’t actually change your Luck stat; just makes things that check Luck return -10. When it wears off your Luck reverts to what it was normally.)
Polymorphing while wearing crystal plate mail, leather armor, or iron mail can cause you to merge with the armor and turn into that respective material of golem (glass, leather, or iron), with the armor returning unbroken when you revert back to your normal form.
When monsters shout to rally their allies to fight, Orctown orcs may choose a random hostile orc on the level (preferably one near them) and call the name of that orc specifically. This could be generalized to any monster giving a rallying shout with a named ally nearby.
Chaotic Archeologists gain alignment for taking historic statues and moving them off-level. Neutral Archeologists gain alignment from bringing historic statues into their quest home. (Lawful ones get nothing, because it’s right for them to leave the statues where they were.)
You can smash apart iron bars by fighting them with a war hammer.
New minor artifact, a weapon with either no or minimal bonuses, but which acts as a curse lightning rod rather like Magicbane: a curse items effect will hit only it and cause it to become cursed, unless it is already cursed in which case the curse items effect happens normally. Invoking it removes the curse from itself.
Give giant mimics an engulf digest attack; they’re certainly large enough to swallow you in one gulp.
Increase the armor delay for mummy wrappings to several turns, because unlike most cloaks you can’t just fasten it quickly.
In special rooms with zoo-like generation, meaning they generate a monster on every square, generate the monsters with MM_NOGRP to suppress group generation. This prevents a group from being one of the last things to spawn into the room and overflow into nearby spaces outside of it.
Converting an altar is made easier to do in terms of RNG (either increasing the odds or making the conversion guaranteed after some number of sacrifices), but in compensation for that, all attempted sacrifices cause the altar’s god to get angry at you and smite you, with the penalty dependent on your XL or level difficulty. They can do things like curse your items, give you negative protection, send minions to defend the altar, and blast you with lightning and disintegration if at a high enough level.
Artifact saddle, that when invoked creates a “spirit steed”, which is automatically wearing the saddle and which you can ride.
Rather than marathon mode using a fixed value of 999 HP, you can set an option to control how much HP is used. (If the option is not set, it will default to 999). The value should appear in both the xlogfile (so that tournaments can set some threshold of HP beyond which the game doesn’t count) and dumplogs.
Whenever a fire attack “partially vaporizes” a water-based creature such as an elemental, there is a chance a steam vortex will be spawned adjacent to it.
Free action enables you to move on turns you would normally miss due to being turned to stone, effectively giving you more actions to save yourself.
Cut the length of Sokoban in half by excising the two middle levels. It is now a two-level branch consisting of a small, easy first puzzle level, followed by a tougher level with a zoo and prize.
Give soldiers (only those, not the higher ranks) javelins as a ranged weapon occasionally, in order to increase the availability of javelins in the game.
If you are polymorphed into a monster that has tentacle attacks, you can manipulate objects such as doors and containers from 2 spaces away.
New side branch, which is extremely difficult. At the end of the branch is an artifact crown, which causes you to become crowned when you wear it. Since crowning titles are bestowed by your god, it is unclear whether this should force the god to crown you and thus break atheist, or merely confer all the effects of being crowned without actually granting you the title.
Leprechauns have a tiny chance, less than 1%, of dropping a credit card on death (or generating with one). Such a card will always be a “Yendorian Express - Gold Card” or “Shamrock Card” when read. They also are capable of stealing any credit card that says either of these things.
New special room “cursed graveyard”. Its initial generation is the same as a regular graveyard. The difference is that it generates undead monsters on open spaces in the graveyard (with messages like “A zombie claws out of the ground!”) at a much higher frequency than normal, so long as there is still a gravestone existing within the graveyard. When all gravestones in the graveyard are destroyed, the room converts to a normal graveyard and undead stop spawning.
Gravestone texts in a cursed graveyard don’t draw from the regular pool of gallows-humor messages. They instead use a separate pool of ominous, vengeful, and threatening messages.
Regular gravestone-destroying penalties do not apply if the gravestone being destroyed is in a cursed graveyard.
Priests can destroy a headstone in a cursed graveyard by #turning while standing on it.
When attacking certain amorphous monsters (could be just puddings and gelatinous cubes, but also maybe jellies and other blobs) in melee, it is possible for your weapon to get stuck in the monster, yanking it out of your possession and putting it in the monster’s inventory. Unless, of course, the weapon is cursed.
Extend the warning scale up to level 9 (and possibly down to level 0) to offer more granular information on warning threats. However, provide an option to keep the scale at its old 1-5 for players who want to assign monsters to the 6 through 9 glyphs.
Warning levels should either be set directly in the permonst struct or be mapped from a monster’s difficulty somehow, instead of being based on the monster’s level; it’s rather silly when a monster gets drained a level and decreases in warning intensity, when it likely hasn’t lost any offensive capability.
New magic beam trap, which fires a magic beam (probably implemented as a magic missile ray, or possibly a random ray type) from a fixed point several squares away in one of the eight directions towards the trap square.
Internally, the fixed point is stored in the trap’s launch coordinates, and the ray type should probably be stored as the appropriate wand type in launch_otyp.
Make the start of the dungeon (level 0) a Minetown-like affair with peaceful shops. (Very possibly you can’t reenter this level once descending into the Dungeon, unless you have the Amulet.) When you reenter it on the ascension run, it is in ruins, with a portal to the Planes newly created there.
A Wand of Orcus artifact, no longer an actual wand of death but now a quarterstaff or mace. It can be invoked to shoot death rays (perhaps with some limitations to avoid overpowering it). Orcus can use it to shoot a death ray at will, without any sort of invoke cooldown.
With polymorph control, you can only polymorph into creatures that you have seen before in the game. You can still opt to not choose something to turn into, which could still give you a random form.
Any effect from a worn amulet applies also to your steed.
Wearing kicking boots automatically adds a kick to melee attacks you make.
Creatures that get caught in a wand’s explosion (from the wand actually breaking, not from the regular effect of the wand) become uncancelled, unless the exploding wand is a wand of cancellation. Notably, this can be used by the player to remove the Cancelled status.
You should be able to wish for figurines of unique monsters. If they activate, they will have no effect , so they would just exist to be something you can wish for as bragging rights.
Expand the behavior of the ‘unpaid’ object flag so that it tracks items that you have stolen from shops or looted from shops with the shopkeeper absent or had a pet steal. Unpaid items outside their shop can render as “stolen” in the object name, and attempting to sell them inside a shop (even if not the same one it was stolen from) will just cause the shopkeeper to claim it and give you no money.
Allow tourists to play as gnomes, and they start the game in Minetown instead of dungeon level 1.
If you attempt to write enchant weapon or enchant armor (that you already know the appearance of) while confused, you will instead write the other one, even if you don’t yet have it identified.
Priests get buffed effects from the invocation artifacts:
Lizards and cockatrices/chickatrices should grudge each other.
Cavemen wielding clubs get damage bonuses that increase with their skill in club, to make up for clubs’ awful damage.
With greasy fingers, you are incapable of playing flutes or harps, which require fine finger control. Attempting to do so just gives a message “Your fingers slip on the strings/valves”.
Possibly, attempting to play any instrument with greasy fingers makes you fumble and drop it, since even things like horns and bugles which don’t require finesse still need to be held.
Playing a cursed tonal instrument accepts your input sequence of notes, but then prints “Your finger slips. You play ‘XXXXX’ instead”. This is either a random sequence of notes, or a sequence which is mostly the same as your intention but with one or two notes shifted slightly.
When you drop a wand of striking while levitating, it should “strike” the floor rather than the usual “hit” the floor.
Add some way to direct a pet to carry an item indefinitely. Most types of pets would not be able to pick anything else up while carrying the directed item.
You can apply a can of grease or potion of oil to a door to guarantee that it will close and open without resisting.
Either guarantee that the potion of healing will be smoky for Healers, or guarantee that it will never be smoky. Guaranteeing them to be smoky is basically an open invitation to startscum them, though.
Add levitation as an object property, so that you can have weapons and equipment that makes you levitate while it’s equipped.
An #alarm command that allows you to set an alarm for X turns in the future or on turn Y, at which point the game will print a reminder for you that requires a –More– by default.
When someone gets lifesaved, the livelog should say “averted being [killed by whatever]” using the formatted killer the game already computes, rather than the generic “averted death”.
The Oracle blasts you with magic missiles (directionless, appearing from nowhere, so you don’t need to be in a straight line from her) if you smash any of her statues in her line of sight. She could also yell something like “That was a gift from Medusa!”
When a trap door makes you fall multiple levels, you take fall damage (unless you’re flying).
Runeswords appear as a “runed black blade” when they are unidentified.
Assuming a monster intrinsics implementation: When a gremlin steals an intrinsic, it gains that intrinsic (if monsters having that intrinsic is coded).
When you anger a peaceful monster capable of speech, it may call for help. Other peaceful monsters of the same monster class within a fairly large radius may wake up and, if awake, will become angered.
Deliberately dipping a bag into water wets all of its contents with no random chance of failing.
You can throw an item down stairs by standing on them and throwing the item >. This makes the item go through the normal fall-down-stairs routine.
After you drink booze, you are afflicted with hiccups for some time, which on some small fraction of turns makes you throw a quivered item in a random direction or drop your weapon.
Make the potion of restore ability alchemizable somehow. Possibly with something non-straightforward but making use of junk potions, like healing + sickness.
Artifact blindfold The Double Eyepatches, which has the normal effects of a blindfold plus radius 2 astral vision.
If the player attacks a monster in melee immediately following a teleport (possibly only a spontaneous teleport), they get a backstab bonus on it, even if they’re not a Rogue.
Certain monsters can intercept [some of] the missiles you shoot at them. This can involve catching arrows and other non-ammo things like spears, maybe even Mjollnir. It might be a good candidate to put on certain boss monsters or other “skilled combat” monsters such as the Yendorian Army.
Wielding Sunsword protects you from being blinded by an Archon’s radiance.
While you are wielding Stormbringer, you gain alignment for killing peacefuls and pets (rather than losing it).
Wresting a wand of wishing is guaranteed to work on the first try.
An artifact wand of nothing or wand of cancellation which has no special powers other than that it will absorb curses like Magicbane.
Rubbing a moonstone, or perhaps being in the presence of a lit moonstone, forces werecreatures to change into their were form, including the player if they have lycanthropy.
In variants implementing a wand of water or other methods of shooting water: a solid creature with eyes that is hit by a shot of water has a fairly small chance of being blinded.
If a spear trap is adjacent to a wall, its associated messages refer to the spears shooting out of the wall.
In variants that have multiple Norse-based non-quest-artifacts, valkyries recieve a randomly chosen one of them as their first sacrifice gift.
The potion of orcish war juice should be at least situationally useful for heroes of any race. One way of doing this is to make it more in line with the portrayal of a similar substance in The Lord Of The Rings: have it give useful short term buffs to anyone (minor healing, cure wounded legs, one point of increased strength) with long-term penalties such as a boatload of attribute abuse. Meanwhile, the potion remains a good thing for orcish characters to drink: they get much more healing, bigger stat boosts, and no long-term penalties (though there may be short-term penalties such as mental stat reductions).
“Partial” magic mapping from a cursed scroll maps a contiguous chunk of about 1/7 of the map, rather than random tiles.
The “vitamin” effect of a pill shouldn’t give a big chunk of nutrition. It should give a token amount of nutrition (say 10 or 20), but its main effect should be to exercise all abilities that can be exercised several times.
When a pill is generated, its effect is pre-randomized and stored in the pill, and it will only stack with pills of the same type.
Using #monster while polymorphed into a queen bee makes you secrete a lump of royal jelly. For balance, this should cost a lot more nutrition than the royal jelly contains, or have some other limiting method so you can’t use an indefinite food source to produce indefinite royal jelly.
While you are hallucinating, any parrot corpses you come across are rendered as “ex-parrot” instead of “parrot corpse”.
If you have an autoreturning artifact wielded, and nothing quivered, using the ‘f’ command will throw the artifact, without making you have to use the t command then select its inventory letter.
Metal and stone chests can’t be kicked open to break their lock.
All monk techniques should have shorter timeouts, but if a technique is used in chained blitz, it has a one-off very long timeout.
Occasionally when a monster decides to use a teleportation wand as a defensive item, and the level is not non-teleport, it decides to zap you instead of itself.
Add a random fountain effect that heals you for a small amount. Magic fountains may heal you for a larger amount (if you are below full HP) and become nonmagic in the process with the standard “wisp of vapor” message.
Kicking towards a pet causes it to move in a random direction and produces the message “You push Foo aside with your foot.” Not specified what this should do for pets that are too large to move aside, or if the pet has nowhere to go.
Casting stone to flesh upwards while standing on a falling rock trap makes the trap drop its remaining ammo as meatballs instead of rocks (which still fall on your head when you trigger the trap, but do no damage).
Wearing cursed rings causes you to hunger slightly faster than if they weren’t cursed.
Add more sources of nausea, particularly in the late game, because it’s an underutilized debuff that only really is relevant early. Proposed sources:
Most of these increased sources of nausea should be subjected to some sort of (low-chance) Constitution saving throw so that characters with better Constitution have an advantage.
Magic collar, an amulet without a randomized appearance, which you can apply to a pet to make it wear it, assuming it has a neck. The pet then becomes visible to you at all times while it’s on your level (similar to seeing it with telepathy) and possibly tracked in #overview if it’s not on your level. Farlooking a pet wearing a magic collar shows HP and other additional information as if you had used a stethoscope on it.
Not specified what effects there would be, if any, if the player wears the magic collar.
Replace Cavemen’s quest artifact with scales from the Chromatic Dragon (their quest then becomes “kill the dragon that is terrorizing our people” instead of “fetch the artifact from the dragon who stole it”). The scales only drop when she is killed, rather than her being generated with them (thus, they can’t be stolen). The scales could either be implemented simply as a base item akin to chromatic scales in UnNetHack which provide a cocktail of resistances, or as an artifact. If implemented as a non-artifact, the Caveman role will have no associated quest artifact.
The scales should NOT be enchantable into scale mail. The pile of resistances is good enough.
Golems are particularly resistant to being tamed, because they have words in/on their head instructing them what to do; magical taming basically has to overpower that and make them do something else.
If blessed, the scroll of magic mapping reveals the vibrating square.
Spellbooks that you have identified but haven’t actually learned display a “(level n)” on them to indicate the spell level.
A monster in the n or perhaps W classes whose main gimmick is that they will dodge or short-range teleport out of the way whenever they see an attack coming. In order to fight them effectively, you can’t be straightforward in attacking. You can use displacement, ray-bouncing, or invisibility (but they’ll recognize you’re using that pretty fast and adjust tactics accordingly).
Do away with all non-randomized object descriptions (things like “high boots” for jackboots).
Putting a wand of cancellation into a bag of holding does not blow up the bag at all; it cancels the wand (as in NetHack4) and additionally “cancels” the bag by turning it into an uncursed sack (which does not normally happen when zapping magical bags with cancellation).
Not specified whether putting in a bag of tricks or second bag of holding would also have this effect, or whether it would still blow up the bag.
Role based on the idea of “trophy hunting”, which gains more experience than normal on killing an enemy species for the first time, and less afterwards.
Ghosts, shades, and any other incorporeal monsters can’t wear armor or wield weapons. (With a possible exception if it’s cursed.)
In wizard mode, the #polyself command (and only that) enables you to polymorph into a non-allowed form, with a confirmation prompt and/or warning message.
Wandering peddler, an always-peaceful, randomly-generated monster that aimlessly wanders the dungeon. (Possibly, these could be implemented as shopkeepers that are detached from any shop, but that may be too complicated.) Chatting to them causes them to try to sell you items from their inventory, which they generate with several of. The items are mostly those eligible to generate in a general store, but with certain weight and possibly cost caps. Killing them either doesn’t drop their items, or it does but carries the normal drawbacks of murder and having to overcome a shopkeeper-quality monster.
In order to prevent farming items off them through create monster, these might have a low extinction cap of 20 or so.
The travel command should select a magic portal, if one exists, before any other trap when the user is at the prompt to pick a destination and presses ^.
New artifact “Darkenstone”, which acts like the Arkenstone except that it’s a black opal, and carrying it provides radius 2 darkness. If drow are in the game, this is often given to them as a gift.
A polymorphed monster will turn into a monster of similar difficulty to its current form, rather than a monster of difficulty appropriate to the current dungeon level.
Inhaling vapors from a potion of gain level produces a message like “You smell hard work” or “You smell elbow grease” (perhaps if hallucinating), granting you 10% of the experience points needed to advance to the next level. Monsters may be similarly affected.
Note that the 10% is calculated just based on the level thresholds and your own experience points don’t matter (only your current level). If you are level 5, with level 5 reached at 120 points and level 6 reached at 200 points, you will always get 10% of (200-120) = 8 points.
Gnomes, being much smaller than other races, hunger significantly less quickly.
The Dark Soul, an artifact that, if it is in your possession when you die, saves your level as a bones file and respawns you in a new copy of the dungeon with the same seed and no gear. If you reach the level you died on, you are guaranteed to load the bones file.
Define a special filling algorithm which adds walls to any space to tile it with small hexagons. When a beehive generates, use this algorithm to fill it with hexagons in order to make it look like a honeycomb.
Artifacts have a minimum XL associated with them. You can’t get a given artifact through sacrifice until you are at least its defined minimum XL.
When a cursed unicorn horn makes you nauseous and about to start vomiting, print a message “You feel nauseous.”
If you displace a tame or peaceful cat onto watery terrain such as a sink or fountain (or shallow water, if implemented) it automatically attacks you, though it doesn’t actually go hostile; it’s a one-off reaction to getting wet.
The higher your encumbrance level is, the more damage you take by falling down the stairs.
Armor can no longer be enchanted with a +/- number that affects AC. It always behaves as +0 with regard to AC. Instead, using a scroll of enchant armor on it gives it a random object property. A blessed scroll gives a good property, a cursed scroll a bad one, and an uncursed scroll any possible one (possibly including situational, double-edged properties that are not available as either “good” or “bad”).
Piercing weapons never generate as gold, because gold is a terrible material for maintaining a sharp point. Either that, or using a gold piercing weapon to attack things regularly decreases its enchantment.
Faction system, which lays the groundwork for more complex monster interaction rules:
Shambling horrors gain their own mextra struct which contains details of their statblock, rather than overwriting the shambling horror’s own statblock in the mons[] array. This allows horrors from a bones file to retain the characteristics they had in the bones game, alongside horrors from the current game that have different characteristics.
It may be possible to look up the attacks and abilities of a given shambler on the map by farlook.
You can’t dip successfully for Excalibur if water nymphs are genocided (and maybe extinct, as well). Not because you killed the Lady of the Lake, but because she’s mad at you.
Chromatic dragon scales or scale mail, rather than providing all resistances at once, can be invoked to choose which one resistance it will provide. This resistance remains active until the next time you invoke it.
If you kill a pet whose species has a zombie counterpart, a zombie of that pet may appear later to try and kill you.
Lava gremlins: a different gremlin species that reproduces in lava instead of water. It has at least one physical damage attack and at least one fire attack, and the regular gremlin intrinsic-stealing attack, except they steal intrinsics during any time that is not night.
Dipping a unicorn horn in acid dissolves and destroys the horn, producing a potion of healing.
Rainbow sphere, a monster that appears and behaves as if it were any other type of sphere with an exploding attack, but it does not die when it explodes; it becomes a different, random sphere type. There are two possibilities for how it can be killed: it could be brought down to 0 HP like normal, or it could have a limited number of incarnations, after the last of which it explodes and dies normally.
Internally, it should use newcham to handle its transformations; possibly it could be implemeted as a shapechanger capable of turning into any explodable e monster.
Zapping a wand of probing at a wall point-blank will inform you if there is any open space (walkable terrain, ignoring monsters/objects) between you and the edge of the screen in that direction. This can be used to find vaults and closets.
Hitting a shambling horror with a probing beam describes its stats and abilities.
Monks have ki-empowered strikes, which means they can strike incorporeal beings such as shades bare-handed.
Canceling a wand of cancellation turns it into a random wand.
Ring that provides magic resistance, but hinders your own spellcasting while you wear it by increasing your spell failure rates. Additionally, it gradually drains your magic energy while being worn. If you have no energy, the ring stops providing magic resistance.
Assuming an implementation that lets monsters wear rings and lets you pick and choose what your pet equips: You can have your pets wear an amulet of unchanging to make them immune from being polymorphed or shapeshifting; possibly the rings of sustain ability could protect from both as well, and having them wear protection from shape changers could be used to prevent them from shapeshifting, if they are a shapeshifter.
Zapping a wand requires touching it, so unless you are wearing gloves, this causes you to incur any effects, such as silver damage, from handling something of its material. Conversely, monsters usually won’t use a wand that will hurt them (unless they’re wearing gloves), and will incur material effects if they do.
Ringing the charged Bell of Opening on the Astral Plane aggravates every monster.
New artifact, The Dwarf Bread, or possibly, The Battle Bread of B’hrian Bloodaxe. It is a cram ration, and if the object materials patch is present it is made of stone. It cannot be eaten; if you try you get a YAFM about how you really aren’t that hungry. Its main effect is that while carried with no other apparent food available, your nutrition will not decrease if it is at or below the threshold of going from Hungry to Weak.
You are considered to “have food available” if:
Possibly, it acts as a club when wielded, though being a cram ration it can’t be enchanted.
New artifact The Never-Ending Doughnut, an unspecified-comestible base type artifact that can only be eaten when Hungry or worse, but will never get fully consumed unless the eater is a purple worm. After eating it the first time, it is perpetually “partly eaten”. You cannot become satiated by eating it.
Engraving with a wand of create monster on top of a single-letter engraving has a chance of creating a monster of that letter class. (If it fails to do this, it will create random monsters as normal for the wand.)
Possibly, the chance of it succeeding depends on the engraving type: dust engravings almost never work, carved only seldom, burnt or graffitied offering the best chance.
Thrown sleeping potions should knock a non-sleep-resistant target out for more than only 0-1 turns.
Leprechauns have a one-way grudge against gold golems and gold dragons.
If a guard is killed in a vault, immediately respawn all the walls of the vault. (Any creatures on the squares where walls are being rebuilt get displaced off them to nearby squares.)
In variants that have both healthstones and the ability to eat rocks: Eating a healthstone gives the same effects as a potion of healing of the same beatitude of the stone.
(Note that eating healthstones for purely a maximum HP increase/decrease is also a possibility; SLASH’EM Extended implements this.)
While you are carrying the Master Key of Thievery, all door and container traps that you would have triggered are automatically removed without any triggers and probably not even any message indicating a trap was disarmed. If you actually want to trigger these traps for some reason, you can drop the Key or put it in a bag.
Possibly, these effects are suppressed when the Key is cursed (for rogues) or non-blessed (for non-rogues).
Within Sokoban, boulders weigh 6000 for giants, just like anyone else, so you can’t carry them around.
Archeologists should have a skill cap of at least Basic in axe.
Add another variable to the eshk shopkeeper struct, which tracks how much they dislike you. If you break their door or rob them, they’ll continue to dislike you even after you compensate them. A shopkeeper who dislikes you strongly will inflate their prices. It may be possible to get them to stop disliking you by buying lots of things from them, but probably not.
The “Take out what?” container menu prints how many inventory slots you have available.
Put an attended temple to Moloch in the Orc Temple Mines’ End, and guarantee generation of the Orc Temple if Minetown has already been generated and is Orcish Town, so that an aligned priest always exists (unless the player’s unlucky enough to generate a non-Orc Temple Mines’ End prior to generating Minetown, and then visits Minetown and gets Orcish Town).
Instead of a human priest of Moloch, it might be possible to have one of the orc shamans generate with an epri struct attached, so it tends the altar like a normal priest.
Snow golem, which is a bright cyan ’ monster found in icy locales. Does not generate in Gehennom. It uses a spitting attack to launch snowballs (flavored as throwing them), which are an object which behaves like spat venom in that they disappear one way or another at the end of their flight. These deal damage and possibly knockback. The encyclopedia entry for snow golems uses “Frosty the Snowman” as reference material.
Assuming some sort of wind blast is implemented: There is a small percentage chance that any vortex monster hit by a wind blast is dispersed and instakilled. (Air elementals are immune to this, and they’re not vortices anyway.)
For variants with a “frozen in ice” status effect, this effect will be randomly inflicted a small fraction of the time on water-ish monsters (water elemental, water nymph, water troll) that get hit with cold damage.
The corpses of monsters killed by cold effects take longer to rot. (Maybe they should also be fresh for sacrifice longer than usual.)
All monsters in the f class take less damage from falling into a pit than usual. (Also applies to the hero if they are polymorphed into a feline.)
When an undead turning beam is zapped over the corpse of an undead monster that’s set to revive, the corpse is either destroyed outright or the revive timer is canceled so it won’t revive. (In this second scenario, zapping the corpse again with no revive timer set on it could resurrect it like normal.)
When generating corridors in the Dungeons of Doom, make corridor-drawing follow established corridor paths when possible instead of allowing long parallel double-wide corridors to be carved, because these are ugly.
A possible algorithm is to build the proposed corridor without editing the map, then identify all squares where the proposed corridor intersects with or is adjacent to existing ones, then pathfind to see which successive pairs of intersections are not already reachable, then only connect those pairs of intersections along the proposed path.
Another possibility is to let the corridors generate normally, and then do a postprocessing cleanup step, where all “unnecessary” corridor spaces are removed one by one until there are no more. An unnecessary space is defined as a CORR space where for each pair of orthogonally adjacent CORR spaces to it, the common corner of those orthogonally adjacent CORR spaces is itself a CORR. Though this may still produce some odd dead-end corridors.
If you wish for a statue and it’s too heavy to hold, it may break as it drops to the floor. The chance of this should be dependent on Strength.
Rename the lance skill to “jousting”, and make lances not count as polearms for the purpose of applying them at range.
The chance of you using a forge to repair an item is dependent on player stats rather than being a total random crap shoot.
Stone-to-fleshing a greased stone object should retain the grease on the resulting meat object.
A cursed potion of enlightenment grants you temporary darkvision.
Shopkeepers offer a lower sell price for a diluted potion, though they still sell the potion at full price.
Monster generation in the Mines automatically selects a G monster on 1/6 or 1/8 of all spawns. It’s odd that the branch’s lawful bias means that dwarves tend to appear over time, but not gnomes.
You can bash things with a wielded acid blob corpse. This inflicts acid damage to both you and the target and has a fixed, lowish chance of destroying the corpse.
You can wish for specific text on a wished-for T-shirt by specifying “t-shirt which says xxxxx”.
If you try to sell a zombie corpse to a shopkeeper, they get angry. Or maybe they merely won’t let you into the shop if you’re carrying a zombie corpse, the same way it works with digging tools.
Sometimes when your god is angry at you, they will grant a gift when you sacrifice to them. But the gift is a negative item, because the god is trying to kill or mess with you.
The blast from an artifact is doubled if the artifact deals double damage to your current form (e.g. if Ogresmasher blasts you while you’re polymorphed into an ogre, the blast damage is doubled).
If you attempt to write something using a marker which dries out in the process, you can continue writing by switching to another non-dry marker you have in your inventory. If you don’t have another one, or decline to use another one, you get the same dry-marker effects that happen now.
Unicorn horns become less effective the more you consort with foocubi, as you are becoming less pure.
Baby owlbears, unlike regular ones, aren’t specified as M3_HOSTILE, allowing them to occasionally generate peaceful for neutral characters.
New artifact, the Ears of the Underworld. They enable you to hear even if you’re deaf and block all sound-based attacks.
You occasionally receive a dragon egg as a sacrifice gift.
Eating royal jelly while polymorphed into a killer bee turns you into a queen bee.
Juiblex has a passive acid attack, and a passive acid explosion attack (AT_BOOM AD_ACID, which triggers on death).
A “never wore dragonhide” conduct, which includes “natural” dragon armor items like scales and scale mail.
The game should award an achievement for ascending with a full set of dragonhide armor (a dragonhide piece of gear in all six armor slots).
Any rock mole (including you, if you are polymorphed into one) that eats a wand of death dies instantly.
Invoking the Longbow of Diana gives you light arrows. These are a special object, weightless, created with the same enchantment as the Longbow, but attempting to enchant them further will fail (maybe making the enchanted arrows evaporate). If they leave your inventory for any reason, they will vanish. As a weapon, they are very powerful (to the point of probably instakilling most weaker monsters they hit). To prevent the player stockpiling them, the invoke effect will only top up the amount of them in your inventory to 5.
When a light arrow strikes a target or falls to the ground (and vanishes in the process), it permanently lights up the surrounding area.
There is a small temple-like structure around the Vibrating Square (not an actual temple) which gets destroyed during the invocation.
If you are on a staircase/ladder (maybe a magic portal), your pets will always try to approach you (using the appr = 1 code path in dog_goal). Maybe, to make it a little less obvious have pets approach you (with a less than 100% chance) if you are merely near the stairs, with a diminishing chance of intervening to set appr = 1 the farther away you are.
Flying creatures have a chance to auto-evade engulfing by flying out of range of the engulfer’s attack. Maybe only if the engulfer isn’t also flying.
Non-fire-resistant creatures have a very small chance of spontaneously combusting in Gehennom.
Potion of regeneration. Grants some medium duration (maybe fifty to a hundred turns) of temporary intrinsic hungerless regeneration. Can be brewed using healing potions, perhaps, but should be fairly rare in terms of random generation.
For every historic statue you demolish on the Oracle level, she jacks up her prices.
Oviparous monsters periodically lay eggs.
Applying an axe or pick-axe, and then specifying a direction where there is a monster, makes you swing the implement through the air, because applying tools is not intended for attacking, and it helps avoid weaponless conduct breaking.
Alternatively, when autodig is off and a digging tool wielded, you must use F to attack monsters.
A fleeing monster will not stop to pick up and equip items as long as it thinks you are somewhere nearby it.
Amorphous monsters that are huge or gigantic cannot squeeze under doors, or through iron bars.
When a container is polymorphed, its contents spill out onto its square rather than vanishing. The contents do not get polymorphed from the same source.
Sacrificing a lamb should guarantee a gift, or at least have a very high sacrifice value.
Reduce the nutrition value of eucalyptus leaves to 1 or 2; its current 30 is six times as much as a meatball, which makes no sense.
Player monsters do not generate with dragon scale mail until well after the difficulty where adult dragons spawn.
Imps’ taunting wakes up monsters nearby.
Nearlooking while standing on a crystal chest will show the contents of the chest, even if it remains locked (because it’s see-through). Possibly it only shows whether there is anything in the chest, or it’s empty.
Iron bars can rust by being hit with water or having a water elemental pass through them. Rusty bars are more vulnerable to damage; they can be kicked down and a monk can punch them down. Presumably, non-diggable iron bars cannot be rusted.
Non-chaotic Priests get punished for having demon pets. The penalty is applied upon taming it and periodically from being on the same level as it, so that you can avoid penalties by abandoning it somewhere. (Internally, it should be applied when a tame demon moves; this means if you have multiple demon pets, the penalties stack up faster.)
Livelog when you obtain the wand of wishing from the Castle.
Steam vortexes leave behind a trail of non-poisonous, temporary clouds behind them as they move. When they are killed, they burst into a large cloud centered on the spot where they died.
Some method to transform a mimic mimicking something into the actual thing it mimics. Possibly zapping it with a wand of polymorph.
If a special level fails to load, its fallback is not to make a maze - instead, it creates a simple large rectangular open area stocked with some random monsters and objects (and stairs, if relevant). It is named the “Bug Room”.
When you are gifted a spellbook by your god as a prayer boon, the book will always be your role’s special spell if you don’t already know it. (Possibly, they won’t give it to you if you have it identified, or they will give it to you if you know but have forgotten the spell.)
Convicts can uniquely get their god to unpunish them as a special prayer boon (or maybe sacrifice gift that replaces an artifact). This requires some prerequisite like a certain amount of alignment record, so that it can’t randomly happen only a few hundred turns into the game.
Potion of bug repellent; is poisonous or otherwise harmful to drink, but if you smash it over yourself, all insects (classes a, s, and x) will flee from you.
Kicking a dragon while you are riding it as a steed makes it use its breath weapon (if it is currently able to, with its cooldown over). This is still subject to possible tameness penalties and other side effects of kicking a steed. It’s not defined whether the player should control the direction it breathes in or whether it will select a target itself.
Track the amount of Luck increase you have had from a unicorn. If you steal gems from such a unicorn or kill a unicorn you have gotten Luck from, immediately revert that Luck increase.
Applying a key at a non-door and getting “You see no door there” shouldn’t take a turn. Using the open command at a non-door doesn’t take a turn, so why should keys be any different?
Priests attending a temple altar can magically fix their temple’s walls periodically like shopkeepers can.
The spell of knock cannot be used to escape from an engulfer (the wand of opening, however, still can). Casting knock into an engulfer produces the message “You knock on the inside of [monster], but nothing seems to happen.”
Polymorphing into any Tiny monster, or a Small non-humanoid monster, allows you to get free of any iron chain around your ankle even if your new form still has legs.
Watchmen don’t yell at you to stop picking a lock if you’re using a key and therefore not picking the lock.
Copper weapons get a bonus versus Kops.
Objects that currently generate cursed 90% of the time instead generate cursed 100% of the time.
One of the random throne effects is to tame monsters nearby. However, monsters that normally generate in throne rooms are immune to this effect.
As a prayer boon, when you have a certain amount of unidentified objects in your inventory, your god can grant you identification.
Make indirect identification more common and reliable through the game, but make the scroll of identify less likely to identify multiple items and impossible to identify your entire inventory. Thrones can still identify your whole inventory as a random effect.
Shopkeepers should charge a very high usage fee for using a charge from a store-owned wand of wishing, though not more than the wand costs by itself.
Vorpal Blade (and other vorpal things in variants with them) can only instakill a monster with less than 400 HP. Otherwise, they merely deal double damage.
Giant players can apply grease to their bodies to squeeze through diagonal choke points.
To nerf the strategy of dropping the Amulet to cast spells, but not to the point of UnNetHack’s teleporting it anywhere on the level, it teleports randomly within a fixed radius every time it’s dropped. (Possibly on the Astral Plane it always teleports away from the nearest high altar, so you can’t use it to jump ahead.)
The Amulet drains your power when you cast spells, even if you’re not carrying it, if it’s on the ground nearby. The amount of power drained is proportional to your closeness to it.
Monks get shorter cooldowns for techniques as their experience level increases, to a minimum of 50 turns.
If you have a silver non-reflection shield, a towel, and grease, you can turn it into a shield of reflection by polishing it.
Traps track the turn on which they were created in the trap struct. This is used to determine the age of a web; creatures will tear through an older web more easily, and with less strength, than a young one.
(Possibly, when you spend time off-level, this trap timestamp updates to account for that time, because time is frozen when you aren’t on a level.)
Digless conduct: never dig any tile by any means (digging implements, wand of digging, spell of dig). Monsters digging don’t break the conduct.
Shovel, a tool that can be used to dig walls, but only deals 1d2 damage in combat (because it’s a pure tool, not a weapon-tool) and doesn’t count as hitting with a weapon if used in combat.
Love potion, an item that can tame monsters it is thrown at. Not specified what the effects of the player or monsters drinking it would be, or whether hostile monsters would throw it at you.
In variants that implement flavorful miss messages (“Your [armor] deflects the gecko’s attack”, etc), your T-shirt and body armor are not eligible to appear in those messages if there are other pieces of armor covering them.
Iron safe additions:
You occasionally abuse Charisma when trudging through raw sewage.
Fountains can be frozen, creating a silver or cyan “frozen fountain”. These can’t be dipped into or quaffed. They appear in ice-themed levels.
Rangers get an alignment penalty for destroying (cutting down, burning, etc) trees.
Assign a different color to the Arch Priest so that he doesn’t appear identically to all the quest guardians milling around in the area.
It’s not possible to dip an item into a forge and have nothing happen. Something should happen, if only a message, in all cases.
Giants don’t get stuck in pits. They can step out without wasting any time on the space.
It’s harder to force the lock on chests or large boxes made of metal, and increases the chance your weapon breaks. Additionally, the material of the weapon used to force the lock affects the result, if it’s used to pry rather than bash:
For variants that have giants as a playable race: A giant who uses the m prefix before moving onto a boulder will step onto that boulder without pushing it, whether or not the boulder has been pushed up against a wall. (Monster giants step over boulders not against walls all the time.)
Cursed two-handed weapons only weld to one hand at a time, allowing you to do things with the other hand. The only way to have no free hands at all is to wear a cursed shield and wield a cursed weapon.
A “druid staff” artifact, which can be invoked to create a patch of grass similar in size to a stinking cloud, radius 4-5. Enemies within the grass radius become rooted to the ground, making them unable to move (but still able to fight, shoot, etc) for some time. While wielding it, you can chat with trees, which causes them to give you some food, mana, or rarely a pet (possibly an ent).
Diluting a potion of amnesia in a water source turns the water into Lethe water. It prints “Dark clouds roil beneath the water’s surface”, or “Somebody’s poisoned the water hole!” if hallucinating.
A force bolt beam stops at the first monster or boulder it hits. Breakable items in the path of the beam do not impede it, though.
The bearer of the Master Key of Thievery cannot be seen with infravision while they carry it. (This is more useful in variants where monsters use infravision to spot the player).
Real-life creatures tend to eat an amount of food proportional to their weight, so the hunger rate in NetHack should depend on your race’s (or your polyform’s) base weight. This mainly helps gnomes by cutting their nutrition rate significantly.
New artifact short sword, which is the first sacrifice gift for Rogues. It does extra damage based on the amount of gold carried in your inventory (or possibly your opponent’s inventory, though this would make it no better than a normal short sword on many monsters). The damage bonus eventually runs into diminishing returns so that the damage bonus doesn’t get too ridiculous.
A magical type of mummy wrapping (or maybe an artifact mummy wrapping) that provides curse resistance when worn.
Some way to close off the double-slow-digestion loophole by which you can survive indefinitely without food, by abusing the fact that ring hunger is counted on certain different turns for the left and right hand. Suggestions include:
Magicbane’s usual special effects don’t happen when a disenchanter is being hit by it.
Blowing up a bag of holding doesn’t destroy any of the items; it just destroys the bag.
Spell of disarming, a level 2 attack (possibly matter) directional spell, which disarms the first monster it hits, causing the weapon to drop. At Skilled and above, it makes the weapon go flying in the direction the spell was directed.
Cut down on the list of inediate monsters by defining some of them to be either herbivorous or carnivorous (note that the game uses carnivorous to mean “can eat meat” rather than “only eats meat”).
Herbivores:
Carnivores:
Make gelatinous cubes and quivering blobs amorphous, allowing them to pass through terrain like iron bars (however, gelatinous cubes should probably be blocked from squeezing underneath doors).
If you bribe a demon lord with less than 1000 gold pieces, a Wizard-style periodic timer is started, except that every time the timer triggers random demons will be spawned around you. The demon lord itself may return, hostile this time.
Throwing something downwards on a down staircase will throw it down the stairs, making it end up on the level below.
A new type of pudding or slime (though possibly a j or b monster) that has a high speed and good attack and splits whenever it takes damage. Its entire strategy is based on surrounding you with lots of clones that all have the same high attack as the original. Has a high monster difficulty; possibly, their attack stats and difficulty should be high enough that they will usually not show up until Gehennom.
This is unintentionally quite similar to Brogue’s fearsome pink jelly.
The castle chest containing the wand of wishing requires a special unique key to open (it can’t be opened any other way). The key is carried by a random lieutenant or captain generated on the level.
Being choked and unable to breathe should confer all the benefits of being unbreathing, including being (partially) immune from the effects of poison gas.
Giants occasionally generate with a rusty or very rusty two-handed sword or battle-axe, rather than a boulder to throw.
When a monster and a gas cloud are on the same space, and you are adjacent to that space and non-blind, the game should render the monster rather than the cloud.
Gold that disappears by losing it in fountains, to thrones, or by failing to read spellbooks, appears in the Fort Ludios vault.
Add lamias, which are very similar to nagas, but have hands and consequently can use items.
If you’re wearing some orcish armor, some orcs may see you as another orc and be peaceful. Possibly the chance of this happening is higher for each piece of orcish armor you are wearing.
Your skill practice points gradually decrease with time on their own. They will decrease slowly enough that if you are using a weapon infrequently but regularly, you won’t notice anything, but if you go many thousands of turns without using a skill, you may need to retrain and bring it back up to speed. There should either be a message when your skill falls a level due to this decrease, or when you try to start using the skill again only to discover that your skill has decreased.
Print “You feel aggravated at the invisible mysterious force.” occasionally when you get hit by the mysterious force.
Pets will never pick up large, bulky containers, like large boxes, chests and ice boxes. For one, picking up a heavy bulky object is unrealistic for many humanoid pets; for another, usually when pets pick up large containers they are doing something annoying like moving around a stash container.
You can bury fruit to make a tree grow where the fruit was buried.
Cleaver can be invoked to toggle its arc-attacking on and off. This should perhaps not set its invoke timeout, since it isn’t giving the player any particular benefit. However, it’s a bit problematic what the default setting should be; if it starts out in no-arc mode it will be hard for players to discover that it has an arc mode at all; if it starts out in arc mode players may hit a peaceful target in their first few attacks before remembering they need to manually toggle it.
Alternatively, just prompt the player for confirmation if the attack they are about to make is obviously going to hit any peaceful or tame monsters.
A new branch with infinite levels, whose level difficulty continues steadily increasing the deeper you go. Monsters killed do not drop anything, except that there is a very small chance, increasing with greater difficulty, of dropping a single wand of wishing. Unlike the rest of the dungeon, monster generation cares only about the level difficulty, ignoring the player’s experience level.
Levels in this branch are non-persistent. To prevent destroying any unique items, you either can’t bring them into the branch at all, or you are prevented from leaving a level in any way while they are on the level somewhere other than your person. Not determined what drinking a cursed potion of gain level would do.
One way to increase the challenge and prevent the hero from resting on the downstairs every level and starting each new level fresh is to suppress or remove natural HP regeneration in this branch.
Using an upstairs will take you back to the branch entrance, which may then close off forever. Possibly, 9/10 of upstairs will just crumble to nothing upon arrival in the level (whether this 9/10 is random or happens regularly every 10 levels isn’t determined). This makes it less easy to decide to bail out, though levelport or branchport would probably still work as escape items.
Not determined is to what degree the branch should enforce the player to spend time on each level. The three proposed options are:
Squirt gun: a weapon which can be loaded with a potion (using up the potion), giving it ammo for 5-10 shots. When you fire it, a liquid projectile flies through the air, and causes potion effects (identical to those of throwing a whole potion) to whatever monster it hits.
It would be silly to define a separate liquid projectile object for each type of potion; probably the best implementation would be to have a single “splash of potion” object and use some field on the object, like corpsenm, to track what sort of potion it is.
Loading water into the squirt gun can be used to discipline pets.
When you read a scroll of web, you are repeatedly given a getpos prompt for where you would like to create a web. The area in which you can create webs is identical to the scroll of stinking cloud in terms of line of sight and radius. Each position you select has a web placed on it (though if will fail if a web can’t be placed there for whatever reason, such as another trap already existing there). If you create a web on a square containing a monster, it is immediately entangled in the web.
The amount of webs you can place is 2 if the scroll is cursed, 6 if it is uncursed, and 10 if it is blessed.
Mummies have a constitution-draining touch attack, which possibly also inflicts a ‘withering’ intrinsic that deals damage over time and abuses Constitution every turn.
Mummies could also “cast” a curse on you, not to curse your items, but to make you sink through the floor, sending you down 1-3 levels.
After the lamassu created from Sharur is killed, it reverts back into the artifact mace Sharur rather than just dying and never being usable again. You can also #chat to it to make it revert without dying.
Make arrow traps multishoot arrows at higher level difficulties.
Allow quest monster generation to be specified more precisely than having a fixed set of probabilities for two specific monsters and two monster classes (e.g. the Wizard quest has a certain distribution of vampire bats, B, xorns, W, and random monsters; it is not possible to change this distribution without changing it for every quest).
Implementation details: keep the definitions within struct Role, but do it with, say, a struct of { int, bool, int } repeated however many times a quest needs. The first int is the % chance out of a hundred for this struct to be selected. The third is either a PM_* monster index or S_* monster class constant. The second just informs it which of those options it is.
When generating a quest monster, the game can then roll a d100 and iterate through this array of possible monsters, decrementing as it goes, until it hits the right element; if it goes all the way to the end without hitting any monster or class it generates a normal random monster. (This is more or less the same as the algorithm for picking items generated in shops.)
Teleport vortex, a monster which moves around the level sucking up items into its inventory; items in its inventory are periodically teleported randomly around the level. If it engulfs the hero, it will do the same.
Make it so that you cannot rename ghosts. (The ability to rename ghosts makes a bunch of otherwise interesting ideas about interacting with a specific named ghost boring, because you can just rename any ghost to whatever you want).
Items underneath a cloak of magic resistance in an object pile are immune to being polymorphed by a beam zapped over that pile. (This gives you a way to protect your stash from accidental polymorph.)
Monsters pulled out of a bag of tricks are tame whether the bag is blessed or uncursed, and hostile only if it is cursed; however, all monsters created by it are temporary and disappear after several hundred turns.
When you cause a Yendorian Army monster to flee, nearby lower-ranking monsters may also flee. Possibly extend this to other ‘pack animals’ such as orcs or ants.
Artifact figurine, the gimmick of which is that it will always turn into a pet if not cursed, and the monster it turns into will fight anything without fear and maybe also has some extra buffs. When it dies, it reverts to the figurine, which immediately has its artifact cooldown set and can’t be applied again before the cooldown ends.
The inspiration for this idea was the Guenhwyvar panther figurine from the Legend of Drizzt, so possibly this artifact could just be named Guenhwyvar and be a figurine of a panther, which already exists in NetHack.
The arrows created by the Longbow of Diana are of your race/role’s affiliation (e.g. orcish arrows for orcs, ya for Samurai, etc), and bear the same enchantment as the bow itself.
The gaze attack of an evil eye can destroy or reduce the beatitude state of luckstones you are carrying.
Delicatessens buy and sell tin openers, though they may not actually generate with any (it would internally appear on the list of the shop’s wares, but with 0 frequency).
Also, the canned food factory shop type in UnNetHack should buy and sell these.
It is impossible to multishoot anything when you are fumbling or have slippery fingers.
Remove sleep as a ray. Sleep wands (and monsters with sleep breath like orange dragons and Nazgul) instead shoot a beam of sleep. The sleep spell either also shoots a beam of sleep or causes sleep in an area of effect. Sleep could also possibly be a cone, spreading out in the direction it’s shot in, but cone spells remain unimplemented.
Remove covetous warping entirely. However, a change like this would need to take into account that it makes the vast majority of boss fights a lot easier and more boring in that they would tend to consist just of the hero and boss standing next to each other hitting each other until the boss dies, so it would need to come with some improvements to boss fights, such as more interesting tactical AI where they will disengage momentarily and multiple forms (i.e. you “kill” it and then it becomes stronger before finally being defeated).
If you are sufficiently skilled at a ranged weapon you are using (perhaps only Expert, possibly Skilled some of the time), you can shoot at non-tame monsters behind your pets and the ranged attack will pass through your pets’ squares silently without hitting them. (If there is no apparent non-tame monster behind the pets, it could either be assumed that you’re trying to hit the pets so the attack would hit them, or more generously it would just continue to pass through them.)
Crossbows deal more damage than bows, but the multishot bonus is lower because they are slower to reload.
Note a similar implementation in dNetHack, where crossbows always only shoot one bolt but the multishot amount multiplies the damage of that bolt.
A dungeon feature that massively improves your spellcasting success rates while you are standing on it.
Add a new option that controls whether autopickup functions in shops. If it is on AND regular autopickup is on, items will be autopickedup in shops; if either of the two are off, they won’t.
When a pudding moves onto a square containing a glob of its own type, it absorbs the glob and gains HP.
When removing a helm of opposite alignment, after restoring your original alignment, increment your god’s anger. Do it after removing the helm because then your original god gets angry at you for putting the helm on, not your new god.
If god anger is tracked separately for each god, it doesn’t need to be done this way; merely make your original god angry when you first put on the helm.
Bronze or brass golem. It would be either a yellow ’ or orange ’, depending on whether trying to avoid color conflicts with the gold golem.
Add several new never-randomly-generated cards, all of which are designed to give strong but short buffs, to you and more often allies. Though their frequencies are 0, they are sometimes dropped from monsters you and your pets kill, at the same frequency the keyed create monster cards do.
Other roles can write these scrolls if they want to or find them in bones, but they are generally intended to be less powerful than many existing scrolls so they shouldn’t steal generation probability from them.
Gently nerf the ability of pets to steal from shops, so that a player with a stack of meatballs or a magic whistle can’t clear out an entire shop. Suggested ideas:
If possible, work in a “pet-ty theft” YAFM somehow.
Assuming the fruit type of a tree has been made deterministic rather than random when kicked: farlooking a tree will describe what kind of tree it is, e.g. “apple tree”, “banana tree”. Fruit trees you have already kicked are described as “bare”, e.g. “bare apple tree”. Trees that never had any fruit, if implemented, are “maple tree” or “oak tree” or something.
Make a radical change to the scroll of scare monster, making it no longer scare monsters on the ground; instead, boost its reading effect to a very powerful scaring effect, more so than can be accomplished with a horn.
Helmet (or possibly blindfold) slot artifact named The Masque of the Read Death. Has some mechanic related to sickness.
Make more monsters immune to magic missiles.
Address the spell of magic missile being overpowered for such a low-cost spell by scaling its number of dice on skill level rather than experience level. One solution is to give it 2d6 per skill level, though this means that starting Wizards can cast it for 4d6 damage, which is rather high. Another option is to make it scale on powers of 2: 1d6 at Unskilled, 2d6 at Basic, 4d6 at Skilled and 8d6 at Expert, which has the same respectable maximum as the linear system.
Note that a 4d6 magic missile at Basic for 10 Pw may not be considered too powerful for an early game Wizard (it’s statistically slightly better damage-wise than force bolt but also has the benefits of being a ray), but this is contingent on the existing Pw regeneration formula, which keeps Wizards from casting spells much in the early game, remaining as is.
Change the Rogue’s special spell to knock rather than detect treasure.
In variants that have the Pirate role, this would free up the spell of detect treasure to be their special spell.
The Seven Deadly Sins can generate randomly in Gehennom. They are the only uniques that do this. There is no guarantee that you will encounter all of them, or even any of them.
Possibly make it so that you need to have committed the associated sin in order for them to spawn; if you have avoided being Satiated, Gluttony will never spawn, if you are celibate, Lust will never spawn, and so on.
You have a boosted chance in getting crowned if you are carrying the Amulet of Yendor. This possibly also nullifies the downsides of crowning, such as an extended prayer timeout.
Remove Wizards’ exclusive access to reduced-hunger and hungerless casting. Instead, tie spell hunger to how experienced you are with the spell; this could either track how many times you’ve cast that specific spell, or use your skill in the spell’s school as a proxy for that, or both. Intelligence could remain a factor, but the important thing is that non-wizard casters can also enjoy the benefits. (Note that Wizards, what with casting spells a lot more than other roles and having high spell skill caps, will still reap a larger benefit from this.)
If you are polymorphed into an inediate monster, you are physically incapable of eating.
Lava on the Plane of Fire regularly erupts in a spray of molten rock, which is extremely harmful and thus very bad for you if you are over it or adjacent to it when it happens. This makes it less appealing to just levitate or fly and completely ignore it.
In variants that have techniques, use the unused ! key as a shortcut for #technique.
Improvising on a fire or frost horn will summon dozens of tame flaming or freezing spheres, respectively.
Fire and frost horns, rather than shooting a bouncable ray of fire or cold, cause a powerful area fire or frost effect centered on you. The intensity diminishes the farther away from you it gets, but it hits every single creature in its fairly large radius (except you).
This effect could also freeze water and lava or evaporate pools in the radius of effect as well.
Damage from kicking a monster is increased if your boots are metal.
If a player fear system is implemented: if the player is adjacent to a creature standing on a scroll of scare monster, they will become scared of that creature. Intelligent creatures will deploy a scroll of scare monster to take advantage of this.
Monsters will try to loot bags of tricks along with other types of containers (receiving a bite for their trouble). On the other hand, this goes against the implicit rule that monsters know all item identities.
Famine’s attack gives you some amount of temporary intrinsic hunger in addition to the direct damage to your nutrition it already does.
Getting hit in the head by a gush of water from a rust trap, or being immersed in water, immediately removes any cream pie on your face.
If you escape the Black Market by branchporting, One-eyed Sam will pursue you on the ascension run.
On Easter, randomly generated user-nameable fruits will generate as “easter egg” rather than slime mold or whatever the user has customized them to be. Despite the name, it remains the exact same item in game and does not break vegan conduct.
Calculating whether a given day is Easter is a complex but solved problem; see here.
Brood wasp infection shouldn’t be curable with a unicorn horn. There should, however, be some way to kill off the infection by harming yourself, like drinking a potion of sickness or otherwise poisoning yourself.
Confused genocide doesn’t necessarily genocide your own species; it chooses a random genocidable species (which might be your own) and genocides that. If blessed, it picks a random monster class containing at least one genocidable monster (including @) and genocides that.
Another option is that confused genocide automatically picks a monster you have probably been thinking about, such as the nearest monster you can see (if you can’t see any other monsters, you can still see yourself!) or the last monster you saw or killed.
If someone steals the Amulet of Yendor and ascends on your altar, your god either still grants you immortality or at least an exalted position because after all, you did all the legwork getting it onto Astral.
Make magic cancellation not work with a fixed rate versus all types of attacks it works on throughout the entire game. Instead, scale a monster’s ability to penetrate your magic cancellation based on its level, base level, maximum HP, or hit dice.
Hit dice and base level are nice if it’s desirable for all monsters of the same species to have the same MC penetration, but hit dice and maximum HP are a little weird since they aren’t meant as offensive stats. Maximum HP and actual monster level are nice because they can be discovered with a stethoscope.
If you are knocked back when levitating, you should fly about 3 times as far, since you’re only being slowed by air resistance and not by e.g. your feet on the ground. This maybe shouldn’t apply to when you throw items when levitating.
When amorphous creatures pass through iron bars, they leave any items they are carrying embedded in the bars. Possibly, small items (as determined by weight) may still able to pass through, subject to a random chance.
Firefly, a bright green a monster that is a light source, but a variable one. It ranges from being totally unlit to emitting light in a radius of 3 for a brief time. Is poisonous to eat, and with very low nutrition; has a mild bite attack. Tends to spawn in dark areas.
Internally, the deciding factor when a firefly should light up should probably use its mspec_used variable, which enables them to light up again when it hits 0. Also, cancelling a firefly should prevent it from lighting.
Remove the player’s Intelligence as a factor in determining the outcome of a foocubus interaction. Instead, use Intelligence (or possibly Wisdom) rather than Charisma as the determining factor in whether they are able to say no to having a piece of armor removed.
Applying a cursed bag of tricks may make it bite you rather than releasing a monster, making you drop the bag. This does not use a charge.
Digging down on a sink does not automatically stop when it becomes a fountain. Some of the time, it goes straight to creating pools, the “Water gushes forth” effect (as if it had momentarily become a fountain then you kept digging), and disappears.
Handling a cursed glob of green slime (picking it up, throwing it, etc) makes it start to slime you, using itself up in the process.
Giants can rip doors off their hinges, by picking them up, to use them as weapons. They do a lot of damage, and can only actually be wielded by giants. Possibly, kicking a door with excessive strength (and/or being a giant) not only breaks it off the hinges, but sends it flying to hit anything unlucky enough to be in its path.
There isn’t really an obvious object class for a ‘door’ object to be in, though WEAPON_CLASS is probably the most straightforward.
Possibly also allow this with sinks or trees. All of these heavy improvised weapons should probably use club skill.
Monsters on the receiving end of a one-way grudge flee from monsters that grudge them.
Rust monsters have a one-way grudge against iron golems.
Kills by cartomancers’ pets should also have the occasional chance to drop a card of summon monster. It should not just be limited to player kills, since this disincentivizes the whole strategy of using temporary summoned monsters to do most of the fighting.
Disenchanters’ touch attacks can cancel individual items in your inventory (not just armor) as well as merely reducing the enchantment of armor. Or possibly add a new R monster that has this ability, and leave disenchanters as they are.
If a system is implemented that tracks the amount of booze you have drunk throughout the game, lawful gods start to penalize the player for drinking too much after a while.
Croesus generates wearing a random gold amulet (probably not change or strangulation, though).
Decapitation is not protected by an amulet of life saving, since the amulet just falls off your neck. Alternatively, keep the life saving, but give a special message about the amulet crumbling to dust as it falls off your neck.
If you enter the temple of a god who is angry at you, all monsters on the level become awakened and aggravated. This should print a more menacing message than the standard “forbidding feeling” one. (Note that a proper implementation of this requires that gods’ anger levels be tracked separately for each god.)
Level that contains a structure with a lot of gargoyle statues. Some of the statues are statue traps.
If teleportation fails because there is a trap or monster on the destination square, and there is an adjacent free square, you get placed on that square, possibly with a message explaining why you didn’t end up exactly where you wanted.
When you attempt to teleport to a square containing a monster, you exchange places with it rather than having the teleport fail and send you somewhere random. This possibly fails based on a monster magic resistance check.
Add gargoyles (or statues of gargoyles) to the Castle.
Remove the graveyard flag from the Castle level, but make it so that undead cannot follow you upstairs past the Valley of the Dead, preventing wraith luring. (Could also apply this restriction to levelport and branchport).
A helm of brilliance no longer boosts Wisdom. It only affects Intelligence.
If you walk over a banana while fumbling, you should be guaranteed to slip on it, making a lot of noise and destroying the banana. (This won’t happen if the banana is hidden under some other object on the square though).
Vault guards have specific responses to other names you might give them, such as “the Wizard of Yendor”.
Cheating in Sokoban no longer affects Luck. Instead, the amount of cheating you do is tracked; the quality of the prize item degrades the more you cheat. So a little bit of cheating might still give you the amulet of reflection, but a moderate amount would turn it into an amulet of ESP, and a lot of cheating would turn it into an amulet of restful sleep or something.
Make djinn genocidable. If djinn have been genocided, they will not come out of smoky potions, so this can be used to ensure that your smoky potions of full healing will work properly.
Spring trap, like the reverse of a trapdoor: stepping on it bounces you up through the ceiling into a higher level, or alternatively just makes you crack your head on the ceiling.
Give all mimics acid resistance, because they have that in D&D.
Objects flying through the air do not interact with a mimic that is currently mimicking something; they just pass through as if it weren’t there.
Put a cap on the number of weapons in a stack that can be enchanted by a single enchant weapon scroll. Maybe 20 for ammunition and 5 or 7 for other stacking weapons like daggers. It’s odd that you can multiply the total amount of enchantment points you’re getting just by wielding a larger number of weapons.
New object, a metal collar you wear on your neck. Makes you immune to being decapitated by Vorpal Blade. It would probably be worn in the amulet slot.
The chance of a foocubus getting a severe headache after an encounter is elevated if you refuse to pay it, underpay it, or have no gold with which to pay it. (Refusing to pay should probably not be random and automatic anymore, it should ask if you want to pay instead.)
Merge the rings of slow digestion and regeneration. Keep the name “regeneration”; make it chargeable. A positive rate boots your regeneration and your hunger rate, up until they are doubled at +10; a negative rate decreases both until they are halved at -10, with the intermediate values scaling as appropriate.
Possibly, since the extremes of &177;10 are hard to attain, make the doubling/halving threshold at &177;7 instead.
Define a “power level” or a “tier” for each artifact, and when gifting an artifact, use the player’s experience level and other stats to calculate an appropriate tier to gift an artifact from. The only reason it feels bad to get Giantslayer is because you know you could have gotten something much more powerful but randomly didn’t; if the more powerful artifacts were simply not possible to get due to you not having the right stats yet, this might not happen as much.
Make potions lighter, on the order of 5-10 aum, on the basis that potions are one-time use and one-time use objects shouldn’t be heavier than many pieces of armor, and also on the realism basis that at their current weight, they’re a few liters of liquid. The counterargument is that if potions are lightweight, there’s less to prevent the hero from scooping up everything in the dungeon as they go.
When you switch from a one-handed to a two-handed weapon and you are wearing a shield, you are asked if you want to remove the shield, and if you say yes it is automatically unequipped before wielding the new weapon.
New artifact The Spear of Mars, an unaligned spear that can be invoked to “charge” it, dealing massive damage (on the order of +100ish) on its next hit, but only works if you’re male. Will only be gifted to a male character.
(Intended as a counterpart to the Mirror of Venus, #2125).
Make it so that dying in a polyform carries a severe, possibly permanent penalty, such as losing some Constitution, maximum HP, or forcing you to a low percentage of current HP regardless of what you had when you first polymorphed.
Since lycanthropy is an “abnormal” polymorph, dying while in your wereform kills you completely. (This closes off the silliness of turning into your wereform and throwing your weapon at yourself until you die and turn back to normal).
Possibly, weak lycanthropes such as wererats and werejackals should be removed so that getting infected by one isn’t essentially a death sentence.
Make lycanthropy less random in when it triggers, allowing the player to know clearly when an episode is approaching, but make the effects when transformed more dangerous to the player. While transformed, the player is overtaken and controlled by an animalistic AI, giving no control to the player until they untransform.
If you have a scroll of remove curse in your open inventory and you get hit with a curse items effect, the scroll occasionally intercepts the curse like Magicbane does, but it gets destroyed in the process.
If a wood nymph is near a tree, or a water nymph is near a fountain, they won’t wander very far from it. Specifically, their AI would tell them to consider any space more than X distance from a fountain to be invalid.
They also don’t teleport away from fountains, unless they’re scared or carrying stolen items. When they do teleport, their destination is biased towards any trees or fountains that are on the level, respectively.
Give iron balls a fairly large to-hit penalty, because they are so heavy that they must be pretty unwieldy.
A chaotic Cartomancer who performs a same-race sacrifice gets not a peaceful Juiblex or Yeenoghu, but a card of summon Juiblex or Yeenoghu.
Add whales, which can engulf you. Several of them spawn on the Plane of Water.
One possible failure effect for reading a spellbook (or writing it, if it’s possible to fail at writing a book) is for the spell to force itself into your head. Your spell retention is internally -1, a special value that means you can cast the spell, but only once, and then you immediately forget it.
If you get paralyzed by reading a spellbook, there’s some message indicating that you got paralyzed. Currently just getting “You can move again” is weird.
Foocubi treat engagement rings the same as they do the ring of adornment; an incubus will put one on you, and a succubus will take one from you.
A monster spell (or perhaps some esoteric monster damage type) that makes you intrinsically fumbling for some time.
Lawfuls get an alignment penalty for writing graffiti with a marker, even if it’s Elbereth or something else useful.
Convicts get an alignment bonus by writing graffiti. (Graffiti has to come from a magic marker, or a felt marker in variants that have it.)
Being polymorphed into a spellcasting monster boosts your energy regeneration rate proportional to the base level of the monster you are.
Any rings the player starts with can’t be more than +2 or +3, because randomly starting with +5 rings is rather overpowered.
Merge Sunsword and Trollsbane like NetHack Fourk does (a single artifact that emits light, instakills gremlins and instapetrifies trolls, with bonuses to undead), except keep it a morning star and name it Sunflash (because a lot of these consolidated effects have nothing to do with trolls). Having it stay a morning star makes it an attractive choice for Priests, and raises the appeal of training morning star.
Magpies, a bird that has a stealing attack; unlike monkeys, the stealing attack is limited to shiny objects (possibly based on their material) that are under a certain weight. Under that rule, rings, gems, and amulets are common targets of theirs. They probably have a rather fast speed, too. They should likely generate in small groups.
Magpies would have an alignment of 0 and lack the M2_HOSTILE flag, and thus may be peaceful to neutrals, but angering one makes all other magpies angry as well.
A monster that, similar to leprechauns, steals items made out of silver, and only items made out of silver.
Only one hobbit per game will be generated with an elven mithril-coat. Once one generates, no other one will generate.
Crysknives don’t revert if you’ve killed a monster with it since the last time you picked it up.
Ring hunger is increased for rings that have high amounts of charges. For each ring you are wearing that is +4 or above, you lose two points of nutrition for it when its ring hunger is deducted, rather than one point.
Add a message for #tipping your fedora.
| In addition to the “x” and “X” characters being suitable for engraving, you can also engrave other basic shapes: “o”, “O”, “l” (lowercase L), “I” (capital i). Possibly also “-“, “ | ”, “/”, “". |
Randomly generated puzzle mechanisms that reveal secret doors once completed. Things such as finding a mechanism hidden under a statue, or having a boulder generate in a room and needing to push it somewhere else in that room.
Option to configure your character to be nearsighted, which prevents you from seeing things more than a few spaces away from you unless you’re wearing lenses. You can also be farsighted, which means you can’t read scrolls or spellbook unless you’re wearing lenses.
If you get hit with multiple illness attacks in the same turn, the second one functions like Famine’s attack, draining your nutrition, rather than speeding up your delayed instadeath.
When you pick items up and they stack with something in your inventory, somehow express how many are now in the stack, so the player doesn’t need to check their inventory constantly to see how many missiles they recovered.
Player monsters on the Astral Plane can be named after people on the top ten list (note that they don’t all have to be; some can use the same names they have now). Possibly, pick a different name if a player monster would be generated with the player’s own name, in order to avoid problems on single-user installs where everyone on the top ten list could have the same name as the player. Then again, that could be cool.
When you engrave with a wand of digging, you engrave it just fine, but you also create and get stuck in a pit on your square.
Freezing a fountain does something. All the following have been suggested:
Add another set of outcomes to interacting with a foocubus: raising your Charisma by one point if a good outcome, or subtracting a few points if a bad outcome.
Fog horn, a magical tool that when played surrounds the user with clouds and possibly fog clouds (the monster).
It would be best if some type of non-poison-gas cloud were implemented first; it is probably a bad idea to actually change the terrain around the user into cloud. It would also be good if the obscuring cloud were useful at blocking monsters’ pathing to the player; currently they would ignore it so creating a fog cloud would mostly hinder the player.
On deeper Dungeons of Doom levels, when the game randomly places an altar in a room without intending to create a temple, sometimes make the room into an abandoned temple.
The #conduct screen tells how many items you have polymorphed over the course of your game. This is because it will also show up in dumplogs, and can be used to determine how much polypiling was relied on.
All demons are automatically aware of all traps in Gehennom, so they won’t walk into them and trigger them.
When you become caught in a pit, bear trap, or other restraining trap in Gehennom, nearby demons become alerted and aware of your exact location, because they’re the ones who set the traps in the first place.
Glowstick: a tool that can be applied to make it emit light in a radius of 2. It lasts a few thousand turns before dying (reducing to radius 1 light when near the end of its life), but cannot be turned off like a candle or lamp can.
Oil lamps hit by water damage lose some of their oil on account of the water flushing some of it out, reducing the amount of turns of light they have left.
Change one of the existing boring wand descriptions to “gold”, and make its material gold, for the purposes of being stealable by leprechauns.
Give the Nazgul a black speech attack, possibly replacing their sleep breath attack.
A fairly accessible way to roughly determine the magnitude of the enchantment on an object, but not the sign of the enchantment, without resorting to magical identification. Possibly tiered in a system with levels of 0/1-3/4-5/6+.
Levitation from a blessed potion or an artifact allows you to use < and > to float into the air and descend at will, without the levitation timing out. This would require implementing two additional flags: one that tracks whether your levitation comes from those sources, and one that tracks whether levitation is currently suppressed due to your voluntary descending.
A monster whose attacks scale in direct proportion to your Luck - the luckier you are, the more damage it deals.
Wearing sea dragon scale mail grants extrinsic swimming.
When a door is hitten by an opening beam, it actually opens, rather than becoming unlocked. Also, any doors adjacent to it will also be opened (for the “double doors” that appear in some special levels).
For all “matched pairs” of scrolls and spellbooks (remove curse, fire and fireball, identify, etc), identifying the scroll automatically identifies the spellbook. Possibly vice versa instead, where learning the spellbook automatically identifies the scroll, or both.
Prevent items from generating on top of the pits and holes in Sokoban.
Implement alternative dialogue for the quest guardians for the case where you have killed the quest leader.
Triggering an anti-magic field, in addition to draining some of your energy, removes any magical buffs or debuffs applied to you, similar to how cancellation works as described in #2673.
At Skilled or above, the spell of wizard lock can be targeted at any point (that you can see) in a radius. It doesn’t shoot a beam, and you don’t need to be in line with the thing you want to lock.
Possibly, at Expert, it locks everything within the radius, but this is not good unless you have the ability to choose whether you want this effect to be cast or not.
Collect a bunch of Evil Patch Ideas and turn them into scary false rumors.
Kicking a tree may summon a couple angry ravens (replacing the bee effect).
Spell of foresight, a high-level divination spell that gives you a short amount of a temporary buff which gives monsters a massive to-hit penalty against you, possibly giving yourself to-hit bonuses as well. It also gives you automatic searching; searching while you have the foresight buff active is guaranteed to find traps.
Monsters can zap a wand of probing at you, which inflicts the studied debuff on you.
Attacking a queen bee immediately awakens and aggravates all killer bees on the level.
Eating too much royal jelly polymorphs you into a killer bee.
Queen bees, being heavier and not flying often, should have a lower speed, at least as low as killer bees. They should perhaps get more attacks to compensate.
Giant spiders grudge killer bees.
If you get bisected by the Tsurugi while polymorphed into a long worm, you get cloned instead, with a tame copy of you splitting off.
When you fail to read a spellbook, increment its read counter. The chance of a book crumbling to dust is no longer a flat 1/3; a never-read book will never crumble, and the chance increases the more times the book is read.
Sometimes, eating a quantum mechanic corpse and causing your velocity to become uncertain can give you temporary very fast speed instead of toggling intrinsic speed. (In variants that implement a player-side slow intrinsic, it should also be capable of giving a temporary quantity of that.)
A potion or spell of searching: it doesn’t give you the regular searching intrinsic, but rather it detects any traps you move adjacent to with a 100% chance (regular searching isn’t guaranteed to find these, and this effect won’t find other things that searching is able to find).
Alternatively, just make it give you temporary intrinsic searching as currently implemented, but make it so that timing-out intrinsic searching (available only from this) is guaranteed to find everything.
Ballistae, a very large and heavy weapon that takes time to set up and prime, but can be used to launch javelins to deal a large amount of damage. Giants can wield them like crossbows. May appear as defenses in special levels like Fort Ludios and the Castle.
A spellbook’s level determines how long the spell stays remembered after you read it, rather than having every spell be remembered for 20000 turns exactly. Lower level spells are remembered for longer than higher level spells.
A tinning kit’s weight is dependent on how many charges it has left, getting lighter as it is used to tin things. This could also be extended to other tools which have charges and are not magical, such as cans of grease.
When the demon lords all levelport away into Gehennom on the ascension run, they always land on the downstairs rather than being randomly placed, because they’re smart enough to lie in ambush for you.
Incorporeal monsters like ghosts and shades are only hit with blessed objects, artifacts, magical attacks, etc 50% of the time they would have otherwise. The only items that are guaranteed to hit (assuming you make the to-hit roll) are those made of either silver or bone.
Some Yendorian Army monsters, particularly soldiers, are eligible to receive bows and crossbows as starting weapons.
The potion of gain energy has a minimum substantial percentage of your Pw pool that it will refill. Like healing potions, it will only increase your maximum Pw if you would have gone over your maximum.
Orcish Town, but it’s a relatively normal Minetown, just with all the gnomes and dwarves replaced by peaceful orcs.
Implement multiplayer as a system where each of the players is in a completely independent dungeon, generated with the same seed so that all levels and branches are created identical. There is a swapchest-like system for exchanging items between the games, without any limits on what can or can’t be swapped, other than unique items and that items can only be swapped within the same co-op game, not all existing games.
Monsters summoned by an aligned caster (meaning a caster with a well-defined alignment: aligned priests, angelic minions) will also be minions of that god. Minions additionally get some extra benefits in exchange for directly serving a god, among which is periodically getting their HP topped up every now and again.
If Astral denizens are able to steal the Amulet from you and try to ascend with it: The amulet-bearer uses a special AI algorithm which pathfinds towards their high altar, using a shortest-path algorithm that avoids monsters if possible but if none are available will plot a path that goes through the minimum amount of monsters. They will only attack when the next square on their path is occupied by a monster, and they will only attack that monster.
If Astral denizens are able to steal the Amulet from you and try to ascend with it: Keep track of the god of the current amulet-bearer (whether you or someone else). Priests and angels aligned to that god grudge all others, and all others grudge them.
Wishing for the Amulet of Yendor doesn’t fail and give you a fake if you have ever held it in the past. In that case, a wish for it will reclaim it from wherever it was. The monster who was currently holding it may appear, too, however.
A certain type of chest (not a new object, just a specially flagged chest) that is magically protected; it cannot be opened, unlocked, be forced open, or destroyed until a certain monster on the level is either killed or leaves the level. Once it’s gone, the chest opens normally.
Some method by which you can capture a djinni into a smoky potion or oil lamp (which in the latter case makes it a magic lamp). It should be non-trivial or somehow costly to do (the original idea just suggested applying the object in their direction, which is abusable). If feasible, the djinni should be angry and disinclined to grant a wish when it’s released.
Also, the game doesn’t track whether a given smoky potion contains a djinni (it would mess with stacking), so this would be tricky to implement internally for smoky potions.
If you get a djinni by quaffing a smoky potion, one of the possible outcomes is that it uses its wish for itself, then is hostile.
If someone of a different god steals the Amulet from you on the Astral Plane and sacrifices it to their god, your god will hit you with a wide-angle disintegration beam in frustration that you got so close and then blew it.
When you polymorph into a monster which reduces your carry cap so that you’re burdened or worse, you automatically unequip and drop your worn items until you are unencumbered.
Monsters can now zap cancellation at the player; effects of cancellation on the player include draining Pw (and possibly maximum Pw if Pw hits 0) and removing magical temporary intrinsics such as invisibility, speed, and detect monsters. It does NOT cancel the player’s entire inventory, as this does not happen when the player zaps cancellation at a monster.
A magical horn whose effect depends on what material it’s made out of. One effect could be pacification; another possibility is to make it a horn of summoning, with the monster type summoned controlled by the material.
All angelic creatures should be immune to death rays.
When you toss a grenade, intelligent monsters flee (away from the grenade’s location, not you, if possible).
Crude (orcish) items should never generate with valuable metals (gold, silver, platinum, mithril) as their material.
When a silver item would randomly generate within Gehennom, try to reroll its materials (possibly multiple times) so that it’s less likely to be silver. This is because the inhabitants of Gehennom would likely have tried to get rid of all the local silver. Additionally, demons should never receive silver items in their starting inventory.
The spell of protection, rather than giving you a golden haze, gives you a “spectral shield”. It weighs nothing, and automatically equips into your shield slot if your offhand is free. It provides around 3 or 4 AC, and this does not degrade over time. However, the shield is temporary and will dissipate in a hundred or so turns.
If the shield is unequipped but kept in your inventory, it hovers around you and tries to block things on its own, but it only provides about 1 or 2 AC in this form. If it leaves your inventory for any reason, it dissipates. Casting protection again while you are already carrying a spectral shield resets its dissipation timer; it doesn’t give you a second one.
The shield has a price of 0, so you can’t sell it.
You cannot levelport down past a demon lord’s lair level until the demon lord is killed, appeased with a bribe, or otherwise gotten rid of. Attempts to levelport past it will just land you on their lair level instead. However, you can still go below the level by way of the stairs, a hole, or a trapdoor in the lair.
Rather than occurring entirely randomly, a secret passage can only generate to close off a dead end, where exactly 2 of the 4 adjacent squares, on opposite sides, are corridors, and the other 2 are rock. The dead end criterion is tested by trying to pathfind an alternate route from one of the adjacent corridor spaces to the other; if none can be found, this space must be blocking a dead end, so it is valid.
An enchanted spell stave will boost your spellcasting in its school, with a greater boost the higher the enchantment is.
Vaults on deeper levels have walls that take multiple digging actions to dig through, like shop walls do.
You should be informed during the end-of-game summary when and how any wands of wishing that you never touched (as defined by whether they have an invlet set) were destroyed.
Bows should be two-handed, as they require both hands to use properly. You’re already not allowed to twoweapon with them, but it shouldn’t really be possible to wear a shield and fire a bow at the same time either, except maybe a small shield. Possibly classify them as hand-and-a-half weapons, in variants that have those, or just disallow firing with a bow while wearing a shield.
Rather than slowly increasing the natural monster generation rate over time, gradually increase other monster stats that are less obvious, such as HP maximum, computed level, or attack power. Though this approach has been criticized for hiding the increase in difficulty from the player, whereas generating more monsters is obvious.
Grab bag: a magical bag that contains up to four small random items. You may take out any one item, and are allowed to view the contents first; after taking out one item the bag and its other contents vanish. Items cannot be put into a grab bag. If you tip it, one random item comes out and then it vanishes.
Spell that lets you do a random uncontrolled short-range teleportation, in order to escape from a tricky situation. Actually, it might not be a bad idea to turn the spell of teleport away into this, with a reduced level (3 or 4), and make it unable to shoot a teleportation beam.
When a light explodes, it permanently lights the terrain in a small radius centered on it. Black lights might only light in a radius of 1, or just its own space.
Livelog when you fall unusually far down a shaft (4+ levels, a “very deep” fall).
If you release a djinni whose response is to say “It is about time” and vanish, the djinni will at least teleport you somewhere safe if you are in danger (not specified what defines danger; perhaps stuck in lava/rock or if there are a number of nearby hostile monsters).
Certain monsters will seek out certain types of items and pick them up even when peaceful. For instance, hobbits will find and pick up rings, especially rings of invisibility.
When a disenchanter hits you, it may drain charges from your wands instead of your armor.
Artifact magic lamp that gives 3 wishes instead of 1.
This might be a useful addition to NetHack Fourk’s Aladdin’s Palace level.
Artifact morning star, chaotic aligned, with an allusion to Lucifer.
You can use booze potions to clean off your wounds, helping you recover faster. Poison wounds, specifically, though this is debatable because 1) the game doesn’t track wounds you got from poison and 2) alcohol can help treat infections, whereas poison isn’t an infection.
Healers should probably be able to do this more successfully than other roles.
Merge the potions of booze and confusion together, because booze is basically just a weaker form of confusion that also has a minimal amount of nutrition. It’s not certain which way they should be merged: deleting booze and favoring confusion has the advantage that monsters can still flavorfully throw it at you in order to cause confusion (you don’t get instantly drunk from being splashed with booze), but deleting confusion and favoring booze is attractive because it’s a more flavorful item in general, what with having a dual confusion/nutrition effect, being nonmagical, contributing to levels like the Wine Cellar, etc.
In variants where you can gamble away, sell, or otherwise lose your soul: a character who has lost their soul will get no more help from their god (until they manage to recover it). Sacrifices will be accepted but will never get rewarded with a gift; otherwise successful prayers will fail to give you shimmering-light invincibility, will go unanswered, and will give you no message as to the pleasedness of your god, and possibly you lose your divine protection as well.
Add a new sort of body armor that makes a compromise between studded leather and crystal plate mail - less AC than crystal plate mail, but more than studded leather (so around 5 AC), weighs more than studded leather but less than crystal plate mail (so around 300-350 aum), and doesn’t hinder spellcasting at all. Possibly, “crystal scale mail”.
Possibly crystal plate mail’s base AC will have to be boosted, or its weight lowered, in order to avoid this new armor being just better (as it stands, a gain of about 2 AC in exchange for about 100 extra weight is something most players won’t take).
If you are only getting one ability score restored from a potion of restore ability, it selects the one that is the most points below its former maximum, rather than picking randomly. Or else you just get to pick the stat you are restoring.
Remove the feature where being gifted an artifact in a restricted skill unrestricts it to Basic; compensate for this by fixing the balance of artifact base types and the gifting logic so that your god’s first gift to you is never an artifact whose skill you’re restricted in.
As a reference to the game Centipede, if you hit a centipede (only with a slashing weapon?) and it still has over 50% health, it has a small chance of splitting into two centipedes. Both monsters are flagged or cancelled so that they cannot split further.
Define Angels to have an additional amulet-stealing claw attack. If you aren’t carrying the Amulet when they hit you, this attack is skipped. (Actually, perhaps all Amulet-stealing attacks should work this way, where they don’t happen if you have nothing to steal).
Sharply cut the frequency of lizards spawning (possibly even lower than 1/7), and possibly remove the special case that makes them always leave a corpse. This is because a player will usually accumulate enough of their corpses to be easily safe from any delayed stoning effect for the whole game. This won’t much affect reverse genociding them, if the player really wants a lizard corpse.
Also, possibly elevate their monster difficulty to something higher than 6; not because they are that difficult, but to make them appear only later on in the dungeon.
Alternatively, simply make lizard corpses rot, so that a player who wants to carry around a stoning defense must use other items, such as tins of lizard or acidic monsters, or potions of acid.
Add a new type of eye with a hallucination-inducing active gaze attack. It could be called either “third eye” or “pseyechedelic”.
If you are eating someone’s brains when polymorphed into a mind flayer, and you are very satiated to the point where you aren’t getting the full amount of nutrition from it, you do less damage with the attack because you aren’t eating as much of their brain.
The higher your charisma is, the more powerful conflict will be when you are generating it. Probably, it makes it harder for monsters to resist being conflicted.
Berserking monsters must be below a certain fraction of their maximum HP in order to act berserk, rather than just being constantly berserk. The fraction (or just a threshold) is deterministically computed based on the monster ID.
Polypiling can’t create matter out of nothing. If an item is trying to polymorph into a heavier item, it must absorb the mass from other objects in the pile, destroying them. Note that if polypiling a stack of same-weight objects (potions, or scrolls), none of the candidate items will be heavier, so this will never trigger.
Rename the wand of secret door detection to just “wand of detection”. It detects other things besides secret doors.
Gold dragon armor’s light radius is increased by 1 if its enchantment is above some amount such as +5.
Revamp the scroll of scare monster: rather than being good indefinitely as long as it’s not picked up, it will increment an internal counter whenever it scares a monster, by an amount equal to that monster’s HD or difficulty. The scroll disintegrates on the floor after this “total difficulty of monsters scared” counter exceeds some value.
You can play a Vow of Poverty Monk, from D&D. This gives you insanely good bonuses and intrinsics, but you are prevented from having any worldly possessions on your journey (which is pretty much all items).
The monk quest is very loot-sparse in terms of random items being generated on the floors of the levels (death drops are unaffected), because all the major players are either monks, without much in the way of worldly possessions, or elementals who don’t have any items.
Glowworms, a w monster that emits light in a radius of 1. Maybe they have a blinding bite attack, but that may be taking the light theme a bit too far. It may also devour globs.
A magical bag which only holds gold and gems, but any gold and gems inside it don’t weigh anything.
Engraving with a blade made of softer metals such as gold or silver should dull it faster than an iron blade.
Items that fall into the abyss beneath Vlad’s Tower disappear from the game, and go into a swapchest-like system where they can be shared between different games. Players in other games may find those items showing up somewhere randomly in a demon lord’s lair when it gets generated.
Spell staves are made into poor melee weapons (comparable or worse than the club, being basically a stick that’s just sturdy enough not to break), but are made lighter than the quarterstaff, weighing only 10. Its bonus to a single spellcasting school is countered by it applying a slight spellcasting penalty to spells of some or all other schools.
Differentiate the neutral alignment by making it not really about killing. Instead, neutrals get rewarded for forcing monsters to back down, surrender, and get left alone peacefully. (Sapient monsters will beg or gesture for mercy when brought down to sufficiently low HP; non-sapient monsters will produce some other message). To keep loot fairly balanced, a monster that surrenders will drop its gear.
When a pool of raw sewage boils away, it creates a poison gas cloud over that space.
Your discoveries list is presented as a menu rather than a fixed list of every single thing you have discovered. The menu contains the subcategories that the current long list is organized into (weapons, scrolls, gems etc), which will let you view that subset of your discoveries. There’s also an option provided to view all the discoveries at once if you want to view that. Possibly this feature should be controlled by an option.
Monks can control whether their strikes cause a staggering blow. This would lend itself to variants that implement technique and combat style systems.
Eating corpses gives you a temporary “queasy” intrinsic, which is a debuff on par with being burdened. This is aimed at fixing the irrelevance of the game’s hunger clock.
If you are wielding a non-artifact weapon, and happen to get gifted an artifact whose base type matches your weapon, your weapon will be converted into the artifact (keeping its existing enchantment).
Implement a player fear system that unlike many other proposals, does not take away agency from the player by paralyzing them or forcing them to flee using a predefined algorithm. Instead, it incentivizes the player to flee by making continued combat unattractive.
Create a new intrinsic called “Panic”/”Panicking”. Sources of fear (including existing sources of paralysis-fear, e.g. ghosts) give you temporary amounts of this intrinsic. While you are panicking:
Outside the Plane of Air (where there is no gravity), stepping onto air terrain automatically makes you fall to your death unless you are levitating or flying. (Or possibly you merely fall to a lower level, taking a fair amount of damage, or you have so far to fall that it takes a couple turns to hit the bottom, in which you have a couple turns to take some action to save yourself, by levitating or flying or whatever). However, you are prompted to confirm stepping out into the open air if it isn’t safe to do so.
Items dropped into open air either end up randomly placed on a lower level if there’s a sensible lower level to place them on, or vanish forever (though in that case an exception needs to be made for the unique items).
If falling into air is an instadeath, life saving acts the same as if you die in lava; it puts you on a safe location (“You find yourself back on solid land again”).
Air can use the W_NONDIGGABLE flag, or possibly one of the other struct rm flag bits, to represent a wind barrier, which the level designer can use to make a region of air impassible. Attempting to move onto such a space produces a message like “A strong gust blows you back!” and makes you lose the turn.
One of the greatest problems with air terrain is what ASCII character to display it as; existing implementations use just regular space (which is what it displays as on the Plane of Air), but this is easily mistaken for stone, which can lead to players unexpectedly falling to their death if there is no safeguard against wandering off a cliff, and would present a problem if there were ever a air/stone boundary, which would be invisible. Other suggestions include: space, but highlighted with the terminal’s black color ( ), black pound sign (#), black tilde (~), black right brace (}), or even just gray counterparts of these. All of these have various downsides; for instance, it must be expected that they will render as dark blue for some players who have use_darkgray turned off.
Create a procedural level generation algorithm for tower levels, particularly Vlad’s tower. Vlad’s tower should also be larger on the bottom than it is on the higher levels.
The game should support poisoned bear traps (that deal extra poison damage much like a poisoned spiked pit does), and it should be possible for the player to manually poison a beartrap item.
Temporary pit trap: it fills itself in after a certain number of turns. A monster in it will be buried. It could either use a timer to decide when to fill itself in, or be tied to the monster id of its creator, triggering after a certain amount of time if the creator is still on the level. Also a good candidate for creating during an earthquake, rather than a permanent pit.
A worn oilskin cloak protects you from the amnesia effects of Lethe water.
Define gods as having an associated holy animal (e.g. crocodiles are Offler’s). If you sacrifice that type of animal to that god, it immediately angers that god.
Priest characters can sacrifice gold at a coaligned altar for identical benefits as they would get from donating to a priest. The altar does not have to be attended.
You can offer gold on a coaligned altar as well as giving it to a priest. This gives you a different, weaker, variety of benefits if there is no priest present (and the same ones if there is a priest present). When you do donate to a priest, they offer the gold themselves in a burst of light (which deletes the gold, preventing you from killing them or stealing to recoup it).
Assuming a compound maximum HP system with a “miscellaneous bonus/penalty” factor (like the one described in #392) is implemented, make it a major trouble for prayer if this miscellaneous factor is deeply negative (e.g. -20 or below).
Change the Mitre of Holiness’s invoke effect to immediately make another artifact invokeable, zeroing its cooldown timer. This effect also happens passively if it is being worn: if you try to invoke another artifact which hasn’t cooled down all the way yet but the Mitre has, it will automatically invoke itself to zero the cooldown timer of the artifact being invoked so that the invoke will succeed. It gives a message when this happens.
Wearing a blessed ring of sustain ability lets you exercise attributes, but not abuse them. A cursed one lets you abuse attributes, but not exercise them. It continues to block all other sources of ability score change. If wearing two rings of sustain ability, determine what happens by averaging the beatitude of the two.
Healers start with a very high Constitution score.
Using digging to escape from an engulfer no longer leaves it teetering on the brink of death at 1 HP. Instead it cuts the engulfer’s HP in half. For unsolid or amorphous engulfers (e.g. Juiblex), it does even less damage than that. It still lets you escape in all cases though.
If you get a black pudding from kicking a sink and you are hallucinating, print a YAFM “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”
If both of your hands are occupied, you cannot multishoot thrown ammo (e.g. darts, shuriken, daggers). You can still multishoot if you’re firing ammo from a launcher.
Multishot cap is halved if you are wielding something in your main hand other than the requisite launcher for what you’re trying to multishoot, regardless of if your other hand is free.
Gods should react in some way when the corpse of one of their own priests is sacrificed. They currently don’t (unless it’s a same-race sacrifice) and this is weird.
You can pay the Oracle to identify a single item for you, but this can only be done about 3-5 times per game, after which she refuses to do it any more. She says something on your last identification indicating that you can’t do it any more.
Dipping a spellbook in any healing potion will restore one of its read charges. Dipping it in a potion of restore ability will restore all of its read charges. In either case, you get a message “The book’s ink becomes fresher and sharper” (or “fresh and sharp” if all its read charges are restored) and the potion is used up.
Occasionally, when generating a level 6+ spellbook, set its opoisoned flag to true. You get “The book was coated in contact poison!” not as a random spellbook reading failure effect, but when you try to read a book whose opoisoned is set to true. Triggering the contact poison usually (but not always) clears the opoisoned flag, so it won’t be poisoned if you try to read it again.
Dipping a poisoned spellbook in any healing potion will neutralize the poison and use up the potion. Possibly, dipping it in a potion of sickness will poison the book, though this would be useless unless monsters read spellbooks.
Less useful potions (useful enough to throw at monsters, but not usually to drink) sometimes generate in small stacks, so they can be thrown without worrying about stashing them as much. It would help if potions were made somewhat lighter.
Add a potion of resistance, which provides a cocktail of basic resistances (things like fire, cold, shock, sleep, and poison) for a limited time. In order to make this more useful and not just yet another candidate for stashing away, possibly all roles start with it identified.
Give violet fungi a hallucination-inducing touch attack. This either replaces or adds to their existing weak physical damage attack.
Extension of the feature in several variants where monster spawns are concentrated on the upstairs during the ascension run: occasionally, instead of spawning a monster, generate an organized group which is trying to get the Amulet, usually made up of sapient monsters (such as a group of soldiers, or a few priests of the same god, or some elves led by a couple elf-lords). Possibly, this only happens after you get back out of Gehennom and are again visible to the other gods.
Make monster summoning less common, but make group spawns more common. (Not necessarily meaning group spawns caused by monster summoning.) In particular, when a monster that is a lord or prince to its kind spawns, it should always spawn in some associated retinue along with it.
New Biologist role, which revolves around polymorphing monsters, brewing potions (probably non-alchemically), and possibly collecting samples from monsters.
Possibly, they start with a number of potions of booze, but are penalized for drinking booze; it’s intended to use for brewing with samples. They also possibly have a guidebook describing recipes (other roles can do this too, but lacking a guidebook they won’t be able to do it very well).
Starting equipment may contain:
One take on the quest: it sees you fighting the Black Mold (a mold that constantly multiplies itself and attacks with random elemental damage, including possibly disintegration, when touched). The quest artifact is the Elixir of Immortality, but this is not possessed by the nemesis; instead you have to brew it yourself using an ingredient found on the goal level and which will be destroyed by the Black Mold if you don’t get there first. The Elixir isn’t needed; the quest is counted complete if you destroy all the Black Mold.
They can get Expert in only a few skills, including knife.
They are penalized for “animal testing”, which is polymorphing or otherwise abusing living peaceful or tame monsters. Or possibly it’s okay as long as the subject isn’t killed. However, they are rewarded for other forms of experimentation.
A Yendorian Army monster will never hit another Yendorian Army monster with a ranged attack, to cut down on them killing each other, and also because they ought to have good enough skill and discipline to avoid friendly fire.
When a mail daemon delivers a scroll of mail and you have kept illiterate conduct so far, it offers to read the message to you rather than just giving you the scroll which you can’t read.
Gnomes don’t have any special cases to generate with daggers, or else they’re much less likely to get daggers compared to their other possible starting weapons. And if they do start with daggers, they’re much less likely to get stacks. This is to prevent the Mines from being an easy source of dozens and dozens of daggers.
Rogues start with a stack of knives instead of daggers, but their dagger skill cap isn’t changed; if a Rogue wants to use daggers, they have to go find some themselves rather than beginning the game with them.
Add hallucinatory artifacts (it’s not clear where these would actually appear in the game): The Lost Orb of Phanastacoria, the Bizarro Orgasmatron.
If you tell a vault guard that your name is Croesus, and you are wearing gold armor, they might lead you out of the vault without forcing you to drop any gold. The chance of this outcome increases for each piece of gold armor you are wearing.
If you are mostly surrounded by puddings, they will merge together all at once and engulf you. This is a delayed instadeath in several distinct stages:
When a creature is completely surrounded by enemies that have hands, or is completely surrounded by enemies that have hands except for squares it can’t safely move to (like walls, or water that it would fall into), every attack made against that creature is an automatic critical hit. This is to make it more difficult to just wade through a sea of monsters while ignoring most of their hits, and incentivize having pets to surround an enemy with.
Possibly, do a lesser version of this (critical hits only some of the time) when a creature is almost but not completely surrounded. Though it should probably require a certain amount of adjacent enemies or something; two opponents facing off in a straight, empty passageway shouldn’t count as “almost completely surrounded” by the walls.
Several issues have been pointed out with this system if implemented naively: getting “surrounded” by two monsters in a corridor or being surrounded instantly with summon nasties or a cursed scroll of create monster could pretty much spell instant death. The original idea was that being surrounded basically amounts to being held down so that all hits have maximum accuracy.
Revamping melee weapons:
hash(monster id + (turns / 10)) % 10 == turns % 10, lose HP due to bleeding on this turn.)Revamped combat system:
Low-level sapient creatures avoid you and will not attack if you are visibly equipped with top-tier gear such as dragon scale mail or artifact weapons, unless they decide they have some advantage with which to beat you.
Add an electric trap, which zaps players or monsters who trigger it. Can also destroy rings and wands with shock damage.
Implement hoard scarabs from D&D. They are a yellow x, which can hide under object piles containing at least 25 gold pieces (and only object piles like that; they can’t hide under single non-gold objects or furniture or anything; possibly they can only hide under a gold-containing pile when the gold is on the top). They have a nasty poisonous bite.
When the game wants to generate one in a random location, it either creates a gold pile for the scarab to hide under where it generates or alternatively it searches around the level for a suitable gold pile and puts the scarab there. (If it can’t find one, it may just fail to generate).
They may also pop out at you from inside randomly generated gold-containing chests, possibly as a container trap effect.
Buff healing potions to be more useful in a true emergency scenario, possibly making them rarer in the process. The problem with NetHack’s healing potions as compared to something like the cure wounds potion in DCSS is that they’re ineffective enough that the best thing to do is stash them away rather than actually using them as an emergency healing item.
Implement a wizard mode command that freezes all monsters (done by blocking their normal movement point gain), which is useful for debugging.
You can read the label on a can of grease. This reads “Yendorian Grease. Caution: water-soluble.”
A much more fleshed out interaction system for sapient monsters. It is initiated by chatting, which opens up a menu offering four key verbs: Ask, Tell, Show, and Give.
Ask is used to gain information from a monster; this could be a whole bunch of things, from rumors to identification to information about the dungeon. Each type of monster you can ask things of has a limited knowledge base, and this knowledge base may contain some inaccurate information. Especially interesting is the possibility that you can ask someone for identification, and they tell you what they think it is - which could be right or wrong, but a good clue either way. You can also ask someone to join you, and pay them some gold to tame them for a certain amount of time.
Tell is currently a less developed part of this idea; the only thing suggested so far is that you can tell a creature about traps you’ve discovered, which will make those traps known to the creature. You can also use “tell calm” on your pets to make them refrain from attacking peacefuls.
Show lets you select any item from your inventory to show to the monster. This can be used for intimidation (e.g. showing a stack of iron skull caps to a goblin).
Give lets you give items to a monster, which in some cases, depending on the AI, lets you test the effects of items.
Note that a potential pitfall of such a system is that if it’s complex enough to do interesting things with, it is probably going to be hard to use without spoilers. And if it’s uncomplex enough, it runs the risk of most possible responses being “I don’t know/care about that”, which also makes it hard to use without spoilers. A middle ground between these is likely to require an enormous amount of work.
Make it easier to destroy non-high altars, perhaps by something as simple as digging them, but destroying an altar will cause its god to smite you hard. If you destroy a crossaligned altar, your god rewards you for it.
Some polyform (perhaps mind flayer) that doesn’t forget spells over time while you remain polymorphed into it.
Add a random throne effect that polymorphs you into a level-appropriate royal monster.
Assuming an implementation in which Gehennom starts to get destroyed after you remove the Amulet: When you kill the high priest of Moloch, he gives you a multiline death message calling you a fool and saying you don’t know what you have done, and maybe hinting a little bit at why Hell is about to go to hell.
Some mechanic that allows you to capture a defeated monster as a figurine (inspired by SpliceHack’s cartomancer but not tied to a specific role, and also not as easy to come by, probably requiring special magic or a special tool to perform it).
Give a warning message when temporary speed is about to wear off.
When you fall into water, you can choose the adjacent space you climb out on.
Add a new ending where you take the unused wand of wishing from the Castle and exit the dungeon with it, to give to your deity to help the next chosen hero. This counts as an honorable ending and a win.
Rangers have a special bonus towards searching for pits.
Special damage type AD_GNAT: when hit with it, you are compelled to attack the offending monster on your next turn if able. (Or as a weaker version, you can do things other than attack, but if you want to attack you must attack the offending monster).
Not specified what would happen if you are hit by two gnat attacks on the same turn.
Scare system that works on the player: the game tracks a list of monsters (or monster IDs) you are currently scared of and for how much longer you are afraid of that monster. You cannot attack a monster you are scared of in melee, nor can you use a ranged attack towards it when you can detect it in the line of fire, nor can you move directly towards it. (Trying to do any of these things won’t cost a turn.)
Intrinsic telepathy only works in a radius equal to your Int (extrinsic sources aren’t changed). Cooperative telepathy, if implemented, works in the same radius if intrinsic, full-level if extrinsic.
Monks who have passed through all the “Student of X” titles may go back and speak to the Grand Master to choose an elemental specialization and receive a power related to it. Stone gives a physical damage reduction; Air gives a random extra movement point here and there and a rare chance of dodging an attack. Water automatically counterattacks melee attacks. Fire boosts attacking power or gives extra attacks.
Add a NAME: directive to the level compiler. Levels that have this will auto-annotate themselves as such (or add an immutable line with the name) once the level is entered.
Archeologists and Tourists get experience for photographing monsters they haven’t yet photographed.
Break the fumbling intrinsic into fumbling (only for hand-related things, conferred by fumble gloves) and stumbling (only for foot-related things, conferred by stumble boots).
The closer someone is to iron bars when attempting to shoot ammo through them, the lower the chance is of it hitting the bars.
Traits or feats, selected when you create your character, and give you small buffs in the form of slight or situational effects. Buffs could include:
Allow “You hear someone counting money” to show up on levels with no vault but which do have a shop.
Kicking a wall where there is a secret door will always reveal the door and will never hurt you. This first kick may WHAMMM or crash it open as usual for doors.
When you’re brought below 20 HP and also below 10% of your HP, with no status ailments, a special adrenaline buff automatically kicks in that grants to-hit and damage bonuses for a short time, but causes exhaustion debuffs after it times out.
Intrinsic aggravate monster from eating dogs and cats lasts for a few thousand turns; actual cannibalism lasts many thousand turns, but neither gives it to you permanently.
Add a hard cap on the amount of levels you can gain via foocubus, but count each level gained this way - each ‘educational experience’ - as +1 on your chance of a good outcome of future interactions.
An alternate ending triggered by invoking a ring of conflict when within sight of all three Riders. You then take up your true identity as War and the other Riders congratulate you. Possibly tie this into the “break the Amulet” ending, in which case this would massively power you up but not end the game until some other condition had been met.
Some mechanic (possibly a ritual spell) that enchants gems by disenchanting other items. Once enchanted, a gem can be used a single-use Pw reserve, magical grenades, or (rarely and lossily) tranfer their enchantment into some other piece of gear. Gem enchantment rules follow ring enchantment rules with respect to exploding when they get too full of magic.
A race whose gimmick is to continually lose Constitution points every couple hundred turns; going below 1 (or 3?) results in death.
A trap or monster (or possibly change sleeping gas traps or homunculi to this) that causes “sleeping poison”: it starts a very short intrinsic restful sleep timeout, so you don’t fall asleep immediately but have a little time to react.
Certain roles have a small set of monsters that they can tame through non-magical means (such as Valkyries and winter wolves).
Add “magical writing” as a nonweapon skill, which is trained at a fast rate by writing scrolls and spellbooks, and increases your odds of writing unknown scrolls and spellbooks successfully.
Some mechanic for Valkyries that involves escorting the spirits/ghosts of those who die in battle.
One take on this idea: you can chat to ghosts to tame them, and then they will follow you around as pets do. Then you can release their spirits by praying on an aligned altar. Doing this successfully gives you some sort of reward. However, hostile monsters will attack the ghosts you are escorting without provocation, making this not trivially easy.
Kicking a tree may cause you to get hit by a falling branch and take some damage. (Possibly, the branch has a smallish chance of appearing on the ground as a quarterstaff, but only once per tree).
Different roles have different speeds for putting on armor, because they have varying amounts of practice with it. In particular, combat-heavy roles such as Barbarians, Valkyries and Samurai should continue to use the existing armor delays, whereas roles like Archeologists and Tourists should take longer to wear armor pieces.
Cursed or unlucky wishes for scrolls, potions, or spellbooks may give you the blank counterpart instead of what you wanted.
Barbarians who roll a 1 on their damage die get the die rerolled and the second result used.
Tourists begin the game with 1 or 2 Luck.
Allow human Rangers to play as lawful. (Note: this will involve changing the Quest text a bit so that it doesn’t refer to lawful as the enemy.)
If you have previously died and gotten lifesaved in the game, some things or people interact with you differently.
Dipping a weapon into a fountain can as a random effect raise its enchantment by one, to a maximum of +1.
Extend Cleaver’s wide-arc hitting behavior to all battle-axes.
Things that can curse, steal, or change your name in-game.
Non-excessive luck system: start by disentangling luck and religion, and convert rnl checks into other checks. Luck can only be -1, 0, or 1 and can never time out unless a full moon or Friday the 13th ends. Some things can reduce Luck to a base of -1, but nothing can increase it to a base of +1 other than carrying positive luckstones.
Addendum to the brewing patch: you can ferment/dissolve newt corpses to produce potions of gain energy, and can combine various fruits with water to produce fruit juice. Also, since booze tastes like liquid fire, fermenting a red mold corpse produces a potion of booze.
Track how many turns the hero has spent on a level. As they spend more time there, the monster spawn rate diminishes, provided they aren’t in the end game with its special spawning rules.
Pushing a boulder costs d3 or d4 nutrition, in order to balance out its easy source of Str exercise. However, something would probably need to be done to compensate in Sokoban (maybe put even more food there?)
Being strangled for more than a couple turns starts to reduce your Constitution (or maxHP).
The chance of you catching lycanthropy is boosted on a full moon and zero on a new moon.
Archeologists begin the game able to recognize all eggs.
Apply the digging-a-grave-up behavior (summoning undead, alignment penalties, etc) when a gravestone is kicked over, as well as digging it up. (The substitute for “You unearth a corpse” is to silently create a corpse buried under where the grave used to be.)
If trees’ fruit is ever made deterministic to the tree, occasionally scatter some of that fruit around the base of the tree.
You can occasionally get a free food appraisal when you eat something. This is based on a random number computed from the turn and (possibly) the object ID, weighed against your Wisdom somehow, such that higher Wisdom increases the chance that you get the food appraisal.
Make the Vibrating Square a brighter color than purple.
Paralysis only freezes you in place on a square; it doesn’t prevent you from attacking and taking other non-movement actions.
Replace the existing polyself nerf that 20% of polymorphs turn you into your own race. Instead, have it so that the longer you stay polymorphed, each successive polymorph has a shorter duration. If you stay in your normal form for a while, polymorphs will return to their original duration.
Occasionally when suffering from food poisoning, you vomit, which will then save you from dying (but still remove a lot of nutrition which means you’re probably still in some peril).
Gnomes (or a potential Tinkerer role) can loot statues without destroying them.
The passtune can be played at any drawbridge in the game to open or close it, but only the Castle drawbridge gives feedback in the form of gears and tumblers. You have to learn the passtune there in order to feasibly use it at other places.
Every turn on the Plane of Fire, all scrolls and spellbooks in inventory or on the level are destroyed (except for naturally fireproof ones).
Only allow levelporting to go out of a branch in the “direction” it rejoins the parent branch. The main reason for this is so that anything levelporting out of Vlad’s Tower cannot end up on levels above the tower; only on levels lower than it.
If you are not deaf, non-stealthy monsters that you can’t see (because they’re out of sight or invisible) occasionally show up as an I when they move. Blindness has no effect, except indirectly that adjacent spaces also count as out of sight.
Add as rare possible fountain effects erodeproofing and blessing a dipped object. (Possibly only in magic fountains.)
If you die next to a pet that can make you arise from the grave, it infects you and makes you arise from the grave as that, without ending the game.
Role or race that gains a bad intrinsic at a certain fairly low XL, and a very good intrinsic later.
You can use #force to pry open doors with edged weapons; however, this requires more Str and has a higher chance of breaking the weapon (perhaps dependent on the weapon’s weight.)
If you are hallucinating, replace the message “You can’t fight yourself.” with “You can’t come to terms with your inner conflicts.”
Remove the unidentified appearance of “grappling hook” as “iron hook”, it’s confusing and serves no good purpose.
Archeologists begin the game with a grappling hook.
You can force-fight a web to cut it, which may occasionally fail and get you or the weapon stuck in the web.
Alternate ending where you can settle down in an abandoned temple or possibly just a random altar room and become the priest of the temple permanently. (Creating a bones file where you are now an aligned priest).
Track your maximum reached HP and Pw (or maximum “external sources” HP and Pw if using a system where it mainly depends on a stat and XL) and allow restore ability to also fix these.
If the player can displace peaceful monsters, hostile monsters should be able to as well.
If you fall asleep while having astral vision, you get astral projection. This consists of you spawning as some sort of incorporeal monster which can phase next to your body. Your body can’t move. Your projection can use your items like normal (consumables and charges are used up). If your projection dies, you return to your body and sleep out the remaining duration. If you wake up, your projection is destroyed and you return to your body normally; however, combat will not awaken you. If something else kills your body while you’re projected, you die and the game ends.
It gets increasingly hard (maybe even exponentially hard) to raise a stat through exercise as the stat approaches its racial maximum.
Role which is outsizedly powerful in the early game and can tear through the dungeon easily, but has a much harder late game, perhaps enforced through bad skill caps (no Expert), or bad HP growth. Or can’t use most artifacts, or has obstacles to putting together an ascension kit.
Make the Oracle consultation prompts more obvious as to what they’re getting. “Dost thou wish to hear the latest dungeon gossip?” / “Then dost thou desire a serious piece of advice?” Also, it should ask the player even if they have no money, and tell them that they don’t have enough after the prompts are shown.
Nymph race very similar to dNetHack’s yuki-onna, but based on regular NetHack nymphs (so no association with cold and no iron weapons). Has the same unarmed-attack-automatic-stealing ability that yuki-onna have, and has infinite carry capacity, but low HP.
Barbarians get extra nutrition from eating corpses, since they have practice in how to eat them properly. Possibly up to 1.5x the nutrition.
Vomiting subtracts nutrition proportional to your current nutrition instead of a constant 20. (20 is a decent floor though). Perhaps it takes half of your current nutrition.
Wielding a one-handed weapon with nothing in the offhand will double the damage bonus from Strength (but not weapon damage or other bonuses).
Assuming empty potion bottles are somehow implemented so as not to be game-breaking: they should weigh 1 or 2 aum, and can be dipped in sinks to fill them from the faucet. This usually fills them with water, but can have other sink effects such as getting a random potion from the faucet instead.
Levelporting to a level you have never visited may fail and levelport you randomly (except in wizard mode). If you have previously visited the level, levelporting will place you in a spot that has been previously mapped.
Trees can rarely drop slime mold “fruit” when kicked.
Priests can hit incorporeal monsters like shades by default. Their attacks never pass harmlessly through.
When you kick a door that is closed but not locked, it can just crash open and become an open door instead of breaking. This is only if you kick it in one specific direction, deterministic based on its coordinates. Diagonal kicks can count as kicking in that specific direction, but kicking perpendicular or opposite will result in the door breaking like usual. If you kick open a shop door like this and don’t destroy it, the shopkeeper yells at you a bit but doesn’t demand money.
Taciturn conduct, which requires that you not use your voice at all. This mostly means that you can’t #chat with things; there probably aren’t currently enough things in the game which require or incentivize speech to make such a conduct meaningful. To that end, a useful #chat system that lets you do many things with many types of monsters (e.g. the one described in #2576) would be useful.
Certain messages like “You scream in agony as your body begins to warp” would need to be changed to special YAFMs if you have taciturn conduct intact.
You can’t ride clinging monsters (how would you get onto them, or stay on them?).
Disfiguring poison that drains Charisma.
When the player arrives on a newly generated level, any monsters within a certain radius of the player are randomly relocated somewhere else.
Wizards start the game knowing the appearances of several random scrolls, rings, potions, and wands, but don’t actually have them in starting inventory.
Explore mode characters start with 5 blessed scrolls of identify.
Being attacked while asleep doesn’t have a random chance of awakening you, but instead it reduces your remaining sleep time by some amount.
When you hit a tree with fire from any source, it can turn into a burning tree (red #). This burns for a few hundred turns before burning out and turning into normal floor. While on fire it acts as a light source of radius 9, and deals fire damage to anything adjacent each turn and occasionally to anything within a radius of 3. Come to think of it, there could also be a “bonfire” terrain using the same glyph.
A weapon slipping out of your hand due to greasy fingers overrides it being welded to your hand by being cursed. Thus, you can get greasy fingers intentionally to get rid of a cursed weapon.
Disable multishot if the player is shooting point-blank.
Assuming unicorn-gem interactions are dropped or otherwise made alignment-agnostic, remove gray and black unicorns entirely, and leave white.
Some special minor effect if you are wearing an ornamental cope as a Priest.
Before you first enter the Valley, demons and undead (chosen from the graveyard monster algorithm, though perhaps excluding wraiths) continually spawn in the maze on the right of the Castle and try to path towards the upstairs. Also before it is set, in the Valley, awake demons and undead will try to path to the upstairs if they have nothing better to do.
If your character is male, a small percentage of AT_KICK attacks deal double damage to you.
You must have at least one free hand to zap a wand. Otherwise the game won’t let you.
The player can shove things, dealing no damage but pushing the monster back. The monster can resist and fail to be shoved; it will resist a lot if the terrain you’re trying to shove it onto is bad for it (like water). You can only shove if you have hands, and you cannot do it to small or tiny monsters. Possibly an AT_SHOV attack should also be introduced for monsters to shove the player.
Walking up stairs exercises Strength.
You can’t safely wear more than N total points of enchantment on all your armor at once. More than that, and armor pieces may start randomly exploding.
If you aren’t wearing armor or a shield and have high martial arts/bare hands skill, you get an AC bonus (probably a higher one for martial arts). The bonus should probably scale up with higher skill, and should be generally higher for martial arts users than bare hands users.
The player gets a small to-hit penalty when nauseous (about to vomit).
If you have confusion charges from the scroll or spell (meaning your hands are glowing red), the Z menu will gain a “confuse” spell option that always has a 0% failure rate, with the associated key being “-“. Casting this allows you to “zap” a confusion charge in any direction, confusing the first monster it touches.
Increase starting HP for all characters by some constant amount.
Archeologists can give artifacts to Lord Carnarvon. At the end of the game, any artifacts in his inventory count towards the game score, without having to drag them up to the Astral Plane.
The usage fee for reading a book in a shop is reduced to 45%, to make it so that unless you have very high Cha, it’s better to pay the usage fee than to buy and resell.
Conflict doesn’t work if a monster can’t see you.
If you are turning to stone and take acid damage from any source, the stoning is stopped.
Rebalance early-game monster base XP; a lichen should not be worth 4 times as much as a jackal.
Attacks that light things on fire also light things on the target square on fire.
If the demigod flag is set, increase the speed of all non-sessile monsters (by giving them extra movement points).
Add the “necrotic” damage type from D&D, so that evil monsters can deal corruptive or decaylike damage without resorting to instadeath, level drain, or disintegration.
Add a joke oracularity about woodchucks.
Monsters only give experience points when they are at least a few levels below your own level (i.e. you can’t level up from level 12 to 14 by killing only newts and grid bugs with any amount of grinding). To compensate, the cutoffs for experience level are brought closer together.
One-and-a-half-handed weapons that are capable of being used either one-handed or two-handed. They default to two-handed if the player is not wearing a shield or twoweaponing. They have better damage stats than pure one-handed weapons, but the damage is reduced if it is used one-handed.
When you first pick up the Amulet of Yendor, you get another screen-overwriting message similar to what happens in the quest and at the beginning of the game, directing you to travel back up the dungeon and give it to your god.
Minimize the impact of enhancing a skill. Effects that changed with the threshold should be migrated to scale directly with practice as much as possible. If you have maxed a skill to its next enhancement threshold but haven’t or can’t enhance further, further practice is not counted.
Teleport at will shouldn’t be gained at different experience levels for Wizards versus everyone else - it should be standardized at the same level for all characters.
Automatic searching triggers standard 1-radius searches even when the player is blind.
If you deliver a staggering blow or other knockback to a cockatrice, and there is a monster behind it, that monster might get stoned.
Change gravestones to display as white instead of gray to help distinguish them from walls.
Inventory wetting triggers every turn you are submerged.
Water turbulence won’t affect your underwater movements unless you are trying to move from one water square to another water square, and the water square you are on has at least one orthogonally adjacent water square.
If polymorphed into a strong clawed monster like a dragon, you can make semipermanent engravings with “-“. However, if your form does not have hands, this will be slower than an athame or wand of digging can do.
The chance of finding a secret door directly relates to how many seen tiles are surrounding the door. The more tiles around it are seen, the more likely it is to be found.
Realistically, a player searching near a secret door will almost always have either 5 or 8 of the adjacent tiles seen; so perhaps just check whether the player has seen the two tiles on either side of the door. If the player has seen both, finding the door becomes a lot easier.
Monks start with potions or a wand of enlightenment.
Sokoban is undiggable until the level is solved.
Doors are much less likely to resist when trying to close an open door.
If you’re being stuck, hugged or grabbed by a monster, you can’t engrave anything.
“while already on Charon’s boat” is appended to the death message whenever the game ends with the player’s own role genocided, not just when they quit. Possibly it’s left off if the player ascends.
Being satiated abuses wisdom for Samurai (at the same rate it does for Monks currently), and gives Monks slow alignment penalties instead of abusing wisdom.
Stat shuffling through self-polymorph should be slightly biased towards reducing stats.
If you have swimming, you can use , to pick items up from underwater.
All thrones are considered historic and Archeologists get an alignment penalty for making one disappear.
Gnomes get permanent detection of gold and gems within a radius 3. Or possibly the radius can scale with XL.
Petrification sources need to be made more consistent - logically, “The cockatrice touches you!” should have the same effect as touching its corpse, but instead it is a mere 1/30 chance of starting a delayed petrification.
Valkyries always get the snow boot bonus while walking on ice (i.e. they never stumble), even if they aren’t wearing snow boots.
Ghosts do not count as undead; they’re just dead.
When you fall asleep, you take d3 damage from falling to the floor. Message for this: “You tumble to the floor”.
If you are wielding a shatterable non-artifact and you are hit by a force bolt, whatever you are wielding is shattered.
New role: the Debtor. You begin the game by having taken out massive loans to buy a lot of very nice (erodeproof, high enchantment, magical) equipment, and so you should be able to breeze through the first part of the game. However, from time to time, your creditors appear and demand large sums of gold as interest payments. If you can successfully find enough gold to comply with their demands exactly, your debt will never actually increase. If you can overpay, you will be paying off the initial loan amount, and hopefully will eventually pay it all off. However, if you cannot meet their demands, they will first disappear with threats and take any current gold you happen to have, then send repossession men to confiscate your equipment (they will sell it for far less than it’s actually worth and not really help to reduce your debt all that much), then send thugs to kill you.
Some YAFMs for pythons should be added, both Monty Python references and jokes about the Python language.
Only knights of XL 7 or higher can dip for Excalibur; but Excalibur is available as a lawful sacrifice gift.
Eating a chameleon corpse has a chance of conveying intrinsic polymorphitis.
After some point in the game (perhaps when you descend below the Valley of the Dead and first “enter Gehennom”), you can no longer buy protection.
The cost of breaking a shop door is at least partially non-deterministic, so you can’t figure out the exact amount the shopkeeper will demand in advance.
Boulders falling on the player’s head deal more damage than they currently do, and they don’t really have their damage significantly reduced if the player is wearing a metal helmet.
Elven priests start with an elven shield instead of a small shield.
When you get a wish from a water demon, it uses the cursed/unlucky wish logic because you’re making a deal with a demon.
Hitting monsters that have a passive shock attack with something made of copper, silver, or gold increases the amount of shock damage.
Some object that you can dip in lava to enhance its properties.
Amnesia makes you forget spells and lose skill points instead of forgetting discoveries and maps. Normally, spell recall is drained; if a spell is at 0%, it is completely forgotten.
You can scare off a vault guard by telling him your name is one of the demon lords. This has the same effect as if you couldn’t say anything, so you’re still trapped in the vault after he flees. The -1 alignment penalty for lawful lying still applies.
Rangers have a role bonus which decreases the overall probability a projectile will break.
If your legs are unwounded and free, Skilled or better martial arts has a chance of dealing a kick instead of a punch. This has a small to-hit penalty but has better damage. If you want to always punch, you can either attack with F or set an option which prevents you from kicking.
At some skill level (Skilled or Expert or maybe even Master) martial arts gives you two attacks.
If you select a travel destination with the _ command that the game cannot find a path to, run pathfinding a second time, this time considering unexplored terrain as eligible. If there is an eligible path running through unexplored terrain, try to move along it; if not, do not move at all.
Give a message when a wand of secret door detection reveals something.
Getpos prompts (when you can move the cursor around for things like jumping or centering a stinking cloud) highlight the path from you to your cursor if that’s a meaningful thing for its use. Meaningful uses include jumping (highlight a straight-line path from you to the destination) or _ travel (highlight the path that you would travel along).
Highlighting could possibly be done by changing the glyph shown, but would probably be better off inverting the foreground and background colors.
Show basic summaries of any pets with you when your game ends. Things such as their inventory, age, basic stats, whether they were a starting pet, etc. This is primarily so that it carries over into the dumplog.
In the C call menu, allow \ to be entered as an alias for d, the discoveries list.
Extend the graphical tile system to support special tiles for artifacts.
When a monster that you can see becomes awake, you get a message like “[monster] wakes up” or “[monster] is roused.”
Untrapping a container, whether or not successful, silently reveals the locked/unlocked state of the container.
New exclamations for peaceful monsters getting mad at the player when they attack another peaceful: “Hey!” “Stop that!” “Get [him/her]!” “Oy!” “Jerk!” “Try me instead!” If hallucinating, add “Dude! Not cool!” to this list.
Treat the vibrating square (if you have located it) as a dungeon feature in the overview, so that the level is shown as having a vibrating square on it.
If you sit on a towel, give the YAFM “It’s probably not a good time for a picnic…”
If you can see a monster only with telepathy, you cannot see its peaceful/hostile status, so all monsters appear hostile by default (except tame monsters, which you can still see as tame). Likewise, you can’t see the monster names of non-tame monsters you can see only with telepathy.
Option to invert the colors of liquids, so the dominant color of the character glyph is the liquid color.
Add the turn a pet was created into the edog struct, so the game can measure how long and loyal of a relationship you have with it. Pets that stay tame for a long time get some combat buffs such as a damage boost or more hit points. They are also more likely to come back tame if killed and resurrected.
Note that if a pet is momentarily untamed and then retamed, it resets the “turn it became a pet” counter.
Donating more than 100 gold to a priest but still less than the required threshold to actually get anything causes the priest to say something gracious, rather than “Cheapskate”.
Watchmen that you chat to on the Tourist quest give special dialogue themed to the Ankh-Morpork City Watch.
Add “choose” as a pettype option, which prompts you to select from the available pets during character creation.
The prompt for blessed genocide only accepts single-character strings; specifying a species won’t work. The prompt also says “(type a single character)”.
The wish parser should accept “scroll of recharging” as a valid variation for scroll of charging.
If scare monster is not formally known, change “The scroll turns to dust as you pick it up” to use the called name or label, e.g. “The scroll labeled NR 9 turns to dust as you pick it up”.
Remove the ability to wish for general items such as “scroll” or “ring”, since more often than not these only get used when someone typoes “scroll of identigy” - people almost always want to wish for specific items.
If you try to go up or down stairs or enter a magic portal, and there is a pet that is still eating next to you, you are prompted to confirm changing levels. Also remove the “foo is still eating” message since it will then be covered in the prompt.
The xlogfile saves the spot on the high score list that you achieved at the time the game ended.
Add a config file parse error that appears when your nethackrc does not contain a newline at the end.
Rename the potion of restore ability to “potion of restore attribute”.
Blessed object detection shows (item carried by a monster) for any object which is currently being carried by a monster, instead of just (item).
For variants that implement terrain recoloring while hallucinating: Don’t select the color randomly. Instead use Perlin noise or other continuous noise so that contiguous regions will have the same colors.
Command that saves your non-default, non-duplicated options to an autogenerated config file, or appends them to your existing config file, or writes out a config file with the wrong name and location (so you can copy and edit it).
Paranoid eat option, which makes you have to type out “yes” for “Continue eating?”
Engravings are visible from a distance, having their own glyph which renders only when there is an engraving on top of “uninteresting” terrain (floor or corridor). In ASCII, they render as a “, or possibly a ~, but their color varies based on what type of engraving it is.
If the verbose option is off, replace “A mysterious force prevents [monster] from teleporting!” with “[monster] shudders briefly.”
An option to disable Japanese item naming.
Add a message for when your pet falls down a trap door and you don’t see it happen.
Add a new damage type AD_CHOK, for specific suffocation attacks (so that rope golems’ AT_HUGS AD_PHYS combination doesn’t have to be interpreted as choking).
Nagas should only be MZ_LARGE, not MZ_HUGE.
When starting or resuming the game while hallucinating and during full moon, replace “You are lucky! Full moon tonight.” with “You’re on the moon tonight!”
Review objects that are oc_big. Certain ones like chests and large boxes don’t count as big, but should be.
For TDTTOE, you only receive a “telepathic” message from your quest leader if you actually have telepathy. Otherwise, you merely “sense” the message.
Allow magic fountains to be specified in special level files.
All eggs display their size, which is the same as their monster size (so e.g. an unidentified killer bee egg would be “tiny egg”). Non-monster eggs are small. Could also change the egg weight to match.
Add Dudley to the list of random ghost names.
When you fail to polymorph and get the “new man/woman” message, prior to this print a message that makes it clear that the polymorph fails. You don’t get this message when you deliberately try to polymorph into your own race.
If you fall into water with teleport-at-will, the game should use casting a teleport spell as its last resort, once you have no other options for escape. It’s very annoying to attempt to teleport and lose energy and nutrition when you’re deliberately trying to jump in the water and can easily climb right back out.
Fix the “Farewell” ending message to say “turns” instead of “moves”, since it’s more accurate.
Add a Japanese translation for kelp frond: “nori”.
Whenever a follower monster follows you between levels, print an appropriate message, such as “The wraith pursues you down the stairs.” and “You are surrounded by a shimmering sphere! The Wizard of Yendor grabs your arm as you vanish!”
When you are polymorphed into a monster with a stealing attack, you shouldn’t be able to make a normal attack and also steal something at the same time. Perhaps the stealing attack should only be made when you are barehanded, though this could interfere with martial arts.
Allow all ranged attacks to be targeted at an arbitrary space. The space does not necessarily have to be in line with anything, but it should be hittable by your attack under normal circumstances, so it can’t be out of range. The ranged attack will fly along Bresenham’s line algorithm to reach its target.
When you’re helpless for more than 1 turn, the game tells you exactly how many turns you missed.
Disallow quivering things that can’t be used as missiles (and therefore have no business being in the quiver).
If the player shoots or zaps something and there is a submerged or hiding monster the player doesn’t know is there in the way, it just flies past without interacting.
The game prints a message “You escape the dungeon, never to return again.” when you escape the dungeon, instead of just going straight to DYWYPI.
Allow the player to dip into adjacent pools, as this is not actually hard to do in real life.
Players’ thrown items should, if they miss a monster, continue flying behind it. (It works this way for monsters.)
Instead of storing door traps as part of the door state, use the trap field of struct lev with a special new DOORTRAP trap to indicate that there is a trap on the door space.
Level teleporters’ message “You are momentarily blinded by a flash of light” should be changed or removed because it is the same message as the more dangerous magic trap effect, and it doesn’t actually cause blinding.
If you are killed by a tame monster, the death message reflects that. Perhaps as simple as putting the word “tame” before the monster.
Allow the numeric prefix to work on the zap command. When zapping with a prefix specified, you will try to zap the wand that many times. (This is for easier wresting).
The hero should be able to see from the get-go that the Candelabrum has seven candle holders, so display it as “(x/7 candles attached)” instead of just “(x candles attached)”.
The #terrain command shows unexplored spaces as red ? marks.
Whenever a monster tries to read a scroll of teleportation and level teleports to the current level (“foo shudders for a moment”), you are prompted to call the scroll.
When a monster teleports away, show a message “The foo disappears!” Possibly, if you also see where they teleported to, show another message, or just print “The foo teleports!” instead of printing a disappearance message.
Negative messages are never punctuated with ! and favor … but may still use just a period. (Example: “You feel attractive…” for gaining intrinsic aggravate monster in FIQhack, the existing “You feel attractive!” sounds like you gained Charisma.)
Split up the job of TELEPORT_REGIONs in special level definition files into it and NOENTRY_REGION. Now, TELEPORT_REGION defines a region that cannot be horizontally teleported into or out of, whereas NOENTRY_REGION defines a region where you cannot enter the level if arriving in an unusual way (level teleport, falling in from above, cursed potion of gain level).
Opening your current space (“o.”) should be equivalent to doing a loot on your current space.
Since untrapping is more common than the rarely used “seetrap” command, remap the ^ key by default to perform an untrap. If you wish to use seetrap, you need to do #seetrap.
The directional loot command works on adjacent containers, not only on your own square.
In wizard mode, attempting to teleport into inaccessible terrain or into or out of a teleport region should prompt the player to confirm the teleport. If they confirm, they override any restrictions; if not, it prints “Sorry…” and works like normal.
The “You hear someone cursing shoplifters” message replaces “someone” with the name of a known alive shopkeeper on the level.
Add a message for when create monster/create familiar/summon nasties fails to summon anything (may happen in extinctionist games).
You can displace peaceful monsters (but not shopkeepers, priests, or Quest leaders) by either walking into them (as the default choice) or by walking into them preceded by the m key.
Fix the effective level difficulty of all Sokoban levels to either the level past the one with the stairs, or the level with the stairs, or a constant 9.
It’s a common refrain that Sokoban was too easy in 3.4.3 with its easier difficulty as you progress through it, and that it was too hard in 3.6 with its harder difficulty. Fixing it at a constant difficulty is a popular middle ground.
There should be a message from when you pacify (not tame) a monster by throwing food at it. “[monster] seems pacified by your gesture”; possibly something about you getting the monster’s order wrong if you’re hallucinating.
When blind and holding a leash with a pet on it, you can see the pet.
Store a bitfield as the property mask in the objclass struct, and a separate one in the obj struct. This lets you define which properties are inherent to the object type (e.g. acid resistance and poison resistance for an alchemy smock) and which abnormal properties it has, which is useful because all alchemy smocks shouldn’t show up as “alchemy smock of poison resistance and acid resistance”.
Anything the player touches or has seen the description of is added to the discoveries list with a blank type name (it hasn’t been named yet, but will be accessible on the list so the player knows they’ve seen it and can call it from the list at a later point).
Specifically, this should trigger whenever an object internally sets dknown to true.
When standing on a (not known untrapped) container and using the search command, prompt the player to check for traps on the container. Search normally if they say no.
When the player is prompted to rename an object or a level that already has a name and submits an empty string, ask the player for confirmation to remove that name entirely: “Remove old name? [yn] (n)”
The scroll of remove curse auto-identifies if it removes a visible curse from one or more objects (i.e. the player can compare his inventory before and after reading it and see that the curse is gone).
Option to bring up the prompt to type-name an item any time it would normally be prompted, even if the object is already type-named. The example given is that if you price-id an object and then later see a monster use it, you then have the option to add this new information immediately.
The xlogfile shows which turn a conduct was first broken on, rather than compacting all conducts into a bitmask.
Wielding a wand will give you an accuracy or damage bonus with that wand. Or if the Wands Balance Patch is implemented, you get the effects of the wand at the next skill level. Monsters will always wield wands they intend to use, so you will usually see them doing so before they get a chance to take you by surprise with a fire or death ray.
When you wield a treat in your hand, pets that normally like that treat will follow you even more closely than they would if you simply had it in open inventory.
Wielding a copper object or wearing copper armor protects against an otherwise successful disease attack some of the time, because copper is antibacterial.
Wielding a mirror conveys partial reflection: you will reflect things 40 or 50% of the time.
Bones files created from filler levels should treat themselves as being on the deepest level the player reached in that branch in their game, so that there aren’t situations where a character carrying good gear who died in a silly manner on a higher-up level will leave a bunch of accessible loot.
Occasionally, when a bones file would create a ghost (e.g. most times), and the level difficulty is high enough, create a wraith of the player instead. If in Gehennom, occasionally create a shade of the player.
When the player is killed by a carnivorous (or, more rarely, an omnivorous) monster, the bones file may not contain a corpse because it was eaten by the monster. Never happens if it would be cannibalism for the monster to eat you.
Make bones a composite option that enables you to load only your own bones files, and never other people’s.
Bones levels have a special level sound. Possibly the same “eerie feeling” you get in abandoned temples.
A special level where the area you can levelport into does not contain any stairs.
A Minetown containing a jewelry store, or add a jewelry store to Bazaar Town or one of the less plentiful Minetowns.
Line the long empty corridor in Asmodeus’ Lair with a few statues.
Sokoban levels with water or lava instead of holes (and make it so that boulders never sink without a trace in Sokoban). Air currents will still pull you down into the liquid if you try to go over them. Not specified what should happen if the player tries to boil away or freeze the liquids.
Replace the Plane of Water bubbles with an initial map looking much the same with bubbles of air surrounded by water. However, instead of the bubbles moving on paths, run a fairly slow cellular automaton that shifts the water around gradually and will eventually join up the air spaces. It’s possible for a bubble to collapse completely, but not if the player’s in it.
Using fire on the water on the Plane of Water boils the water away and opens up air space, but spawns in steam vortices.
Ranged divination effects (monster detection, object detection, clairvoyance, maybe telepathy) are suppressed if the level is not mappable.
Level flag that prevents mapping as long as the local “boss” is alive (nemesis if anywhere in the Quest, demon lords/Croesus on their own levels). Maybe make the ‘nommap’ field 2 bits instead of 1.
A level or branch that forces permanent hallucination while you’re in it. Hallucination blocking from Grayswandir may or may not function.
Change Fort Ludios’s door to a drawbridge, and add several more drawbridges leading into the throne room from all sides. When one drawbridge is opened or destroyed, all the others automatically open to let the monsters swarm out and attack.
Put some or all of Gehennom behind a one-way gate that you can’t return past, by any means, until you have the Amulet.
Make Fort Ludios a multi-leveled branch leading upwards; the upper floors are smaller levels with the same footprint as the base of the building on the bottom level.
On the level containing the stairs to the Gnomish Mines, either always or often generate one gnome in a random place.
Big Room variant that has a river cutting the level in half horizontally, with a bridge across it in the center. The upstairs is placed somewhere on the left; the downstairs and all the monsters generated with the level are placed on the right. The bridge sides could be walled.
In the Big Room variant that has squares of light and darkness, make the lit areas circular rather than square (possibly by scattering candles and lanterns on the ground, or just by making random circular spots of light).
Redesign the Plane of Water: instead of moving bubbles, there is just a lot of water and little land; the water constantly sloshes around, changing the land and forcing the hero to follow it, but not every turn like the bubbles.
New Medusa-alternative level (like the Grue and Echo levels in dNetHack): Chrysaor’s Palace, containing a fair amount of water, soldiers, and Chrysaor, who wields a +10 gold broadsword and a gold shield of reflection, and whose attacks and resistances are on par with Croesus or even better.
Make the Wizard’s Tower its own level(s) rather than embedding it in Gehennom.
After the Valley, have a guaranteed special level “The Gates of Hell”. This level design is very clear: “This is hell. These are the gates, and they are closed. You are not wanted here. Go away or perish.” The level is a large cavern, with a massive arc-like fortification across either the left or right side. The gates are implemented with both iron doors and a drawbridge across lava. There is quite a lot of lava, and a lot of demons inside and outside the fortification.
A special level (possibly in a quest, Rogue-locate is a good candidate) level that contains a pond outside some building or city wall, with one iron bars square on the other side of the wall, inaccessible except by going over the water. Behind it is a (maybe randomly generated?) network of corridors inside solid rock representing a sewer. Either there’s something in here required to complete the level, or there’s an alternate path to complete the level, or there’s some treasure.
Add a clear and obvious ice theme to Asmodeus’ Lair, as an indication to the player that he has nasty cold magic at his disposal.
Make the Vibrating Square level into, rather than just another maze level, a level with 3 symmetric 7x5 chambers embedded in the maze, each with four exits, and a smaller 3x3 chamber at the bottom containing the upstairs. In the center of one of the 7x5 rooms is the Vibrating Square. This is intended to be a dark mirror of the Astral Plane.
Add some Hitchhiker’s Guide easter eggs on dungeon level 42.
Remove/replace the guaranteed L and V monsters from Astral; the priests shouldn’t tolerate random high level undead hanging around.
The natural spawn rate of monsters on Astral (and perhaps the other Planes) is zero.
The vibrating square level is just one big open rectangle with the vibrating square in its usual spots.
A peaceful large dog named Sirius is found in the Ranger quest home level near Orion. Ranger starting dogs don’t have to be named Sirius anymore.
Many bear traps generate on the Ranger quest.
The Valkyrie quest home level should not be all ice. It seems like a frozen lake currently.
Gehennom level that is cavernous but with 1-3 defensive fortifications consisting of a slightly twisty undiggable wall with turrets or guardhouses staffed with demons, and lava moats with drawbridges. Stairs on opposite sides of the fortifications.
Vaults with undiggable walls. You must teleport into them. (The guard will appear inside the vault and teleport you out once you drop your gold.)
One of the Oracle’s fountains is guaranteed to be magical, but it’s randomly placed among the four fountains.
Mines’ End variant that is an actual mine, with many twisty corridors dug out of the rock, and many unmined gems in the rock. The luckstone is unmined, in one of several possible spaces, not adjacent to any corridors but not too far away from them, and certainly not as far away as in the Wine Cellar. A pickaxe will be guaranteed somewhere on this level.
The Astral Plane should be brightly lit, what with having all the halls of the gods and being suffused with holy power.
Orcish Town should bear more gear of the deceased shopkeepers and priests: there should be at least one key per dead shopkeeper, five dead shopkeepers’ worth of gold pieces (probably to be picked up by orcs), a robe and spellbooks for the priest, and so on. Possibly even add gear for the wrecked shops. Or it should have a random piece of good gear being carried by an orc-captain.
Guarantee the Big Room in all games, and possibly expand the range of levels in which it can generate.
Sokoban is a one-level branch that strings together a bunch of different puzzles that must each be defeated in turn, all eventually leading to the treasure zoo. Obviously, the pits must be changed to holes that drop you on the level with the Sokoban stairs.
This allows the player to use object detection to see what the prize is ahead of time, and therefore whether they want to bother doing the puzzles or not.
Slightly bias priests’ and angels’ allegiances on Astral to be generated near their high altar so that the player can get a clue, but not enough so that it’s obviously distinguishable from random noise.
Remove the beehive from the Wizard’s Tower. Bees are too easy for a late game player. If, instead, it should be kept (maybe a Wicked Witch of the West reference?), the beehive should open into the central area of that floor, so the bees can come out and attack the player.
Redesign the Wizard’s Tower so the hero enters in the southeast corner on the bottom floor, spirals into the center with the upstair, the second floor has the downstair in the center and spirals out to the upstair in the northwest. The top floor has its downstair in the northwest and basically the same layout as now.
Remove the Fake Wizard’s Tower special levels. Instead, there is simply a doorway you can walk into on the bottom floor of the normal Wizard’s Tower. (If it’s desirable to keep the fake towers, let them be randomly generated features in Gehennom.)
Ludios uses a smaller, elite team made up of mostly captains and lieutenants for defense, with maybe some recruited dangerous monsters, instead of a swarm of soldiers.
The Caveman quest goal level contains several dragon eggs of random colors beneath the Chromatic Dragon.
Add small jails to most if not all Minetown maps.
Add a guardhouse to the Castle outside the immediate drawbridge area containing some soldiers and sergeants, where the player might find a bugle with which to play the passtune.
The top level of Vlad’s Tower is now an open level with Vlad and his throne, and the vampires and their chests are moved to lower floors.
A Mines’ End that has a water theme, though not necessarily as extreme as the Gnomish Sewer.
If a monster steps on a squeaky board near you when you are asleep, it may wake you up. (Really, this should be the case for any effect capable of waking monsters.)
Magic portals are never hidden.
When a magic trap shakes your pack violently, any bells you happen to be carrying get rung. For normal bells this doesn’t do much besides awaken monsters, but the charged Bell of Opening will be rung, do its usual ring effects, and lose a charge.
New container traps:
If there is a web over water or lava and you are a web-walking monster, you can move onto that space without falling into the liquid. Possibly if you’re any monster, not just a web walker.
Rangers have a significantly better chance than other roles at untrapping beartraps (perhaps even just 100%).
Monsters, including the player, under a certain body weight plus inventory weight don’t trigger squeaky boards. This weight factor is fairly light, possibly in the low hundreds (so even a player carrying nothing will still trigger it).
If there are items on a pit space, the vision code doesn’t render them until you’re adjacent to the pit, at which point the pit is automatically mapped and you see the items. If there are no items in the pit, it remains undetected.
Occasionally when a pit or hole is generated, generate a random cloak on top of it (it’s poorly covering the opening and the hero doesn’t notice until they either search while next to it or step onto it).
Empty boxes are never trapped.
Holes always drop you exactly one level (though trapdoors may still go farther).
The rumbling from a rolling boulder trap wakes up monsters.
When the player or any monster frees itself from a beartrap, it removes the trap and puts a beartrap item there instead. The trap shouldn’t magically become primed again.
Lighting a web on fire will burn it away, and also spread to any adjacent webs and burn through them. Monsters on squares containing burning webs take a smallish amount of fire damage.
Traps that shoot out potions. Generate with a variety of negative potions such as sleep, acid, lit oil, hallucination. (Or possibly, they only generate with 1 or 2 potions, because then the player will go over and untrap it for any remaining potions.)
Would work best if the trap struct contained an object pointer for ammunition, as described in #768.
The player can’t cast spells or use magic items while standing on top of an anti-magic field. (Rather than straight up not being able to use the magic items, they would behave either like their non-magic counterparts, or as if they had no charges, as much as possible. Magic instruments would play normally, wands would fail to produce an effect, scrolls would have no effect, and so on.)
Remove the odd feeling messages from magic traps. Instead move them to a new trap, a “foresight trap”, which gives you a vision of something to come. Once triggered, the trap vanishes. Effects can be:
When you try to move onto a known trap with the m command, the game interprets it as you specifically trying to avoid the trap you already know about, and your chance of triggering it is greatly lowered.
When a monster triggers a magic (or maybe polymorph) trap, one possible effect is that they turn into a figurine of themselves with appropriate beatitude. However, the trap exploding on them is more likely, so that it can’t be used to farm figurines. A possibly evil addendum is that if the player would have otherwise died from damage from a magic trap, the bones file may contain a figurine of them instead of a corpse.
Rolling boulder traps don’t expect a boulder at a specific spot: they look up to 9 squares in all 8 directions for boulders, and the first boulder it finds will be triggered. If no boulder is in range, it may create one by dropping it from the ceiling in a suitable location, then rolling it across the trap (but only one boulder per trap will be created like this, and some traps generate incapable of creating a new boulder).
Add a level flag for the level being open to the sky or otherwise no ceiling. Effects of this include: falling rock traps do not generate, cursed potions of gain level do not work, scrolls of earth do not work; monsters that normally cling to the ceiling are unable to. Levels that would have this: lots of Quest levels, the Elemental Planes.
You can untrap falling rock traps. Unlike dart and arrow traps, this just dumps all the remaining rocks onto that space all at once with the message “The rocks clatter onto the ground”. If there is a monster on this space, it gets hit repeatedly by each rock.
Dart traps can make you fall asleep, go blind, hallucinate, get confused, etc. This would mesh well with #1922.
Polymorph traps have some percentage chance of disappearing whenever they polymorph anything (some people have suggested it always disappears). This is better for symmetry and means players might be able to deliberately polymorph themselves multiple times, but can’t abuse it on behalf of their pet.
Beartraps are much lighter so as to make them feasible to carry around, and Rangers start out with two or three of them.
Rename rust traps to “water traps”, and the gush of water hitting you may hit your pack, wetting several items.
Using the m command to move yourself into a pit makes you lower yourself into the pit without taking any damage (so you can easily get items and other things in the pit). Maybe a spiked pit still deals a bit of damage, maybe not.
Rolling boulder trap hit chance and damage is based on dexterity and not AC, for how much you can jump out of the way. Only high dexterity will allow you to dodge the boulder entirely.
A floor trap that sounds a loud alarm, waking monsters (a lot more so than a squeaky board, perhaps level-wide).
New container trap effect, a loud alarm that wakes nearby monsters. (Exploding chests already wake nearby monsters, but the chance of it happening is miniscule unless your Luck is below -7; this was proposed as one of the common effects even at high Luck.)
The more gold you pay to a priest, the stronger his god becomes. Newly generated priests of that god could get better equipment, or altars of that god might be harder to convert. In Moloch’s case, Gehennom gets slightly harder if you pour a lot of gold into his temple. This applies with money donated to your own god as well, but the effects are naturally less visible since you won’t go around fighting your own priests or converting your own altars.
Fuzz the effective difficulty of monsters sacrificed, so that you can’t trivially count up and calculate how much more you need to sacrifice.
Praying while standing on a throne, assuming you’re in good standing with your god, causes the god to have an increased chance of crowning you. Possibly, they always crown you if they decide to grant a boon and you are in good enough standing to be eligible for crowning.
Gods can grant you (unique?) pets as a sacrifice gift, or possibly a prayer boon. Example here was Sleipnir for valkyries. If it’s a steed, it will always be saddled.
Temple priests can sell holy water as a donation benefit.
When you escape the dungeon by leaving on the level 1 stairs without the Amulet, your god is immediately set to be angry at you (for abandoning their mission). This will have no effect on the game since it’s ending, but end-of-game enlightenment will show that they were angry with you. Possibly disable this if the hero had the Amulet at some point or is carrying an unidentified fake one.
Monks’ vegetarian-breaking alignment penalty is assessed at -1 alignment per X weight units of meat you consume. Eating a huge chunk of meat will cause a much larger penalty than a jackal corpse.
Alignment penalty, or possibly even angering your god, for Monks and Priests for consorting with a foocubus.
“Awe” intrinsic, granted only as a divine boon for a short duration: any monster you hit or that attacks you automatically gets scared.
Rangers get an alignment bonus for disarming naturally-generated bear traps, or possibly for catching a hostile monster in a player-set bear trap.
Magical taming is easier to do on coaligned monsters and harder on crossaligned monsters.
Increase the rate at which annoyed gods will send down minions to defend their altars from being converted, since this rarely happens.
Possibly, your god will not crown you until you have completed some milestone (finished the quest, probably, but also could be going to Gehennom and back).
When you are crowned, your character gains a literal ethereal crown above their head that causes hostile monsters of (significantly) lower level than you to have to pass a resistance check upon seeing you or else flee.
Add clerical spellcasters that are more dangerous than shamans but less threatening than priests.
Shamans count as clerical spellcasters and follow a god. If they follow your god, they are peaceful. Killing them will anger their god.
A YAFM when you donate exactly 1/10 of your gold to a priest: “You pay your tithe.”
If a god doesn’t have any good artifacts or spellbooks to grant you as a sacrifice gift, they give you a prayer boon instead.
Worshipers of The Lady (neutral Tourists or some neutral Priests) have a permanent full-moon effect with Luck timing out to +1 due to the Lady’s influence.
The Arch Priest specifically offers to open up a magic portal to the Plane of Earth if you talk to him with the Amulet of Yendor, as a Priest benefit, to skip the last dozen or so levels of the Dungeons of Doom.
If a priest gives you two bits for an ale while hallucinating, change the message to “two bitcoins for an ale” (or just use a hallucinatory currency.)
Your god considers both your luck and your alignment record when deciding whether to grant a prayer, and weighs alignment record more heavily. That is, if you have negative luck but good alignment, your god will often still grant the prayer, and positive luck might save you from bad alignment, but not often.
If you get hit by something reflectable, have no other source of reflection, and prayer timeout is 0, your god may rarely intervene (“But it reflects somehow!”). This could either increase timeout a smallish amount or not increase it. Does not break atheist conduct.
Alternatively, instead of “using” prayer timeout, automatically spend a couple points of divine protection. Because you would have had to break atheist to get that, the atheist problem doesn’t apply.
Replace all the priests of Moloch on the Astral Plane with (still hostile) priests of the other gods. Moloch is a disgraced, hated god, and his priests have no business there.
One possible “trouble” if you are praying is having more than a certain total level/total difficulty of hostile monsters around you relative to your own level. If your god decides you are in trouble from this and decides to fix the trouble, they will teleport you horizontally somewhere else on the level far from any monsters. If the level is non-teleport, they will instead lift you up one level like a potion of gain level would. If that cannot be done, they will not attempt to fix it.
When you kill the high priest of Moloch, Moloch himself shows up with the Amulet, and you have to beat him up and take it from him.
You get an alignment penalty for digging up a grave if you are a Priest.
One of the prayer boons you can get from a god is intrinsic light: you become a light source (probably of radius 3, but could be 4). Crowning may give you this permanently, since you’re now all holy.
Don’t gift a character a spellbook as a prayer boon if the character is illiterate or certain roles (like cavemen or barbarians), and if a spellbook is given limit its level somehow so that a character doesn’t get a spellbook of much too high level.
Permanent alignment conversion prevents you from receiving any more protection by donating to a priest ever again.
Crowning makes it impossible to change alignment ever again. You can neither permanently convert at an altar or put on a helm of opposite alignment after you have been crowned.
When you try and fail to wear a helm of opposite alignment in the quest branch, you only lose all your protection if you had it identified as a helm of opposite alignment.
Divine lightning (a god smiting you, particularly Moloch when you attack his high priest) should ignore reflection; it’s a “wide-angle” blast of lightning. Maybe this should apply to the lightning monster spell too. The high priest of Moloch should also be shock resistant.
Polymonsterless conduct: you never intentionally polymorph a monster. (Though defining “intentionally” is probably quite tricky.)
Tins of “pureed monster” or “soup made from monster” do not break foodless conduct. Possibly change tin behavior so the preparation method can be discerned before eating it, or just display the preparation when the tin is opened, e.g. “You succeed in opening the tin. It contains a puree that smells like newts. Eat it?” This doesn’t have to reveal every preparation method, so that greasy fried food remains a danger.
Petless conduct: increment when the player starts with a pet or tames a monster.
This conduct could be accidentally broken by the taming effect of a magic trap, which is problematic. One solution is to have magic traps pacify instead of tame if the player has the pet option turned off, but mixing options and gameplay like that seems like a bad idea. Worth noting that polyselfless is another example of a conduct that can be broken accidentally and is far more likely to happen. Note that xNetHack’s implementation of petless conduct just turns the charismatic magic trap effect into a pacification of adjacent monsters regardless of whether you’re petless or not.
Another issue is the guardian angel; it would be especially cruel to unexpectedly break the conduct on the final level of the game. xNetHack’s implementation prevents the angel from appearing if you still have petless conduct intact when arriving on Astral.
Artifactless conduct: is broken whenever an artifact enters the player’s inventory (since the player never has to pick up an artifact).
You can wish for a shop type. The next shop that generates (of random type; specific shop types on special levels do not qualify) will be that type.
You can wish for health. This restores between 50% (or 75%) and 100% of your missing hit points and cures all status ailments.
You can wish for terrain types and dungeon features. These are already wishable in wizard mode; the justification is “If the player wants to wish for lava, why not let them have lava?” You are allowed to wish for a throne, because the chance of getting two or more wishes off it is tiny.
You can wish for friends. This duplicates the effect of casting create familiar.
You can wish for “polymorph”, which makes you polymorph. Possibly you get control over the polymorph.
You can wish for “strength”, “dexterity”, and so on. This increases whichever ability score you wish for. Maybe a d4 or d5 increase so it’s not inferior to a blessed potion of gain ability.
You can wish for intrinsics. This gives you any intrinsic that you can actually get in your normal form. Wishes for intrinsic reflection, drain resistance, and the like will be unsuccessful. Not sure about intrinsics normally only possible by eating jewelry.
You can wish for luck, which increases your Luck by d5 points.
You can wish for time. This decreases the turn count a bit, or alternatively gives you a large amount of movement points so that time effectively stops for everyone else besides you for a while (like what SpliceHack’s scroll of time does).
Walled-off sections of graveyards with locked doors named “crypts” can generate. Inside crypts are very strong out-of-difficulty mummies. Note that this would require that very strong mummies exist in the game in the first place.
Monster lairs (antholes, cockatrice nests, etc) are not filled wall-to-wall with monsters.
Graveyards can rarely generate visible pits (open graves) with no monster on top of them.
Treasure zoos try to generate only “animal” monsters (those that have the M1_ANIMAL flag).
Add code that allows the game to determine whether a room is a “dead-end” room (contains only 1 door which connects to the rest of the level, but unlike shop-compatible rooms, it’s okay to have closets.)
Certain special rooms (typically ones that have awake monsters in them that shouldn’t wander around the level) always generate with all of their doors locked.
Throne rooms should place the throne along one wall, preferably the narrower wall of the room.
Abandoned temples can generate as a special room, or else a room containing a random unattended altar may be converted into an abandoned temple.
Vaults on deeper levels may generate with four gold golems instead of four gold piles. Or both.
If you are a Monk and the game decides to generate a delicatessen, replace it with a health food store 80% of the time. This is independent from the special case for health food stores in Minetown.
Gehennom special room “ice cavern”, with mixed ice/regular floor, possibly with unnethack-style irregular ice walls, and containing ice devils and cold-themed items like wands of cold and rings of fire resistance.
New shop type “thief shop”. Contains blindfolds, lockpicks, thiefstones (if implemented), rogue/pickpocket gloves (if implemented), cloaks and daggers. Something special should happen when you directly steal from a thief shop.
Spider nest room; a zoo-type room (where every square generates a monster independently) with giant and cave spiders. Each square additionally has a 70% chance of a web. Loot consists of several “bones piles” that have a few random objects but no comestibles.
Special “cell” room. Only valid if one end of the room has no doors. It generates a line of iron bars across this end of the room, with a locked (iron if possible) door somewhere in the line. Independently, it may contain: a prisoner, a sink, a bed (if those exist), and 1-2 chests with random contents.
If cauldrons are added, new special room that contains several gnomish wizards, orc shamans, and kobold shamans standing around a cauldron.
One Gehennom “special room” should be an active temple with a peaceful priest of Moloch.
Storeroom: a special room that only generates in a dead end room, perhaps only if the room is under a certain total area. Contains 2-4 chests or large boxes, and rarely ice boxes. If the game had barrels, it should have some of those too. May contain a couple rats too.
New special room “lich hall”. Contains one difficulty-appropriate or somewhat-out-of-difficulty lich, generated asleep with difficulty-appropriate undead. One or two statues generate along the walls, and there are several spellbooks on the floor or in chests. Within the hall, the lich can summon more undead.
New shop type “thrift shop”. Contains items priced at a steep discount but which aren’t very useful on their own. Examples include negatively enchanted or eroded (not necessarily cursed) weapons and armor, blank scrolls, magical tools with zero or one charges left.
Occasionally, instead of a werecreature corpse being placed in a closet behind iron bars, a live werecreature will be placed there instead.
Assuming a new Gehennom generation algorithm which generates doors, some of which must be passed in order to get through the level: have a special type of “demon key” to open doors in Gehennom. Lots of them generate in Gehennom (though not as many as there are doors; possibly a certain type of monster there generates with them so you can obtain more if you get stuck), but each key is single-use and breaks when used to open a door.
Shops can sometimes generate disconnected from the rest of the level and must be teleported or dug into.
Antholes contain eggs of the type of ant the room is filled with; fewer than the ants themselves.
When the game tries to generate a sink in a room, it tries to place the sink next to the wall (though not in front of a doorway).
Sealed closets (with either a wall or iron bars) generate some additional item loot on top of their guaranteed scroll of teleportation.
Throne rooms generate their monsters awake, but also generate all their doorways as locked.
Weapons and armor that generate in shops can be randomly eroded at any erosion level. Perhaps 10% or 20% of items are eroded, the rest are not.
Aligned altars can generate in Gehennom, and standing on a coaligned altar in Gehennom is the only way to contact your god (via prayer or sacrifice). If the altar is crossaligned, you can try to convert it, but Moloch may seize control during the process and turn it into an altar to Moloch. Molochian altars in Gehennom are very difficult or outright impossible to convert.
Some random graffiti is not rumors; it contains helpful in-game information. Things like “NR 9 is a scroll of earth” (giving object identifications), or “The Big Room is on level 12”.
Put engravings outside or nearby inaccessible closets so that you know that something’s there.
Trees’ fruit is generated along with the tree (possibly buried for code purposes so that it shows up on object detection but not when you just look at the tree, or perhaps just “embedded in the tree” is good enough). When you kick or chop down the tree, this fruit is released rather than generating some fruit on the spot.
Add a “specialness” value to each special room and possibly dungeon feature, based on their approximate usefulness to the player. (For example, a swamp room is virtually useless to the player, a treasure zoo not very useful, a throne room more useful, and a temple or shop the most useful.) A level will start out with some amount of specialness available, and randomly chooses special rooms and features to add until it runs out of specialness.
Random piles of loot can sometimes generate buried in the floor or behind walls on spaces not adjoining any walkable spaces. Nearby engravings are generated to indicate that there is something in the vicinity. Archeologists get an alignment bonus for digging out these items.
If fossils exist, they should generate buried beneath gravestones.
The Mines have a higher rate of gold and gems embedded in rock than the other branches.
Track the number of unattended altars generated in the Dungeons of Doom above, say, the Quest portal level. If zero have been generated yet, the chance of one generating on a new level in that range increases more and more until it’s a certainty on the final one.
A very small percentage of closets have a random item generated in them, even if they aren’t sealed off.
Sconces (perhaps a black \ found on the walls of dark rooms, and in dark Mines levels, that may contain (lit or unlit) candles. You can untrap or loot them to remove the candle. Could also generate with an oil lamp, which would give you a potion of oil or a partially filled oil lamp when looted.
Open doors can generate trapped. When you step off an open door to some other space, it closes and locks behind you.
Add a level attribute which serves as a multiplier for the monster spawn rate on that level. Can be specified in des files.
Instead of being completely lit or unlit, Mines levels can generate with large contiguous areas of lit and unlit floor.
Containers never generate with food. Instead, split up the probability of food among other object classes that have nonzero probability, and also allow some tools to generate in them.
Touchstones can generate in hardware stores.
New “hedge” terrain, green #. It blocks movement but not line of sight (like iron bars), can be chopped down with an axe, and has a chance of blocking ranged weapon attacks passing through it. Possibly it can be jumped over.
Upper Mines levels’ stairs are biased to generate relatively close to each other.
Slightly increase the minimum depth of rolling boulder traps, which is currently 2 and can instakill a character on level 2 easily.
Mud terrain, brown }. It can be walked on, but if you stand in one spot for long enough you will start sinking into the mud. You will be able to pull free if you are only a little stuck, but once you get more stuck you cannot, and if you cannot extricate yourself somehow you will eventually sink below the surface and suffocate.
This might best be implemented with a new “mud pit” trap, which gets created by standing on mud for too long and works similarly to a regular pit in that you are held in the same place by it for a while as you try to move out. Except a mud pit allows you to sink down and suffocate.
Scale the probability of secret doors and secret passages in a room-and-corridor level based on its depth, so that level 1 is almost guaranteed not to contain any blocking the way, and the other early levels are also not likely for this to happen.
Place a statue of every demon lord who has not yet been generated lining the walls of Moloch’s Sanctum. This way, if you really want to fight one (or all) of them, you can do so.
Any lava plain levels that generate should grow the region of normal floor by 1 in each direction, so that the player does not have to walk on narrow and diagonal paths through it. Ideally, this should be provided as a flag to any cavern-fill levels.
Iron doors, which generate 30% of the time a normal door would be generated on dungeon levels 7 or below. They use the symbol cyan +. They work the same as normal doors, but they cannot be burned, kicked, or blasted down, or destroyed any other way. If one happens to be locked, you have to unlock it “properly”.
An artifact often gifted to Barbarians which provides magic resistance and half spell damage but prevents Pw from regenerating. Or assign these properties to the Heart of Ahriman, which makes it good for Barbarians as they rarely cast spells.
New artifact Mirror Brand. It is an artifact short sword that grants reflection when wielded and when it hits an opponent, takes the higher of its own base damage roll and the other weapon’s (then adds its own enchantment to the result).
It is based on dNetHack, though it’s more akin to a generic mirror blades than the actual Mirror Brand artifact in dNetHack.
Intelligent non-quest artifacts will evade your grasp if you are directly cross-aligned (lawful when it is chaotic or vice versa). That is, a lawful can never pick up Stormbringer and a chaotic can never pick up Excalibur, though neutrals can still can and will still get blasted.
New artifact The Mirror of Venus, a mirror that confers slotless reflection. If you are female, you can invoke it to charm monsters; otherwise, invoking it will only pacify monsters. Will only be gifted to a female character.
(Male counterpart artifact is the Spear of Mars, #2756).
Trollsbane can be invoked to instapetrify all trolls in a radius of 5.
Artifacts whose base item type isn’t chargeable can be charged; this will clear or reduce any invoke timeout remaining.
Make the Mitre of Holiness invoke effect give temporary intrinsic energy regeneration rather than a single huge boost of power.
Demonbane, while wielded, warns of demons.
New artifact Fishing Pole, some sort of polearm that deals double damage to all sea monsters and can hit squares as if you were Expert (in the full 2-square-wide ring around you), regardless of your polearm skill.
Artifact brass lantern that gives light in a radius of 4. Invoking it recharges it.
New artifact The Silver Shoes, silver low boots that levelport you when invoked. They are the shoes worn by Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Make Demonbane a mace rather than a long sword, to make it more attractive to Priests.
New artifact The Captain’s Hook, artifact grappling hook that never fails to do what you want it to do and has zero chance of hooking yourself, regardless of skill. Deals double damage to crocodiles.
The Orb of Detection confers automatic searching while carried, with a 100% chance of succeeding.
New artifact Green Thumb, neutral/unaligned gauntlets of dexterity, or gauntlets of defense if implemented. (Ideally made of wood, if possible). Invoke to create a tree. While you have them equipped and you are near a tree, you get some extra damage reduction.
New artifact Sinsword, a chaotic two-handed sword. If your alignment is positive, it behaves just like a regular two-handed sword. If negative, it gains a bonus to to-hit and damage (capped at 6) based on how negative your alignment is. Deals double damage to angelic beings.
Fire and Frost Brand can be invoked for powerful fire and cold bolts.
If Magicbane has not yet been generated when the player reaches the Wizard goal level, Newt the wizard has a higher-than-usual chance of being given it.
If an artifact has been generated and is on some existing level, wishing for it will remove it from that level and teleport it right into the player’s hands. However, the beatitude, enchantment, and other fields of the wish will fail.
Convert the Master Key of Thievery’s base item type to a lockpick. Because flavor-wise, giving Rogues a key means they never have to pick locks again.
New artifact Gungnir, an unaligned spear (spear of Odin from Norse mythology). Confers nothing, but has +20 to hit (or whatever is necessary to make a hit basically guaranteed) and +d8 damage.
Note that SpliceHack implements Gungnir, but not as described here.
Artifact whose carry effect deflects incoming status ailments onto nearby monsters. If there are no other monsters around (or if there is one monster who is causing the ailment and is ineligible), you take the status effect like normal.
The Tsurugi of Muramasa always bisects long worms, cutting them in half (unless they have only a head segment).
The Magic Mirror and Master Key’s rumor-granting effects are removed or replaced, because they’re stupid and a way to read the whole rumors file while still technically sticking to unspoiled behavior.
Artifact instruments that are actually useful.
The Orb of Detection confers passive detect unseen: every few turns when carried it triggers the effect of zapping a wand of secret door detection for free.
Non-weapon artifact which, when carried, adds bonus fire damage to all of your physical attacks, regardless of what you’re using to make the attack.
As part of artifact weapon rebalance, there should be at least one Ranger-friendly non-bladed weapon that’s available through sacrifice (and therefore available pre-Quest.) Doesn’t necessarily have to be a bow.
New artifact Elfrist, a chaotic orcish dagger which can be named. It has bonuses against elves, of course, but also a smallish flat damage bonus versus any monster, so it might actually be useful to name it early.
Artifact magic marker Scrivener. It generates with 3 charges and cannot be recharged. Instead of using the charges normally, a single charge will write any scroll or spellbook without fail.
Artifact ring Nenya (Galadriel’s ring from Lord of the Rings): a mithril ring of warning that also confers unchanging. If possible, its warning should apply level-wide, not in a specific radius.
Make Sunsword out of gold.
Add one or two artifacts or modify artifact base types such that there is more than one good blunt artifact you can obtain through sacrifice. (The current three are Mjollnir, which is decent, and Ogresmasher and Trollsbane, which are not.)
Artifact shuriken The Silver Star: deals +d8 damage to all targets. Like Mjollnir, it returns to the player’s inventory after being thrown, but doesn’t have any chance of hitting the player. Since there is only one of it, it cannot be multishot.
This would be a good first sacrifice gift for Monks.
Add a non-wielded-weapon non-quest artifact that is a guaranteed first sacrifice gift for Monks.
When the player kills a giant spider with an elven dagger and Sting has not yet been created, the dagger is converted into Sting automatically. Sting is made of rustproof steel, instead of wood (this would be tricky to do because of base items; you would still want to be able to create it by naming an elven dagger, but Sting in the lore is made of steel or at least metal, not wood). Sting has bonuses versus spiders, in addition to its bonuses against orcs.
New artifact dagger The Barrow-blade of Cardolan: has some flat bonuses, some additional bonuses versus undead, and instakills all W, ghosts, and shades. It is either lawful or unaligned. Could also be a short sword, since there are currently no artifact short swords, but for flavor it should be a dagger.
Remove the spell of knock entirely in favor of the wand already being a good enough source of opening magic.
Nerf the spell of knock in comparison to the wand of opening: it should be a melee-range spell (or a beam with range 1), and possibly it can’t be used to open containers until you are at least Basic in matter spells.
Flavor the spell of protection’s messages differently if you are a Priest.
The spell of detect unseen grants temporary intrinsic searching in addition to its usual effects.
Make the sleep spell scale like it does in D&D: you can only put a total of (your level) HD of monsters to sleep.
The player can cast destroy armor at other monsters at melee range.
For role differentiation: each role can only learn up to a certain number of spells. Wizards can learn them all, while roles like Healers can learn about a dozen; valkyries might be able to learn 3 and barbarians 1 (or 0). Possibly combine this with #2084.
The player can never learn, or can learn but never cast, spells that they are restricted in.
Distinguish between monster spells “summon random monsters” and “summon nasties”, allowing lower level casters to summon at-difficulty non-nasties.
When you are hit by the aggravate monsters spell at melee range, you gain intrinsic aggravate monster for a little while.
Summon nasties can only summon nasties on squares adjacent to the target creature. If there aren’t any available adjacent spaces, it has no effect.
The healing spell is a ray. Monsters will cast it on allies, but they might also hit you. But now that it’s a ray, it’ll bounce off you if you have reflection.
Give Healers at least Basic skill cap in enchantment spells, maybe Skilled.
The spell of remove curse may be cast offensively at monsters to bestow a curse.
Magic missile damage depends solely on skill and not XL. (Perhaps realized by scaling its damage die size - d4 for Unskilled, d6 for Basic, d8 for Skilled, d12 for Expert.)
Trying to cast a forgotten spell and getting nightmarish images in your mind drains a few points of Pw.
The spell of invisibility has an advanced form which casts a make invisible beam, like the wand does.
Reduce haste self to level 2, but make its duration significantly shorter.
Make the spell of detect monsters level 2 or 3.
Move the spell of light to the clerical school.
In variants with the Wands Balance Patch, or otherwise have multiple levels of lightning power (Skilled lightning spell or something), lightning should chain into other monsters near the first thing it hits. Chain lightning can still be reflected. The jumps are made in random directions, so hitting a monster close to you may cause it to chain back into you.
At high skill, the spell of wizard lock forces items off the doorway to adjacent squares so it can make the door. If there’s a monster on the door, it also gets forced off to an adjacent square, or becomes embedded in the door if none exists.
Zapping an opening beam at a closed, unlocked door opens it. Casting knock at Skilled or Expert lets you unlock and open all at once.
Rename cone of cold to “frost blast”, because it does not act like a typical D&D cone spell in either of its forms.
The base Pw cost for a spell is specified per-spell, and only correlates with spell level rather than being tied to it, which allows for interesting things like low-level spells that are easy to cast but expensive.
The spell of protection does not gradually dissipate. It disappears all at once, with the player given a warning a few turns beforehand.
The spell of light has an advanced form, which is a ray. It blinds monsters it is fired at like a camera flash does. (The camera flash is also transformed into a ray, which can be reflected.) In Wands Balance Patch-implementing variants, the wand of light should also have this effect for skilled users.
Spells now take different numbers of turns to cast (interruptable by normal means). Combat spells and some of the emergency spells still take only 1 or 2 turns, but utility spells can take up to five or so.
The spell of clairvoyance grants a few hundred turns of intrinsic clairvoyance when cast at Skilled. This makes it useful for Samurai in particular.
Cure blindness is a pretty useless spell, and should probably be removed or its effects folded into some other spell like extra healing or clairvoyance. Alternatively, if see invisible is nerfed so that it cannot be granted permanently, this could be folded into a “spell of true sight”, which grants temporary see invisible as well as curing blindness, perhaps temporary blindness resistance, and blocking (but not curing) hallucinations like Grayswandir’s wield effect.
Reduce the spell level of invisibility to 1 or 2.
Reduce the spell level of turn undead to 2 or 3.
Spell of blindness (possibly also available as a wand), which blinds monsters.
Spells whose main purpose is to buff allies within an area of effect. (They will give the player the buff too, but the buffs won’t be a huge improvement for a single creature. So you get more out of the effect the more allies you can affect with it, and it’s best used when you have allies around).
Spell of necromancy that turns a corpse you’re standing on (or possibly adjacent to you) into a tame undead. Probably in the clerical school, though a case could be made for matter (and certain variants have a school of necromancy which this would much more directly fit into). It will work on corpses of undead that you have killed. Casting this spell would have some sort of penalty for lawfuls; there would be some sort of warning before trying to cast it.
You can normally only create zombies or mummies when an undead monster exists for the kind of corpse you are animating (i.e. a jackal can’t be turned into undead but a gnome can turn into a gnome zombie/mummy). For intelligent monsters that have no counterpart, the spell can create ghosts.
At a high enough skill or caster level, you can create skeletons from the corpse of any vertebrate, and maybe even vampires from humanoids. You can also create wraiths and shades from monsters that have no undead counterparts.
Monster spell that either generally or specifically debuffs the player. It targets beneficial timing-out intrinsics you have, such as speed, detect monsters, and see invisible, and reduces their time remaining, possibly removing them outright. Does not affect permanent intrinsics or extrinsics.
Spell of summon single nasty: summons only one monster, but the game looks at the target’s current gear and defenses and analyzes exactly what sort of monster would be the best for facing it.
Make the sleep spell scale with your skill level in its school.
Animate monster spell: if you cast it at a pile of objects with the correct material, it creates a tame golem of that material.
Spells that give temporary to-hit or damage buffs. Must be carefully balanced; this is intended for fighter roles more than wizards. It also shouldn’t last long enough or be cheap enough to be perpetually castable.
A spell that provides see invisible (but the potion should be objectively better than it by at least an order of magnitude).
Spell of earthquake, mid-level matter spell. Causes an earthquake centered on you; range and power varies based on your skill level.
Add a spell of paralysis, which basically copies the same monster spell. Melee range, better than sleep.
Level 1 divination spell “waypoint”, which reveals the location of all stairs/ladders (but no other spaces) on the level. Does not work if the level is unmappable.
Spell of baleful polymorph: a beefed-up version of polymorph (or an advanced form) that, when it polymorphs a monster, allows you to determine what to change it into. Perhaps this does not work on pets, so you can’t give yourself a army of titans.
Ring spells, level 7 (or even 8) attack spells, which cast a ring of some elemental power emanating from your square that does not hit your square itself. The radius is 1 if Unskilled or Basic and 2 if Skilled or Expert.
Spell of shove: level 4 or 5 escape spell. At Unskilled and Basic, it fires a beam that pushes the first monster it hits back one space (as if receiving a staggering blow, but doing no damage); at Skilled and Expert, it fires a shorter-range beam in all eight directions. What with shoving monsters into moats to drown them and things like that, this could be a pretty fun spell.
Spell of repair: level 3 matter spell. If wielded weapon is eroded, fixes its erosion. Otherwise, target a random piece of worn armor and fix any erosion it has. At Unskilled, the erosion will only be repaired 1 level at a time; at Basic, 2 levels; at Skilled, 3 levels; and at Expert (maybe) the item will be erodeproofed.
Rolling a boulder on ice makes it slide for up to 10 squares (provided it keeps sliding over ice) before stopping. If it hits some other non-ice walkable terrain, it stops immediately on that square. It is treated like a rolling boulder trap, capable of hitting monsters in its path. This mechanic could be used in Sokoban to create interesting puzzles.
Eating a carrot is “crunchy”, and it may wake monsters around you due to being so loud.
Applying a cursed bag of tricks sometimes causes it to explode, causing magical explosion damage to you while also expending all of its create monster charges at once.
Generalize cockatrice-egg mechanics to all eggs: eggs of acidic monsters will be acidic, eggs of poisonous monsters will be poisonous. Possibly even have a (reduced) chance of getting intrinsics from a monster egg.
When a potion of oil gets hit by fire, it ignites and explodes.
Blessed potions of gain level give you at least 75% of the experience points required to reach the next level, instead of being totally random.
Revamp ring explosion on charging them: a ring enchanted to a positive value has a enchantment in 7 chance of “vibrating unexpectedly” or something similar. This is a warning and, like weapon vibration, does not hurt the ring. If you get this message, the ring’s otrapped flag is set. Charging a ring with otrapped set always explodes it.
There is no other way to ascertain the otrapped value of a ring, other than getting this message. A ring that generates at +4 or above has an enchantment in 10 chance of already having otrapped set. Discharging the ring via cursed charging or drain life has a 50% chance of removing the otrapped flag per point lost.
Tinning kits are lighter, but generate with a small amount of charges rather than the large amount they currently have.
Enchanted boomerangs can continue flying after hitting a monster, with an enchantment/7 chance. (Add 2 to the effective enchantment if the boomerang is blessed; subtract 2 for each successive monster it hits.) If the boomerang is cursed, enchantment doesn’t matter - it will always fall on the first hit.
The reason behind this is twofold: because it makes boomerangs a more attractive weapon, and for the slapstick comedy value.
Dipping a unicorn horn into a potion of a type it normally “cures” will do nothing if the potion is cursed.
Statues of a monster occasionally contain a figurine of that monster inside.
Hitting a statue with a wand of opening (possibly the knock spell too, but it might be nice to let the wand have a fringe benefit) causes it to drop all its contents without breaking.
When you take shock damage, any brass lanterns you are carrying in open inventory get recharged an amount proportional to the damage taken (possibly up to only 1/3 or 1/2 of its maximum charge).
The amulet versus poison (and only this) prevents food poisoning from tainted corpses.
Reading a noncursed scroll of remove curse will also cure any lycanthropy you are suffering.
Lances go through one or two levels of visible damage (e.g. “cracked lance”) before being destroyed completely, rather than being able to break outright. Repairing the lance with the same methods being used to repair erosion will fix this damage, and erosionproofing it will make it immune to cracking or breaking.
Make the ring of slow digestion’s effects totally opposite those of the ring of hunger: rather than cancelling your normal digestion entirely, it only stops you hungering on every other turn, effectively increasing the hunger rate while you wear the ring from 1/20 to 1/2.
Every unicorn horn cures one type of ailment and no others.
Beams and rays from wands have a slightly reduced range if the wand is cursed, and a boosted range if it is blessed.
Attempting to pick a lock with a credit card may result in it slipping through the crack (ending up either inside the box or on the other side of the door). The chance for this is getting a 1 on a rnd(Dex*2) roll (with an uncursed card; cursed cards will always slip through and blessed ones will never slip through). If fumbling, use Dex/4 instead of Dex*2.
Every lock in the game has a deterministic chance (based on object ID if a box and xyz coordinates if a door) of being unopenable by a credit card. Attempting gives the message “It doesn’t look like this lock can be opened with a credit card.”
Object materials: cursed gold items cannot be dropped.
When you put on cursed gear or worn gear becomes cursed, it gives you a message that it welds to the appropriate body part. When becoming uncursed, it gives you a message that it is no longer welded.
Artifact large box Pandora’s Box: it contains a ton of good loot, but opening it (or destroying it, or tipping it) alters several overarching gameplay mechanics that all make the game tougher.
Since it’s not as straight up beneficial of an artifact as most others, perhaps it shouldn’t count as a generated artifact for gifting/wishing purposes.
Make magic whistles a charged tool. When out of charges, it behaves like a tin whistle. Its initial amount of charges and the amount it gets back by recharging are in the “high” tier like a tinning kit or camera, generating with 30-99 charges.
The cursed scroll of remove curse removes the curse from one item in your inventory at random, to give it at least a tiny bit of use.
Some charged tools (such as horns of plenty, crystal balls, and other charged tools, NOT magic markers) slowly recover charges over time on their own up to a reasonable maximum.
Increase the price of the magic whistle to 50 or 100 zorkmids. Identification of the whistle type is trivial anyway.
If you are not fully healed by a potion of full healing, it prints some other message than “You feel completely healed”, like “You feel vastly better” or “You feel much, much better.”
Remove restore ability vapors healing monsters to max HP, because that makes no sense.
Cursed potions of gain level work in Sokoban, but they always place you on the downstairs of the next level up instead of randomly, effectively letting you skip any level except the last one.
When generating a corpse during level creation, pre-age the corpse a la zombie and mummy corpses so that it’s not weirdly fresh.
Stethoscopes don’t work on non-living monsters.
Greased scrolls and spellbooks, if they catch on fire, burn up and deal additional damage.
Wolfsbane lying on the floor has a similar effect to werecreatures as garlic has on undead: they won’t step on that space.
Eating garlic replicates the effects of the fountain effect “This water gives you bad breath!”, causing all monsters on the level to flee for a limited time.
The chance for writing an unknown scroll or spellbook is based not on luck but on how many scrolls and spellbooks you already have identified (and thus, how familiar you are with their sort of magic).
This was later written up as a more complete proposal.
Failing to write an unknown scroll or spellbook just consumes an average amount of ink; otherwise it implies that the character knew how much ink the job would have taken.
Amulets of ESP occasionally randomly cause a detect unseen effect, because extra-sensory perception is more than just telepathy.
Amulets of change shuffle your stats the same as polymorphing into your own race, without risk of a system shock. Possibly, the stat-shuffling process should be a bit more limited primarily to ability scores; it probably shouldn’t affect experience level (and thus HP, Pw, or skills), reset your nutrition, or cure most illnesses like a self-polymorph would.
When a crysknife leaves your inventory, it starts a timer with 10-50 turns. The timer is canceled if it reenters your inventory. If the timer times out on an unfixed crysknife, it reverts to a worm tooth; if a fixed one times out, it loses one point of enchantment and restarts the timer, or if it’s at +0 it reverts to a worm tooth.
Trying to enchant multiple crysknives at once will fuse them together before trying the enchantment.
The ring of conflict autocurses when worn.
Polymorphing a corpse does not turn it into random food, but instead turns it into the corpse of a random level-appropriate monster. Discards any oextra information about the previously existing monster.
Give a YAFM when you gain very fast speed from any source while hallucinating: “Gotta go fast!”
Restore ability (potion or spell) also cures wounded legs, “restoring your ability” to jump, kick, carry, etc, and will cure most status ailments as well.
Meatballs, meat rings, meat sticks, and huge chunks of meat all become possibly tainted at the same age as corpses.
If you enchant multiple worm teeth into a single crysknife, the enchantment of the resulting knife is increased by 1 point for each additional tooth involved. This can go up to a maximum of +9, bypassing normal overenchantment dangers.
If you throw a wand upwards and hit yourself on the head with it, it consumes a charge and zaps yourself. Come to think of it, this should extend to wielding a wand and hitting monsters with it.
The non-cursed scroll of taming always pacifies monsters that can be pacified but not tamed (shopkeepers, priests, watchmen). If blessed, the pacification is extended to all monsters that can be pacified at all (nearly everything, except a few uniques). The MR roll to tame monsters is unaffected.
Placing potions in an ice box makes them instantly freeze and shatter.
Add “gourmet” as a random tin preparation type, giving 350 nutrition. Also add “stale” as a tin preparation type, giving 100 nutrition.
Shuriken may degrade in enchantment when they hit monsters, but they no longer break.
Silver objects are corrodeable but not, of course, rustable.
Hungerful regeneration from the ring only costs excess nutrition if your HP is actually below full. Possibly, to compensate for not having to micromanage your ring finger, accelerate the hunger rate while regenerating HP: instead of double, perhaps triple or quadruple its usual rate.
Convert the potions of monster and object detection into scrolls, since they are a bit of an oddity among potions in that all the other potions have a direct effect on the drinker. These one-time divination effects seem more suited to scrolls.
Dipping a spellbook in a potion of gain level turns it into a spellbook of some spell that is one level higher. You only get “Interesting…” if you try this on a level 7 book. Not determined whether this should count as polymorphing an object to break polypileless conduct.
Chargeable ring (or amulet, if it’s feasible to make chargeable amulets) of energy regeneration.
Almost-rotten corpses, those that give the “You feel sick” message, may cause you to vomit.
Potions of acid and oil are immune to freezing and shattering.
Dipping water into oil doesn’t count as random alchemy.
The confused scroll of magic mapping tells you where some special level or branch entrance exists on the main branch of the dungeon which you have not yet visited. If you have visited every special level including the Sanctum, it gives you a message about the DL 1 upstairs.
If you are wearing iron shoes, you cannot be forcibly knocked back to other spaces, unless you are levitating.
When you equip a ring of hunger or conflict (or regeneration), you get a message about feeling hungrier.
C-rations and K-rations are readable, which give the names of various real-life army food.
The blessed potion of gain ability still only grants one attribute point, but it allows the player to choose which.
Stinking clouds spread out from their origin point instead of using a preset diagonal shape.
There should be three ways to interact with potions: drinking them, getting them splashed on the exterior of your body (e.g. having them thrown at you and hit you), and inhaling their vapors. These should all be fully symmetric between the player and monsters and have noticeable effects for most if not all potions.
The key missing one to implement is the “topical” potion effects. Currently, the only potion with topical effects is acid, and thrown potions only do vapor effects to the monster they hit, which is often weak and ineffective. Topical effects would probably be best implemented as working the same as quaffing the potion, or a bit weaker. This would also be useful for buffing potions that monsters throw at the hero: the vapor effects of, say, a potion of blindness are so short that it doesn’t make much sense for the monster to throw it rather than doing something else, but if blindness splashing in your eyes causes a significantly longer duration, it makes more sense.
Remove the “unlabeled scroll” description. All roles recognize the scroll of blank paper for what it is.
Buff the potion of gain energy so that it refills around 100 points of Pw. If this would take you above your normal Pw maximum, you get temporary Pw equal to that difference.
The scroll of light gives the player a light radius of 3 for a temporary amount of time, rather than lighting up a fixed area.
Scalpels can generate made of obsidian, which gives them extra damage due to a sharper edge, but they can shatter on hard monsters or armor.
Amulets of change don’t disintegrate when you put them on; instead they autocurse. Once you remove the curse and take off the amulet, your original gender is restored.
You need to have hands in order to operate a tinning kit or tin opener.
Athames are a chargeable weapon-tool, or just a tool. Has tinning kit levels of charges and recharging. Once out of charges, it can’t be used to make a semi-permanent engraving anymore.
Tins that don’t contain monster meat can contain either spinach or spam.
Fire bolts light potions of oil on the ground that the bolt is zapped over, and cold bolts snuff them.
When acid breaks on someone’s head and spills on them, it actually does more damage than quaffing it, because it is spread out over more surface area.
Make potions of oil undilutable.
Confused genocide (uncursed or blessed) does not genocide you. Instead, it sets a level flag that prevents any more monsters from spawning on that level via the normal mechanism for the remainder of the game. (Monsters already created are unaffected.)
You can read the label on tins. All player-made tins are unlabeled, while random tins will randomly (and deterministically) either say truly what sort of monster is in them, or have an irrelevant message. Messages could include: “Tuna Fish - expires Feb 6, 1989”, “Rare Meat of a Genocided [hallucinatory monster]”, “Water Chestnuts - be sure to eat while underwater”, “Yendorian Brand Applesauce”, “This Tin Is Not Booby-Trapped”, “Fresh Tinned Adventurer Meat”.
Blessings or cursings on spellbooks does not translate to automatic success or failure. Instead, it acts as a fairly large bonus or penalty to your effective Intelligence when reading it.
If your Intelligence is 6 or lower, reading a scroll may give its confused effect even when you are not confused.
Dipping a scroll of amnesia into some (or all?) non-polymorph, non-water potions will make the potion “forget itself” and turn to water. The scroll also blanks.
Reflavor the hexagonal wand as being a quartz crystal and change its material to GEMSTONE.
Buckled boots take less time to put on than other boots, since they are easier to attach to your feet.
Flint stones should weigh 1, so they are not inferior ammunition to arrows and darts.
Spellbooks can generate pre-read. They will always have at least 1 use remaining in them (and that will be uncommon), but they are not always new spellbooks. If monsters cast player spells and generate with spellbooks to cast them (as in FIQHack), those spellbooks should be pre-read as well.
Dropping a scroll onto a fountain usually or always blanks it.
Breaking a wand of teleportation will teleport as many monsters around you as there are charges left in the wand, always including yourself.
Wearing an oilskin cloak prevents theft attacks by nymphs, monkeys and leprechauns.
Confused cursed scroll of punishment decreases god anger by 1.
Zapping the wand of opening (but not the spell of knock) at a trapped door will cause it to blow up.
Boulders deal 5d4 damage instead of 1d20.
Dunce caps are made out of paper. (They continue to be the same color and tile as cornuthaums, though, so it’s not trivial to tell them apart).
The blessed potion of hallucination, in addition to making you hallucinate, grants enlightenment (maybe a “corrupted” enlightenment where there’s only a 50% chance of seeing things you can’t see through the ^X command)
Make somewhat more of the effects from dropping a ring into a sink not lose the ring.
Genocides can only be targeted on monsters you can currently see. This means if you want to blessed-genocide L, you actually have to go and find a lich and read it in its presence.
When dipping an oilskin sack in water, give a unique message “The water runs off the [bag/oilskin sack], leaving it dry.”, which unambiguously identifies the oilskin sack.
Change the material of the oilskin sack to leather.
Wielding and hitting enemies with a pyrolisk corpse deals fire damage.
Amulets of change generate cursed no more than regular amulets (it no longer generates cursed 90.5% of the time).
Perfectly fine uncursed food should not make the hero pass out.
Applying a looking glass cures blindness, in some very odd uncommon set of circumstances (like when hallucinating).
Rubbing iron on a flint stone gives the message “Sparks fly from the stone”.
Unicorn horns are a one-handed weapon that does 1d3 damage, and train no skill (the skill is removed outright). However, when wielding one without gloves, you automatically “apply” it (not consuming any turns the same way as a stethoscope), every turn.
If blessed, the potion of polymorph gives you control over your polymorphing form when quaffed.
The scroll of teleportation now levelports when blessed and limits your possible teleport destinations to a small radius when cursed. Confused teleport gives you a single controlled horizontal teleport.
Recolor the lump of royal jelly to magenta %.
Darts can be dipped in several different potions besides sickness to get different effects. Blindness, hallucination, sleeping, confusion, etc. Implementation-wise, this can be done by overloading the corpsenm flag on ammunition to indicate which potion it’s been dipped in.
Zapping a digging ray upward may either detach a boulder from the ceiling, or several rocks, instead of a single rock. If several rocks are released, each gets a separate damage roll.
Detect monsters shows invisible monsters as I (or whatever S_invisible happens to be).
The “weakest” beatitude of the potion of acid (usually blessed in vanilla, but if #1918 is implemented it will be cursed) may not cure stoning.
Swap the blessed and cursed effects of the potion of acid, which means that blessed acid is more powerful acid, while cursed acid is kind of cruddy.
If you try to drink a potion underwater, it will first go through the normal dilution routine. This means that an undiluted potion will become diluted (but will generally be fine to drink), a diluted potion will become water (and thus useless), and a potion of acid will blow up in your face.
Wearing mud boots confers a benefit on mud or muddy swamp terrain (the benefit depends on what exactly the terrain does).
Potions of acid have a splash radius effect when broken (could probably be implemented as an acid explosion).
New non-magical gauntlet which is metal and has no special effects but has 2 or 3 base AC. Knights start with it instead of leather gloves.
New container trap effect: a monster is generated from the box (was hiding in the box and pops out at you), taking you by surprise. It gets a free attack on you.
Wearing a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor gives you the sucker markup in shops.
When you zap a wand of undead turning at a corpse that has an undead form, unless there is a ghost above it, it will resurrect the corpse as that undead. Also do this for living monsters that have undead forms, subject to monster magic resistance.
Improvising on a wooden flute may compel all r monsters (or just the rats) within its audible range (or the whole level) to move closer to you or follow you, a reference to the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
You don’t take damage when tossing lightweight, non-hard, non-weapon objects upward. “Light” is defined by some weight threshold. (It’s very weird that you can take damage by tossing, for instance, a eucalyptus leaf in the air.)
Spellbooks cannot be written by appearance. If you don’t know the spell, you can’t unknown-ID write it based on appearance (though you can still try to make an attempt to write it based on the spell).
The amulet of life saving does not restore the hundreds of hit points it can currently restore; it restores something on the order of 6d10, enough to buy time to quaff a potion of full healing, but not enough to repeatedly put on more amulets and let the massive HP store run down on its own.
Hitting monsters with a non-cursed unicorn horn cures them of status afflictions. Hitting them with a cursed horn gives them status afflictions.
A blessed scroll of light lights up the entire level.
Putting on a ring of protection from shape changers and forcing a shapechanged monster somewhere on the level to revert to its normal form wakes it up if it’s asleep.
All the various fruits and vegetables have slightly different (and generally good) non-nutritional effects, like with carrots and blindness. Ideas:
The cursed Book of the Dead will occasionally raise the dead around its location on its own without warning.
Accuracy, damage, and AC bonuses should not be available as intrinsics, and eating their rings should not do anything.
Non-erodeproof copper items corrode over time.
Very fast speed from extrinsic sources such as speed boots is gently nerfed to be better than intrinsic speed, but worse than temporary sources.
Writing an unknown spellbook is not as likely to fail outright as it is now. Instead, there is a chance that it will “warp strangely” as normal, and become some ‘‘other’’ spellbook you don’t know yet.
The wand of speed, zapped at yourself, grants temporary very fast speed and does not grant intrinsic speed. Intrinsic speed can be gained from a non-cursed potion of speed, and a blessed potion will still grant temporary very fast speed. These would be more useful in a system where permanent very fast speed is unobtainable.
Invoking the Staff of Aesculapius allows you to select a direction. If you pick a direction with an adjacent monster, the monster will get the healing effect instead of you. If you aim at yourself or a direction with no monster, the healing effect applies to you as normal.
Reading a scroll of confuse monster while confused confuses nearby monsters in a large radius akin to confused taming.
When a bag of holding explodes, each item inside has a 1/13 chance of being destroyed and a 12/13 chance of being scattered (using the same code that scatters drawbridge chains). Note that scattered fragile items such as potions are liable to break by crashing into things.
You can apply a spear to hit things two spaces away like an unskilled polearm.
Because you pass beyond the mortal realm when you exit the Dungeons with the Amulet, life saving does not work in the Planes, at all, even for monsters. (In wizard mode you can still choose to die of course.)
Objects thrown at hidden monsters (whether the monster is hiding under something or an undetected mimic) pass right through the square as if no monster is on the square.
Junk mail is not only addressed to the finder of the Eye of Larn, but contains references to other games too.
Colored glass frequency corresponds to its real-life frequency; red, orange, and yellow glass are rare; green and brown common, etc.
A blessed scroll of destroy armor should allow the player to select which piece of armor to destroy. If they decline to choose, it selects a random piece of armor like the uncursed scroll.
Flip the blessed and cursed effects of the scroll of create monster, with the argument that if beatitude influences an object’s effects at all, blessing should amplify them and cursing should reduce them.
However, consistency along these lines conflicts somewhat with the current behavior of objects, which is that blessing generally always gives the player a better effect and cursing gives them a worse one. The create monster scroll is in a weird place because both its blessed and cursed effects could be considered beneficial in different contexts.
Whenever a diluted potion of acid would be created (i.e. by wishing or polypiling) it immediately explodes in an alchemic blast.
Reading a blessed scroll of fire allows you to select a spot to center the blast of fire, similar to the selection for a scroll of stinking cloud or the advanced fireball spell. The damage of this scroll is also increased somewhat from what it is now, about four times the current damage, to make it worthwhile to use.
A small fraction of wearable items are generated with a “trendy” property, which is pre-identified and not hidden from the player. Trendy items have an increased base price and add one charisma when worn.
When breaking an identified wand of nothing, give a YAFM: “Predictably, nothing happens.”
When the hero sits in a corner while wearing a dunce cap, give a YAFM and exercise wisdom.
Rename the two-handed sword to “greatsword”, moving “two-handed sword” to its unidentified description.
The amulet of restful sleep confers hungerless regeneration whenever the player is asleep.
Applying a blessed whistle (either type) will unparalyze pets in range.
Breaking an amber stone (e.g. when fired from a sling and hitting a monster) has a chance of releasing a random insect, an a-class or x-class monster.
Gold nuggets as a replacement for loadstones. They are expensive, but heavy, and generate cursed. Like loadstones, cannot be dropped when cursed.
Skeletons for vertebrate monsters. Corpses turn into these when they rot away. They cannot be undead turned into their monster; trying to do this will create a skeleton monster instead. Lawfuls might get an alignment boost for burying a skeleton in a pit and filling it.
A magical whistle that instead of warping pets summons a temporary ally who disappears after a while.
Gloves of fortune, which unlike SporkHack cause killed monsters to drop d10 gold pieces that didn’t previously exist, and rarely a gem.
Boots of earthquake: when you stomp the ground with them (by kicking downward), an earthquake happens. However, this spends 1 point of enchantment on the boots (not going below 0; if they are 0 or less then no earthquake happens.)
Potion of elixir, which heals more HP than healing, but less than extra healing. It also recovers the same amount of Pw and restores 1 ability point in all attributes. HP and Pw maximums do not get raised.
Another type of magical horn, a “horn of heroes”, that when improvised on creates powerful allied monsters (dead heroes?). Ideally the summons would be temporary.
Ring of gold detection, which provides persistent passive gold detection in a radius. Lets you see how much gold a monster is carrying when you chat to them or use a stethoscope. Vault guards are guaranteed to carry one; leprechauns very rarely generate with one.
Potion of honey; nonmagical but provides a lot more nutrition than juice. Can be obtained from bees somehow, possibly by dipping royal jelly into a potion of fruit juice or potion of water.
Dowsing rod: chargeable magical tool that when applied tells you the total value of all gold and gems on the level that isn’t being carried by the player (but not their locations), and whether there are any artifacts on the level that are not carried by the player.
Stealing gloves (also possibly named “rogues gloves” or “gauntlets of thievery”). 0 base AC, and Rogues begin the game wearing a pair. When you hit a monster barehanded while wearing them, you deal no damage (and don’t train bare handed combat skill) but you get a Dex-versus-monster-AC chance of stealing a random non-equipped item or some gold out of their inventory. You can also attack a peaceful monster with them to attempt to steal something; in addition to the Dex-vs-AC roll, this requires passing both another Dex check and a Cha check for them not to notice. If the Dex check fails, you don’t steal anything successfully; if the Cha check fails, they notice (waking up if asleep) and get mad. If the stolen item is currently equipped, there’s no Cha check; the monster just gets alerted and angry.
Nuggets of various metals (copper, gold, iron, silver, mithril, maybe generic metal). These are all * class and are basically rocks but worth more.
Wand of detect magic. Non-directional; if you are carrying any items in your inventory which are magical, “You feel a magical aura inside your knapsack.”, and any object classes in open inventory which are magical but not type-identified are identified as being magical.
Ring of item protection (ported from Rogue’s ring of maintain armor): protects all inventory items from damage of any sort, which includes outright destruction such as monsters casting destroy armor and ring/wand explosions. Also includes protection from disenchanter disenchantment.
Scroll of create magic item, which attempts to generate a magical item. If the scroll is blessed, you can choose the object class; if cursed, the object will be cursed.
Assuming the game supports creating temporary regions of non-poisonous gas clouds: New “smoke bomb” potion. It makes you choke/vomit when quaffed. Intended to be thrown; where it shatters, most of the surrounding terrain will be transformed into cloud.
Vanilla has since added non-poisonous gas clouds (for things such as mist from zapping fire over water), and this effect could work just as well by breaking a smoky potion, instead of adding a new object.
Woolen shirt, shirt-slot armor which gives zero AC but cold resistance.
Jars, which are like tins except made of glass (or possibly, tins made of glass material, in object materials implementing variants). Generate quite often as chest contents. Possibly, what is in the jar is apparent just by looking at it.
Bodkin arrows that have heavyshot (from DynaHack): instead of multishooting, they deal double or triple damage depending on how many you would have multishot otherwise.
Assuming that some limit has been implemented on the number of pets you can have at one time: New amulet that allows you to have more pets than you normally can.
Some consumable object that lets you freshen a corpse (for eating or sacrifice) that doesn’t require resurrecting it with undead turning.
New randomized appearances: “starry spellbook”, “iridescent potion”, “creamy potion”.
Amulet of drain resistance, which also gives immunity to death magic. Useful if monsters casting drain life are implemented.
Scroll of repair: uncursed repairs all levels of erosion on an item of the player’s choice; a blessed scroll repairs all erosion in the player’s inventory; cursed scroll attempts to erode one random item in inventory 1d3 times. If confused and non-cursed, will erosionproof an item of the player’s choice; if confused and cursed, will remove erosionproofing from a random item and then erode it 1d3 times.
The scroll of enchant weapon retains its confused effect of erosionproofing a weapon, but it no longer erosionproofs non-weapons or repairs the weapon. Enchant weapon scrolls are also made much less common, with the probability dumped into the scroll of repair instead.
Wand of charging: non-directional wand that uncursed-charges an item in inventory. Will explode if an attempt is made to recharge it.
Wand of identify: a non-directional wand that will always identify one item when zapped.
Tomatoes, a type of comestible that you can throw at monsters to decrease their charisma (if they had charisma).
Whetstones, imported from SLASH’EM, but with some additional effects.
Party hat, a conical hat which increases Cha by 1 if uncursed, 2 if blessed, and decreases it by 1 if cursed.
Lemons, a comestible that deals 1 point of damage when eaten unless acid resistant and exercises Constitution. If you are killed by eating a lemon, the death reason is “killed by citric acid”.
A cloak of flying.
Chain whips and silver chain whips, which use whip skill.
Blowguns, a weapon which can be used as a launcher for darts. (Cavemen can thematically use these.)
Characters with at least Basic in sling can do something (use a touchstone? flint stone? any gray stone?) to break rocks into slingshot, which weigh 1 and have comparable to-hit and damage to flint stones. Slingshot may be weapon-class instead of rock-class. The higher the sling skill, the more shot that one can get out of a single rock. There should also be rare silver rocks, which can be broken into silver shot.
Armor of training: has no AC, but gives you a small multiplier to your experience point gains (and possibly skill point gains) whenever you are wearing it.
This could also exist as an object property rather than a new object.
Potion of training: gives you a temporary multiplier to your experience point gains (lasts for the next N monsters, not the next N turns). Might also give you a temporary multiplier to skill training point gains.
Add “candelabrum” as a new randomly generated tool. It can hold 3 candles and gives a light radius of 2 with one candle, 3 with two candles, and 4 with three candles. Its material is brass. The Candelabrum of Invocation’s unidentified description is now “ornate candelabrum”.
Queen bees drop a few killer bee eggs.
Corpses dropped by aligned priests or priest player monsters are always blessed.
Straw golems have a smallish chance of dropping a T-shirt.
Corpses dropped by mummies are always cursed.
Air elementals drop some rocks (and “sticks” - the occasional wand of nothing?) which is the debris you have been pummeled with. (Also makes the Plane of Air a little less difficult to cross if you haven’t got a levitation source.)
Rock moles and other item-eating monsters drop any gold or gems they have eaten (digesting them can’t be a fast process), or they destroy 10% of all gold they eat and have a 10% chance of destroying any other items they eat; otherwise those items will be placed in the mole’s inventory.
Skeletons may drop skeleton keys when killed.
Killer bees occasionally drop lumps of royal jelly when killed.
Adult female dragons drop eggs (more so than the usual oviparous drop odds).
Eating a rust monster while polymorphed into an iron golem is instantly fatal to your polyform.
Gas spores, because they are volatile, always have exactly 1 HP, regardless of their level or HD.
Not all vampires are capable of shapechanging. Some of them will remain in their ordinary form. A smaller fraction of vampire lords is the same.
Flavor the Dark One as either a servant/lieutenant of the Wizard, or someone ambitious who wants to attack him.
If a peaceful unicorn sees you wielding or applying a unicorn horn, it gets angry.
Make trappers and lurkers above mindless, so they’re not trivial to find and avoid with telepathy.
Shopkeepers will buy identified glass for the same few zorkmids they will buy it unidentified, rather than refusing to buy it, because it makes no sense that they buy it when the player doesn’t know that it’s glass and refuse to when the player does.
G-class monsters will pick up tools if they wander onto them. (They won’t specifically seek them out and pathfind to them though).
When a light explodes, all monsters adjacent to it are affected equally.
Shopkeepers won’t buy wands from you if they are empty.
Allow monsters to hallucinate (mostly from the same sources that cause the player to hallucinate, e.g. exploding black light). Hallucinating monsters will, after choosing a target, refuse to attack it 90% of the time (because it sees it as a fellow hostile monster). They also will not pathfind to items on the floor because they cannot see them clearly.
Ants can dig and tunnel out corridors when there is an anthole on the level, eventually turning the whole level into an anthole-like network of corridors. The tunneling AI prioritizes connecting up existing corridors rather than just destroying rock indiscriminately.
Monsters can drink potions of booze as a defensive item, but only when fleeing. It cancels their fleeing and confuses them.
Monsters can wear amulets of ESP. This allows them to know your exact location (regardless of invisibility or displacement) when you are within the telepathy radius.
Ants (or locusts, if implemented) can eat food off the ground, and they create more of themselves when they do, proportional to the nutrition consumed. They can also eat food out of the inventory of something they are attacking, and if the target is carrying food in a bag, they can reach into the bag and either eat the food there or spill it out on the ground. Locusts that can’t find any food to eat could inflict illness with their bite instead. They could also eat grass terrain, if implemented (turning it into normal floor) and multiply that way.
Maybe, to avoid the problem of how unchecked gremlin multiplication creates a bunch of low-HP, one-shottable gremlins, locusts will increase their maximum HP by eating if their own maxHP is below some threshold. (Then they’ll split again by eating more after getting over the threshold.)
Werecreatures, including the player, never change into their beast form during new moon. (If a level is restored with the creature in beast form during new moon, it will be forced into normal form.)
Demon gating happens more or in greater quantity when in Gehennom, and less often outside Gehennom.
Monsters can defensively zap you with a wand of teleportation if you are not on a non-teleport level.
If a monster would receive a teleport item but the level is non-teleport, don’t give it to them.
Assuming monster casting has been expanded somehow to include ally buffing: an orc shaman can generate with a group of other orcs.
Aligned priests can sometimes generate with 1-2 holy water instead of 1-2 of their spellbooks. Moloch priests will get unholy water rather than holy.
Assuming an implementation in which player monsters can steal the Amulet of Yendor from you: they may instead steal an imitation amulet you are carrying in main inventory.
Up for debate whether they should have, say, a fixed 50% chance of stealing the real Amulet regardless of how many fakes you are carrying, or whether they should pick one of your apparent Amulets at random, which would give an advantage to carting around more fakes.
Shriekers caught in a flash of light shriek (however, this should only come from non-renewable sources to avoid being able to use them to farm monsters, or possibly this shriek should be unable to summon monsters.)
Zombies can’t open doors, but if there are multiple adjacent zombies on one side of a door, they can bust it down.
When a monster picks up an item owned by a shop, its base price is deducted from any gold they’re carrying and gets transferred to the shopkeeper. If they’re short on cash, they don’t have to make up the difference at all.
Mindless undead are immune to every form of fear effect, including scare monster.
Note: EvilHack takes this a step further and makes every mindless monster immune to fear, not just undead. This may be more apt, depending on your point of view.
Vampires grudge werewolves.
Vault guards grudge leprechauns.
Mimics can mimic other pieces of furniture like sinks, thrones, and altars. (They can already mimic doors and stairs.)
Croesus is able to displace other monsters, because he’s the king. Perhaps all king-type monsters should be able to displace other monsters.
Monsters only spend their turns on picking up items and equipping weapons and armor if they don’t think you are close by. So when fighting a group through a choke point, you don’t get free hits on every monster that steps onto the pile of dropped loot and begins to equip themselves from it.
A monster flag that designates that its inventory is actually the contents of its stomach and is therefore not stealable, nor usable by the monster. Gelatinous cubes, rock moles, and purple worms should get this flag. (Also some other proposed “eater” monsters, like the bookworm.)
If a monster (like a purple worm) eats another monster, that monster’s inventory should be added into the eater’s stomach.
If you try to buy a high level spellbook in a shop while outwardly looking unqualified (low XL, low Int, Barbarian), the shopkeeper raises an eyebrow and condescendingly asks you if you’re sure you can read it. This can help you informally identify high level spellbooks.
Famine’s hungering attack takes the maximum of his current 40-80 nutrition and a large fraction (1/2 to 3/4) of your current nutrition.
The Wizard will only cast Double Trouble if he has already been killed at least once.
Monster speed system that tries to keep all the good qualities of 3.6.1’s while also not letting randomization make monsters super fast or super slow: add a 16 bit int to the monst struct, and every 12 turns set (speed % 12) of them to 1. Then on each turn, the monster gets (speed / 12) moves, plus 1 if the bit for that turn is 1. This 12-turn cycle would need to be phase shifted randomly per monster (probably using hashing based on monster ID) so that you can’t move-count based on the turn clock.
Research on an efficient algorithm to generate the series of 12 bits has found this, though it might be more entropy-efficient in the long run simply to generate all 4094 permutations of bits and randomly pick one with the correct number of bits whenever needed.
Some angels generate with a harp. A fraction of those that do get a magic harp; the rest get mundane ones.
Add another negative foocubus result: you get a headache, which gives 10-20 points of HP damage.
Dwarf and gnome kings will never pick up worthless glass or gray stones on the ground (they continue to pick up all valuable gems).
When a monster is about to wake up from sleeping or unfreeze from paralysis and you can see it, give a message to that effect.
Monsters that divide/split must find a space adjacent to the splitting monster that is safe for the new monster to be on; if no space exists, the split doesn’t happen (and any effects on the monster’s current or maximum HP are nullified).
Currently, the split monster lands on the closest available square, which could be not at all close to the original monster in a packed environment, and this is weird.
Instead of actually becoming any random monster, chameleons choose any random monster type to display as, but their attacks and stats remain those of a chameleon.
Ghouls eat rotten corpses they find on the ground.
Some monsters, a subset of item-using monsters, can’t read scrolls even though they can use all other items. Trolls and some orcs would be in this set (possibly even allow some members of a species to read and some not to, based on their internal monster ID.)
The hostile angels created on the Astral Plane by wearing conflict are immune to conflict.
Hostile monsters zap wands of make invisible at fellow hostile monsters, allowing monsters that can’t usually use items to become invisible.
Monsters will only pick up projectile ammo if they are carrying an appropriate launcher; they will otherwise ignore it. (This does not apply to darts and daggers and other non-launcher missiles.)
Remove the monster spell destroy armor, and instead allow them to read destroy armor scrolls at you offensively.
Increase piercer damage by a lot, make the piercer hit ignore AC so that it hits most of the time, and make helms not count for much against a falling piercer.
When you trigger the Kops, it doesn’t immediately summon massive swarms of them all at once. Instead, it triggers an effect that lasts 50+d50 turns, which causes one Kop to spawn on the upstairs and downstairs each turn, and occasionally on random spaces. Reconciling with the angry shopkeeper cancels the remaining duration of the effect and vanishes any existing Kops on the level.
This might have odd interactions if you leave the level while Kops are still spawning. Perhaps it should internally be tied to the level structure, not the player or a global variable; the effect would be suspended while off the level and resume once you reentered it.
Ants can dig tunnels in rock (slowly).
If you have egg on your face, your Charisma is temporarily and sharply reduced, lasting until either you get hit by or immersed in water or #wipe with a towel. This could also apply to having cream pie on your face.
A possible addition is for monsters to throw random (non-cockatrice) eggs at you.
Another possible addition is to add a new “egg trap”, which fires eggs at you with the intention of getting egg on you.
Cancelled monsters can quaff potions of restore ability to uncancel themselves.
Fiery monsters and possibly some demons get healed by fire traps and will deliberately jump onto them in order to heal up.
Gnomes generated outside the Mines generate carrying one or two random gems (possibly none, subject to current level difficulty).
Nazgul have limited gating ability. Every time one lands a hit on you, there is a small chance that another nazgul spawns somewhere else on the level.
When a vampire is killed in shapeshifted form and reincarnates in its normal form, it comes back at half health. Due to this, vampire AI sometimes chooses to stay in normal form at full health.
Give Croesus a gold-stealing attack in addition to the regular attacks he has now.
Monsters that generate with weapons should automatically be wielding those weapons, unless they generate asleep or peaceful. The player shouldn’t get a free turn while they use theirs to wield the weapon (notable with player monsters on Astral).
Djinni released from bottles and water demons released from fountains don’t care about beatitude or depth for giving a wish; instead they will give the hero a wish if the hero is intimidating enough. “Intimidation” is based on stats like Charisma and XL, and the chance of successfully intimidating them increases as they do. Djinni from lamps are not affected by these rules.
When werecreatures summon help, the help appears at random locations on the level, out of sight if possible, not around the player.
Give a YAFM for telling a vault guard your name is Spartacus.
Same-sex foocubi will use an amulet of change on themselves as an offensive item.
A pet will only eat a corpse that will make it polymorph if its tameness is very low. Otherwise it will avoid it.
Vampires can only regenerate while standing on top of a gravestone or in a graveyard. (Ideally, they could only regenerate in a coffin, but nethack lacks those.)
When a monster that hides under objects moves from one hiding spot to another, there’s a very low chance that you notice it and it becomes unhidden. This chance is boosted by higher Wisdom, and having searching provides a boost.
Monsters that hide under objects can also hide under or behind various types of terrain, such as sinks, ladders, thrones, and gravestones.
Fog clouds block line of sight.
When you kill a jabberwock while hallucinating, give the message “Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
When a monster is crushed in a drawbridge, its inventory might be dropped instead of totally destroyed.
It should be possible to have monsters that are sessile but still get “movement points” to make active attacks. Lichens and spotted jellies are two good examples of monsters that could be like that (i.e. their attacks are fine, but them using actions to slowly move around doesn’t make that much sense).
Fire vortices uniquely among whirly engulfers don’t make your lamp or candle go out when they engulf you; they keep it ignited. In fact, they might ignite any candles you happen to be carrying in main inventory.
Stalker corpses don’t confer see invisible anymore, and have their odds of conferring invisibility decreased from 100%.
The first major consultation from the Oracle is always free, and subsequent ones are always cheaper than they are now.
Telling a vault guard you are Croesus or an alias might fail, depending on your Charisma. If it fails, the guard becomes hostile.
Golems will pick up (and add to their body?) any item made up of the same material as them.
If you kill a grown-up form of a monster, all equal or lesser forms of it that see it die turn hostile even if they were formerly peaceful and the monster you killed was hostile.
Monsters that are MZ_HUGE or larger block line-of-sight like the giant turtle does in dNetHack.
Shopkeepers can be cancelled. When cancelled, they won’t buy or sell any items. They will still react to theft, but they can’t be paid and they don’t offer any money or claim ownership of items you drop in their shop.
On March 15th, your first minor consultation from the Oracle will always be “Beware the Ides of March.”
Unicorns (possibly only coaligned) can be tamed by throwing them a specific gemstone, which is deterministic for each individual unicorn and is random. Or else keep it simple and make it a low-ish chance per gem thrown.
Rock moles (and other tunneling monsters?) can’t eat through wooden doors.
Change how drowning attacks work, by making them pull you into a water square that is adjacent to both you and the attacker, and then sticking to you so you can’t move out of the water. This requires that the hero be allowed to survive (with a suffocation timer) underwater for several turns without magical breathing. If there are no mutually adjacent water squares, the attacker can’t use their drowning attack (it would either do nothing or you’d still be held but not get pulled anywhere). Unlike regular drowning, this wets your items each turn.
More randomization or unpredictability in foocubus results so a player can’t be nearly or actually guaranteed of a good result by having a certain amount of Int and Cha.
Creatures that are stuck in a web (either the player or monsters) get a to-hit penalty.
Spiders have an attack that wraps you in a web (using sticky attack behavior?) or creates a web on your square and traps you in it, so you can’t move.
See also #1409, which discusses a similar idea where spiders can do this sort of thing at range.
Give Lord Surtur fire attacks, since he doesn’t actually use any.
Spiders can spin webs as they move along (cave spiders with less frequency than giant spiders.) This chance is boosted if they move into a doorway or choke point.
Priests object to you locking the door of their temple, and will unlock it if you try. If they cannot for some reason, they get angry.
When you ride a clinging monster like a wumpus, you get a message about all the blood going to your head.
When something infects you with lycanthropy, the infector and all of its summoned monsters become peaceful.
All monsters of class W (except perhaps Nazgul) get the PASSWALL monster flag, allowing them to phase.
Chatting to the ghost of a dead player may tame it. At least one of your role, race, name, or alignment must match the ghost’s, with an increased chance the more factors match. If the attempt to tame fails, it may become peaceful or remain hostile. In either case, subsequent chatting attempts won’t work.
When the hero observes a fox take fire damage, print a YAFM about Mozilla Firefox or automatically name the fox “Mozilla”.
If a monster has horns, AT_BUTT attacks deal extra damage.
Change rothes’ AT_CLAW attacks to AT_BUTT (also probably do this for most q).
Croesus is generated with 2 random amulets and 5 random rings (bling) in inventory.
Soldiers and watchmen can be tamed by throwing gold at them. In order to make them tame, you must give them over a certain initial amount X, which will give 1 point of tameness, and giving them additional gold will increase tameness by 1 for every Y gold. Tameness steadily declines over time, removing Y gold from their inventory each time it drops by a point. Should tameness drop to zero, they become hostile. Chatting with them while tame will give you a clue about how tame they are: they will either talk about how they’re going to spend all their money, or wonder when the next payment is coming, or threaten you for more gold, depending on the amount of tameness. Normal magical taming methods do not work on them (as currently happens).
Dwarves don’t go within two spaces of a tree if they can help it. (This is an Order of the Stick reference.)
Intelligent pets don’t eat shapeshifter corpses unless you give it to them.
Scale M1_CONCEAL with monster size, so that larger monsters with M1_CONCEAL can hide behind objects of a sufficiently high weight or those that are oc_big.
Monsters lacking hands can only carry up to a certain weight maximum which depends on their size. The player, if polymorphed, gets this as carrying capacity.
Piranhas and other sea monsters’ bite attacks can only hit you if you’re actually in the water, in a water space next to them.
Throwing a treat at most non-domestic d or f will make them devour it, and will often pacify them and occasionally tame them.
Unicorns can only be tamed/ridden if you have never consorted with a foocubus.
In the absence of monster hallucination being implemented, make a monster stunned whenever it would become hallucinating.
Fleeing monsters may randomly get a few bonus movement points each turn.
The proper way to make late-game elemental damage matter is to give late-game enemies elemental attacks with large enough damage to matter, which don’t care about reflection.
Foocubi can be pacified or tamed by throwing a ring of adornment at them.
Ghosts cannot be touched with most items, or the player’s body, similar to shades (probably blessed + silver objects would suffice; though silver does not sear them like it does shades). They don’t need to have an amazing AC anymore because of this.
Make killer bees’ evasiveness so high that a player should still be missing them a lot even in the late game. To compensate for this, reduce their HD to 1. However, area of effect attacks always tend to hit monsters regardless of evasiveness, so are still useful against them.
Whenever a zombie steps over a zombie corpse, it revives.
Consorting with foocubi abuses Wisdom.
The crossaligned high priests on Astral are hostile.
When the Wizard of Yendor has the real Amulet, he gets an infinite mana pool to cast from, or otherwise his magic becomes more powerful.
Pets are not stealthy by default, and wake up sleeping monsters just like the player does.
Golems do not regenerate hit points, and healing spells do not work on them.
Balrogs have a fire attack.
Skeletons can spawn in places that aren’t Orcus-town.
MZ_GIGANTIC monsters cannot enter any space that has nonwalkable terrain on at least one pair of opposite sides in any direction (like a doorway, with walls on opposite sides). MZ_HUGE monsters cannot enter any space that has nonwalkable terrain on 2 (or maybe 3) pairs of opposite sides (like a corridor).
Whirly engulfing monsters have a random chance of causing dizziness (stunning) every turn you are engulfed.
New monster behavior flag M2_CLIMB or M3_CLIMB: added to monsters that are natural climbers (spiders, ants, most Y) and with effects like being able to get out of a pit in one turn, or who can climb up ladders without having hands.
All Riders have intrinsic player-style MR, making them immune to death rays, but summon insects and summon nasties don’t work on the Astral Plane.
Mimics are very likely to mimic chests, instead of random items most of the time.
Monsters that spawn in groups are regarded by the monster-generation function as having a higher difficulty than they actually do.
You can pay the Oracle to tell you the depth at which various branches split off from the main dungeon. These are then recorded in your #overview.
Dragons’ alignments are adjusted so that the values actually matter (at the least, yellow should be very lawful, gray should be pure neutral, and black should be very chaotic), and are not specified as M2_HOSTILE anymore so that they can rarely be generated peaceful. Perhaps more interestingly, their difficulties should be varied.
Shopkeepers charge a hefty fee for digging pits in their floor, hundreds or thousands of zorkmids. The shopkeeper will warn you when you start digging.
When chameleons polymorph, they retain their same number of hit dice and hitpoints. So while you may be facing a minotaur or an arch-lich, it’s a very fragile one.
Most d and f monsters can be pacified, but not tamed, by throwing appropriate food at them (they will eat it, so you can’t reuse the same food item).
Increase the difficulty of werecreatures, to compensate both for their lycanthropy and that they are capable of summoning many monsters of equivalent difficulty.
Gelatinous cubes can eat wooden doors in their path.
The monster generation rate in the Quest gets reduced to almost nothing once the nemesis is defeated.
Alternatively, monster spawn rate in the quest is very, very low, and more monsters are generated with the level.
Alteratively alternatively, defeating the nemesis removes the Quest-specific monster generation; newly generated monsters will be random like ones outside of the Quest.
Any G that generate inside the wine cellar secret area in the Gnome King’s Wine Cellar are automatically hostile regardless of the player’s race or alignment.
Trappers’ and lurkers’ above digestion happens much more quickly than purple worms, on a shorter timer. As it stands, most digestion attacks aren’t very threatening as an instadeath because the player almost always has time to kill the digester.
For that matter, all digestion attacks should probably be accelerated somewhat, even those of purple worms.
Purple worms going “Burrrrp!” wake up nearby monsters.
Purple worms eat corpses in 1 turn, because they can eat the monster in 1 turn so why not the corpse?
Demon and undead pets move reluctantly over blessed items.
Rock piercers instakill stone golems, glass piercers instakill glass golems and iron piercers instakill iron golems.
If you attack a spellcasting monster that is currently at full potential to cast a spell, it may cast a counterspell to ward off your attack.
New monster strategies:
Elemental giants and Lord Surtur get elemental attacks corresponding to what kind of giant they are.
A b-class monster which is a shapechanger and may transform into any P, b or j monster.
A sessile invisible monster with a nasty passive attack.
Undead in Sunsword’s light radius will flee.
Undead caught in a flash of light (from cameras or just from casting an area light spell) get awakened if they were asleep or confused (with a chance that decreases at higher levels) if already awake. Possibly, just illuminating their space by carrying some light source near them should be enough to wake them up.
Some monsters’ corpses, like rats, have a chance of conferring FoodPois when eaten, regardless of whether they are tainted.
After you finish the Priest quest, Nalzok may appear once more, randomly in Gehennom, since you didn’t actually kill him the first time, just banish him.
If a shrieker summons a purple worm with its shriek, check for difficulty first. If purple worms would be out of difficulty, generate a baby purple worm instead.
Hippocrates, being sick and frail, does not start moving around when you first chat to him. You cannot use his throne or chest until you complete the quest and heal him with the Staff of Aesculapius. Before this, if you wish to kill him, he is extremely easy to kill and should be easily one-shottable.
Zombies and possibly mummies have a new sound MS_GROAN instead of MS_SILENT. This would not do anything at the moment except give you “The zombie groans.” when chatted to.
Change covetous warping so it only works for demon lords on their lair levels, and then they can only warp back into their lair.
Vampires drain levels much less than they currently do, or not at all; instead they use a bite with an AD_DRHP damage type (described in #1627). Possibly give vampires one AD_DRHP attack but let vampire lords keep one AD_DRHP and one AD_DRLI.
Chameleons randomly select a monster of up to (level difficulty + N) when shapechanging, not any monster ever.
If ents exist, chopping down a tree angers any ents on the level.
Disintegration rays have a small (on the order of 5% or 10%) chance of destroying the player’s reflection source instead of reflecting. This terminates the ray, so the player can’t get hit twice by it.
Sandestins, when they can see the player, examine the player’s worn equipment and try to shapechange into something that the player appears to be vulnerable to.
Storm giants have active and passive lightning attacks. Not sure why they don’t actually have anything to do with shock currently.
“You hear the splashing of a naiad” may happen if there is a water nymph on the level at all.
Water nymphs may create a pool on their spot when killed. Items they stole from the player fall into it, of course. If in a variant that implements shallow water or puddles, those are more reasonable to create than a deep pool.
Wood nymphs may create a tree on their spot when killed, and mountain nymphs may leave a boulder.
Nazguls’ sleep gas acts as a beam, not a ray, and therefore cannot be reflected.
When riding a non-flying, non-swimming steed, give a warning by making the steed stop and “shy away” before riding into water. Only allow this if you use the m command or the steed has already shied away once. But it’s not very fair or realistic to have the steed instadrown under you.
Intrinsic cold resistance only halves damage from Asmodeus’ cold attack. Only extrinsic cold resistance protects against it fully (or cuts it to 1/4?).
Monsters may spawn on the upstairs or downstairs in sight of the player; this is easily flavored as them coming in from other floors. If the monster selected spawns in groups, it picks somewhere that isn’t the stairs, though.
Asmodeus and Baalzebub have a chance of re-appearing hostile to their levels (not a certainty; if they always came back there’d be no reason not to kill them off) when the player is on the way back up with the Amulet. Flavor-wise, this is because the player only paid for safe passage ‘‘down’’, and now the player has their coveted Amulet.
Add a knockback attack and a monster that can use it. Getting knocked back into a wall deals some extra damage, and getting knocked back into water or lava has predictable effects.
Hostile conflict angels don’t appear on the Astral Plane any longer, but all angelic and human beings are now immune to conflict on the Astral Plane.
Wandering hostile priests of Moloch occasionally generate in Gehennom.
Small mimics (but not large or giant ones) can mimic the floor, looking like nothing in the same way a trapper or lurker above does.
Green slimes have an engulfing attack that guarantees to start the sliming process (assuming the player isn’t unchanging, on fire, etc).
Aggravate monster from a ring (and only from that) gives pets a special behavior: as they are aggravated, they will attack enemies with no regard to their current HP or the enemy’s level, basically ignoring the checks that exist. Enemies might also attack pets of their own volition (which they don’t do under normal circumstances except in retaliation).
Goldfish, a yellow ; monster that is level 0, always generates peaceful and has no attacks. The purpose of having it is for flavoring special levels, especially quests.
Fire/flame nymph, a red n, which normally only spawn in Gehennom (or possibly near lava not in Gehennom) and are noticeably stronger than other nymphs. Have two steal attacks which burn any items stolen, and also a fire attack. Potentially a passive fire attack as well. They also explode into fire when killed.
Bookworm, a bright blue w monster that eats books (they end up in its stomach/inventory and aren’t destroyed, though they may lose a read charge). Levels up, gaining power and speed, for each book it eats (higher level books give it more power), eventually gaining more attacks. Possibly can also eat scrolls. Initializes as having already eaten a few books.
Satyr, a brown h monster that is either chaotic or lawful (either could fit), are always male, generate with booze frequently, and chase after any nymphs nearby (who flee or teleport from them). Appear in the Ranger quest frequently.
Carpenter ant, which eats wooden items on the floor and can tunnel, but only on wooden terrain (doors, trees).
Bumblebee, very like a killer bee, but its poison sting is worse. However, when it stings you, it becomes cancelled and can’t sting you again; a cancelled bumblebee additionally loses 1 HP per turn.
Fairies, a white n monster similar to pixies: very small, flying, capable of hiding under objects. However, they are lawfully aligned and possibly always generated peaceful. If you chat to a non-hostile fairy, it will heal you a moderate amount (as in the Legend of Zelda) and become cancelled (a cancelled fairy can no longer heal you).
Burrowing monsters that don’t actually dig out tunnels (or phase), but instead move through solid rock non-destructively. They ‘‘only’’ move through solid rock; they won’t move into wall spaces or move into corridors or rooms of their own volition.
Will-o-the-wisps: gray or possibly bright blue y-class monsters that spawn individually, leave no corpse, and have no attacks except a passive blindness attack. They emit light radius 0 so you can see them, but no surrounding squares, across a dark area. Not infravisible, and could have teleportitis to replicate their folkloric effect of suddenly vanishing. Spawn rarely in swamp rooms and may not spawn at all in a lit area. Most importantly, they have a special AI that causes them to avoid the player and orbit around treasure (occasionally) or around hazards like monsters or traps (commonly).
A monster that emits non-persistent darkness in an area, just like how various monsters shed light in an area.
Various monsters have been suggested for this effect:
Wyverns and/or wyrms that share the D glyph but don’t have breath attacks. Probably brown colored, since no dragon uses that.
Itinerant merchants who, if chatted with, offer one of several non-renewable trades. Generate on stairs, path to the opposite stairs, and once they reach them they disappear forever from the game. Generated with the requisite inventory to make all their trades. Always peaceful. Tougher than shopkeepers, since they have to defend themselves out in the dungeon. If you kill one, no more will ever spawn.
Dementors, W monsters that have some sort of blinding, despair-inducing attack. Lawful aligned. If you become completely incapacitated by one, they suck out your soul for an instadeath.
Arch-foocubi which do the same seduction as regular foocubi, but the random number they choose has a higher average than a foocubus’ 1-35, so the chance of a bad effect is greater and it’s less effective to boost your own stats. Perhaps rnd(35) + 25. They are also more grabby than regular foocubi, and will steal jewelry if you have insufficient gold.
Monster or damage type that un-erosionproofs gear, not very common.
Monster that steals your intrinsic invisibility (but only that, unlike gremlins).
Some sort of late-game nymph monster that steals items. Helps mitigate an underlying issue: some of the early-game threats like stealing are completely absent in the late game, with no particular reason for that being the case.
Pixies, a bright bue n monster that can hide under objects. Chatting to them will make them say “Hey! Listen!” as an Ocarina of Time reference.
Mosquitoes, an a-class monster which uses an AD_DRHP attack, which replenishes the mosquito’s health by some fraction of the damage it dealt you.
Slime mold as a new F monster, which is guaranteed to drop a slime mold comestible on death.
Silver golem, which naturally causes silver damage to silver haters, and drops silver items on death. Should be pretty rare to avoid giving the player their pick of silver items.
Demon lord who has no real special abilities, but has a very, very high physical damage output. Or give one of the existing, uninteresting demon lords a high physical damage output.
New demon lord with a fire attack comparable to Asmodeus’ cold attack (this is actually already implemented, but is unused). It seems weird that no demon lords are really associated with fire.
New demon lord who spellcasts, favoring touch of death and summon nasties. However, the only thing it summons and gates in are incubi and succubi.
Rat king (a randomly generated monster, not the SLASH’EM unique Rat King), based on the real-life rat king. It is a magenta r, not much faster than a rock mole, but has several bite attacks (possibly scaling the amount by monster level). Each bite has a small chance of conferring disease. Its level corresponds to the number of entangled rats, so a slashing attack could sometimes cut off one rat, which then appears on the floor as a new rat, and makes the rat king lose a level.
A monster that gets more powerful every time an attack misses it.
Add several types of tape, which can be applied to mute yourself. While mute, you cannot cast spells, but you have a chance of not speaking the incantation when you read a scroll (resulting in the scroll becoming identified but not used up; none of its effects happen). There are four types of tape which randomly generate: Scotch tape (generating blessed 75% of the time and cursed 25%), packing tape (always uncursed), duct tape (50% blessed, 50% cursed), and Flex Tape (25% cursed, 75% uncursed).
Tape may fail to prevent you from reading a scroll, with a message “The magic of the scroll forces your mouth to move against the tape.” followed by the normal scroll reading messages. The chance of this happening is 2% if the tape is blessed, 12% if uncursed, and 50% if cursed. When taking off blessed tape, there is a 75% chance you take it off normally, but a 25% chance that you rip it off instead, dealing 2 damage. When uncursed, there is an equal chance of taking it off, ripping it off, and having it be stuck on your face. When cursed, there’s a 99% chance that it’s stuck on your face, but a 1% chance that you tear it off, dealing 15 damage. Every ten turns you spend wearing tape, it might fall off on its own (5% chance), falling on the floor. Finally, every time you put on or take off tape, there is a 15% chance that it lose its stickiness, fall off if you put it on, and turn into an “odd strip of material”, which can be used as a blindfold. Odd strips of material cannot be generated randomly.
A cursed bag of tricks can be applied at monsters to eat them up, which will add one charge to the bag. (The existing behavior of applying a cursed bag of tricks producing a monster like normal is suppressed.)
You can apply a cursed bag of holding (or possibly empty bag of tricks) at a ghost to capture a ghost, which can then be used to recharge a wand of undead turning.
If you have at least Basic in martial arts, you cannot injure your leg by kicking.
The cost for buying protection is based on your maximum level reached, not your current level, to prevent draining for gain.
Zombies destroyed by turning never leave corpses, or the corpses they do leave are incapable of reviving.
When you wish for an artifact and it arrives with an angry person, that person gets an appearance message, or at least a single line of dialogue.
Some monsters can block being detected by your telepathy, either innately (disenchanters, perhaps) or as a monster intrinsic conferred by armor (such as a tinfoil hat) or spellcasting by an ally. Also, possibly allow for area-of-effect “telepathy dead zones”.
Archeologists can apply their whips to cross over a ground-based trap with impunity, a la Indiana Jones.
Pressure plate traps that cause all the doors of the current room to close and lock (doorways without doors could turn into iron bars or, on deep enough levels, all doors could turn into iron bars). Triggering this automatically removes the trap. Generated very rarely, and has special generation that occasionally makes it appear just inside a door to a throne room.
Placing bag-of-holding-explosion-causing items into a bag of holding blows up the item that is trying to be placed inside, but does not harm the bag itself. If the item causing the explosion is a second bag of holding, its contents end up inside the outer bag.
Sustain ability also gives stun and confusion resistance, and prevents you from studying books.
At the start of the game, three artifacts are selected as potential divine gifts, and you will never get any other artifact than these three by regular sacrificing. These three artifacts must not hate the player’s race and ideally will provide a good balance in terms of power and utility. Gods can also grant non-artifacts as gifts, which no longer count against your odds of receiving an artifact. Also, the chance of getting an artifact is biased against low-level characters who have not made many sacrifices and towards high-level characters who have.
Internally mark all of your starting gear with a special flag; if you die before receiving the quest, any items marked with this flag get degraded when placed into your bones pile: things like magical armor becoming nonmagical, wands lose charges, scrolls may fade, and spellbooks are made too faint to read more than once.
The Staff of Necromancy: an artifact quarterstaff that deals double damage to non-drain-resistant creatures (but doesn’t life-drain them as the Staff of Aesculapius does), grants cold resistance and curse resistance when wielded, and can be invoked to raise one vertebrate corpse on your square as a tame skeleton.
You can only use cursed potions of gain level once or twice while carrying the Amulet. After a few uses, the Amulet will start to pull you back down as you rise up, wasting the potion.
While you are on the ascension run, mimics prefer to disguise themselves as upstairs. It also edits your memories to make you think you remember the stair being where the mimic was (in order to fool the travel command routing to the correct upstairs anyway).
Add some mechanic that allows you to pay for training to unrestrict a skill and bring it to Basic. Players of any role are also able to get riding training.
When either you or a creature is brought below 10% HP while wearing an amulet of life saving, it “begins to glimmer”. Note that something should be done to prevent this message from appearing in rapid succession if the wearer heals back up around 10%. Also, ideally, something should be done to prevent the player identifying the amulet of life saving by hurting themselves deliberately until under 10% HP.
An artifact T-shirt that provides free action when worn, but only if no armor is worn over it.
Chatting with a shopkeeper makes them offer to appraise your inventory; if you accept, they will automatically type-name all your unidentified and un-type-named items (that they would be willing to buy) with the price they would buy it for.
When you are quoted a price for an unidentified item, it is automatically remembered on the discoveries list. (Not specified how this would interact with being quoted a different price by different shopkeepers, or being quoted both a buy and sell price for the same item, or whether this price should be stored as the object type-name or independently from it.)
When a monster disappears by becoming invisible (and you can’t see it anymore), place an I on its square.
Allow configuration of a list of monsters that the player should be prompted to confirm fighting before automatically attacking by moving into them. Fighting with F bypasses this check.
Also, possibly add an option to make this behavior happen for any monster.
Additional clerical spells for aligned priests to cast: raise undead, floor to lava, ball lightning (not a ray and thus not reflectable), summon elemental.
You can somehow weaponize globs of green slime to forcibly transform other monsters into slime. Possibly this could be as simple as throwing or flinging the globs at them, perhaps subject to a monster magic resistance check for the transformation to work.
You can use stethoscopes (or possibly probing) on eggs to identify them.
Dwarves don’t tunnel within Minetown limits (they can dig up the outer areas of the level just fine).
Cold rays are colored light blue, to be distinct from lightning.
Hallucinatory message for squeaky boards: “You hear a chicken squawk a B note loudly.”
Foocubi gain a level when you get a negative result from them. This should perhaps be extended to other types of enemies with draining powers.
Gelatinous cubes automatically engulf items thrown at them rather than the items falling to the floor.
An artifact that occasionally polymorphs the monsters it hits.
When hallucinating, replace “You hear a chugging sound” with either “You hear a steam locomotive passing by” or “You hear someone chant ‘Chug, chug, chug!’”
Excalibur starts out much weaker than it currently does, but you can perform further feats to enhance its power and give it more abilities as the game progresses. Such feats include: slaying a dragon, returning to King Arthur having finished the Knight quest, getting crowned as a lawful, re-dipping it into a fountain at a high experience level.
Dragon scale mail changes the color your character renders as depending on the color of the mail.
After you struggle free of a bear trap, it becomes disarmed.
Fix the problem with Aleaxes creating a copy set of your gear which can then be used as polyfodder by flagging the armor that gets generated with an Aleax to polymorph only into non-magical items.
Object property “curing”: allows the item to be used like a unicorn horn to cure ailments.
Unicorns of different colors grudge each other.
Crystal plate mail is so transparent to magic that it provides no magic cancellation and can’t be enchanted, disenchanted, canceled, destroyed with destroy armor, or cursed with curse items. Possibly extend this to any armor made out of crystal (GEMSTONE). Also possibly it always generates as +0, because anything otherwise would imply that it had been enchanted previously.
Merge the wand of enlightenment into the wand of probing: probing gives enlightenment when zapped at yourself.
Spell of probing, in the divination school, that probes monsters based on skill:
The wand of probing is raised to be on par with the Skilled effects.
Shopkeepers should pay you a small fee for killing a mimic that was generated in their shop. (Or at least give you the corpse for free).
A set of options (similar in structure to the paranoid options) that manages triggers that you want to interrupt you. Examples of triggers: a monster attacks, you teleport due to teleportitis, a monster comes within sight, a monster comes adjacent to you.
Merge magic cancellation and monster magic resistance into a single stat “magical protection” which determines how easy it is for the magical portion of attacks to reach you and deal effects. All races have a low innate MP, but armor can raise it higher. Most monsters’ innate MP resembles their current monster magic resistance.
Use a miniature cellular automaton to determine which spaces in a swamp room will become water, rather than using a fixed checkerboard. This may not work well for tiny rooms, so enforce a minimum size constraint on what can become a swamp room if necessary.
Fuzz the base prices of objects at the start of every game, between 75% and 125% of the item’s defined base price.
Monks can gain intrinsic immunity to just about everything by leveling up, but most of these are nullified if the monk is wearing body armor.
“Piercing” object property, eligible on ammunition, which makes them not stop flying or break when they hit a monster, continuing on to possibly hit more monsters behind it.
Invoking the Longbow of Diana gives a temporary buff of “piercing”, in which all your projectiles (not only those fired from the bow) pierce through monsters and continue flying.
When a Priest is gifted an artifact weapon, they are unrestricted in its skill and their skill cap in it is set to Skilled, rather than Basic.
If a mind flayer eats your brains while you are confused, it becomes confused.
Drinking booze reduces your memory retention of spells.
True pacifist conduct, which prohibits you from directly hurting any monster.
Any comestibles death-dropped by an F monster are rotten when eaten.
Improvements to secret doors:
Cursed weapons deal bonus damage to all angelic beings, like blessed weapons do to undead and demons.
In an effort to make unicorn horns not infinitely usable but also preserve their other good qualities: Split the unicorn horn into two items, the horn, a simple tool which now has a number of charges, and a “unicorn spear” / “hardened unicorn horn” which is a weapon.
Both items have the same base damage, are two-handed, and use the unicorn horn skill, but reading a scroll of enchant weapon while wielding a unicorn horn will transform it into the weapon version like how crysknives work. The weapon cannot be used to cure ailments.
A level 5 or 6 divination spell that creates a tame speed 0 monster. This new sort of monster gives you permanent vision in a radius around it if it is tame.
In certain cases, you can see what telepathic monsters can see in a radius of 2 or 3 centered on the monster, assuming it fails a saving throw versus you reading its mind.
Oilskin cloaks prevent you from getting entangled in webs. Greased cloaks do too, but the grease may wear off in the process.
Add a TDTTOE message about swinging your dead cat if you start hitting things with a wielded cat corpse. Also have a separate message “There isn’t enough room to swing your dead cat” if there are 4 or more walls adjacent to you.
New mode for #terrain that hilights spaces you or a pet have stepped on. (There is also popular demand for a NetHack4-like display of this on the regular map.)
Damage reduction from AC happens before half physical damage instead of afterward.
Every time you use a unicorn horn to cure a problem, the chances of any unicorn horn curing that problem in the future slightly and permanently decrease. Effectively building up an immunity to the effects of unicorn horns.
Challenge mode in which all non-sessile monsters are faster.
A “blank ring”, which has no powers. A gemstone can be inserted into it, which will turn it into that type of gemstone ring, whatever it happens to be. Possibly can be obtained by canceling other rings.
Arrows fired from The Longbow of Diana will never break and will automatically return to you. It also counts as your racial bow regardless of your race.
Color priests differently to distinguish them from player monsters.
Whenever the Wizard of Yendor revives, he has immunity to whatever he was killed with the last time.
Cartomancers start with the create monster card identified and they have a whole bunch of them containing various early to mid game monsters in starting inventory.
Markers no longer have charges; instead they drain Intelligence points.
Covetous warpers can only warp to the location of the item they covet. This means that if you are carrying it, they can warp to you all they want, but they can’t warp back and forth to the stairs.
Striped shirts have random per-shirt prisoner numbers on them when you read them.
Illithids and illithid-race players can only eat brains and corpses that have brains. If you kill a monster after eating its brain, its corpse offers no nutrition.
You can enter into a pact with a single non-unique demon of your choice over the course of a game. This gives you significant benefits (varying and according to the type of demon) but also major disadvantages for the rest of the game. One major disadvantage for all demons is that it becomes much harder to be in good standing with your god.
Other examples of advantage/disadvantage pairings:
Archeologists can ascertain a rough estimate of an item’s sale value without a shop handy, due to their profession.
Anyone who wields Sunsword can perform the #turn command, which is flavored as brandishing the sword threateningly.
Refactor to-hit mechanics into a simple 1d(attacker’s bonuses) versus 1d(defender’s bonuses) computation, where the attacker hits if their roll is higher.
Elven characters can read the runes on runed objects (which presumably don’t say much of interest, except possibly a runed wand will say what it is).
Pets eat corpses incrementally, not all at once, and you can interrupt their eating by moving them off the corpse (e.g. swapping places). The corpse becomes progressively partly eaten as they eat it. Interrupting their eating deducts tameness points from them equal to how many they would have gained if they had been allowed to finish eating normally.
Different death texts for if the quest nemesis is paralyzed or sleeping when they die.
Make it impossible to portal-dance in Fort Ludios and beat it easily by putting a second exit portal in the fort and some sort of one-way gate in the starting room which has no other exits and the original exit portal.
When you are turning to slime, higher luck increases the odds of a container trap or magic trap being a tower of flame, and increases rather than decreases the odds of any tower of flame trap (container, magic and fire) hitting you.
Artifact unaligned touchstone called Grinder: rubbing it on or applying it to an object repairs one level of rust or corrosion but decreases enchantment by 1 (which can go negative). Invoking it cancels a single object.
Enchanted boomerangs (or magic boomerangs, if implemented) can gather items from the floor and return them to you.
Frisbees, a plastic weapon using boomerang skill. Deals only 1d2 damage, but can fly in a straight line at extremely long range. Frisbees thrown at dogs might tame them.
Aggravate monster, as well as possibly wielding Stormbringer, disables Elbereth’s protection.
A mechanism for checking the health of your steed that isn’t as specialized as a stethoscope. Possibly chatting downward at it gives you a clue.
Monster spell (or song, for bard-patch variants) that temporarily causes allies to grow up by one growth stage, regardless of its level (e.g. a little dog under this effect will become a dog, a demilich will become a master lich).
Define a new set of ability score maximums which represents the highest the score can reach via exercise. These caps are always equal to or higher than the existing maximums, which represent the highest a stat can be increased to through potions of gain ability or other stat-boosting effects. In some cases, the exercise maximum should stay the same and the non-exercise maximum may need to be decreased.
It’s an open question on whether restore ability should be able to restore points to their exercise-only maximums, or just up to the gain-ability maximums.
Deafness multiplies your spell failure rate by a constant amount, due to maybe not getting the pronunciation right because you can’t hear yourself.
Deafness should provide total protection against cockatrices’ hissing attacks.
Restrict bones files from being loaded (possibly just discarding the bones file) if they contain monsters that are far out of difficulty for the player encountering them.
Adjust NetHack’s monster speed system to accommodate the additional property that if your speed is greater than a monster’s, it is impossible for that monster to move 2 turns in a row before you get to act.
Candles and lamps “burn brightly” when blessed and just “start burning”/”is now on” when uncursed. Lanterns don’t change their messages. Note though that this makes it trivial to tell when a potential magic lamp is blessed.
Invoking artifacts for invisibility makes you visible again if you are already permanently invisible. Also, move the Orb of Detection’s invoke invisibility ability to some lesser artifact because it’s a lame power for a quest artifact.
Moving right into an engulfer with the ‘m’ prefix automatically engulfs you.
Underline statues to distinguish them from white colored monsters.
Rust monsters are only hostile towards you if you are wearing or carrying iron or are an iron golem.
Rename mattocks to ‘cutter mattock’ and pick-axe to ‘pick’ to make them less ambiguous.
Give the Magic Mirror of Merlin an invoke effect of enlightenment.
Remove the special damage bonus skill tables for bare-handed and martial arts combat. In place of them, scale up the die size based on skill: bare hands damage is a d2 at unskilled, a d3 at basic, etc. and martial arts doubles this die size, for a d4 at unskilled, a d6 at basic, and so on up to a d14 at grand master. Note that this still gives pretty poor damage output. Possibly it should be 2 dice being rolled (with the die size changing as described here).
Assuming that shopkeeper identification services have been implemented: Shopkeepers of stores besides general stores will identify any item that can be sold by their shop for a fixed price. General store shopkeepers either don’t identify anything, or can identify everything for you with an exponentially increasing price.
Something would have to be done to avoid trivial item identification of items that shopkeepers sell only one or two of in a class (e.g. showing a bunch of potions to a delicatessen shopkeeper, they reject most of the potions as ones they wouldn’t sell, and informally identifying the potion of fruit juice by not rejecting it). Perhaps they should only offer identification for items for which they sell the entire object class.
Monsters will grudge another monster wielding an artifact that is a bane of them.
If a cloak is on top of an item pile, it will protect anything underneath it from burning up in a fire blast on that space (though the cloak itself might burn).
Randomly generated foocubi may generate with some amount of gold (taken from previous partners).
Tinning huge corpses produces the tin as usual, but just makes the corpse partially eaten instead of destroying it.
Pool of acid terrain that deals severe damage and corrosion if you fall in.
Tame dragons never drop scales.
You scuff engravings less when wearing elven boots because you are walking very quietly.
Bats flee upstairs whenever possible in Gehennom, because they are bats outta hell.
“Homing” object property, which generates on ammo and guarantees a hit.
Reading mail does not break illiterate conduct.
Lightning spells:
Regenerating HP naturally doubles your hunger rate while you are regenerating.
Make orcish armor out of bone rather than iron.
Give Sunsword an invoke effect that creates permanent light in a radius like the wand of light. “PRAISE THE SUN” optional.
Monster generation in the Quest, when calculating your experience level, takes the maximum of your actual level and the minimum level required to receive the Quest.
Make all unidentified objects of the same object class cost the same (rather high) amount until you know what it is, at which point it can be bought and sold for its correct price.
A levelable haggling skill that gets you better prices in shops.
Make it possible to leave bones on certain levels that have a branch entrance in them (mainly mine entrance, sokoban entrance, quest), by virtue of removing the branch entrance before saving it as bones. If branch upstairs are removed in this manner, replace it with a pile of rocks; if downstairs are removed in this manner, replace them with a pit.
When you step onto a pit or hole, your chance of falling in is based on your Dexterity rather than being the usual flat 20% chance for traps.
All spheres should explode in a 3x3 explosion like gas spores do. They should do this regardless of whether they died by attacking or some other method, so they should have an appropriate AT_BOOM attack.
Implement directional looting for objects embedded in a wall where the object is a spellbook and the room type is LIBRARY, so the player doesn’t have to kick the wall to retrieve the books.
Bringing back different types of keys for different sorts of locks. This is not the old random key shapes and random lock shapes system; the discussion concluded that special keys should be used for a few specific purposes: game progression, a one time use reward, or some non-unique type of door where each key is one-time use or limited use. In particular, this third one could be used in Gehennom to block off areas, with “soul keys” or something similar that open special doors there and are generated with demons. Gehennom doors could also involve a blood ritual requiring some sort of expenditure of resources or damage to the player.
Premonition system: under various conditions (crystal balls, clairvoyance, dreaming while you sleep, the Oracle) you can receive a premonition of something that will appear later in your game (this could be almost anything: a monster, object, dungeon feature, special room, etc) which then has a very high chance of generating subsequently.
Shopkeepers can summon a minion or clone to guard any second door into their shop if one should happen to exist.
If you attack a peaceful monster, other peaceful monsters that saw the act but grudge the first monster will not be angered.
Thirsty weapons sometimes gain a point of enchantment when they drain a level from something. Probably only up to a certain maximum.
Yellow dragons digest the player much faster than the other types of dragon, because they’re all acidic.
Various ideas to give the bonus from certain sources of speed only as a bonus to movement, not to getting more turns to attack, use items, etc.
Player status called Terrified: it acts like confusion and stunning in that it makes you move in uncontrolled ways, except that it pathfinds away from whatever is scaring you.
Equipment or artifact set bonuses, such that carrying or equipping all of them provides some bonus effect.
Save the exact text of wishes made, and add it to either the dumplog or the #conduct list of wishes.
(This now exists in vanilla via livelogging of wishes and #chronicle.)
Being engulfed by a solid monster makes you blind unless you are carrying a light source, because it’s dark in their stomach.
Magical sources of light that light up a fixed area are temporary, and revert to darkness given time.
Make zruties eat every sort of food off the ground, including tainted corpses but not cockatrice corpses. Make them MZ_GIGANTIC and block line-of-sight. Give them a bull-rush attack that runs you over like a boulder trap but with more damage.
Don’t maybe give Wizards a scroll of punishment in their initial inventory.
When you get lifesaved, a ghost with your name may be created next to you.
Add Acid Brand and Storm Brand (lightning damage) artifacts. Ideally make these all different base weapon types.
Healers receive an alignment penalty from using poisoned weapons.
Allow multiple randomized item descriptions to correspond to the same actual item identity (e.g. a yellow potion and a red potion might both be healing).
Separate command to pick up an item and put it into a bag immediately after, in 1 turn. Or an option that changes pickup behavior to this effect.
Pudding globs that fall onto a sink slide down the drain and disappear.
Instakill effects deal a large amount of HP damage rather than instakilling, and give an appropriate message when something survives them.
You can apply a towel to remove grease from items if your face and hands are already clean when you apply it.
Sand terrain, which slows you down a bit when you walk on it. Shows up in certain special levels. Might be a yellow . glyph.
If the player drops a leash that’s in use or gets teleported away or dies, etc, the pet starts dragging the leash visibly on the map like a player drags an iron chain.
Alter the player’s corpse weight based on how hungry they were when they died.
You can douse an angry shopkeeper in Lethe water to make him forget you.
Random amulet appearance “necklace”, which apart from its regular amulet effect boosts Charisma when worn.
Artifact Shade Cloak: cloth cloak that is always tattered (has 1 level of unfixable erosion), confers (not-very-fast) speed and drain resistance. Invoke effect is temporary phasing and the incorporeality of a shade.
Randomized clan names for samurai player monsters (or a single randomized clan name applied to all enemy samurai in the Quest).
Crystal gear (wands, plate mail) occasionally comes in a certain gem type.
Remove your experience level as a factor from the logic that determines how large a newly generated monster group will be. Instead, scale the group size based on depth. (And to take this further, groups created by magical means such as create monster should be independent of both factors).
The potion of levitation has negative weight, and lightens your inventory load rather than weighing it down more.
Some limited way to charge rings that isn’t the general-purpose magical charging that also charges wands and tools. Maybe add a “scroll of enchant ring” that, like armor and weapon scrolls, only works on rings.
See also L’s Scroll of Enchantment patch, which merges ring, weapon and armor enchanting into a single scroll.
Dragonbane behaves like in DCSS: it gains enchantment, safely and for free, upon killing dragons, maybe up to a higher maximum than usual.
Your base hunger rate is adjusted slightly up or down based on the amount of weight you’re carrying.
If you stand on a pile of objects that are all the same class, replace the “objects” in the message “There are several objects here” with the name of that class. E.g. “There are several weapons here”. Also do this even more specifically if they’re all the same object type: “There are several daggers here”.
Shopkeepers track your petty thefts, and automatically anger if you steal a valuable single item or 50% of their stock or items totaling more than 1000 zorkmids.
Shopkeepers recognize items that they originally owned but were stolen from them by pets, etc. They reclaim ownership of those items if you return to the shop with them, or possibly get angry.
Baluchitheria and other elephant-like q flee from small rodents like sewer rats.
Cursed amulets of life saving allow you to remain in the game, at the cost of bringing you back as a skeleton.
Whenever you arrive on a level through a portal, either the portal moves a short distance or you appear a few spaces away from it. Or turn all 2-way portals into paired 1-way portals which can have different arrival coordinates defined.
Procedurally generate the game-equivalent of Elbereth each game (the literal string “Elbereth” does nothing special anymore), and make it fairly likely to appear somewhere in the Dungeons of Doom.
Wishing for “world peace” pacifies all non-unique monsters on the level, possibly subject to monster resistances.
Dropping items into a sink has a 1% chance of sucking you in and levelporting you randomly.
Iron and copper items engulfed by gelatinous cubes get corroded in the process.
A magic trap that causes you to yearn for your distant homeland may instantly magic portal you to your quest home level (perhaps asking you first).
Fruits can be applied to create potions of fruit juice.
Cancelled trolls won’t rise from the dead.
Shining spellbooks give off as much light as a candle when wielded.
A bag of tricks may occasionally engulf and digest you.
Stomping boots. While wearing these, you may instakill and move into the square of all small monsters in the a, s, and x classes.
Priest characters are allowed to choose the pantheon of gods they follow. This gives them Basic proficiency in one or two of the skills of that pantheon’s corresponding role.
Gloves that are sufficiently burnt or rotted only protect from touching cockatrice corpses some of the time.
Move Sokoban much later in the dungeon, and make time not pass there. This Sokoban would consist of larger levels, but the boulder puzzles don’t cover the whole level.
Turn kicking a door into an occupation: you’ll keep kicking it until you get interrupted somehow, or successfully kick it down.
Since polearms are designed for use against mounted enemies, they get bonuses versus all u and C monsters. Also mounted enemies, if in a variant that has monster riding.
In item classes which have multiple price tiers (scrolls, spellbooks, potions, rings, etc), unidentified items will sell for the lowest price tier and cost the highest price tier.
Eucalyptus leaves always taste terrible, except to certain herbivorous polyforms (such as koalas and other zouthern animals in SLASH’EM).
Boots with the random appearance of “hiking” slightly decrease the speed penalties if you are encumbered.
Assuming bhaak’s bag of tricks proposal is implemented, allowing an empty bag of tricks to function as a sack:
When the bag is recharged, don’t destroy the contents. Instead, just make the contents inaccessible until it becomes empty again. Also, add a possible random effect to using the bag while charged: it spits out one of its contents at random.
Another proposal is to place the items in the bag into the inventories of the monsters created by the bag. It could even influence which monsters get created (e.g. a monster who will receive an orcish helm from the bag is likely to be an orc).
Not all zombies are hostile; only the hungry ones are. Thus, some zombies might be generated peaceful. However, a nonhungry zombie has a small chance of turning hungry each turn.
Scroll of religious text, which can be read for a prayer (or opportunity to pray) that ignores your prayer timeout.
Karma stone: a type of gray stone that, if it is blessed or cursed, can be rubbed on another item to transfer the blessing or curse to that item, making the stone uncursed in the process. Cursed karma stones in inventory eventually transfer their curse to a random item on their own; the stone might remain cursed after doing this. The loadstone in the Mimic of the Mines is replaced with one of these.
Dungeon branches that are completely submerged: their levels have a special level flag that treats you as underwater no matter what the terrain is. Would work better if a breath timer were implemented rather than instant drowning if a magical breathing source is lost. Trying to go down the stairs leading into the branch without the ability to survive underwater is equivalent to jumping into a pool: you will get wet and then crawl out (still on the stairs), without changing levels.
Digging through a vault wall counts as 5 tiles (for digging time or wand of digging purposes), and dulls your digging tool’s enchantment by 3.
If you attack a peaceful monster in sight of your quest guardians and leader, they give you a warning rather than instantly becoming angered.
Elven daggers and arrows (and really any pointy wooden weapon) has a 5% chance of instakilling any vampire who is not wearing body armor.
Centaurs can use lances as if they were riding.
Add “reach the Valley of the Dead carrying the Amulet” (or the Castle) as an achievement tracked by the game.
The “To what level do you want to teleport?” prompt accepts level names defined by the player.
You can knock monsters into water or lava with a staggering blow.
Explosions destroy diggable walls.
Psuedodragons that are tiny D-class monsters. They may be the starting pet of Wizards, but don’t grow up. Instead, they have some kind of telepathic/psychic/magic-enhancing passive ability that scales with their level.
The scroll and spellbook of web allow you to fire a web projectile (which would work similarly to a venom projectile, probably also being in VENOM_CLASS) or beam in a direction. If it hits a wall, it creates a web on the last non-wall space; if it hits a monster it creates a web on the monster’s space and immediately entangles it. If it goes far enough without hitting anything, it creates a web at the end of its range.
Giant spiders should possibly also be able to shoot a web like this, and if so the player should be able to do it via #monster when polymorphed into one.
God gifts come pre-identified: artifacts automatically become known (so that you get “the Giantslayer” rather than “a long sword named Giantslayer”; non-artifacts automatically become type-identified. At the same time, it may be useful to newer players to not hide the artifact’s base type, so perhaps the artifact should not become learned (though identifying its enchantment, etc is still fine).
Izchak sells scrolls and wands of light, maybe spellbooks too, at low frequencies.
Giantslayer kills all insects adjacent to the player for a possible “Seven at one blow” effect.
Track monsters that you have named. If you genocide a class of monsters that contains any you have named, notify the player of their death.
Falconer role that starts with a kestrel and special arm-protecting gloves.
Barbarians and cavemen get weapons/ammo instead of spellbooks as a prayer boon, or enhancements to their current weapons.
Orcish characters will never be able to tame elves, and elvish characters will never be able to tame orcs.
Scale the monster “healing” spell so that late-game spellcasters can actually heal themselves with it.
Remove the possibility of “Blecch! Rotten food!” from uncursed non-corpse comestibles.
If Mjollnir is thrown and would hit a valkyrie player monster wearing gauntlets of power, they catch it instead.
If the Wizard has started to harass you, enlightenment shows “You are being harassed.”
Make the Castle a side branch, putting two down staircases on Medusa, one of which goes to the Valley and the other of which goes to the Castle branch, first preceded by several maze levels.
In cases where Vorpal Blade won’t decapitate because the monster is headless, it does double damage instead with the message “Vorpal Blade goes snicker-snack on the foo!”
When viewing skills with #enhance, show the maximum skill caps for all listed skills.
When choosing the monster type for a mask, use a higher difficulty threshold than it would take to generate monsters; otherwise masks only generate with level-appropriate monsters which the player probably doesn’t want to turn into.
Blessed harmful potions give resistance to that effect.
When a packrat generates normally, a random item is created that it carries.
New artifact Imaginary Widget: The base object is randomized among non-polearm melee weapons each game. Deals double damage to monsters that don’t exist in real life (e.g. foxes and mastodons and giant eels are real; wargs and mumaks and krakens are not).
If you dip for Excalibur while using a helm of opposite alignment to be lawful and the attempt would succeed, the Lady of the Lake notices that something is wrong. She emerges from the fountain, grabs your sword, turns it into Excalibur, and rips off your helmet. This allows non-lawfuls to get Excalibur, but only by defeating her.
When you’re hallucinating, show the Black Market as “Sam’s Club”.
Unless you are blind, all boxes are obviously locked or unlocked once you see them. There is no need to first loot a chest only to learn that it’s locked.
You can dip a potion into a sink to pour water into it from the tap, diluting it and causing runoff which subjects you to vapor effects (hopefully identifying it). For simplicity, the 1/30 chance of a random potion coming out of the sink should probably be ignored here.
Nerf the effects of diluted potions in order to disincentivize diluting them and fix alchemy abuses. Start with healing potions: a diluted healing potion of any type heals only half as much as otherwise, and either confers half as much max HP as an undiluted potion or possibly no max HP at all. When alchemizing with diluted potions, half of the amount dipped will bubble or steam off as water, wasting those potions entirely (e.g. 6 diluted healings + gain energy = 3 diluted extra healings).
Dipping potions deliberately into a large water source (anything but the potion of water) turns them into water in one go, without a need to dip twice. You get a message about pouring out the old potion and filling the bottle with water. Being submerged underwater is not necessarily deliberate so it does not instadilute potions to water all at once.
Rope golems sometimes drop leashes, bullwhips, or grappling hooks upon death.
Crystal balls can accept words instead of symbols, such as “dragon” or “trap”.
Artifact blank spellbook that guarantees success when writing in it and can be read infinitely without blanking. However, it can never be blanked or cancelled. Or possibly it generates as a random type of spellbook, and can only be blanked if not yet read.
Artifact wand of striking whose damage increases with its recharge count. Its odds of exploding on a recharge are lower than usual for wands.
Blessed gloves of any type allow you to handle cursed weapons without them welding to your hands.
A #ragequit command which quits the game without any confirmation. But it’s a non-autocompleting extended command, so you do have to type the whole word out.
Allow the game administrator to put a random value that will be mixed into the game’s seed into the sysconf file, so that RNG-predicting manipulation can’t be used.
Rather than making weapons train 1-to-1 on all successful hits, make them train differently:
Gauntlets of force guarantee that any #force attempt will succeed, and will not break your weapon or items in the container being forced.
When a spellbook’s ward is studied, it is possible to get a non-failure, non-success result of “you’re not skilled enough to tell if there is a useful ward here”. This is done by throwing the player’s Int, XL, and possibly other stats into some deterministic function along with the book’s object id and the ward it actually contains.
Stepping on a squeaky board near a sink may spawn one or more sewer rats on the sink. Alternatively, sinks may occasionally just spawn a sewer rat on their own.
The mysterious force triggers every certain amount of turns; this sends you either back to the downstairs of your current level or the upstairs of the level below. Changing levels resets the timer.
If you use any stolen shop items while in the shop, the shopkeeper recognizes them and gets angry at you.
You can eat cloaks of protection and invisibility to get those intrinsically. Eating a cloak of protection is equivalent to eating a +3 ring of protection.
When you kill a demon lord, its lair becomes diggable.
Monks get a small amount of free bonus movement points when they kill a monster bare-handed, and also gain a small amount of free bonus movement points while making movement actions and not wearing body armor.
A command that you can prefix some action with to voluntarily make that interruptible action uninterruptible.
A role whose main mechanic is engraving and carving different magical runes on the ground.
Artifact weapon that creates a shockwave upon hitting a monster, dealing minimal damage to other monsters behind it.
Add spheres that give buff effects and deal no damage to whatever they explode at. They target tame monsters if tame, and hostile monsters if hostile. There is a spell that summons them.
If monsters with area-of-effect passive attacks are implemented, these monsters should perhaps be eyes instead of spheres, and have the buff effect as their passive, and no explosion attack.
Add stunning and confusion spheres, which cause those effects when they explode.
Cursed scrolls of wishing give the usual cursed wish effect - the item comes out cursed regardless of beatitude, wishing for positives gives you negatives, etc.
Anti-magic fields end a bunch of temporary magical intrinsics, such as speed or see invisible.
Replace the mysterious force with “dark energy”, which starts pooling from the high altar of Moloch soon after you get the Amulet, and thereafter from the downstairs of a given level. If you are caught by the dark energy, you start taking a bunch of damage, limiting the amount of time you can spend on levels after getting the Amulet.
New object property “sacrificial”. When something bad happens to you (any one bad effect, really), if you have a sacrificial object equipped, the object disintegrates and the effect is nullified.
Using wizard lock on a monster locks their pack, preventing them from using items against you.
The travel command automatically opens doors as you go.
Sunsword does extra damage to vampires and trolls, on top of its normal bonuses versus undead.
Chargeable ring that reduces incoming damage (perhaps by half, not triggering if half physical or half spell damage applies from some other source) but may lose a charge every time you take damage.
A spell that lets you mark a tile within some radius. A few turns later, any monster on that tile is dealt significant damage.
If you have very high strength, kicking open a door can cause it to be knocked off the hinges and land on top of a monster behind it.
Give potions more side dipping effects:
Whenever a lich is created, a special phylactery amulet is created somewhere on the level. When the lich is killed, the phylactery begins a timer to resurrect into the lich again. The player can somehow destroy it to finish the lich off once and for all.
Weapon differentiation - possibly a replacement of the old D&D “damage vs. small / damage vs. large” system currently in use. Weapons would do the same damage regardless of what size the target is, but might get a damage bonus or penalty based on if the target is vulnerable or resistant to piercing, slashing, or whacking/blunt weapons. Being resistant to this weapon type means that the damage is halved; being vulnerable to it means that the damage is multiplied by 1.5. Some obvious examples:
While wielding a polearm, moving orthogonally towards an enemy that is 3 spaces away (making it 2 spaces away, after the move) makes a free attack on that monster.
Allow the player to complete the Invocation as long as they have ‘‘ever had 7 different candles in the game’’, even if they don’t have any right now. Flavoring this as the candle stubs being kept around and sputtering to life for long enough to do the invocation, immediately snuffing them afterward.
A bunch of scattered ideas for handling candles, given that the hero almost always wants to have only one lit at a time:
The #attributes screen gives you several time-related pieces of info:
Instead of the Wizard of Yendor stealing all quest artifacts, he can only steal ones that don’t belong to your role, since you didn’t actually earn them.
The portal on the Plane of Fire moves around, one space in a random direction each turn. Never onto lava or another trap.
Negative “paranoia” intrinsic that randomly adds and removes fake invisible monsters on the map.
An early-game body armor piece that increases Pw regeneration.
Electric spider that, when it stands on a web, can electrify that web and all contiguous ones, dealing shock damage to anything in it.
Fountains can be contaminated by letting corpses rot on top of them. This makes them more dangerous to use.
Allow capital letters to be entered at direction prompts.
When you have greasy fingers, you can touch and pick up cockatrice corpses safely.
A intrinsic that negates the single next instance of HP loss, and then goes away. Possibly granted by a spell.
When you forget a spell, give the player a message “You have forgotten the ‘foo’ spell.” Also give warnings when you reach 10% and 1% memory.
A compass item, which when applied points up or down depending on where the stairs to Vlad’s Tower are. It spins around if you’re on the level itself or inside the tower.
Invoking the Amulet of Yendor gives you a random possibly helpful, possibly harmful effect:
Reduce the level of create familiar significantly, and make it only able to create replacement pets and possibly similar low-difficulty monsters, and not work if you already have any pets. Add a 7th-level clerical spell, “create minion”, that summons tame/allied minions of your god.
Confuse monster scrolls grant more charges than castings of the spell do. This means that the uncursed scroll should grant several charges, and the blessed one even more.
If the player has glowy confuse-monster hands, ranged projectile attacks also work to confuse monsters, not just melee attacks.
Pressing space gives the YAFM “This command intentionally left blank.”
Allow spells to be moved to arbitrary letters in the spell rearranging menu, not just letters starting at ‘a’ up until however many spells the player currently knows. This lets players have their spells on letters they are used to from game to game.
Factor your role’s skill cap in spells’ schools into the success rates for those spells.
Remove fainting and direct starvation as a game mechanic.
You can haggle with shopkeepers to sell items. They’ll make an initial lowball offer, you can counter with something, they can counter it, eventually converging to a mutually agreed price. Sometimes refusing to go lower can convince the shopkeeper to accept the higher price; sometimes the shopkeeper will refuse to go higher. If you make an offer lower than their current offer, give them a YAFM ‘[shk] raises his/her eyebrow. “Deal.”’
Entering ‘*’ at the prompt for genocide does a current-dungeon-level genocide attempt of all creatures. Cursed reverse genocides random monsters, blessed kills all monsters level-wide subject to a resistance roll, and uncursed does the same but in a smaller radius.
Let the player type “bgf” at a wish prompt and alias it to “blessed greased fixed”.
Various forms of AoE monster-debuff candles. Charm them, anti-undead, etcetera.
Special candle found generated in Gehennom. While one is lit on a level, it suppresses spawn rates and makes the difficulty about what it is now (without the candle lit monsters will generate at a much higher difficulty). They should be fairly nonrenewable, perhaps wishable but not polymorphable. This limits your duration of time in “easy Gehennom” before it gets harder. The candles work the same outside Gehennom, but are less useful (maybe they specifically suppress demon spawns).
A conduct that is broken if you use a unicorn horn. (Possibly, only if you get healing effects from a unicorn horn; using it as a weapon is fine.)
Fruit juice turns into booze all on its own if you leave it alone for long enough.
If you ascend while polymorphed and your role is genocided, your god gives you some YAFM.
Alternatively (or additionally), the game is recorded as “ascended while on Charon’s boat”.
You can dual wield Sting and Orcrist; this gives an even bigger damage bonus against orcish monsters.
Custom-order shop: you pay up front for an item which is not there, and come back a certain (random maybe?) amount of turns later, when a mail daemon will deliver the item.
After a priest gives you two bits for an ale a certain number of times, they say “wow maybe I should not enable your alcohol addiction” and stop giving you more.
Unchanging prevents you from starting to turn to stone (it already prevents starting to turn to slime), and if you are in the process of turning to either, it halts the process but does not cure it.
Random closets that have secret doors (but not no door at all) can sometimes generate a random item inside, or possibly a dungeon feature like a sink. (Generating a sink would be a bad idea unless the sink glyph is changed, since it’s otherwise identical to the corridor glyph normally used for closets).
When multiple-turn searching, stop when a new monster enters your field of vision.
Artifact flail or short sword, the Debugger. Deals double damage to all a-class, s-class, and x-class monsters.
When remove curse changes the beatitude of things in your inventory, those things glow the appropriate color (or feel warm if you’re blind). The scroll is identified only if at least one beatitude-identified thing changed its state.
If you escape the dungeon, a short blurb prints describing your post-dungeon career. This factors in your material wealth (gold, gems, and other things you escaped with), deity anger (they will be mad at you for abandoning the mission regardless, but if already angry before your escape you will not live long outside the dungeon), and alignment record (bad alignment could cause you to get spurned by your peers), along with possibly more factors, such as if you escaped with a fake Amulet.
Breaking a wand of wishing will wrest it if possible.
Hitting a fountain with a ray of cold or cold blast freezes and breaks it, creating frozen pools in the area.
A greased object thrown across the floor will slide an extra 2d4 spaces.
When a container containing items is polymorphed, it can only turn into other containers (possibly never a bag of holding to prevent abuse). Or else the contents just get spilled out (and possibly polymorphed themselves).
You can invoke the Amulet on Moloch’s high altar to destroy it; this does something good later for you (more points? prestige?) but Moloch will now harrow and hound you down all the way back through Gehennom even more fiercely than usually.
Playing a wooden harp (and possibly a wooden flute) near intelligent peacefuls may cause them to give you some money or items from their inventory, but there’s also a chance that they become hostile (without an alignment penalty though).
If you happen to get teleported while you are _ traveling and you have teleport control, the cursor is automatically placed on where you wanted to travel to. (It doesn’t automatically teleport you there - you are still able to move the cursor around before doing the teleport.)
Possibly, add an option to toggle this behavior off, though it’s hard to imagine why someone wouldn’t want it.
The spellcasting menu automatically (by default) assigns letters to spells in a fixed order, rather than alphabetically in the order the player learned them. For instance, ordering by school, then by ascending level, then by name. Or even just in objects.c order. This guarantees that unless the player rearranges the menu, they will always have the same letters from game to game.
Samurai can wield katanas, wakizashis, and sabers in zero turns.
Give a YAFM if you would “sink like a rock” while currently turning to stone, or polymorphed into a stone monster (gargoyles, earth elemental, stone golem).
You can stomp your foot by kicking at the ground. This causes noise around you, waking monsters, depending on how much weight you’re carrying. Cannot be done over a certain encumbrance.
Dogs are buffed to be better fighting than cats as a starting pet, but lose their ability to curse detect.
When applying a mirror at yourself, give different messages depending on your race, gender, and charisma.
Deafness protects against cockatrice hissing and therefore their stoning. (This might be too powerful; it might need to just reduce the chance of stoning rather than eliminating it altogether.)
Thick woolen socks, worn in the boot slot. Give no AC, but provide cold resistance.
Gillyweed: comestible that grants temporary intrinsic magical breathing when eaten.
Allow sufficiently skilled characters to multi-fire while levitating.
Make the breakage rate of ammo tied to the player’s skill ‘‘cap’’ in its corresponding skill, in addition to the actual level the player has advanced that skill to. This incentivizes roles which start with ammo to use it rather than finding a subpar melee option because any ammo they would fire early on would break..
Allow Rangers to advance bow skill to Master.
Intrinsic teleportitis is no longer binary; you build it up by getting the intrinsic from multiple corpses. With more of it built up, the random teleports happen more frequently (essentially, “teleport opportunities” happen at the same rate the currently do; if you have N% teleportitis, you have an N% chance of teleporting on each opportunity).
However, the effect wears off over time and eventually fades completely (with some message like “You feel less jumpy”, so the hero knows they can’t Ctrl-T at will anymore).
Extrinsic teleportitis remains the same, triggering a teleport at the same rate it does currently.
This implementation meshes well with a partial intrinsic system like in SporkHack or EvilHack.
The Longbow of Diana has different effects based on which alignment you are (or perhaps it’s just different artifact bows, only one of which appears). Lawfuls get an Apollonian bow which shoots gold arrows which have higher base damage. Neutrals’ bow fires silver regular arrows. Chaotics’ bow automatically poisons fired arrows.
Applying a pruning hook (or possibly any polearm) to a space containing a tree, assuming there’s no monster occupying that space, it triggers the regular bees/fruit from the tree without needing to kick it.
If you apply a mirror at an empty square and that square is a “corner” (in a corridor), you gain temporary vision in the perpendicular line around that corner. If it’s a T-junction you look both ways. There is a “Done.” at the end like detect monsters has.
The Amulet of Yendor blocks teleporting within a dungeon level, but only after a certain radius. Short-range teleports work fine.
Structure player speed on a four-tier system: normal, fast (available intrinsically), very fast (available extrinsically via speed boots), and extremely fast (temporary and available only via consumables).
Unconsecrated or minor altars. They are either to some unnamed lesser god, or to no one in particular. They can be converted to your god like normal, but don’t have any penalty for kicking or attempting to engrave or anything while still unconsecrated.
Desks as dungeon furniture: they can store items like a container, and acts like a table if you are on top of it (if levitating you can interact with it and things on it). Sometimes generates a magic marker inside. Writing scrolls or spellbooks at a desk has some bonus: maybe a higher chance of writing unidentified, or a slightly reduced or capped ink cost. Possibly put one or more in the College of Archaeology, and Warden Arianna’s office for Convicts.
When polymorphed into a paper golem, you can’t write on the floor with your finger because it would get too dirty.
Usage fees can never exceed the original cost of an item, and when you buy the item, any usage fee is removed (it’s only charged if you use the item without buying).
King Arthur gets the same resistance suite that the player gets for crowning, and the Grand Master and Master Kaen get the suite of intrinsics that high-level monks get.
Boulders tear through spider webs (whether from a rolling boulder trap, thrown by a giant, or pushed by the hero). For extra realism, the web slows its momentum.
Delicatessen shopkeepers chide you if you eat something while in their shop that doesn’t belong to them and that you didn’t buy from them. “Buy something or get out!”
You can climb into and hide inside large boxes.
When you have a slower pet leashed, slow down _ travel by resting whenever you would move far enough from the pet to pull on the leash.
Potions of sickness induce vomiting, which can be used in a pinch to cure food poisoning or overeating.
Thrown potions of sickness create a stinking cloud centered on the spot they break. If the potion were diluted, the cloud is either smaller or disperses faster.
When an egg gets very, very old, it cracks and releases a small stinking cloud. If it happens to be carried by the player, the cloud centers on the player. When it is close to rotten, the player can throw it and it will release the stinking cloud wherever it shatters. (The chance of it releasing a stinking cloud increases with age, asymptotically towards 100% the older the egg is).
Attempting to eat an old rotten egg will create the stinking cloud on the player’s square.
Amulet of reincarnation: when you die, it prevents your game from ending, but it permanently polymorphs you into a different form.
Cavemen (maybe only lawfuls) get a small alignment bonus for cannibalism, because it is honoring the ancestors.
Some, most, or all roles begin the game with high or maxed Luck. Of course, without a luckstone, this times out over a few thousand turns.
Alchemic golem, which is basically made out of potions. Its melee attacks expose you to random potion or potion vapor effects. Killing it drops a few random potions and causes more random vapor effects. It can spontaneously explode when it hits something, with a greater chance when you hit it in melee. The explosion obviously also causes multiple random vapor effects to the area, and scatters potions around (by throwing them, so they tend to smash if they hit anything).
Vorpal and bisecting weapons don’t get dull when you engrave with them.
Hallucinatory trap names for when you look at traps while hallucinating: “slime pit”, “jack-in-a-box”, “buzzsaw trap”, “spiked floor”, “axeblade trap”, “queasy board”, “revolving wall”, “uneven floor”, “anti-anti-magic field”, “ice trap”, “finger trap”.
When a monster wields Vorpal Blade out of your sight, you hear “a distant snicker-snack”.
Because general stores will buy anything, they will only buy stuff at 1/2 or 1/3 of its usual sell cost. To obtain the full cost you have to sell items at a specialized shop of their type.
You can dip an item in a ochre, spotted jelly, or acid blob corpse to make it take acid damage (if applicable).
Inflicting poison damage on a monster, or killing it by poison, makes the corpse poisonous to eat.
General artifact-stealing attack; like the Wizard’s quest-artifact-steal attack but applicable to all artifacts and without Amulet of Yendor theft baked in. Archeologist player monsters might use this (“That belongs in a museum!”).
Various alternate endings for the game:
Also see the Astral Escape Patch.
Armor of lifesaving. Works as expected, saves your life but disintegrates in the process; more interesting than an amulet because it leaves you more vulnerable after disintegrating. This could possibly be an (extremely rare) object property.
Resistance rings, if worn while using barehanded ungloved combat, get a damage bonus of the elemental type they provide resistance to.
Non-cursed rings of hunger don’t drain excess nutrition when you are Hungry, and slow digestion rings don’t slow your digestion when you’re oversatiated.
If you attack a monster while standing on Elbereth, all monsters in line of sight stop respecting Elbereth.
Artifact figurine Doppeldoll: when applied turns into a tame clone of yourself with copies of all your weapons and armor.
Generalize health food stores into a special type of role-specific shop. This shop isn’t an actual shop; it signals the level generator to transform it into a different specific type of shop depending on the player’s role. The role-specific shops contain role-helpful items like health food does for Monks. They can be found randomly generated with probability around 5%. If a role doesn’t have a specific type of shop associated, the shop becomes a general store instead.
Glass doors that you can see through and kick to break with ease.
AC you have from your polyform should not stack with AC you have from armor. The game should compute both, take the max, and then add on AC from other factors like protection.
Non-weapon stethoscope skill, which gives less information than it currently does at Unskilled (perhaps just HP), the same amount of information as currently at Basic, more information like pet tameness and apport at Skilled, and a full probe at Expert. Possibly it also takes a full turn to use until Basic or Skilled.
Gloves that give a boost to multishot somehow: either increase the maximum by 1, or reroll the roll if it happened to be 1, or something. There’s debate on how not to overpower multishot with an item like this.
When starting or restoring the game while hallucinating, after the “welcome to NetHack!” message, print the message “NetHack is filmed in front of a live studio audience.”
If you used to have the Amulet but now don’t for some reason, your death message gets “(without the Amulet)” appended to it.
Up the chance for a wish for a wand of wishing giving you a wand that contains one more wrestable wish, to 50% or 75%.
F corpses can be dipped into potions to make different potions: juice + violet fungus = booze, juice + yellow mold = sickness, water + green mold = acid. (Note the existence of the Brewing Patch, which dissolves most F in juice to produce confusion, hallucination, booze, sleeping, and healing.)
Later suggested recipes which involve dipping a corpse in acid to dissolve it:
Losing alignment makes it permanently harder to regain alignment. Do this by instead of using a linear scale where current alignment equals alignment gained minus alignment lost, use a ratio where current alignment is alignment gained divided by alignment lost (probably with some constant factor in there somewhere).
Weight the probability of Orcish Town down lower than 1/7. Possibly as a starting point, reintroduce Frontier Town as minetn-8 so that the probability will become 1/8.
Leashes show on the map so you can tell where a leashed invisible pet is.
Monks, and possibly other roles, can learn martial arts techniques out of spellbooks similar to dnethack wards and SLASH’EM bard spells.
Spell that creates temporary weapons and armor made of energy: good base stats, but no magical properties, and vanish after some amount of time. Not defined whether they should be enchantable; probably they should but the enchantment will vanish along with the rest of it.
Luggage pet for Tourists. Has very high carry capacity and doesn’t drop items of its own accord. Fights like a normal pet. Either it is immune to damage but has a low maximum level to compensate, or if overwhelmed, it doesn’t die but instead turns into a normal “luggage” object that will eventually reanimate.
The common suggestion along these lines has been to give tourists the Luggage as their starting pet, but the common criticism of that idea is that it makes Tourists far too powerful from the outset. Instead, a possibility is that you can trade the Platinum Yendorian Express Card to Twoflower in exchange for the Luggage. (The Card then vanishes, so you can’t arrange Twoflower’s death and get both).
Customizable, player-named “hat” armor that uses a similar system to slime molds, except it is 0 AC helm-slot armor. Archeologist fedoras are set to this by default, and the fedora item is removed and replaced with the more generic “hat”, which is hard-set to fedora for Arc’s starting hat.
When riding, your steed may randomly go in a different direction than you intended. Higher riding skill decreases this, and expert blocks it entirely. Possibly, the steed will use this ability to shy away from water or other known hazards.
Monsters apply mirrors at you if you are a nymph or umber hulk.
Seduction (possibly for nymphs as well as foocubi) may not work if the seducer is invisible.
Quaffing cursed invisibility removes the invisibility intrinsic if you had it. Possibly the same for see invisible.
When a monster wears a helm of opposite alignment, it becomes tame if it were hostile, hostile if it were tame, and either hostile or tame depending on the helm if it were peaceful. When it removes the helm, it undergoes a fresh peacefulness check as if it newly generated.
Spells can be “bound” together so that they can be cast simultaneously.
Make the Castle not a graveyard level, and compensate for this by altering wraith corpse drop odds somehow.
Engraving (or ward) that is bad/cursed, and it causes bad things to happen on or around it. Anti-Elbereth of sorts. Monsters may deliberately engrave it to hurt the player.
Extend the Advent Calendar patch to include Hanukkah gifts: behind the same appropriate doors depending on the date in December, you can find candles and potions of oil. If mundane candelabrums are added, possibly add those too.
If polymorphed into a giant, you can pick up a door off its hinges (breaking it).
Checkerbug: like a grid bug, but can only move diagonally.
Ravens flee from straw golems, who are basically scarecrows.
Make the Wizard of Yendor’s corpse always taste terrible.
Fix flavor of steam vortex messages. “You’re being boiled alive!” and “Mmm, a sauna” if fire resistant. If you aren’t carrying a towel, “You wish you had brought your towel to the sauna”.
Asmodeus’ cold attack can freeze potions in containers.
Archeologists (maybe gnomes too) start the game with all valuable and worthless gems (but not gray stones) identified. If this is too powerful, perhaps they only begin the game with all worthless glass identified.
You can apply an empty expensive camera at a yellow light to recharge it.
If you manage to get an aligned priest to wear a helm of opposite alignment, he becomes a priest of a different god. (Not defined what this should do to Moloch priests; maybe their heads explode?)
Wearing gauntlets of power, you can snag a boulder and pull it with a grappling hook. If in Sokoban this incurs a penalty.
Ranged attacks get an accuracy bonus if you rested the previous turn.
Confused scrolls of wishing let you wish for a terrain type that appears under you, like in wizard mode.
Ghosts lose their physical touch attack in favor of a reusable attack that scare-paralyzes you. Possibly, if this is unflavorful due to it just being the same ghost, change their AI to make them turn invisible after a certain amount of time being visible and not next to the player. Then they path towards you, and if you either stumble into them or they are next to you and get a move, they turn visible, paralyzing you. Since the actual action of them appearing out of nowhere would be what frightens you, see invisible would negate the effect.
Pits (and other traps?) on early dungeon levels sometimes generate revealed.
Object property “frost walker”, which only generates on boots. When worn, lava cools into solid floor and water freezes into ice in a radius 1 around the wearer. Optional if they unfreeze afterwards. Alternatively, make this an artifact pair of water walking boots.
Give a different message for when you injure your legs by kicking. Possibly as subtle as “Ouch! That really hurts!”, but could be more explicit like “Ouch! You injured your leg!”
Reading a scroll of knowledge while confused or hallucinating gives you enlightenment instead.
If Aeglos/Aiglos, the Spear of Gil-galad, is ever implemented, it should have cold-related effects, because it means “Snow-point”.
Closed-for-inventory shops, if you encounter them again on the ascension run, will now be open.
Whether an artifact has or hasn’t yet cooled down is visible to the player.
All instances of “mysterious force” are changed to “normal force” when you’re hallucinating.
The hood on a worn dwarvish cloak will protect your helm from getting rusted.
Wearing armor made of gold increases your Charisma by 1 or 2 for each piece worn (possibly even bypassing racial maximums).
If you stack up too many extra movement points from scrolls of time, time freezes even for you, and your game ends with the killer reason being “became frozen in time”.
When you throw ammo without the proper launcher, the game makes it clear that you’re doing it wrong, e.g. “You clumsily throw the arrow”. This also abuses Wisdom.
New artifact: The Trident of Poseidon. Chaotic (only because Poseidon is in-game). While carried, grants magical breathing, swimming, and protects items from water damage. When wielded, confers water walking. Double damage versus aquatic monsters, and gets a damage bonus versus all that scales with the amount of water squares adjacent to you. Invoke to get an UnNetHack-style flood.
Armor made of bone increases your spellcasting ability somehow (many ways to do this; decrease failure rate? Decrease Pw cost?)
Give a YAFM when near or chatting to a hallucinogen-distorted leprechaun: “They’re after me lucky charms!”
When you are polymorphed into a sea monster, you can sit on fountains and drink potions of water to regenerate HP.
Instead of being perpetually rechargeable (that opens up a lot of exploits and farming like smoky potion farming and infinite altar farming with the Platinum Yendorian Express Card), horns of plenty now stop being rechargeable after 7 recharges.
Silence auras that prevent both you and monsters spellcasting. Maybe also a directed silence spell, which silences an individual monster. While silenced, monsters can’t be chatted to, and nothing they do will make noise (possibly only if in a silence aura).
While under the effect of silence, the player’s stealth is elevated.
Assuming that shallow water is implemented: all giants should use the shallow water behavior of only wetting their feet even when walking through deep water. Also, fire giants can wade through lava, which acts mostly the same.
The treasure found under randomly generated gravestones should be more treasure-like or the sort of items that get buried in graves in real life, rather than just random objects.
Once you enter the large vault in Fort Ludios, several guards or Kops will appear from the portal and try to come hunt you down.
If you wield a c corpse and take any of several actions that normally turns you to stone, it instead rolls a body part to see which part of you touches the corpse. If this part of you is wearing armor, you don’t touch it and so don’t turn to stone. However, it’s impossible to cover yourself completely.
Command that marks a given square with something that’s visible on the map but doesn’t exist in the actual game.
The weight of your character varies depending on your hunger status.
When potions break on the ground, they leave puddles of that potion. Pets can drink this puddle to get the effects. They also give effects (vapor effects, plus acid burning) to any monster standing in them, which is nice because it makes it harder for the player to stand in one place and fight a horde of enemies. Not defined what should happen if multiple potions mix in one spot - alchemize perhaps.
Magic lamps and regular lamps can generate as various different materials. For rare material variants, a djinni that comes out of a magic lamp of that material and grants a wish will return back inside it one or two times, thereby granting multiple wishes.
The game records the number of times the mysterious force triggers in either the dumplog or the xlogfile, so that it can be observed and analyzed later.
Circus artist role. You can tame circus animals like tigers, catch incoming missiles with your bare hands, and jump over bottomless pits.
Alarm trap on doors: it makes a noise to alert nearby monsters, and also summons a squad of ogres or Kops or whatever on one of the stairs.
You can pray at a gravestone, or possibly ring a bell at one, to cause any of a number of good and bad effects:
After you get one effect, the gravestone is flagged so that it doesn’t happen again (or, more evilly, that any further attempts will only result in bad effects). Possibly shouldn’t work at all on graveyard levels, because they have too many graves to balance these effects.
Bluff monster: a shapeshifter that is biased towards powerful forms and nasties, but it actually retains the weak attacks and HP and AC of its regular form.
Genociding part of an amalgamation turns the monster into a non-amalgamation of whatever its other half is.
Caltrops: a nonmagic stackable tool that when applied creates a “caltrop trap” on your space, which damages / immobilizes / slows the first monster to enter it. Rangers and rogues excel at using them and possibly get some bonuses from them. Not difficult to untrap, though it would be nice if some caltrops could gradually be lost in the process. Maybe spreading caltrops consumes five or so of them, and you won’t always get five back during an untrap.
Slime terrain or puddles of slime, left behind when P-class monsters move around. It either deals damage or erodes footwear to stand in it.
New artifact Callandor, a glass long sword or crystal sword in dNetHack. Lawful, provides double spell damage when wielded. Possibly only gifted to male characters (based on its source mythos, the Wheel of Time, where it is a male-magic amplifier).
You can leash peaceful and hostile monsters, but peacefuls will turn hostile, and they will attempt to get the leash off.
Dipping or dropping gold pieces in a fountain very rarely increases your Luck.
Poisonous tree frogs, which only generate in trees. Applying darts or arrows to them can coat the darts or arrows with poison, but the poison can also get on your hands.
If you’re invisible, peaceful monsters may bump into you and get mad.
Chatting to monsters gives different various effects depending on your current form and the other monster. For instance, chatting to an orc as an elf or vice versa will make them hostile.
Artifact weapon Rodneybane: has a giant bonus against the Wizard (only) and negates the Amulet’s extra Pw drainage. Located in some heavily guarded location.
Rings carried by Nazgul are all artifact rings of invisibility. They autocurse and also confer telepathy, see invisible and aggravate monster.
For variants with wand skill, higher wand skill improves the outcomes from snapping a wand. Ideas include increasing the effective number of remaining charges, increasing the explosion radius, and decreasing the damage the player takes.
Statues generate in throne rooms, because they are the sort of thing a throne room would have.
All acidic corpses, not just acid blobs, never get tainted (but do eventually rot away).
Add nets, on the basis that NetHack needs to have nets in it. You can throw them in pools to fish with, and throw them at small monsters to trap them in place. There could also be a trap that catches you in a net. You can also mess up throwing them and tangle yourself instead. Possibly, nets would be their own skill too.
For simplicity of implementation, they should create a temporary web on the player’s space (with a flag set so that it uses “net” in its messages instead of “web” and is probably harder/impossible to tear through at high Strength). Either nets would generate in stacks of 11-20 and get destroyed when the monster escaped the net, or they would drop themselves (most of the time) when the monster escaped the net and destroyed the trap. Either way, they should be fairly light.
If you hit a cockatrice with a corpse of a non-petrification-resistant monster, the corpse turns into a statue.
Scroll of material change, which converts the material of an object into a different one.
If you drown while playing as a Pirate, the death message is changed to “went to Davy Jones’ locker”.
When either 1) you are hallucinating and hit something well enough to have gotten a ! on the hit message or 2) hit something with a type weakness (fire versus cold-resistant, cold versus fire-resistant, electricity versus water, etc), an additional “It’s super effective!” message is printed.
When Fire and Frost Brand come into contact with water due to rust traps or dipping them in fountains, print a message about the water instantly evaporating or freezing. If either is dipped into a fountain, it dries it up.
Muzzles that can be put on pets so they stop eating food off the floor. Uncursed ones block their eating 90% of the time; blessed 100%; and cursed ones weld to the pet’s face and prevent it from eating anything until it starves or the curse is removed. May also decrease tameness when put on the pet.
Add un-eroding a dipped item as an additional fountain dip effect.
If you have been crowned, you can trade your crowned status for a wish. (You still keep the huge prayer timeout though.)
Spellcasters who curse items also have a separate way to remove your knowledge of items’ beatitude, so you don’t know what might have just been cursed.
When an imp says “Look! Thy bootlace is undone!”, he might tie your shoes together and cause you to fumble for d10 turns.
The game opening text for certain roles is changed from “It is written in the Book of [deity]:”
Some means of leaving an engraving on the ground for the next player who reaches that floor to encounter (not a bones file, just a random engraving).
If you’re polyselfed to a lithivore, worthless glass tastes terrible but valuable gems taste delicious. Each gray stone gives a different YAFM: “Yabba-dabba delicious” for flint, “That was a heavy meal” for loadstone, “The stone’s texture is delightful/distasteful” for touchstone, ??? for luckstone.
Rework hard helmet mechanics so that for large objects like boulders, they only take a few points off if anything.
Drop bears: possibly t-class monsters (or z-class, if the SLASH’EM zouthern animals monster class is used) that hide on the ceiling, generating next to or near trees. They are unimpressive in combat, except for the nasty amount of damage they deal with their initial dropping attack. Can only go back to hiding when next to a tree.
For most calculations that involve the depth of the Sanctum (score, level difficulty with the Amulet) use a constant 50 in place of the Sanctum depth.
Bird pets are better at combat than mammals, but can carry much less due to weighing less.
Subspace branch, which has many entrances and exits to various parts of the dungeon for quick traversal. However, it’s populated with nasty monsters.
Figurines cost 50 times their monster’s base level (or some other constant).
Instead of instakilling, death rays cause a delayed instadeath that require consumables or prayer to fix. Touch of death should also probably fall under this.
Random killer bees always spawn female. Male ones can only generate in beehives.
You can’t produce more holy or unholy water by dipping. Instead, each water can be dipped into a largeish but finite number of times.
An unaligned alignment quest.
Restore ability sources (including unicorn horns) only restore stat points up to their starting values, not to the highest values reached. Alternatively, restore up to the average of the starting and maximum value, rounded down.
If you have enough Str, you can dig with your bare hands, but it takes much longer and may incur HP damage.
When you complete your Quest and return the artifact back to your Quest leader, and if you return to them with the Amulet, you are rewarded with a (one-time) hero’s feast. This restores HP and fills your nutrition to just below Satiated (and increments the turn counter?)
Tourists begin the game with walking shoes.
You can consolidate wands of the same type by rubbing them on each other. This transfers one less than the number of charges in the wand (or just 1 charge if the wand has only one charge), and increments the recharge counter of the new wand. Overcharging a wand like this beyond its normal generation limits is likely to make it explode.
Rebalance multishot damage so that multishooting +7 projectiles doesn’t give a massive damage bonus over a single +7 melee weapon. Possibly only apply the damage bonus to the first projectile.
If the player is strong enough and able to pick up a sink off the floor, it actually works: they rip it off the floor and water floods the room.
Player monsters can pray and become invulnerable and have their problems fixed by their god.
Inside the Wizard’s Tower, the player encounters some of the Wizard’s hostile apprentice wizards.
Shepherds’ crooks: a wooden multi-purpose weapon-tool.
The Master Key of Thievery can be wielded and makes 3-4 stealing attempts per hit. Alternatively, it can be wielded in the offhand while twoweaponing and make 1-2 stealing attempts per hit.
Itlachiayaque can be read to get a clairvoyance mapping, with the message “You see nearby terrain reflected in the depths of the shield.” This should possibly be limited so that it can’t be done infinitely; perhaps it only works when the invoke timeout is zero and increases the invoke timeout by some small amount when read.
The Staff of Aesculapius doubles healing from all sources while wielded.
Assuming a scroll of consecration exists: confused scroll of consecration consecrates your weapon, which blesses and fooproofs it and maxes/increases its enchantment with no possibility of evaporating. Possibly, turn it into an artifact as well.
Multi-skill gifted weapons should unrestrict all of their skills.
Lesser and greater scrolls of enchant weapon. The lesser enchant by 1 point up to a maximum of +2 (uncursed) or +3 (blessed); the greater enchant by 1-3 points to a maximum of +5 (uncursed) or +7 (blessed).
Replace blessed genocide’s class genocide effect with one that lets you name multiple species not from the same class.
Backstabbing can additionally occur if you are stealthy and the target monster does not correctly know where you are.
Magic missiles, and possibly other rays, stop at the first creature they hit and don’t continue to other creatures behind it. Possibly this should only happen on the first magic-resistant creature and “the missiles bounce off” (they clearly aren’t bouncing off in the same exact direction they were traveling before hitting the target, and the message implies they scatter harmlessly).
Vortices, or possibly all whirly monsters, scatter items to different squares when they pass over them (using the throwing code, so items may shatter and creatures may be hit by them). Possibly only objects under a certain weight.
More evilly, they could be able to scatter unequipped items from your inventory when they engulf you.
The three unoccupied corners of the Castle contain mimics mimicking chests.
You can fill a pit by dumping sufficient rocks in it.
Eating a disenchanter corpse sets Pw to 0.
Armed bear traps and land mines can be teleported away if hit with a teleportation beam.
Fragile items get smashed by falling to the ground while dying or passing out or falling downstairs.
Padded sack: bag that protects its fragile items from breaking.
Cavemen get a small alignment penalty for writing or using complex tools.
Penalty (alignment? luck? aggravate monster?) for eating a coaligned unicorn.
Track, and report at the end of the game in the dumplog or xlogfile, how many times the player prayed and sacrificed.
Monks can forcefight or kick boulders and break them with high enough Strength.
YAFMs (both regular and hallucinating) for sitting on the Vibrating Square. Something to do with a vibrating chair massage.
Decorative objects/furniture for atmosphere: sarcophagi, (inanimate) skeletons, rubble in corners, mist, shafts of light that illuminate small areas.
Vomiting erases any dust engravings on your current square.
Boost healers’ starting Dexterity; they should be better at delicate surgical procedures than the minimum Dx:7 implies.
Add fruit in tins as an alternative to spinach or corpses.
When you are both hallucinating and weak from hunger, monsters start appearing as % instead of regular hallucinatory glyphs.
You get a small Pw boost (similar to newts, or perhaps not boosting max Pw)? by eating the corpse of a spellcasting monster.
Exercise or abuse Charisma as a result of consorting with foocubi.
Booze is a customizeable name in the options like fruit/slime mold.
Hitting monsters with a passive shock attack doesn’t hurt you if you’re hitting with a non-metallic weapon or your hands with non-metallic gloves on.
Wind trap: when you step on it, your wielded weapon and any items on the square are blown upwards by a gust and fall back on your head.
Forest rooms, which contain a scattering of trees.
Phoenixes: birds with fire resistance and who may automatically resurrect on death, or else revive from their corpse/ashes similar to trolls.
Thunderbirds: birds with lightning breath.
Rocs: large, rideable, fast and powerful birds.
A Big Room variant that is an idyllic scene with a nice river cutting through it with some scattered trees and maybe a couple fountains and a lake. Idyllic except for the usual bunch of monsters, of course.
Rooms are generated dark much more often when your luck is negative.
Message for when a nymph finishes stealing something from you: “The [nymph] giggles and vanishes.”
Ice boxes occasionally contain potions of booze or fruit juice in addition to corpses. A proposed frequency is 1% of ice boxes, and they contain d3 of either type of potion (possibly both).
Falling rock traps are reflavored as thwomps from Mario if you are hallucinating.
Water lily terrain: can be walked on, but if burned, rotted, or dug on, it turns to water.
If you pray at low HP with a single hostile monster in the vicinity, your deity might decide to “fix” the problem by smiting them to death.
The rocks generated by smashing a boulder or statue should never weigh more than the boulder or statue.
When you or a monster digs a hole to a level below, rocks/boulders are created on the square you fall into.
Digging downwards destroys any existing engraving on the square.
Message for when a pet (that you can see) gains a level.
Swimming skill: how well you can swim on top of water and carry weight at the same time. At Unskilled you can carry very little, but it quickly increases beyond that.
A troll killed by fiery or acidic means (including Fire Brand) cannot revive.
The wish parser accepts “anything”, “something”, and “surprise me” as valid candidates for a wish for a random object.
Dipping a wand of lightning in a pool of water electrocutes nearby monsters in connected pools of water, and possibly you.
Farlooking monsters tells you whether they are asleep, paralyzed, or fleeing.
You have a small Dexterity-based chance of catching a potion thrown at you instead of having it break on you (this chance is zero if you cannot see the thrower.)
Tinning the corpse of a named creature transfers the name to the tin.
Swarm monsters which are invulnerable to weapon attacks (or else take extremely reduced damage from weapon attacks, making weapons a last resort) and instead must be hit with area-of-effect attacks. Given the relatively low availability of area-of-effect attacks, the swarm should go down in one or two hits from one.
Tigers occasionally drop tiger eye rings.
Rings of regeneration are chargeable. While positively enchanted ones drain nutrition to increase your life, negatively enchanted ones sap your life to increase your nutrition.
Rogues get backstab bonus against any incapacitated enemy (sleeping/paralyzed) in addition to fleeing ones.
Fish scale mail; awful AC but grants magical breathing.
Water elementals have an active rust attack.
If you are lifesaved after dying from ability score loss, the ability score gets restored to its base value, as with restore ability, instead of 3.
Mummy corpses never rot away.
If a zombie finds a mummy wrapping, it will pick it up and transform into a mummy of that type.
Creatures in pits are very hard to hit with projectiles.
Occasionally, sitting next to a tree will cause an apple to fall on your head.
You can carve statues from boulders with a pick-axe.
Soul selling: when you summon a demon lord, there is some opportunity for you to sell your soul to them in exchange for a wish.
If you are completely armorless, shopkeepers will block their door and prevent you from entering.
A diving helmet item which confers magical breathing when worn.
Being a male Valkyrie is a minor trouble when praying and will be divinely fixed by reverting you to female.
When a force bolt hits a huge chunk of meat, it turns into a bunch of meatballs (using the same formula for how many rocks are produced from a boulder).
Nurses rarely generate with stethoscopes.
Barbarians feel angry (not sad) for a moment when a pet dies.
Vaporizing gear by overenchanting it abuses Wisdom.
Quest leaders verbalize their confusion at the player’s change of gender if the player has changed from their original gender.
Cavemen, Barbarians, and orcish players don’t get the message “An urge to take a bath overwhelms you” from fountains.
Dipping a blank scroll or spellbook into a potion of gain ability turns it into some random scroll or spellbook. The beatitude of the resulting object uses the same formula as magic markers. Could also do this for wands of nothing, which become some random wand, without changing their charge count.
Polymorphing a crocodile corpse makes fireproof water walking boots instead of fireproof low boots.
TDTTOE: If it’s possible to fooproof arbitrary items, fireproof candles are unlightable.
Give cursed wands some bad effects other than rarely exploding, such as a cursed wand of fire also hitting your own inventory.
Ideas about nerfing the player’s ability to scare off a large group of Yendorian Army troops at once:
This doesn’t necessarily have to be only the Yendorian Army; the rule could be extended to all monsters being “supported” by other monsters of their same species, with some special cases for things like all orcs supporting each other.
Potions of oil heal iron golems when quaffed.
Attempting to light a cursed lamp or candle may burn your finger, dealing a little bit of damage: “Ouch! You burnt your finger!” (No damage if you are fire resistant).
Stealing or destroying a Nazgul’s ring instakills it. Or possibly stealing reduces it to 1 HP.
Leprechauns do massive damage to gold golems.
A boulder that falls on top of an altar destroys that altar.
Destroying a charged camera may spawn one or more yellow lights (or black lights if it is cursed).
Dipping cursed unicorn horns into harmless potions turns them into harmful potions.
When a pet eats a teleportitis-granting corpse, it randomly teleports (if possible).
You can dip fruits (slime molds) in a potion of acid (or potion of water?) to turn it into a potion of fruit juice (consuming the fruit).
The blessed potion of gain energy gives temporary sleep resistance.
Whacking monsters with certain types of wielded scrolls may have certain effects on it (and may consume/shred the scroll in the process): fire burns them, confuse monster confuses them, scare monster scares them.
Flying is voluntarily controlled, not automatic (i.e. you tell the game when you want to start and stop flying). While flying, you burn nutrition faster.
Placing a fake Amulet of Yendor into any container blows it up.
Chaotic same-race sacrifice demon summoning causes the demon to give you a nice item or some gold when they appear.
When you crush a monster who is carrying a wand with a drawbridge, the wand explodes.
Gradually, over time, you lose points of Charisma due to accumulating dirt and scars and generally looking worse. This can be fixed with the usual restore ability methods, by entering water (possibly sitting on fountains should do this), by getting hit by a rust trap (this only restores one point at a time), or by #wiping with a towel (which may have limited effectiveness).
If you are a Caveman, you get telepathy or clairvoyance while you are hallucinating.
The helm of opposite alignment has no effect on neutrals (except autocursing). Alternatively, some helms may turn lawful and chaotic characters neutral.
Wand breaking effects that depend on the number of remaining charges use (charges+1) instead of (charges), to account for the wrest charge.
Erosion on rings and amulets makes their effect intermittent.
Sitting on gold should be comfortable if you are polymorphed into a dragon.
Priest characters get sanctuary in rooms containing unattended coaligned altars, even though they aren’t temples.
You can roll a boulder into the same square as a non-trapped flying monster (which doesn’t interact with it at all).
Any sort of death by explosion should scatter the possessions around, rather than having a single bones pile stack.
Falling boulders (e.g. from scroll of earth) will smash fragile items lying on the ground on the square they drop on. Possibly rolling boulders do this too.
Scrolls of remove curse never generate cursed, and resist becoming cursed.
When you use stairs, not only do adjacent pets follow you, but any pets adjacent to adjacent pets, and so on, also follow you.
Trollsbane blocks intrinsic or extrinsic aggravate monster.
Water moccasins occasionally drop water walking boots.
Moon phases affect the Plane of Water somehow.
Swimming while satiated can cause you to drown from stomach cramps.
Lit candles get snuffed when you move next to an unseen secret door, trap door or hole: “A draft blows out your candle.”
Tallow candles are edible and provide a decent amount of nutrition.
A “money train” - a random event that spawns in a bunch of soldiers and giants carting chests of gold from the upstairs on a level to the downstairs.
Shopkeepers gradually over time replenish their in-inventory gold, but only if Ludios is not yet generated. Any gold that is replenished to shopkeepers is removed from Ludios’ large vault when it generates.
Credit cards act as holding containers for gold. Not literally, but if you have credit in a shop and apply the card towards the shopkeeper, they can put the credit on your card, which you can then use to pay at other shops. Paying with a credit card has a 3% transaction fee, minimum 1 zorkmid. Each card also has a “credit limit” which is the maximum amount of gold you can put on it. Randomly generated cards may have some (small) preexisting balance on them, but you might get the Kops called if you try to pass it off as your own, or if you pay with a cursed credit card. A possible evil extension is that occasionally your card is invalid because the owners took all the money and fled to [other roguelike]. Priests and demon lords cannot be paid in credit. Gold that you have on a credit card doesn’t count towards score. Killing a vault guard zeroes all your credit card accounts.
Leprechauns steal credit cards as well as money.
It costs more money to donate to crossaligned priests for protection.
When Schroedinger’s Box is probed or has a stethoscope applied to it, it either reveals the housecat corpse inside or releases the live housecat as normal. Alternatively, stethoscopes give “You hear a characteristic WOM WOM WOM sound” as a reference to Bob the Angry Flower, and probing gives you “The box contains a cat that is neither alive nor dead nor alive nor dead nor… You resolve to call the YSPCA later.”
Reading a spellbook while confused may teach you a random spell but only set your memory of it to 1000 turns. It can also reduce memory of all other spells by 1000. Alternatively, it has no real effect, and just prints a message “You were holding the spellbook upside down… You learn the spell of ‘kcol draziw’.” (a random spell name printed backwards).
You have a lower chance of genociding monsters, wishing for items, and identifying canned food if you have never seen the monster or item in question.
Artifacts occasionally resist being vaporized from overenchantment (however, if they do, they don’t get the extra points of enchantment.)
Dropping a lit candle on a coaligned altar gives you some message about your standing with your god and your ability to pray safely. The candle is consumed in the process, and possibly the beatitude matters (with a cursed candle plus an angry god ending in a fiery explosion). Some unspecified bad thing happens if you try this on a crossaligned altar.
Rust monster corpses are untinnable, or else attempting to tin them rusts the tinning kit.
Hitting a tin of long worm or purple worm meat with an undead turning beam turns it into a can of worms, which when you apply or eat it creates a bunch of random w around you. Cans of worms can also be found randomly generated.
If you eat a cursed C- or K-ration when hallucinating, you get an MRE YAFM: “That wasn’t a meal, it wasn’t ready, and you shouldn’t have eaten it.”
Brass knuckles, an item that increases damage done with bare hands and martial arts if you are unarmed. There are multiple takes on it:
You can polish metallic shields by rubbing a towel on them. While it is polished and erosion-free, it provides reflection; but once it gets hit with some form of erosion it loses its polish and can’t be polished unless the erosion is removed.
Leprechauns steal potions of booze as well as gold.
Drinking multiple potions of booze in a short time span has progressive effects: first confusion as normal, then vomiting, then sending the drinker to sleep or losing some (resistable) HP via alcohol poisoning. Also add in monster (dwarf, orc, leprechaun) booze-drinking behavior, complete with drinking songs as level sounds when a monster is intoxicated.
Zapping a cancellation beam downwards while standing on a magical (magic, teleportation, polymorph, etc) trap will remove the trap.
Wood nymphs, or players polymorphed into wood nymphs, can walk through trees as if they weren’t there.
Kicking a tree may generate one or more angry wood nymphs.
Rangers can chat to certain animalistic monsters to calm them and make them peaceful (but not tame). Possibly generalize this into a skill that can be achieved by Cavemen, Monks and Tourists too.
When two elementals of the same type are adjacent to each other, they may merge into one elemental with a higher level and higher hitpoints.
Option to make the confirmation letter “Y” instead of “y” so that you don’t accidentally hit people when moving in the “y” direction.
Saving saves the previous N messages, so that one can find out what happened recently upon returning to a game after a long break.
Death descriptions distinguish between “killed by a falling boulder”, “killed by a hurled boulder”, and “killed by a rolling boulder.”
The appendage (“foreclaw”) for a paper golem should be “forescroll” or “endpapers” or something.
Apply ‘-‘ for a YAFM: “[Your quest leader] always said you needed to apply yourself!”
YAFM for when polymorphed into a glass golem and you rub a touchstone against “-“.
Zapping a wand of opening down at a bear trap you are stuck in should free you immediately.
If you have slippery fingers, your chance of failing to engraving the text you wanted in the dust is higher.
The quest-text associated with the Sceptre of Might suggests it confers strength. So the +n Sceptre of Might acts like a +n ring of gain strength.
Bear traps injure your legs like xans do.
The various Banes scare their target type of monster on top of the extra damage they deal them.
Fire/water elementals are not only uninjured by fire/rust traps, but are strengthened or healed by them.
Sitting on the floor messes up things written in the dust.
When polyselfed to foocubi of the appropriate gender, #monstering will seduce (i.e. de-robe) human and elf monsters.
Asmodeus is a “cold” demon, so should not be visible with infravision.
Cavemen get a large damage/to-hit bonus when throwing spears at large mammals, or an alignment bonus for killing large mammals with spears.
The description for the katana says it can be used as a two-handed sword. Maybe twoweaponing could be adapted for this, i.e. use both hands on the weapon for an extra damage bonus based on strength, at the expense of being able to use a shield.
High level spellcasting monsters should have stone-to-flesh in their arsenal. Then they can use it on statues which come to life, always fighting on their side. They should also attempt to cast charm monster on your pets, with success inversely proportional to the pet’s level.
Wands of striking and digging tools deal double damage to all stony monsters like earth elementals, clay golems, stone golems, xorns, and gargoyles.
Hitting vampires or all undead with light should hurt them. Not to the extent of gremlins though.
Silver variants of gear should cost more, and “precious” rings should have some kind of surcharge too, above the base cost of that type of ring.
Shopkeepers refuse to deal with invisible customers completely.
Dragons have a smaller chance of leaving scales if they are killed with a sharp weapon.
Vomiting on an altar should offend its god, as should digging on it.
You get petrified when you faint or otherwise fall asleep while wielding a cockatrice corpse.
Electric eel corpses increase Pw/maxPw to an extent greater than newts.
A digging ray shot into amorphous engulfers (such as green slimes or gelatinous cubes in some variants) splits them instead of reducing their HP to 1. This automatically makes you not engulfed anymore. (Does not change the effect on things like purple worms. Not specified what should happen with unsolid engulfers like vortices and air elementals.)
Allow closets to generate on east/west sides of rooms.
Sitting as a Monk enables meditation, which can have useful effects.
Plumed helmets increase Charisma by 1.
Fizzy potions cure confusion when quaffed.
New or replacement (or hallucination-only) flavor-only message for magic traps: “Your spider senses are tingling!”
Dreaming about more than just noises that are really happening: stuff like fantasy dreams where you dream that you ascend to the status of Demigoddess, etc.
Yellow dragon scale mail gives petrification resistance instead of (or possibly in addition to) acid resistance.
Stacking too many uranium wands in a single object chain causes a huge explosion.
Fire trap effects, fire explosions, and camera flashes light up a large area, but only momentarily, before it goes back to darkness.
Pets cannot move and eat in 1 action. Also, pets eating food off the ground merely makes it partly eaten, rather than completely destroying it.
If a leashed pet falls down a trapdoor, the player may be able to pull it back out, depending on Strength and the weight of the pet.
When you finish eating a food ration while hallucinating, the game produces the message combination “That food really hit the spot! The spot hits the food ration. The food ration is destroyed!”
Sokoban prize closets that don’t have the prize instead have mimics that imitate the prize.
Artifacts held by adjacent pets count towards your final score when you ascend as if you were holding them.
Burnt offerings: via some mechanism, you get the corpse smoldering on the altar. When sacrificed, it is treated as higher difficulty.
Item called “message in a bottle” that sometimes generates near water sources. You can read it to get a random rumor.
Allow teleportation onto the vibrating square, since it isn’t really a trap.
Drinking booze while already under its effects, or occasionally when its confusion effect wears off, causes hallucination.
New monster “master grid bug”. When they zap you, you get a status effect that forces you to move only orthogonally like a grid bug for some time.
When a black pudding is created from a sink, rings buried beneath the sink may be placed into the inventory of the pudding.
Allow scrolls to generate as metal, flavoring metal scrolls as engraved plates. These cannot have their labels wiped and cannot have new labels written on them, but they are immune to fire and water damage.
You can write a scroll onto a piece of paper armor (with a magic marker, incurring the regular ink cost), then instantly read it.
Attacking with a crossaligned artifact weapon halves all damage you deal.
Give some monsters the M2_SWIM ability: rats, possibly dogs, possibly horses.
Graffitist role, in which your job is to go around making graffiti everywhere.
If you die from overeating and then are lifesaved, you automatically finish eating.
If you’re polymorphed into a unicorn, you can dip your horn into potions.
If you are wearing fencing gloves and are carrying some iron chains, you can create iron bars (a “fence”).
Mimics can pretend to die, mimicking a mimic corpse or appropriate death drop.
If a monster is hurtled into another monster (i.e. from a monk’s staggering blow), both monsters wake up.
Using a cursed tonal instrument makes the gears and tumblers in the castle drawbridge lie to you.
Lithivorous monsters can gain intrinsic speed by eating a dilithium crystal.
Am amulet versus thievery, which protects you from all theft attacks including nymphs, leprechauns, foocubi, and possibly even Amulet-stealing attacks.
Using a stethoscope on a monster requires that you succeed in making a to-hit roll against it. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.
Throwing things against walls or dropping certain metal objects produces some noise and wakes monsters.
Healers heal monsters when meleeing with no wielded weapon or worn gloves, sort of like nurses.
Wearing kicking boots protects you from all damage caused directly by you kicking things.
Small room with a door near the start of each Sokoban level for you to place your pet in while you work.
You can command pets to come towards you, and also command them to stay in place until summoned.
Greased items that get exposed to fire become flaming for a certain number of turns afterwards (and then the grease is gone).
A simpler version of this idea would be simply to burn off a weapon’s grease when it’s exposed to a fiery monster.
Enlightenment tells you how many more turns you have for timing-out effects.
One of the playable races, possibly halfling, should get a permanent +1 to Luck similar to the full moon effects.
Attempting to wear armor while already wearing armor in that slot will prompt you to remove it.
Scroll which makes an evil clone of a target monster which will attempt to kill it.
When you get arrested by the Watch or a guard, you are teleported to a prison level, from which you must escape.
When fountains dry out, they become empty fountains instead of disappearing (possibly turning its { to white or gray?). There is something you can do to restore the water to a dry fountain.
A way to allow the player out of locked shops they teleport into. Possibly chatting to the shopkeeper, or trying and failing to open the locked door from inside the shop.
Dirt terrain, behaves the same way as stone but digs faster.
Potion that keeps your HP from dropping below 1 for a limited time.
Demigod level containing a boss which is generated from a real player who recently ascended.
Worker ant that restores walls that have been dug out.
Confused genocide doesn’t kill you; instead it genocides something close to what you named, like the opposite case of a monster letter.
Conflictless conduct: never have a monster attack another monster while influenced by conflict. Would be best if you can safely ring-test conflict, perhaps it gives some message like “You feel aggravation” or “You feel irate” when wearing it (these messages would be shared with the ring of aggravate monster so as not to be unambiguous).
Potion of antivenom/antidote which cancels out any Str loss from poison. (Not really that useful if poison is simple Str loss; blessed restore ability is superior, but if poison is an actual status effect, it would be more useful.)
Watchmen will attack monsters that they see attacking you unprovoked.
Sanctuary in coaligned temples is granted only if your prayer timeout is nonzero.
Wielding a light source increases its radius by 1. Or possibly 1 if offhanded and 2 if directly wielded.
Allow a count for eating, or else have the character stop once they hit Satiated. (Note that numerous people have pointed out flaws with allowing the player to specify exactly how much they want to eat - for instance, it becomes trivial to stretch out a lizard corpse to every bite it provides).
Different game ending messages than “You die…”. Pull in some from other games: “WASTED”, “YOU DIED”, “FATALITY”, “Game Over”, “Your bones are scraped clean by the desolate wind, your Vault will now surely die”, “Haha noob”
You can convert spellbooks into scrolls. You may get scrolls related to the spellbook topic if possible, otherwise random. Possibly beatitude affects the number of scrolls produced.
Polymorphing into a big scary monster like a dragon or minotaur causes some monsters (failing a resistance roll?) to flee.
Dipping mundane tools into potions of gain energy charges them with the same beatitude as the scroll would. Possibly extend to magical tools and wands, but only allow the uncursed charging effect.
Change the Ranger quest artifact to an infinite quiver that can produce an endless supply of arrows, rocks, or crossbow bolts, preferring to match to whatever the hero’s wielded weapon is. This benefits gnomes who want to use crossbows.
The Caveman pantheon should be changed to monosyllabic god names like the rest of the Caveman-specific text.
Pets don’t go feral if you are both in Sokoban, even on different levels.
Monsters carrying food will eat it when at low health and get healed by it.
One or two Orcish Town exits are blocked by boulders instead of iron bars. This allows the player to get inside when they’re ready without requiring digging or acid, but won’t allow the orcs to escape.
Casting wizard lock at Expert skill will transform a door into an iron door or create an iron door.
Setting fire to a web should burn through it, spreading to any adjacent webs and destroying all of them.
Higher skill in a spell school allows you to subtract some points off its Pw cost.
Add some incentive for orc characters to prefer orcish shields over elven ones.
Wood golems drop small shields in addition to their quarterstaffs.
Make quasits generate in large groups.
When hallucinating, you hear monsters that can speak say funny things. Possibly only when chatted to; they say “O great wise [bogusmon], how may I help us defend us all against wicked adventurers who quest for the sacred Amulet?”
Sinks’ glyphs should be changed to a white {.
Have a value that tracks the next turn Luck will check its timeout. Once the timeout ticks, it will re-randomize this value to some other turn.
Conflict negates Elbereth protections.
Peaceful priests and angels of your own god on Astral help you out by attacking hostiles. Possibly only if your alignment is good.
Having an Elbereth square fade under you in 3.6.1+ makes the square permanently unengravable.
You should be prompted to confirm before attacking a monster while standing on Elbereth.
Vortices confuse you after you spend a few turns engulfed in them, because you’re dizzy from spinning around so much. (Limit this to actual vortices: fog clouds, for instance, are in the v class but don’t spin you around.)
Make most if not all rings chargeable:
Certain monsters (e.g. the Riders) shouldn’t be able to be frightened by getting a ghost from a bottle.
Dipping a ring of polymorph control into a potion of polymorph allows you to control the ring it turns into (not its enchantment though, if the ring is enchantable).
The player’s own ghosts generate peaceful (possibly only in bones files).
Healers can use an uncursed unicorn horn as if it’s blessed. They could also get the unicorn applied passively every turn as long as it’s wielded (with or without gloves on).
Give unicorn horns a to-hit penalty: they are not a manufactured weapon, and are not designed to be wielded in your hand.
Get rid of the enchant armor and enchant weapon scrolls. Artifacts have fixed enchantment values. Higher-enchanted gear spawns as depth increases.
Vegetarian pets will eat meat if they are starving, but they only get 10% of the regular nutrition from it.
Guarantee a random sack somewhere in all Minetown variants.
Vapors from the potion of polymorph should cause a brief or minor polymorph. Possibly the “you feel like a new foo” effect.
Merge extra healing, cure sickness and cure blindness, and make the resulting spell level 6. Or just merge cure sickness with cure blindness, and call it “cure ailment”.
Being very fast reduces your AC and/or to-hit.
Remove the spellbook of haste self so that casters don’t have a large advantage in speed over non-casters.
Enchantments on armor and weapons time out (rather slowly). Also, any erosion damage to a positively enchanted item will be absorbed by that positive enchantment, which then vanishes in proportion to the amount of erosion. Perhaps the enchant scrolls should be made more common or cost less ink to balance this.
A “reset button” for Sokoban, which restores all the original holes and resets all the original boulders, and places the player on the downstairs (or is reachable only from the downstairs). Probably not activatable after the level is solved. Flavored as some sort of mechanism.
Better ghost scaling in general. Ghosts should have a wide range of strength levels, and should be capable of posing problems even to late game characters. The more ghosts you summon by repeatedly entering a haunted temple, the stronger they get.
The scroll of create monster now summons only 1 monster (occasionally 2 or 3). The beatitude determines whether they will turn out allied with the reader (blessed), created normally with the usual probabilities of being peaceful (uncursed), or whether they will be hostile to the reader or omnicidal (cursed).
Polymorph, teleport and levelport traps should disappear once used by any monster (including the player). Or else they have a low-ish chance of disappearing per each use.
Monster hallucination, if implemented as a status, should be rather stronger than confusion: when confused, monsters can still see what the other monsters around them are, but when hallucinating they ought to see the same random monsters as the player does, and lash out at any of them.
Float stone, a gray stone which has negative weight. Non-stacking, and rare. If you get enough float stones to more than cancel out your own weight and the weight of any possessions you’re carrying, you levitate. Possibly doesn’t work when put into containers, or at least doesn’t get multiplied by the effect of a cursed bag of holding. May gain positive weight when cursed, or greater negative weight when blessed (or vice versa).
Helms of opposite alignment use a hash function for determining what alignment they’ll set a neutral to, instead of just using object ID mod 2.
Manes and lemures should count as undead rather than demons, and should perhaps be moved to the ghost or wraith monster class.
Randomized appearances for each type of egg.
Blind or eyeless monsters aren’t affected by invisibility or displacement.
Fix race base monster weights: human weights should be dropped from 1450 to 1000, elves should be dropped to 500, dwarves should weigh a bit more than elves, orcs should be between dwarves and humans, gnomes should be lightest.
Special level or branch that is populated by dinosaurs and an intelligent reptilian humanoid called sleestaks. There is an artifact somewhere in here that is guarded by the dinosaurs and sleestaks.
In order for a random item to drop as a death drop, it must be able to have been carried by the monster. This means that newts and such won’t get many death drops and the ones they do will be small.
Specifically, this approach doesn’t involve trying extra hard to pick an appropriately sized item, because then lightweight items such as scrolls and magic markers would become too common. It merely rolls up a random item, checks whether it would be the right weight for this monster, then decides not to drop it if it’s unrealistically heavy.
Convert the spell of polymorph to a form that polymorphs only monsters and never items.
Wand definitions specify the amount of charges each wand should generate with. Polymorph wands should get fewer charges than other beam wands, for instance.
Polymorph beams stop at the first square on which there’s an object or a monster they affect. In addition, golem formation is made much more aggressive and item-destructive to discourage one-large-stack polypiling.
Homemade tins give the minimum of the corpse’s nutrition and 50 nutrition. This is to prevent silliness like a killer bee corpse giving 5 nutrition when eaten but magically giving 50 after being tinned.
Most corpses have sharply decreased amounts of nutrition (from the current values). They may also be too mangled to be good for a sacrifice, randomly based on their object ID. Their intrinsic-conveying chances are unchanged, though.
Higher wand skill makes the shooter’s wand rays harder to dodge.
You can wield artifacts in your offhand, but they must be non-intelligent, non-gifted, and non-crossaligned. (Non-wished-for is an option, but may be too exclusive.)
Scroll of knowledge: rare scroll that directly increases Intelligence when read.
Healers start with higher Intelligence (perhaps at the cost of their high starting Charisma, which they don’t need as much). Priests could stand to have guaranteed a bit more Int and monks a bit more Wisdom, as well.
Healers get a Basic skill cap in divination spells.
Monks will only get gifted weapons whose skill they have previously trained at some point.
If you take damage from eating a hot corpse while hallucinating, you get a YAFM about spicy food.
Various ideas to prevent powerful bones generated on a level’s upstairs from instakilling a player:
You can convince peaceful intelligent monsters to join your cause (taming them) by chatting with them. The outcome depends on several factors: your respective alignments (lawfuls have a very hard time recruiting chaotic monsters), respective levels, respective races, your Charisma (which should be a large factor), and possibly others. Failing might turn the monster hostile, or do nothing. You only get one attempt per monster; if they don’t want to join you, trying again will never work. More complex behavior could possibly be implemented with the monster demanding something from you or making you do something before they will follow you. E.g. “I’ll only join you for 100 zorkmids,” or “Bring me the helms of three goblins to prove your worth!”
Internally, this would probably work by having a new flag “recruitable” on a monster, which is only set to true when a monster generates as peaceful (and is not set at all for certain monster types like shopkeepers and priests). Chatting first checks this flag: a taming attempt is only made if it is true, and it is set to false regardless of the taming outcome. Some peaceful monsters of a recruitable species could also generate with the recruitable flag as false.
To avoid this conflicting with existing #chat, there are a few options:
The maximum difficulty a monster can be generated at is independent of player experience level. Only the level difficulty (and perhaps other player-independent stats such as branch) matter. The details of how the curve of monster difficulty compared to level difficulty should look are up to debate; NetHack4’s is a piecewise function that climbs slowly until level 10 and thereafter is (level difficulty - 5).
As a more minor version of this, only enforce this rule during level creation, and respect experience level for monsters generated after creation.
Non-magical tools that can be used to heal wounds.
New role “Deprived”: starts with a poor club and shield; no other items.
Clubs may stun monsters that they hit. Perhaps the chance increases with skill, such as 0% unskilled, 10% basic, 20% skilled, 40% expert.
Make Big Stick (Caveman quest artifact in Fourk) deal two bonus attacks which may or may not hit (but it still all appears to be one hit). If both bonus attacks hit, the target is stunned and confused.
Grand Master martial arts skill allows you to (attempt to) force-fight boulders and statues to shatter them with your bare hands.
All Banes artifacts are bloodthirsty (disabling the attack prompt for peacefuls, like Stormbringer) versus their respective monster type.
If a pet moves over a square with multiple cursed items, it moves “very reluctantly”.
When “Sting cuts through a web!”, the web is destroyed. Currently it only allows you to escape the web in 1 turn and does not destroy it.
One or two softball easy player monsters that generate early in the dungeon, with mostly starting gear, and are not hard to kill.
The higher your skill is with your wielded weapon, the lower the chance is that an enemy will yank it out of your hand with a bullwhip.
If you don’t have a default window port set in your config file or the sysconf, you get to choose which to use on startup.
Nymphs are weak spellcasters and may generate with a few enchantment spells or have hardcoded ones like sleep and charm monster.
Sensitive eyes intrinsic: you can see farther in the dark, but anything that creates light such as the scroll or a camera will blind you.
You can set some fixed inventory letters in the config file, so you don’t have to adjust them manually. In its simplest form, this would apply only to starting inventory, and would allow things like a Tourist’s credit card to be guaranteed to be placed on a familiar letter.
All H can step out of a pit in 1 turn.
Engulfing by a water elemental or a monster with a digestion attack cleans off any cream pie blinding the hero has.
Overhaul poison so that its effects are less random: some might still cause instadeath, but it would only be found in the late game or via bosses like Demogorgon and Scorpius; early game poison shouldn’t drain multiple stat points at once.
Leprechauns are occasionally generated with a sack of gold rather than gold pieces in free inventory. Though this would either have to be quite rare or only be possible on leprechauns generated outside leprechaun halls.
Potion throwing is a skill, and enhancing it will let you get stronger effects out of thrown potions. Later game monsters may throw potions with this skill enhanced. If traps throw potions, they always do so at Unskilled.
Swap the spell levels of sleep and cause fear: sleep is now level 3, cause fear level 1 (to maintain there being a level 1 enchantment spell).
Mind flayers have to grapple your head before they can successfully suck your brain (like in D&D), forcing them to spend a turn doing this. If you have a greased helm, this gives you at least one extra turn to act since they will not be able to grapple your head until the grease dissolves.
This would probably best be implemented by giving them a sticky grab or bear hug attack and ignoring the existence of their tentacle attack if they aren’t already grappling you (or you are being held by another enemy and thus can’t avoid them). Either way, checking u.ustuck is the key.
Possibly, they need to spend another attack getting your helm off, which will unequip it, though this will get weird if your helm is cursed. A cursed helm shouldn’t offer total protection against them. Possibly, they should be able to remove a cursed helm (like nymphs and foocubi do) despite its curse; this could be handwaved as them using their psionic powers to do it.
In variants that implement zombies eating your brain, it should work on basically this same system, where the zombie needs to hold onto you before it can eat your brain (and which also works that way in D&D).
“Painting” dungeon feature / furniture. Players can look at them to see what it’s a painting of, possibly identifying item types they didn’t already know about. Could be free-standing (magenta \) or could be part of the struct rm flags of a wall (magenta |, interactable by farlooking them while adjacent). Might be able to be haunted - can produce a ghost?
A race where you start polymorphed into a low level monster and with every level you gain, you can polymorph into a stronger monster.
Slaughterhouses as a Gehennom special room, filled with corpses, leashes, and knives.
Change the message “This food tastes okay.” for “palatable” food to “This food tastes gamey.”
More harassment effects: the chance of respawning the Wizard is a fixed 1/7 and the rest of the effects are equal probability. Multiple non-duplicate effects may happen at the same time.
If you polymorph, and are not helpless, all of your torso armor that has a delay of 1 or less and isn’t stuck under slower armor is automatically removed. This includes all cloaks and shirts.
Chatting to trolls while hallucinating makes them appear to say internet-troll phrases: “Problem?” “U mad bro?” “Trololol!”
Wizard-harassment summon nasties should produce a “Monsters appear from nowhere!” message, and this message should force a –More–.
Reduce the impact of a single master mind flayer attack, so that they don’t just spawn out of nowhere (e.g. via harassment) and one- or two-hit kill a character with low Intelligence.
Very rarely, when eaten, candy bars have a Golden Ticket inside, which does something good like grant a wish. (Requires some method of not being farmable; possibly, polypiled candy bars have obroken set, and obroken candy bars never have a ticket in them.)
Deployable barricade on a tile. Blocks movement; must be attacked or kicked several times to be destroyed. Presumably lightweight to actually carry around.
Ensure that roles that start with spellbooks always have enough Pw for one castable spell.
A wand that, when it hits a creature, saves that creature’s position and forces it to teleport back to that position after a few turns.
The Orb of Detection can detect the presence (but not location) of artifacts on the level. Possibly this is an Archeologist-only power.
When the player is afraid of a monster, to-hit is reduced and they may not be able to attack that specific monster at all.
Hostile elves can engrave Elbereth and use it on the player, scaring them.
Make the amount of bonus movement points from temporary speed directly dependent on its remaining duration, with it gradually decreasing back to normal as the speed wears off. Also provide diminishing returns where giving yourself more speed boosts on top of already having temporary speed gives you less extra duration than it otherwise would, until eventually you can’t get any more duration than 1 per turn. These bonus movement points should also stack directly with all other speed sources, and be visible to the user in the status bar.
Scroll that restores you to full health but decreases your maximum health.
Ring or amulet that causes your spellcasting to draw on HP instead of Pw, possibly only when your Pw is zero, or possibly not requiring a ring. Each point of HP is worth 2 Pw points. If cursed, doubles spell Pw costs. If blessed, energy regeneration will regenerate HP until full before regenerating Pw. Casting from HP too much may decrease your HP maximum. If implemented as an artifact, possibly flavor it as an evil counterpart of the Eye of the Aethiopica.
Note that a couple variants have implemented this as a “ring of blood magic” or similar items.
Additional temporary effects accompany drinking a potion of booze. The effects wear off when the confusion does (so if you extend it by, say, drinking a potion of confusion, the effects are prolonged). There is consensus that there should be both positive and negative effects; all of the following have been proposed:
Casting a forgotten spell consumes some Pw, perhaps one point per spell level, or just a random amount, in addition to its confusion and stunning effects.
Incorporeal monsters should be immune to mind flaying (and probably most physical) attacks, except attacks from angels.
Dungeon branch or level filled with toxic contact gas (breathless doesn’t help, or only helps a little) so that you constantly take damage and must bring a lot of healing with you. The deeper you go, the worse the gas becomes, but the loot gets better.
Scroll that tells you the dungeon overview for the next 5 levels of the dungeon. If blessed, shows more levels; if cursed, shows fewer levels or omits details.
Lure, which attracts monsters to you. Could be a magical non-consumable item, or a charged item that amounts to spraying yourself with scents. The Amulet of Yendor should also have this effect, at its maximum level at all times.
Spell that grants temporary hit points.
Temporary hit points and Pw: your maximum goes above its normal bounds for some time, before returning to normal. If your normal maximum changes for some reason, the temporary maximum changes by the same amount. There are two proposals for how the effect should end:
Make fireballs like old-school D&D: the explosion isn’t a certain radius; instead it has a defined volume, and will expand out from its origin point via random breadth-first search. This makes it dangerous to use in confined areas.
Elves and possibly Rangers get an alignment penalty for cutting down trees. Dwarves get an alignment bonus.
The confused scroll of identify, if non-cursed, identifies a random unknown object class and adds it to your discoveries list, even if you’ve never seen any of that object.
Blessed scrolls of identify, if the player selects a container, will bring up a second menu that allows items in the container to be identified.
Shimmering dragon scale mail grants see invisible.
Figurine monsters generate with an inflated monster generation difficulty (because a figurine of most at-difficulty monsters is likely to be underwhelming as a potential pet).
Blessed figurines always make the monster turn out tame. Uncursed ones make a tame monster 80% of the time and peaceful 20% of the time. Cursed ones make a tame monster 20% of the time and a hostile monster 80% of the time.
Move angelic and demonic maledictions out of quest.txt/quest.lua; they have nothing to do with the quest. They should probably still live somewhere in the dat folder.
More angelic maledictions:
Hallucination should prevent against all death magic, including death rays, using the “near death experience” logic. Not just the touch of death.
Dipping eucalyptus leaves in water gives you a potion of tea.
Type of arrow that is made out of enchanted worm teeth. Gives the racial arrow bonus to anyone using it.
Merge crossbow and bow skills so that gnomish rangers don’t get hurt by the lack of ammunition.
Writing “Elbereth” in the prompt for writing a scroll should alias to “scare monster”.
Add two fields to struct trap: an object, which represents the “ammo” of the trap (darts, arrows, potions of oil), and a number to represent the “level” of the trap (which can affect a lot of things, such as a to-hit bonus the trap gets, how hard it is to untrap, or what the skill was of the player when they set the trap).
Rogues can build and set traps, more types of traps than just plain pits and land mines and bear traps. Traps may consume some types of items to be set, like a sleeping gas trap will consume potions of sleeping. This should probably not be totally reversible through untrapping. Intended so the player can pick their battles and set up traps in an advantageous position.
Add restrictions on levelporting for various roles to help differentiate them.
Debilitating wound system that expands on wounded legs. Includes wounded arms and various types of disease and poison, all of which provide various debuffs. Quaffing any healing potion cures all of these at once on top of its usual HP healing.
You can make deals with demon lords (or maybe just one demon lord) for special abilities, but this has major drawbacks.
Warn the player before they melee a monster with passive attacks.
Gelatinous cubes specifically seek out scrolls labeled YUM YUM to eat.
Remove the extra healing, cure blindness, and cure sickness books. The healing spell scales in the amount it heals with skill level. At skilled it also cures blindness, and at expert it cures both blindness and sickness.
Long worms and pythons can be saddled and ridden as steeds, but only if you are a small monster.
Statues can come in bronze or other types of material.
The monster spawn rate gradually decreases the longer you spend on a level. (May not apply if you have the demigod flag set or are carrying the Amulet.)
Implement farming, in certain special rooms called greenhouses. Allows you to grow fruits, carrots, garlic, trees, etc.
Status effect that temporarily lowers all attributes to 3.
A Gehennom Gnome Fortress, like a demon lair except with gnomes. The gnomes are physically weak but have strong crossbow attacks (and clockwork minions).
Change the “killed by the wrath of [god]” death to “annihilated”.
Intentionally destroying an artifact, such as by eating it, reduces the artifacts generated counter and unsets it as having existed, so you can wish up or be gifted new (or even the same) artifacts. Possibly do this whenever an artifact is destroyed, including by accident.
When you have displacement, you displace your pets appropriately even when stunned, confused, or hallucinating, rather than attacking them.
Dogs will eat candy bars off the floor, but will then get sick or nauseous from eating it.
Turn trying to open a door into an occupation: if you get attacked or otherwise distracted while trying to open the door, you will stop, but you don’t have to manually keep trying and failing to open it.
Intrinsic see invisible now works only at a range of 2-3 squares. Extrinsic see invisible works at the current see invisible range (unlimited as long as you can see the space normally).
Wraith corpses cannot give food poisoning, though they can still rot away.
Make death messages more diverse and flavorful. Base it on the attack type of the monster and possibly the weapon used, so that “killed by a jackal” becomes “clawed/mauled/shredded by a jackal”, “killed by a gnome” becomes “bludgeoned to death by a gnome” if it was wielding an aklys, “stabbed to death by a gnome” if it was wielding a dagger, etc.
Note that this creates a headache for tournaments that track unique deaths.
If you have divine protection and become near death from a timed instadeath or low HP, some or all of your protection may automatically convert itself into a cure: “You suddenly feel the power of [deity] surround you! You feel limber/cured/much better/etc.” This should probably work for a narrow range of symptoms (probably not HP loss, possibly any major trouble), and the help delivered should be strictly worse than a prayer if possible (because having this trigger will not affect your prayer timeout).
It should also probably not work in Gehennom, and a key factor is that it should not be reliable, either. Possibly, also track which gods you got it from; protection from donating to crossaligned gods (especially Moloch) will trigger less often.
A slightly more extreme version of this idea is to make divine protection no longer grant AC at all.
Covetous monsters can warp to the up stairs only if they know where the up stairs are. Demon lords would know this in their own lairs, but not otherwise, and monsters randomly spawned on a level may or may not.
Reduce the odds that a nonmagical potion polypiles into a magical potion, to disincentivize mass-blanking potions and polypiling them.
Cancelling a unicorn horn makes it non-magical and removes its curative properties.
Spiked pits and a lower percentage of pits generate with an item or two buried. When you fall into one, any buried items are automatically exposed. The most commonly generated items here are a few gold or an eroded weapon.
Chests generated in barracks should contain gold, which is the soldiers’ payroll.
Gold objects deal extra blessed damage and extra cursed damage (i.e. extra damage from wielding a blessed weapon versus undead will be enhanced if the weapon is gold).
Make blessed identify give no more type-identification than uncursed identify, but it will identify the beatitude and spe of all its items. Uncursed identify will identify the beatitude and spe of some, but not all, items; the rest will only be type-identified.
Make identify scrolls generate blessed more often (perhaps 1/3 of them blessed, 1/3 uncursed and 1/3 cursed, or 1/2 1/3 1/6, or something) to remove the incentive for players to hoard everything until they can get holy water.
Use timing-out intrinsics (beneficial ones gained from corpses) to invert the hunger clock: use the limit on how fast you can hunger as a restriction on how many intrinsics you are maintaining.
Holy water fountains in temples (would require balancing though).
Attacking in melee with an unsuitable weapon like a launcher should negate the player’s Str bonus or monster’s weapon attack bonus.
Engraving should be an occupation rather than weirdly leaving the player paralyzed but still writing until it’s finished. If it is an occupation, the usual interruptions will make the player stop engraving.
Raise the XL threshold of dipping Excalibur for non-Knight roles to around 9-12. Knights can still dip at level 5.
Provide an option to label branches with the branch name instead of using “Dlvl:” all the time. Also allow it to be shortened to “DL”, with no colon, for those who want extra space in the status bar.
Skeletons, or any other monster with MS_BONES, don’t paralyze you by rattling their bones if you’re hallucinating; instead you get a message about it playing the xylophone.
Iron chains are given either whip or flail skill. Probably flail, since they’re heavy.
Track “did not enhance any skills” as a conduct.
Artifact whose invoke power creates attack wands.
Merge the rings of slow digestion and hunger into a single chargeable ring of digestion. Negative values increase hunger faster, positive values slow it down. Duplicating the effect of a vanilla ring of slow digestion would require getting a +10 ring or stacking up to 10 with two rings. (Possibly the negative/positive values should be switched, but that would complicate the generation code.)
A #stomp command that lets you stomp on a grounded creature that is a certain number of monster size levels smaller than you. A hit will instakill it.
Add a defence/evasion skill, which is trained by having monsters miss the player (while not wearing torso armor?) and grants an AC bonus when enhanced.
Kicking a sink can dislodge a small swarm of sewer rats (and possibly some other random r monsters), or snakes, in addition to its other kick effects. Unlike puddings which are one per sink, these don’t stop coming until they’re extinct.
All sinks spawn with a ring buried beneath them. If you kick the sink and get the “Flupp! Muddy water” message, the sink will spit out one of the rings buried under it. This removes the need for the S_LRING flag, and also allows players a non-destructive way to retrieve rings they dropped down the sink.
Nurse healing should cure other ailments like sliming and possibly stoning.
Gnomish characters read spellbooks faster than other races.
TDTTOE: Skeletons use gendered pronouns if and only if the player is an Archeologist (and therefore used to analyzing bones).
Frost Brand is made of platinum and deals triple damage to monsters that are fire resistant but NOT cold resistant. Fire Brand is made of gold and deals triple damage to monsters that are cold resistant but NOT fire resistant.
Condensing all of NetHack’s poison mechanics into one unified mechanic:
Frost lamp, a tool which gives out a radius 3 cold aura. Water and lava within the radius freeze and then revert once out of the radius. Fiery monsters take damage from being in the radius. Eventually runs out and has to be recharged.
Sokoban will either contain a prize of ‘‘three’’ amulets (one reflection, one versus poison, one other), or three bags (one holding, one oilskin, one other).
Ring of fast living: gives an experience multiplier and increases hunger rate drastically, multiplies your damage but also multiplies damage you take.
Smoke cloud monster (black v), has a mild fire damage attack and a suffocating smoke attack. Generates in fiery areas.
Meleeing monsters while you are afflicted with a zombification disease will start zombifying them.
Change rne() so that it doesn’t depend on the player’s experience level: instead it depends on the current level depth. Specifically, change its theoretical maximum from max(XL/3, 5) to max(depth/5, 5).
Ring of carrying: new chargeable ring that multiplies the weight of the player’s inventory by (1 - (0.05 * enchantment)) when worn. Stacks with a second ring. Initial charge and beatitude is set the same as any other charged ring.
Some weapons’ unidentified appearances are shared with other weapons, so characters who start the game without knowledge of many weapons have to play a bit of an ID game with them. For instance, scimitar and katana could just be changed to “curved sword”. This has problems, though: it doesn’t translate very well to tiles (tiles of weapons sharing a description would have to be made identical), and it’s vulnerable to weight-ID if two weapons with different weights share the same description.
Add a “fruit” database entry: “They say this is edible. Some adventurers have strange tastes.” and tweak the database code to recognize a typed-in fruit name in the game as this entry.
If you consort with a foocubus while Lawful, “You feel unclean.”
Torches, which can be created by dipping a club into a potion of oil. Torches are their own item, not just a “lit club” (though possibly the lamplit flag could be used for this), and have a light radius of 3. Deals additional fire damage to monsters it hits, but may go out. May light the hero on fire if they fall down the stairs with a lit torch in inventory.
There is some sort of way to store a soul (ghost, or monster’s or pet’s soul from its corpse before it rots) in an item, and later release it into a freshly killed corpse to make the soul inhabit that body. Possibly this could be a ritual spell.
Give a Luck penalty for destroying a Sokoban boulder by polymorph shudder (or polymorphing it in any way, really, since turning it into anything else removes it from the map).
Portals on the Planes generate non-hidden, so you don’t need to bring mapping items for them.
Wearing an opera cloak allows you to sing like a musical instrument (e.g. the passtune).
Sell price depends on Charisma, whereas buy price does not. (Slightly more flavorful.)
The hunger property, instead of doubling hunger rate, halves any nutrition you get from any source, making it marginally more useful for eating large corpses. (This should probably only be granted by the actual hunger intrinsic, i.e. the ring of hunger, as opposed to other intrinsics like conflict and regeneration that burn through nutrition fast but aren’t explicitly about being hungry.)
New conduct for not hitting things with thrown items, and another conduct for not casting offensive spells.
Special message when a self-concealing pet “reluctantly hides under” a cursed item instead of stepping over it. Or maybe pets which hide under objects will never hide under cursed objects.
Cannibalism angers your god instead of removing telepathy.
Non-intrusive ways to tell new players important parts of the game, like how to use #enhance. For instance, “You feel more confident in your skills. (Use #enhance to advance this skill.)”
Healing potions don’t give you different HP maximum increases depending on their beatitude any more. Instead, if they would have taken you above your maximum, your HP maximum is increased by that amount, to a maximum of +1 (healing) / +2 (extra healing) / +4 (full healing).
Random earthquakes. Same effects as drums of earthquake, except not triggered by anything and not necessarily centered on the hero or anything special. Earthquakes (from any source) now can collapse diggable walls (turning them into floor spaces without pits) and drop rocks and boulders out of the ceiling. No effect in any Plane except Earth. Possibly, to limit this, a finite number of earthquakes can happen on any given level (after which it either collapses entirely, or just fails to produce more free rocks and boulders.)
Instead of a mslow flag in the monst struct, use a signed char called “speedbon” which represents the amount of speed offset that the monster should have from its normal speed. This allows for more nuanced speed mechanics, like zapping a wand of speed monster or slow monster multiple times and having the effects stack.
Tile that indicates, somehow, that it is suspicious-looking - it might conceal a secret door or something else discoverable, or it might be nothing, but it’s a clearer hint to the player than usual. This would work well in a tiles windowport, but it’s not clear how it could be done in ASCII.
Disenchanters can eat magical items for food like incantifiers do (i.e. draining the magic out of the item, leaving it as uncharged/cancelled/+0 or turning it into a mundane counterpart). This works for disenchanter pets, and for players polymorphed into them. Not specified whether this should give the player intrinsics.
Possibly, add a ‘magivore’ monster flag to represent monsters that can do this, though if only disenchanters are capable of doing this then it may not be needed.
Shop type “psychedelicatessen”: contains some normal delicatessen food, but also hallucinogens and lots of drugs.
Proposed nerfs for ring and wand destruction due to electric damage (some of them extensible to scrolls, spellbooks and potions for fire and cold damage):
Magicbane should block random item cursing from a fountain.
Hands holding a quarterstaff or wands don’t count as being occupied for the purposes of calculating spellcasting penalty. (Perhaps generalize wands to any other non-weapon.)
Replace the shield of reflection with a “polished shield”, which is nonmagical. It can come in any material, but only brass, copper, silver, and gold are shiny enough to make it also confer reflection. (That is, you can have a polished wooden shield or a polished iron shield, but the material just isn’t lustrous enough.)
Merge the rings of sustain ability and slow digestion into a “ring of stasis”. Double-edged effects: slows down digestion like normal, but also slows down healing, energy regeneration, timer effects like confusion and sickness, any timing-out intrinsics, prevents exercise from happening, blocks or reduces to 1 effects that directly change ability scores.
If you have teleport control, quantum mechanics’ attacks toggle your speed instead of giving you a free controlled teleport.
When a gremlin steals an intrinsic from you, you can recover the intrinsic by killing it or eating its corpse.
You can trigger land mines from a safe distance by hitting the square with a polearm.
Kicking a sink may produce an air elemental.
The chance of failing to polymorph into a target monster (whether chosen randomly or intentionally) depends on the base level of that polyform relative to your own level.
Unicorn corpses are never tainted from age, though they do eventually rot away.
Add a “summoned” bitfield to struct monst, which is used to identify monsters that have been created through magical means. Should be a bitfield rather than a flag so that it can track different details of how it was summoned (from trap/wand/etc, by player or by something else; it probably doesn’t warrant a mextra struct). Summoned monsters can have various anti-farming nerfs applied to them: no training skills, no corpses, no deathdrops, no starting inventory, no experience, etc. Possibly, summoned monsters also disappear after a few hundred turns.
The Candelabrum refuses to light if it has fewer than 7 candles.
Leprechauns (or anything with AD_SGLD) should steal items made of gold out of the hero’s inventory.
The hero can either not write unknown scrolls and spellbooks at all (writing by appearance is still fine as long as the appearance is known), or else the chance of writing one increases with every scroll and spellbook the hero identifies.
In variants with felt markers, allow them to write spellbooks and scrolls of mail - the other scrolls are the only thing they can’t write.
Bump the spell of sleep up to level 3 or 4.
Carrying gold items openly causes leprechauns, dragons, and Croesus to be automatically aggravated.
Clerical spell that gives you a certain duration of a property that steals enemies’ maxHP and heals you when you hit things in melee.
You can put rocks into a sack, oilskin sack, or bag of holding and then wield it and swing it at enemies. (This uses flail skill.) Damage depends on the total weight of the rocks.
Augment the stealth system by adding a monster AI attribute representing “hasn’t sensed you yet, or has lost sense of you”. Also allow players to take a deliberate action to conceal themselves. This would allow for players to hide in (or flee into) a corner or closet and allow a monster to pass them by, then get the jump on them afterward (perhaps in the form of a bonus for attacking an unsuspecting monster). Some monsters should ideally be able to conceal themselves as well, perhaps even by casting illusions that make a door appear as a wall or something to the hero, until discovered.
Invoking Mjollnir allows you to cast a bolt of lightning as if from a lightning wand.
Vampires can’t step onto sinks, because they “can’t cross running water”.
Scroll of healeportation: performs both a heal and a teleport at once.
New artifact spellbook Akashic Records:
An artifact boomerang which is a guaranteed first sacrifice gift for Archeologists.
Long worms should be much faster than they currently are, and they get a damage bonus for each tail segment that is lined up behind their head.
Gnomes spawned with a sufficiently high starting level, or else just a fixed percentage of gnome lords and a different fixed percentage of gnome kings, generate with a touchstone.
Make potions of oil more common, so that the player has more area-of-effect combat options (for throwing firebomb potions of oil). Possibly allow hardware stores to stock them.
Merge the damage versus small and damage versus large stats of weapons, since they don’t really matter that much and add mostly pointless complexity. Damage should be more dependent on skill than on the size of the target monster. The only problem is how to stop the highest-damage weapons from becoming used by everyone because they’re so optimal; perhaps skill should do something drastic like add an extra die with every skill level, allowing you to have weapons that are decent at low skill (by having multiple small base dice) but poorer at high skill (because adding more small dice doesn’t work as well).
The game makes fully clear to the player, in-game, how the skill system works and what the consequences of investing points in a skill means.
You have access to the full total allotment of skill points from the beginning of the game (effectively making it so that gaining more levels isn’t required to unlock skill slots). To compensate, you can only train skills by fighting at-difficulty monsters or higher, so you can’t train everything by farming weak monsters.
Scale monsters’ hit dice bonuses based on their size. In order to reduce the high amount of variance monster HP currently has, monster HP is now computed by this formula: (HD)d4 + HD\*2\*(size), where size is 0 for MZ_TINY, 1 for MZ_SMALL, and so on.
Random engraving: “This ASCII tile was donated by [user].”, where user is either a name of someone that has contributed to nethack in real life, or just pulled from the high score list.
Escape as its own key should be used as an actual escape command, so you can do things like try to get out of pits and engulfers with it.
If you press Escape while being grabbed by a monster, at a time when you could normally enter input (so not in the middle of messages or in a prompt), you get the message that says “You cannot escape from the [monster]!”
You can light a greased sword on fire. Attacks with it will deal fire damage for a few turns until it burns out.
New object property “identification”. Generates on containers, and type-identifies any item put into it.
When a boulder drops on a tile containing another boulder, it tries to roll to an adjacent tile. If it can’t (because all adjacent tiles have boulders or are walls), it drops as a second boulder like normal.
Don’t allow giants to carry an infinite amount of boulders.
Thrones have an affiliation with a monster. Only the affiliated monster can sit on it and use it. It starts out as the king monster generated on the throne. If the monster dies, its killer becomes the new affiliated monster. This would need some flavor for why the king doesn’t just sit on it and use it until it vanishes; there are a few possible ways to handle that. One is that though the throne effects are good, the king is flavored as not wanting to lose the throne. Another is that throne rooms will start empty except for the king and maybe a couple guards, and the king does in fact use the throne’s powers against you (without risk of it vanishing since he is the original owner, or something).
Remove the scroll of genocide, or else institute some awful (divine?) punishment for genociding monsters, because it is a heinous act. (This would help with symmetry for monsters using genocide.)
Polymorph potions affect all monsters adjacent to where they shatter.
Fountains, sinks, and other dungeon features can generate inside shops. Using them in any way incurs a usage fee. Destroying them incurs a larger charge to be paid immediately, or the shopkeeper will get mad.
Use the builtin pathfinding algorithm to trace a path between the upstairs and downstairs of each level in the Dungeons of Doom. Along this path, remove or relocate any traps, and (in early levels, perhaps up until the Oracle) convert any secret doors or passages along the path into regular ones.
Monster flag M3_TELWITHU. Monsters with this flag (examples: quantum mechanics, some devils) will follow you when you teleport horizontally.
A demon lord who lives in Gehennom who you can sell your soul to in order to gain levels. This will have drastic effects on your score (or something) at the end of the game.
Diluting full healing potions turns them into undiluted extra healing; diluting extra healing turns them into undiluted healing. Though this may create weirdness where, for instance, a milky potion gets diluted and turns into a brilliant blue potion, and then gets diluted again and turns into a golden potion.
Make more potions effective for throwing at monsters, first by making the vapor effects hit more than just whoever they were thrown at (i.e. splash effects), and then by making more potions have a vapor effect that affects monsters.
More variety in ranged unreflectable elemental attacks, as a sort-of-nerf to reflection (all ranged elemental attacks currently in the game are reflectable). For instance, have enemies shooting fire arrows at you.
A Minetown (or some other town) minigame based around classic survival/area defense games:
If the player sits on a throne after being crowned, even in non-royal polyforms, they get the royalty message.
The ability to chat with intelligent pets and give them basic strategy directives, such as what type of attack they should be favoring, or whether they should stop attacking and stay by your side. Opinions vary as to whether this should be limited to intelligent pets or not.
Reach gloves: let you pick up items from adjacent squares and grapple monsters.
In order to make extrinsic regeneration scale better, it acts as a multiplier to your natural regeneration rate. x2 is an option but may be too high; x1.5 might work better.
Another idea is to make it so that regeneration gets better the closer you are to dying of HP loss, formally: if current HP = X * maxHP, regeneration will heal you at a rate of (2 - x) times its normal rate.
Flesh-eating scarab beetles: they may reproduce every time they bite you.
When wearing gauntlets of power, thrown javelins (or other spear-likes) continue flying after hitting monsters, and may damage monsters standing further back.
Hallucination should cause statues to be seen as monsters that don’t move and perform nonsense actions.
Change Vorpal Blade to do very high damage (on the order of x3 or x4) when it critical hits, instead of decapitation, in order to remove YAAD potential in monster hands. The new critical hit message is “Your Vorpal Blade goes snicker-snack!” (Some other message might be needed to replace the existing message when you are neutral crowned but already holding Vorpal Blade).
When you attempt to interact with (or possibly explicitly search) a door or container, you get “There [are no traps / is a trap] on this [door / container].” which guarantees that there is not or is a trap, rather than an ambiguous “You find no traps”.
In Orcish Town, there should be peaceful orcish racial shopkeepers with actual shops (who will happily sell you the human shopkeeper corpse on their floor.)
“Coffin” boxes should use corpsenm instead of spe to represent whether they contain a vampire. Useful because it could be used for other creatures (including Schroedinger’s Cat).
Monsters in groups should always spawn with the same affiliation (peaceful/hostile).
Modify Sokoban maps so that a monster can never get stuck in an awkward place except by the player doing something foolish. Possibly make the corridors leading to the goal double-sized or have alcoves off to one side where a monster can move.
Saltwater or murky water, intended as a nerf for “just dilute most potions”:
Alternatively, don’t actually make saltwater a separate potion; just use saltwater as a flavor reason for why the player can’t intentionally dilute potions to water. (Can use a separate flavor argument, that potions are generally corked while not used, to explain away the lack of dilution for water damage.) Also, make most potions cancel into non-water base potions (such as confusion and hallucination to booze), with the notable exception of polymorph. It’s also harder or impossible to get water from random alchemy or polymorph.
A third option is naming blessing-capable potions “purified water” and leaving the mundane potion of water as it is. Things such as unicorn horns can neutralize toxins but can’t actually remove them, so the resulting water isn’t purified.
Ignore missing “of”, “the”, and the like in wishes.
The number of levels a trap door will take you down is deterministic for every trap door. Possibly also extend the trapdoor and migration code to allow deterministically placing coordinates of things that fall through a trap door as well.
Nazgul cannot be killed “incorrectly” (unclear on what this needs to be, perhaps stabbing them with a barrow-wight’s knife, or being female). If you happen to kill one incorrectly, it will be killed without giving experience and its inventory will be deleted (minus unique items). The Nazgul born counter then ticks down by one, so it can be spawned again elsewhere by the normal mechanism.
Rename AD_SEDU to AD_CHRM because it’s not really seduction.
Strictly separate the AD_SITM and AD_SEDU stealing attacks (hostile theft vs. charming to hand over an item), and remove the is_animal checks from the stealing code.
Cave-like or cavernous levels, like the Mines and the Caveman home level, spawn bats fairly often.
Entering the Valley and entering the second level of Gehennom (as well as possibly entering other branches) give the hero an automatic level up.
Your quest leader can heal you if you come to them injured or sick.
Dart and arrow traps are much more likely to generate if the trap is next to a wall. Alternatively, when generating a dart or arrow trap, look for a wall tile in line within 3 squares that contains the launching mechanism; if no such tile exists, the trap cannot generate. The player must then untrap the wall square, or dig it out, to remove the trap.
Merge dart and arrow traps into “missile” traps, that fire a random sort of missile. Also, make such traps store their ammo in the trap to be fired one by one or released when untrapped, not to be created one by one when triggering, as described in #768.
Restructure Gehennom as follows: the main trunk consists of the Valley, then 5-7 filler cavern/lava levels interspersed with two bribable demon lairs, then the Vibrating Square level (also cavern/lava), then the Sanctum. The Vibrating Square level contains six revealed portals, one of which leads to the Wizard’s Tower, one of which leads to Vlad’s Tower, and the others all lead to demon lairs in which you can’t leave the level until the demon is defeated.
Erosionproof items should be immune to disintegration as well.
In shops, picking up an item spawns a peaceful monster that vanishes once you pay for the item properly. If you make any attempt to steal, it turns hostile. (The general principle: the more you want to steal, the harder it is to do so.)
Kicking down doors exercises Str and not Dex.
Black pudding globs convey only one of the three intrinsics they currently convey (maybe shock resistance), and brown pudding globs convey another (maybe cold resistance).
If a scurrier selects , or . when asked what to eat, they attempt to chew through the floor.
Greased gloves grant extrinsic slippery fingers.
You can engrave on walls or doors. Elbereth on walls or doors doesn’t work. You can read it by standing on the nearest space. Random graffiti, if it generates on a floor square next to a wall or door, may say “Something is written on the wall here.” instead of the floor. Graffiti could render as ~ or something similar.
Intelligence can be abused and exercised, but unlike other stats, exercise will never bring it above its base value (or the value you have raised it to through gain ability).
Sources of abuse: mind flayer brain eating, zombie attacks. Sources of exercise: reading and writing spellbooks and scrolls, learning a new spell, getting a major Oracle consultation for the first time, plus possibly some of the uncommon, non-farmable ways stolen from the list of actions that currently exercise Wisdom.
Random chance of getting lead poisoning while quaffing from a sink. This abuses Int and Con.
Resolve the problem of having to double-enchant launchers and ammo and get double bonuses in one of two ways:
The Oracle centaur statues may contain sizeable piles of ranged ammunition, particularly arrows and crossbow bolts.
Very powerful artifact armor that cannot be removed without dying. If you take it off, polymorph out of it, or have it removed by a monster, you die.
Reflavoring of Heaven or Hell mode: everything explodes when it gets hit by anything. A.k.a. “HackSplosion”.
Summoning spells examine how many summoned monsters are currently on the level, and cap it at some point so the level can’t fill up with more and more summonstormed monsters.
Every spellcaster should have its own list of spells it can cast. (Archons and possibly nalfeshnees should be casting clerically aligned spells rather than mage spells.)
Challenge rooms that occasionally get embedded into Gehennom levels. They are sealed off somehow, perhaps with solid stone you need to dig through to enter. They are not intended to be required, and contain some sort of reward. Rooms might include:
You occasionally get an alignment bonus if your alignment record is negative and you are Weak, because you are doing hunger penance. (Possibly only works for lawfuls, since chaotic gods are unlikely to approve of weakness.)
Special room that is lined (not filled) with statues of you, and contains no monsters, items, traps, or anything else interesting. All doors in contain traps that will make them lock behind you. Intended only to make the game more creepy.
Rust traps’ item rusting is delayed. You can use a towel to prevent a wetted item from rusting.
You can use whole object classes when using the numeric prefix with the D command, e.g. D 1 ? will drop 1 of each scroll you are carrying.
You can attack yourself by using the F command and selecting . for yourself.
Mummies have a curse item attack that would probably make them not fun to have in their current quantities. So mummies are not randomly generated; they appear in graveyards and some special levels like the Catacombs and the Archeologist quest, but otherwise do not appear.
Buff zombies, to make them more of a threat. Import FIQHack zombification (a zombie bite will place you 90-100 turns away from turning into a zombie, each additional bite decreases the timer by around 10 turns, but it will go away by itself if the timer doesn’t dip below 40); boost their difficulty, but keep their HD low; allow them to revive themselves less frequently than trolls, but also revive themselves whenever another zombie steps over their corpse.
Add a monster species flag for “zombifiable”, and track zombification or mummification as flags on an individual monster, removing the need for Z or M to be separate classes.
Ammunition that is +X will break if and only if it scores a hit on a monster above a certain difficulty. The formula suggested was that it can only break when 5X+3 < difficulty, but this is just a wild guess at the numbers and isn’t balanced.
Change the color of the player’s @ when their HP gets low or decreases sharply.
Make monster sleep work more like player sleep, where being attacked / taking damage is quite likely to end the sleep. Then sleep is not basically a duplicate of paralysis.
Set the minimum dungeon level for polymorph traps to a deeper level, to perhaps 12 or 15. Polymorph traps now polymorph you in spite of magic resistance, but you can acquire some property (not as strong as polymorph control) that makes it much more likely or guaranteed that you will polymorph into a form that will preserve your armor and your hands.
Change the definition of polyselfless conduct to “You have never intentionally changed form.” If you step on a hitherto unknown polymorph trap and have an uncontrolled polymorph, the conduct is not broken.
Demon lords that accept a bribe don’t actually go anywhere. They get out of the way to the stairs if they were previously in the way, but otherwise they have their movement points set to 0 and cease warping for as long as they are peaceful.
Add hallucination effects to (many, perhaps all) scrolls:
Change the confused effects of the scroll of punishment: blessed mollifies your god if angry, uncursed increases anger by 1, cursed increases anger by 1 and your god smites you.
Implicitly untrap a chest when opening it (check it once for traps, not enough to guarantee there are no traps, but if one is found, prompt to attempt removing it.)
The cursed potion of see invisible removes any see invisible intrinsic that the player has.
Your success chance of writing an unknown scroll or spellbook should be based on Intelligence, not Luck.
Differentiate between poison, which comes solely from ingesting it, and venom, which comes from getting toxins in your bloodstream from a bite, claw, or sting. Monsters like spiders can be both poisonous to eat and venomous when attacking.
More marginal corner-case uses for gems (similar to the amethyst/booze interaction):
Jumping either acts on a timeout and can’t be done right after a previous jump, or else it takes a full turn’s worth of movement points (more so than the existing mechanic of reducing movement points to 0).
Remove the scroll of stinking cloud in favor of a potion that when shattered releases a stinking cloud. Drinking this makes you vomit or become ill.
Add “You vaguely feel a vague sense of vagueness” as a hallucinatory message.
As part of artifact rebalance: guaranteed sacrifice gifts should probably not be ascension kit quality gear, since otherwise sacrificing for such gear becomes a dominant strategy. (Most important for weapons; you don’t want to be able to obtain a weapon early that will obsolete all other weapons in the game.)
Revamp Astral so that the challenges to player mobility, options, and time don’t all depend on being crammed in by monsters. One idea is to have spellcasters that summon force fields / temporary walls to block your progress.
Determining whether you escape or dodge trap effects should be based on stats like Dexterity and maybe role and XL, rather than Luck.
Wands may generate pre-recharged.
Add an option to re-enable displaying statues as `, rather than their monster symbol.
Higher pickaxe skill increases digging speed.
Elves get low-light vision, which doubles the radius of light sources, rather than infravision. It also gives them vision on dark squares that are orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to a lit square.
You can mark certain squares as “ignored” so that when you walk over them they don’t show you the items on it.
There is a cap on the number of smoky-potion wish-granting djinni that can appear in one game.
Charging a potion of fruit juice turns it into a potion of see invisible. Dipping fruit juice into confusion turns it into a potion of booze.
Squares containing burning candles ignite flammable monsters (such as golems) that move onto them. However, such monsters should stay away from spaces they can see have a burning candle.
H-class monsters are tall enough to stand above water, and don’t drown in it. Or maybe they only drown on water spaces completely surrounded by other water.
If you attempt to put on a helm of opposite alignment in the Astral Plane, your god is angered and disintegrates it off your head before your alignment changes.
Eating a cockatrice corpse only petrifies you 85% or so of the time, the rest of the time it “tastes like chicken”.
Find some justification for making the flavor of Sokoban a branch where the ceiling collapsed and opened up pits and dropped rocks everywhere.
Add pegasi, lawful u-class monsters that fly, have a slightly higher base level than a warhorse, and speed around 25. Might be tameable with vegetables, or only blessed vegetables, or one certain veggy food, though.
If you throw a bell (or possibly any non-cloth item), it makes a clanging or clattering noise that wakes monsters.
Paper bags that are a container but disintegrate when wet. They can generate with a potion of booze inside.
In variants that have multiple selectable Sokoban prizes, one prize is multiple random rings and a random amulet, but there’s no way to see what they are without sealing off the other prizes.
In variants with auto-reviving undead, you can apply a weapon downwards at a dead zombie’s corpse to destroy it so that it can’t revive. This may take several turns.
When a monster decides whether you are peaceful and makes race or alignment checks to do so, they do it based on polyform, current alignment, and when they first spot you as opposed to when they are first created. If the player polymorphs into an orc and some other orcs are hanging out in an unexplored room across the level, they should be peaceful to the character as long as the character is polymorphed into an orc (but will turn hostile when she changes back).
New role, the “Renegade”, where your goal is to destroy the Amulet of Yendor. You start the game with the Bell of Opening (you found it as a child and had your mind opened), and you are unaligned so all the gods hate you. No quest.
Ranged attacks can be directed at the . space. If this ends up killing you, the death reason is “shot [him/her]self in the foot”.
Artifact shield of reflection that reflects thrown or fired projectiles.
Make death magic resistable by an amulet or ring. Possible names and corresponding exact effects vary:
Gods may grant a saddle as a sacrifice gift and unrestrict riding skill.
Mjollnir confers shock resistance.
Restore the Amulet Delivery Service to the game: demon lords in the Sanctum, but not the Wizard, will fight the current holder of the Amulet of Yendor for it. Only do this if lugging a demon lord down to the Sanctum is considerably harder than just fighting through the Sanctum is itself, and no demon lord is actually guaranteed to win against the High Priest.
Keys only work on locks in one dungeon branch.
Convert some of the Gehennom filler levels into ADOM-like greater vaults that contain many challenging monsters and an artifact.
Fort Ludios is a visit-once level: once you leave by the exit portal, the Dungeons of Doom portal disappears and the level becomes inaccessible forever. (Maybe if you leave any of the invocation items or the Amulet there, the portal refuses to let you out so the game doesn’t become unwinnable.)
Single-level branches whose portals, found in vaults, disappear after one use; they are subdivisions of the Magic Memory Vault, and modeled after ADOM “vaults”. These are basically challenge levels, smaller and less rewarding than Fort Ludios (the master branch), that contain some nice loot and harder-than-usual monsters. Portals to them can also be found in vaults in Gehennom.
Role-specific artifacts given to you only when you are crowned.
Potions that you can drink from multiple times.
Applying or invoking the Candelabrum with insufficient candles prompts you to attach more candles to it rather than lighting it.
You can walk diagonally into or out of an open door if there is also another open door adjacent to both your starting and ending location.
Make magic cancellation visible in the status bar.
Artifact bullwhip that grants extra damage against tigers and other animals, and grants better passive pet-control effects.
Have different summon nasties lists, based on what monster is doing the summoning. If a demon summons, you get mostly demons; if an undead summons, you get mostly undead. Needs some more lists for lawful summoners like titans or Archons and Quest nemesis spellcasters. The current list is kept for the Wizard of Yendor.
When tame shapechangers polymorph, they attack creatures based on their current monster level (or perhaps the maximum of their current level and their new form’s level), not blindly use the new form’s level.
A type of boots, perhaps high iron boots, that protects fully against xans.
Have the tab key be a shortcut for auto-attacking monsters (at range or at polearm range).
Add a mechanic like applying a scalpel to a monster to cure its ills to give healers a way to heal monsters that isn’t tied to magic.
The scroll of scare monster, on the ground, will do a check versus monster magic resistance before it actually scares a monster.
If hovering over a trap door and zapping an opening beam downwards, the trap door becomes a hole.
Failed artifact wishes give you the base item type instead of nothing.
Luck ideas:
New unaligned artifact dagger Almagest: uses the powers of scrolls to augment itself, and bears a scroll label signifying which scroll ability it is imbued with. Opinions vary on whether this label should be randomly generated by the dagger (and the player may choose to read it, upon which it gives the uncursed scroll effect and disappears for 1000 turns, eventually returning with another label) or whether the label should be deliberately imbued by the player by rubbing it on a scroll. It gains +d4 to damage and +d4 to hit when it has an inscription.
There are additional special effects if the player has formally IDed the scroll whose label is on the dagger:
q class monsters should have their difficulty rebalanced to at least roughly reflect their damage output; mumakil are the strongest q of all and have one of the lowest difficulties.
Bows might break, like boomerangs, when you whack things with them in melee. (Will require an AI rewrite so 500 gnomes don’t break their bows on you.)
Allow edged weapons to be applied to force open door locks. (They can break in the process of doing this.)
Amplification trinsic which is a counterpart to reflection: an attack that hits you will be amplified and continue past you (greater range and greater effects).
Levels between Medusa and the Castle generate with roving contingents of the Yendorian Army, and have large open areas if they are maze levels.
Rock moles can be tamed by throwing a metal weapon at them, which they will catch and eat.
Statues block line of sight.
Touchstones no longer count as magical items. (Real-life touchstones aren’t.)
Kicking a lightweight object into a wall will cause it to “rebound” or “clatter” (for wooden objects) off the wall, not just “Thump!”. The object might move a couple spaces.
Add a boulder-throwing skill for giants. Like other skills, its skill cap is determined by your role.
Fixed crysknives never revert.
Monster spell that creates a wall, or possibly just a boulder, to block the hero’s progress.
New slot for belts:
The Heart of Ahriman returns to your quiver when slung. Or at least add some returning sling-ammo artifact.
Wizards who can’t cast spells while crowned (permablind?) receive something other than a spellbook of finger of death.
Tinning kits include tin openers implicitly, so if you wield it you can open tins.
On the Plane of Water, fire wands and fire spells expand your bubble, and throwing a bag of holding out into the water creates a new huge bubble (as a large but finite amount of the water is sucked into it).
Revenant race. Only available for roles you have died playing and didn’t leave bones. Gets death-magic resistance and unbreathing from XL1, has an automatic counterattacking kick. Does not have starting gear; any starting gear your role has is scattered randomly across dungeon level 1. Cannot start with a pet.
Samurai can’t use Excalibur, because it’s cross-culture. The Tsurugi should be buffed to be quite good enough.
A level sound for when there is a dragon somewhere on the level.
When a monster kills a monster that it grudges, it gets some bonus like a small HP boost or a level up.
Monsters who can use items and estimate that they are strong enough will attack crossaligned unicorns to get the horn.
Rogues have a 20% (or 10%, or whatever is balanced) chance of stealing a random lightweight item (say, less than 5 aum, or less than 20 aum to include potions) out of a monster’s inventory with every successful melee hit they make. This chance is increased if they are hitting with no wielded weapon or have no secondary weapon or shield, and maybe should scale with experience level too.
Rebalance Fort Ludios so that it can realistically only be completed after finishing the Castle. One way to do this is to make soldier AI better, another way is to put the entry and exit portals on opposite sides of the level (or put the exit portal inside the fort), so the player can’t return to the Dungeons of Doom when things get hairy. The goal of doing this is to delay a large power spike due to collecting all of its gold until the player is truly ready for it.
Shopkeepers type-identify any item they sell you. (This allows the player to type-identify an item by selling it and buying it back.)
The Oracle sells type-identification of any one carried item for a fee.
The wand of death at master skill kills and automatically zombie-enslaves the monsters it hits.
Sokoban provides a choice between an oilskin bag of holding and an amulet of reflection and magical breathing. Neither of these is very likely to generate randomly.
Werebane provides protection from shape changers and immunity to lycanthropy while wielded.
Other priest benefits: the chance of receiving a sacrifice gift is doubled, make it easier to get crowned or other high boons, the prayer timeout isn’t increased when crowned.
Priests can sacrifice corpses anywhere, with no need for an altar, except in Gehennom. (This should be strictly worse than altar sacrifice - maybe it only reduces prayer timeout, by less than it would normally, and can’t result in gifts.)
Make being on fire a status effect, which deals damage over time. (Other obvious things to make into damage-over-time effects: poison, bleeding/internal damage.)
Special room that contains a demon gate in the center. This continually spawns monsters who try to defend the gate; the player has to make it through the spawns to destroy it or block it off. The gate could be implemented as a magic portal to a special challenge level like an ADOM-style vault.
Valkyries only gain wings (and therefore flying) after they are crowned.
If escaping a prompt would use up an item or charge, re-prompt at least once (or maybe have an option configuring how many times it re-prompts.)
Autocursing armor always generates cursed; it is thus perfectly safe to wear any confirmed non-cursed armor the player finds.
Water elementals deal active water damage to the player, more broadly than rust monsters: blanks scrolls, dilutes potions, extinguishes candles, etc.
Applying a blessed magic whistle while confused teleports you to one of your pets.
Barbarian unarmed skill enhances for free when you finish the Quest, get crowned, or reach a certain level.
A windowport that allows you to configure local sound files to play when the game produces certain messages.
“streak_mode” option. It puts you into a game mode that only allows one saved game at a time.
Cursed magic whistles send pets away from you. (This is perhaps exploitable with e.g. purple rain strategies on Astral.)
Elementals fire back weapons you throw at them with additional force (dealing additional damage to you): water elementals in a geyser, fire elementals burning with primal flame, air elementals in a gust, earth elementals in a shower of rocks (or they just incorporate the weapon into themself and become stronger, dropping it on death).
The Oracle has the same item as the prize in Sokoban, so you can pay her to tell you what the prize is (because she’ll have it with her). This opens up a strategic choice where players can decide whether to kill her and skip Sokoban, or not. She will need to be quite stronger than her current abilities are, with passive attacks that work even at range. Alternatively, she could carry the other Sokoban item, depending on how formidable she is.
The Oracle now prompts the user to ask a question. Her oracularities now have associated keywords (a many-to-many relationship); if you use keywords, she will select an oracularity matching as many of them as possible. If she doesn’t know what you’re asking about, she gives you a random oracle (with a slightly different message to rationalize why she’s going off topic). This could even be leveraged to ask about information that’s normally hidden from the player; for example, asking about the Sokoban reward or the location of branch stairs.
Yendorian Army units surrounded by fellow army units have higher AC, to-hit, and damage.
Make the Castle barracks have second doors that open onto the courtyard.
Zombies always try to path in a straight line towards the player (assuming they can see or otherwise are aware of the player), and get stuck on terrain.
Golems hate existence so much that they attack all other creatures, but the other creatures don’t hate golems, so they just defend. This is a special case of implementing one-way grudges.
The scroll of destroy armor, when confused, cursed, and naked, grants temporary disintegration resistance.
Pacifist option, which suppresses the normal bump-to-attack mechanic. (You can still attack with the F command.)
Quantum mechanics’ hits toggle your intrinsic speed instead of teleporting you if you have teleport control. (You already know your position, so your velocity must become uncertain.)
Eating a bag of tricks (as a gelatinous cube) does something interesting, maybe only YAFM, maybe more.
Change up and add new failure effects of spellbook reading:
Books no longer have a 1/3 chance of disintegrating when failing to read them; instead, a cursed book will always disintegrate.
Dropping an item on an altar to Moloch may, in some cases, curse the item. Ideally this should not be exploitable, so things like a very small chance per drop of an item would not be good. Maybe tied to object ID number if that can’t be exploited.
Give all roles a warning when they might fail to read a spellbook, but make the numbers involved much less useful than the Wizard’s warning. (Possibly, just give players “difficult to comprehend” when success chance is less than 100% and nothing else, and buff Wizard warning to add more levels: “somewhat difficult”, “difficult”, “very difficult”, “extremely difficult”).
A Minesweeper minigame where you start in an empty zone with a pickaxe. You can always move diagonally through gaps without dropping anything. The amount of mines next to a tile are represented by rock piles on the ground, and you can throw single rocks to embed them in walls to flag mines. Every mine hit causes an explosion that damages, wounds legs, scatters inventory, and penalizes Luck.
Remove the ability of ID scrolls to give a full inventory ID, or make blessed ones give a guaranteed type-ID of everything in inventory. Confused blessed scrolls of ID give a full ID of charges, beatitude, and enchantment on all items in inventory, but NOT type-identification.
Artifact chaotic amulet Amulet of Splendor: provides every single amulet effect, as well as unchanging-ignoring controlled polyself when invoked. Wearing it conveys life saving (this WILL disintegrate the amulet if triggered), magical breathing, unchanging, poison resistance, ESP, reflection, strangulation (doesn’t kill you due to magical breathing but maybe it makes it so you can’t eat food or something while wearing it, or it autocurses), restful sleep, and gender change for as long as you wear the amulet. Base type is a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor.
On Valentine’s Day, succubi (or any female seducer) steal candy bars you are carrying, and incubi give you candy bars.
The blessed scroll of gold detection also detects gems, and possibly type-identifies any pieces of worthless glass on the level as well (more to prevent interface annoyance than anything else). Maybe rename it to “scroll of treasure detection”.
If the scroll of enchant weapon targets a wielded bow but you have arrows quivered, or you are not wielding anything but have thrown weapons quivered, it may switch to enchanting the quivered ammunition instead.
Petrification is a contact poison secreted by cockatrices, and only partially stones the body part it touches. If you touch one with your hands, you cannot use your hands anymore, etc.
Stepping on a square containing a cockatrice corpse while not wearing boots instantly stones you.
Players polymorphed into nymphs have infinite carrying capacity.
Unicorn corpses have a chance of conveying teleportitis.
The fireball spell’s unadvanced form creates a single fire explosion at a targetable square, rather than a ray that explodes, so you can cast it at squares that aren’t directly aligned with you.
Strength should not give a to-hit bonus; the encumbrance system is already there to address that.
Zen or illiterate players get spells for free as a prayer boon where they normally would have been granted the corresponding spellbook.
Don’t print a message or interrupt anything when your Pw reaches full while you are maintaining a spell, if you haven’t actually cast a spell manually since the last time it was restored.
Resting on a bench regains Pw as well as HP.
Ogresmasher doesn’t need bonuses versus ogres, or confer beneficial properties. It is simply an oversized sledgehammer with such terrible crushing power that it splatters anything it’s swung at. On top of modest damage bonuses, it has chances to instakill sufficiently small monsters, and may inflict negative status effects on large monsters like stunning or slowness (or bleeding, if that is implemented). Probably better if war hammers are made into two-handed weapons.
Make monster stunning work like player stunning: it moves randomly and may cause them to miss turns.
Interface option to shorten “blessed”, “uncursed” and “cursed” to three letters so that you get more use out of the inventory sidebar.
The Master Assassin offers you the Bell of Opening if you will leave him in peace and let him keep the Master Key. If the player wants to play a chaotic good rogue, they are able to go back and kill the Master of Thieves (without immediately being kicked out of the quest), after which the Master Assassin will give you the Master Key.
New msgtype intended to be even stronger than msgtype:stop, perhaps called msgtype:paranoid. Requires the user to type “yes” before continuing.
Note: A patch has since been created for msgtype:alert, which forces you to hit tab before continuing.
Throwing a tin of cockatrice meat at a monster who will normally eat through the metal will instantly stone it, if the monster is stoneable.
If you have all three invocation items and have not yet performed the invocation, the Oracle always gives you the message about going to the bottom of Gehennom and performing the invocation. If you are missing one or two of the items, she will give you a message focused on (one of) the missing items. If you have the Amulet, she will give you an otherwise unreceivable message about continuing upward through the Elemental Planes.
If you end the game by ascending, you get a fixed baseline score instead of one based on the maximum dungeon level reached. Complementary YASI: this fixed score is zero, so that true zero-point ascensions are possible.
An addendum to ideas where the player starts the game with some random object types identified, without actually starting with such objects. Use a different ID state for these types, so the player will recognize them when they come across those items, but they can’t startscum for “good” discoveries by checking the discoveries list at the start of the game.
New type of book “encyclopedia”:
You are not asked “Pay whom?” if you are standing inside a shop, it just selects the shopkeeper whose shop you’re in. Also, you are not asked if you can see multiple shopkeepers, but don’t owe money to more than one.
Erosionproofing projectiles greatly reduces their chance of breaking.
Dragonbane gives 100% reflection versus dragon breath.
Aquaman role/race, which starts with magical breathing, a +1 trident, and an oilskin sack. Only regenerates health when in water. If a race, should be able to walk around on dry land (so merfolk are probably out, perhaps merlings or half-merfolk would work). Can drown surrounding enemies. Starts with scrolls of flood.
Valkyries can fly at will with the #fly command, but it costs Pw per turn/flying action to maintain.
Tigers have a small chance of being pacified if you apply a whip on them.
Archeologists should be immune to rolling boulders.
Change trap symbols and colors to be more unique: holes should go on their own glyph, level teleporters should be colored bright magenta, trap doors should be colored green.
Object properties are more likely to appear on poorer weapons and armor.
Add a message for a monster you can see that polymorphs via a polymorph trap (or, come to think of it, any source, like the player zapping it at them).
Sunglasses, an eye-slot tool that protects versus being blinded by flashes of light from things like lightning bolts, cameras, and yellow lights, either completely or with an 80% chance. (They probably shouldn’t block blinding from spat venom.) May also block certain gaze attacks. They should have some downside when worn, such as limiting your maximum vision radius or impeding searching.
Tourists start with a pair of sunglasses.
Valkyries offering fire giant or frost giant corpses get double the sacrifice value. Possibly this could be generalized to other roles sacrificing “enemy” monsters.
Racial shopkeepers give the player discounts. This could be in the form of a direct buy price reduction (must be capped at 50% of the base cost though to prevent farming) or treating the player as if they had higher Charisma. If the shopkeeper hates your race (for example, elves versus orcs), they will also block the entrance to the store as if you were carrying a pickaxe.
Wishing for an artifact drains two charges from a wand of wishing. If it’s a wrest wish or from a source that only gives one wish like a djinni, you merely get the base item type instead.
Valkyries have some drain life power, as they are “choosers of the slain” in Norse mythology.
In the last level of the Dungeons of Doom (normally the Castle), the powers of your god and Moloch are approximately equal, and prayer may or may not work here. (The Valley is strictly Moloch’s territory.)
Dragons can cast spells.
New object property, burden. Makes the item heavier than it is normally. Objects with this property generate cursed 90% of the time.
Reduce the level of the spell of create familiar to 2, and give it a dedicated list of summonable monsters based on skill level: Unskilled creates only kittens and little dogs, Basic will pick a random non-fully-grown dog, cat or horse, Skilled will not create kittens, ponies, or little dogs but otherwise will choose any d, u, B, or f that isn’t a unicorn. Expert will choose from the Skilled list, plus any q or w. If not doing that, as a more minor change, don’t create any monster that is always hostile.
Split containers into a dedicated object class, whose symbol is ]. (Mimics can still be ] because the traditional disguise of a mimic is a chest.)
If you get another role’s quest artifact through bones or wishing, player monsters of that role will gradually start to be spawned of increasing difficulty who pursue and hunt you down because you are now their quest nemesis.
Energy regeneration should cause you to hunger faster.
Remove the [yn] prompt for both looting and untrapping. Also maybe streamline the “You carefully open the box… –More–”
The ascension run through the Dungeons of Doom (the instant you come back into your god’s sphere of influence) is trivially easy: your god will regularly smite any enemy that dares attack you, and will ignore prayer timeout when answering prayer (but only to fix problems; if timeout is not 0, the god will not grant you any boons.) However, once you reach the Planes, the other gods step in and start interfering with the god so that they can’t directly help you anymore. These other gods don’t want to kill you since you’re still bringing the Amulet closer to them. But when you reach Astral, the other gods will do all they can to kill you, relieve you of the Amulet, and bring it to their own high altar. Your god sends you several A (might be Aleaxes, ki-rins or possibly even Archons) instead of just one, but you are now faced with elite teams of player monsters, priests, and A sent by the other gods, who have amulet-stealing attacks. The gods’ struggle to each get the Amulet manifests in all sorts of ways: disintegration beams blasting at you but being redirected onto a hapless monster nearby, inventory cursing, lightning bolts, resurrecting the corpses of dead player monsters or priests, and so on.
Wands of digging kill any monster made of earth instantly.
Giant characters or characters polymorphed into a giant should have a boosted carrying capacity.
There should be multi-level shops containing stairs to each other, presumably with multiple shopkeepers or one shopkeeper that follows you to whichever level you’re on.
Water walking boots should give you the same extra speed as speed boots if you are standing on water or a fountain.
It should be possible to read the spellbook of cure blindness while blind.
Arch-liches should sometimes generate with potions of unholy water in their inventory.
Add a message for when the player first satisfies both conditions of having teleportitis and being able to teleport at will.
Pets should get (Cha + 6) bonus movement points every turn.
Maximum HP should depend totally on three factors: function(role, race, XL) + function2(XL, Con) + (all bonuses or penalties from other sources, like nurses, full healing potions, fire traps, etc), with some diminishing returns on the third factor.
The Oracle should stand on a neutral altar, but killing her to access the altar should set your luck to -10. Not specified what should happen if you teleport her off the altar to access it.
Eating a shimmering dragon corpse should have the same effects as quaffing a potion of wonder.
The demon lords should take no interest in you until you are on the ascension run with the Amulet. At which point they attack.
To avoid the annoyance of disrobing in a closet to cast utility spells, mark certain types of spells as being non-combat, utility spells. Such spells should have a much reduced armor penalty, but take several turns to cast.
Reorganize which roles get which special spells, based on the change that every role should always have a 0% failure rate at casting its special spell.
Kicking down a door should have a possibility of damaging a creature standing immediately next to it on the other side. This should be guaranteed if you are wearing kicking boots.
A blessed scroll of teleportation should allow you to follow monsters that recently teleported away, whether that is a levelport or a normal horizontal teleport.
Dragons, and probably all MZ_HUGE monsters, shouldn’t be able to enter corridor tiles or go through open doors because they’re too big. (This would probably mean that corrmaze levels in Gehennom would need to be removed or not generate huge monsters.)
Polymorphs from polytraps, on monsters, should revert on death or timeout the same as player polymorph. This is to prevent the mines having a balrog forever, or your nice pet archon becoming a leprechaun permanently.
Artifact pickaxe that blows up the wall instead of simply digging it.
When you fail to write a scroll because you ran out of ink, it should become a “garbled scroll” instead of disappearing. Garbled scrolls can’t be read (or possibly they could be read, for a number of generally negative weak magical effects), but they can be re-blanked so the scroll can be written again. This could also happen when you fail to write a scroll by not knowing it. There is a slim chance, probably less than 10%, that you end up writing some random scroll instead of a garbled scroll.
If you have autodig enabled and a digging-capable pet is next to a wall or rock square you move into, it should dig that square out for you.
Cursed potions of gain ability should give you an ability point in something by taking it away from one of the other scores.
The confused effect of a scroll of consecration should remove the graveyard flag from a level if non-cursed, and add it if cursed.
Rename the potion of gain level to “potion of level up”.
If the player is polymorphed into a red or blue dragon and has sufficient energy to use their breath weapon, they should be able to burn-engrave on the floor with their fire/lightning breath.
Dwarven characters should always passively see all gold on a level, with the possible exception of gold carried by a monster.
Reduce the base price of the scroll of blank paper to something low and unique. It should probably cost less than the scroll of identify, but not be incredibly cheap.
Increase the damage of slung touchstones. Thrown luckstones should retain their lowish damage but have a chance of getting “lucky” hits that do much more damage or instakill monsters.
Split weaponless conduct into melee-weaponless, ranged-weaponless, and spell-less conduct.
If a tame nurse is next to you and you choke over food, it should do the Heimlich maneuver on you, saving you from dying and making you vomit voluminously.
Fire and frost horns shouldn’t shoot rays of fire or cold. Instead, they temporarily grant you the appropriate Brand effect (resistance to fire/cold plus double fire/cold damage to your attacks).
Fire and frost horns’ damage should scale with the level of its user. (Mainly to prevent a random gnome in the Mines dealing way too much damage with one).
Kicking option or game mode which changes your bump attack into kicking.
Instead of having Sokoban as a branch, occasional Sokoban puzzles should generate in the Dungeons proper. It must not be mandatory to complete them to pass through the level.
Covetous warping should only work on teleportable levels. It should also count as a regular teleport and cost Pw for the warping monster.
Rather than giving Monks a flat -20 to-hit for armor, it should be based on the armor delay - the factor that determines how many turns armor takes to take off or put on.
Yumis should be treated as “very well-crafted bows”, and they should allow elf or orc multishot to be used with them (as opposed to the current where you need to use an elvish/orcish bow). The Longbow of Diana’s base item should be changed to a yumi.
Rangers should start the game with all types of bows and arrows identified.
If an undead monster tries to put on an amulet of life saving, it should be either undead turned or destroyed, or brought back to life.
Certain monsters (intelligent ones like Elvenkings that are smart enough to realize you probably will kill them) should turn peaceful or generate peaceful depending on your XL.
Tourists should start with a leash.
Add some orc corpses in Orctown, because they probably didn’t defeat the entire town without any losses.
Add “jackal kills” as a feature or themed room that generates rarely on early dungeon floors: a corpse of a playable race surrounded by a few jackals. If fake bones piles are added, make this a fake bones pile with “killed by a jackal” on the headstone.
New special room “rat nest”: generates very high in the dungeon, and contains some r, some eroded/negatively enchanted armor, and some comestibles.
In the uppermost levels of the dungeon, there should be (randomly generated and not guaranteed) fake bones piles which contain starting equipment from some role. Gear is eroded or biased towards negative enchantment, most magical items are removed, and perhaps one or two non-starting items are added. Then the whole pile is mostly cursed as usual.
Note: This has been implemented in 3.6.1 but differently; it places random cursed items instead of selecting starting gear.
Falling rock traps should be flavored as unstable ceiling (so that the flavor doesn’t get weird for situations like large open levels) and the message changed accordingly. Alternatively, create a separate unstable ceiling trap for that purpose.
Several things relating to making the upper dungeon feel more “eroded” or exposed to the elements/other adventurers, in keeping with NetHack flavor that other people have been seeking the Amulet:
Note that this has been partially implemented in 3.6.1 with the addition of fake bones piles that come with a pre-disarmed trap if applicable, although that was aimed less at adding ambiance and more at helping players avoid early traps.
You should be able to break and destroy a loadstone in inventory by applying a pickaxe to yourself, or rubbing the pickaxe on the loadstone.
Nonmagical instruments should be a valid target for a blessed charging scroll, converting it into a (uncharged?) magical version of the same instrument.
Give a YAFM when confused and trying to read a scroll of blank paper: “Being confused, you mispronounce the lack of words…”
Eating brains while polyselfed into a mind flayer should recover magic power instead of nutrition.
Monsters should not be able to unlock, open, and move into the space of a door all in one turn, or move and eat in one turn.
Elven gloves, which grant stealth and can be enchanted to +7.
2-handed weapons should be able to be enchanted up to +7 as normal, but one-handed weapons should only be able to go up to +5. Alternatively, +9/+7.
Fire elementals and vortices should have a light radius of 2, not 1.
When the game looks up the scoreboard to generate a player name for a corpse, statue, or ghost, it should ignore any games that ended in an ascension, so that players who have only ever ascended don’t have the implication that they died at some point.
Humans should have a slight advantage in their chance of taming creatures.
Gnomish characters should get some interesting starting items, like tin openers, candles, oil, or cans of grease.
High level (maybe only XL 30) monks should be able to get enlightenment by sitting on normal floor.
When reading a scroll of identify when confused, you should get enlightenment (you’re “identifying yourself”).
The spell of identify is an unlimited replacement from the scroll that makes them rather useless, so nerf the spell so that it only type-identifies items (beatitude, enchantment, and charges will not be considered). If you want to learn these things, you must use scrolls of identify.
When a god decides to give you a gift and you are already wielding a non-artifact weapon of the same type, the wielded weapon should become the gift, retaining its original enchantment and beatitude. Erosionproofing should still be added if the weapon doesn’t have it.
Archons should emit light, in a radius of 2 or 3.
The chance of breaking items inside a container by kicking it should be based on Strength minus Dexterity. The idea is that more force is likely to smash something, but more control will make it less likely.
The scroll of create monster, when blessed, should say “This is a scroll of create monster.” and allows you to choose between 0 and 8 monsters to create.
Make instadeaths more consistent with respect to life saving: brainlessness destroys only the brain but cannot be life saved, whereas disintegration destroys your entire body but can be life saved. One or both of these should be changed.
Make Elbereth work the same as it did in 3.4.3 for animals or mindless creatures. Intelligent foes won’t be scared by it, but they merely won’t attack in melee.
Polymorph traps, when they polymorph the player, should always choose a form considered to be “playable”. I.e. it must have greater than 0 speed, and must have hands or be fast enough to run from threats or be well-defended enough to sustain damage until transforming back.
However, the polymorph should then be permanent - you will not re-form with your original HP when your polyform is killed, you merely die.
All Sokoban levels should add extra spaces to the corridors to let you push spare boulders all the way into the room if you so wish, which lets you handle monsters zapping wands of digging in the doorway or corridor.
Unicorn horn skill should also be trained by curing things with it, and its chance of fixing something increases with skill level.
Skills should be trained even when damage output is 1 (but cutoffs would probably need an increase). Skill level cutoffs should probably be rebalanced anyway; for example, it should take longer to train long swords than it does for broadswords, and this could add an extra dimension to weapon choice.
Wearing gloves should prevent you from making touch attacks. Affects monsters too, so monsters that have touch attacks will avoid wearing gloves.
Replace Sokoban with some other game like mahjongg. Instead of a pass/fail, you can achieve a degree of success. Doing really well nets you both the amulet and the bag, doing slightly less well lets you choose, but ordinarily you will get only one.
Replace the Sokoban rewards with something that is still nice but not as nice.
Replace the passtune prayer boon with something more useful, since it is only marginally useful to spoiled players. Then, let the Oracle provide the passtune as either a major consultation or as a service. The Oracle can also be used to tell you which prize is at the end of Sokoban.
Killer bees should hurt even more than they do currently, and their sting should poison 100% of the time, but they should instantly die when they sting.
New conduct that tracks whether you ascend with your original pet. (Though this isn’t really in line with the other conducts, since it doesn’t require abstaining from anything. It might be better off as an achievement.)
Ordinary monsters should attack any player monster with the same priority as the actual player.
If you’re hallucinating and get the “You can’t handle [artifact]!” message, it should give a YAFM referencing A Few Good Men (presumably “You can’t handle the truth!”).
Add a scroll of polymorph. If blessed, it polymorphs you with polymorph control over this one occasion; if uncursed, it polymorphs you normally; if cursed, it polymorphs you and everything adjacent to you.
The Master Assassin should have an instakill attack (though not unpreventable; the player should be able to prepare and protect themselves some way).
Alter the scroll of remove curse’s effects:
May need to make this scroll rarer or more expensive to write in order to keep it balanced.
Jetpacks, a chargeable source of levitation/flying. They are worn in the cloak (or body armor?) slot and grant 0 AC.
Ovens, a dungeon feature (orange \) that you can use to cook food, light items on fire, and test potions in a safe, controlled manner like you can with rings and sinks. This happens by putting the potion in the oven and it produces some cosmetic message that can be used to identify it.
Give YAFM when a monster uses a bullwhip on you while you are polymorphed into a foocubus.
Add a few more sources of the uncursed charging effect, because charging resources are rare enough as so that things like common wands never get recharged by players.
Expert use of the wand of lightning shouldn’t create a lightning explosion on the first target it hits; it creates chain lightning instead that may hit adjacent targets.
Reduce gnomes’ Str and Con caps, but ensure they get decent Dex and Int. They should be obviously different to play than humans (rather than being mostly superior). Dwarves should have a Wis cap of 16. Elves’ Dex cap should be higher than humans’.
If wind dragons are added, their scales should grant speed or slow resistance in addition to flight.
Tame monsters should continue to hold grudges against each other, unless the master’s Charisma is high enough.
Variants that give Geryon a lair should implement his two-headed dog Orthus.
New artifact The Phial of Galadriel. It is a potion of water (potion of starlight in dNetHack) that acts as an infinite light source which scares giant spiders and Nazgul that come into its radius, and can be invoked to bless 1 item. May need more powers to make it better, and behavior for what happens when you drink it, but these are unspecified.
A t-class monster that generates on a wall space and pretends to be part of the wall, then attacks/eats you when you step next to it.
If someone throws a potion of sleeping at you and you die while asleep, the death should not say “while sleeping off a magical draught” since you didn’t drink it.
When killed by a monster that brings you back as something else (zombie, vampire, green slime), there should be a chance that you might not die; you would instead get the chance to continue playing in that form with permanent intrinsic unchanging. This might make it actually beneficial to get killed by a vampire, so the chance of continuing can’t be 100%, or else it should only work in a limited set of mostly-uncontrollable circumstances (like maybe a vampire’s or zombie’s bite takes you down to exactly -1 health). Green slime death is probably okay to stay at a 100% chance, though.
Also needs some thought for how the unchanging squares with being a vampire and wanting to #monster into different forms. Perhaps intrinsic unchanging, unlike extrinsic, allows a monster to change into its normal alternate forms, but nothing else. Some other downsides should possibly be present too, like you don’t get your normal amount of HP and are stuck with the amount given by your new form.
The ring of slow digestion should have no ring hunger, but instead prolong hungering by a factor of 20 (presumably by making hunger naturally decrease only on multiples of 20 turns). Wearing 2 of them should prolong it by a factor of 400.
Ring and amulet hunger should be counted all on turns that are a multiple of 20, to close the two-slow-digestion-rings loophole.
Jousting should be affected by riding skill, not just lance skill.
Samurai should have an ability (maybe a special ability) to displace hostile creatures.
Knights should pass over monsters in their way when doing a knight’s-move jump.
Knights should instakill any “king” monsters that are a knight’s-move away and are surrounded or cannot move, via putting them in checkmate.
Make it harder to accidentally wipe out a game in the “Destroy old game? [yn]” prompt by raising the barrier above simply hitting y. Instead, it should subsequently ask “Are you sure?” and force the player to type out “yes”.
Female oviparous monsters should sometimes drop eggs of their species when killed. This chance is reduced if the monster was dead and revived.
“Omnicidal” monster state, basically an exaggerated version of “hostile”: an omnicidal monster attacks peaceful, hostile, tame, and other omnicidal monsters. Suggested in relation to monsters reading cursed genocide or creating monsters.
There should be a kitchen sink at the top of the Sokoban branch (so that anyone wearing a cursed levitation item on that level has some recourse to get back down).
Add a field to struct rm (or possibly reuse the flags field which is 5 bits) that determines the type of tree that is on that space, if typ == TREE. This enables you to control what kind of tree it is, and what kind of fruits you will get by kicking it, and whether you can get bees from it.
Also add a level flag that allows a level designer to specify that all trees on the level should be barren.
Add lizard scales: they are a common drop from lizards, and are wearable as AC 1 body armor. They can be upgraded into lizard scale mail, which has AC 3. This armor protects you from petrification.
The Norn and Valkyrie quest friendlies should have different messages if you talk to them after having been changed into a man.
The Orb of Detection should grant automatic searching in a region of radius 2.
Weapons should rarely generate as erodeproof.
The Heart of Ahriman should grant half physical damage, and Thoth Amon should be nearly guaranteed to pick it up.
Your alignment record should shift over time based on your alignment:
If Orcish Town is generated, there should be a guaranteed “peaceful” Mines’ End where all the inhabitants, surviving shopkeepers, watchmen and the priest have fled. Chatting to the priest will make him ask you to clear the orcs out of Orcish Town, upon which chatting to him again will make him grant you a protection boon and give you a luckstone.
The Archeologist quest should have either a lot of fairly weak artifacts or a lot of mundane items (golden staffs, death masks, sacrificial daggers etc) that are worth a lot of money in the locate and goal levels of their quest.
When undead are destroyed outright by any turn undead effect, they should never leave a corpse.
War hammers should be a two-handed weapon, with much higher damage than they currently have. Slashing and (maybe) piercing weapons should no longer get a Str bonus to damage, only bludgeoning ones do. Probably need to rebalance weapon damage types and attribute bonuses completely.
Expert and higher martial arts should let you hit twice, but only if your first attack hits and you are wearing no shield.
Bias the probability of bones files to be a general bell curve fixed on around level 10-15.
Elbereth should work from the very outset of the game, but get less effective over time.
Elbereth should not work until the hero discovers it in-game. (Similar to dNetHack’s wards.)
A new flying monster with a displacement attack, which attacks from water in order to displace you into water. Also a bull monster that charges at you, and will either displace you if you pass a Dex save or gore you.
Vary the monster AI for using miscellaneous items; some monsters like trolls should be “hoarders” and will not use misc items unless there is a compelling reason to do so; others should use them at the first opportunity.
Remove deathdrops entirely, and instead give monsters items in their starting inventory with the same rules as a deathdrop.
You should be able to wish for magic items that have a “bane” versus one specific monster type. The weapon deals massive damage to that monster type but has no other advantages.
Uncontrolled teleportitis should count as a minor trouble; a god may decide to fix it by removing it, but only if there are no other troubles. If there are other troubles, teleportitis will not be removed.
Chameleons should only transform into monsters close to them.
The player should have the ability to seduce peaceful characters in a fairly weak, non-magical way (to get better shopkeeper prices and such). This is initiated if you chat to them while wearing no armor. Works best when the target is the same race as you, you are opposite genders, and you have high Charisma. Possibly, seducing a priest in a temple risks the god smiting you.
Yellow lights should have a light radius of larger than 1.
Also add white lights, white-colored y monsters which have a light radius of 3 or 4, with a blinding gaze attack and no explosion attack (unless keeping the explosion attack is too thematic to the y class, in which case it should blind for a long time).
If two-way level communication is implemented (meaning that trapdoors and such deterministically go to a specific space on a specific lower level), allow the player to go back up through holes in the ceiling with levitation or flying, or allow them to place ladders there that become a brown < to do the same thing.
Add herblore (possibly as a non-combat skill). This allows you to brew various potions using herbs and potions of water. Healers are quite good at it, and their quest contains many herbs. Requires actually implementing herbs, which cannot be planted or grown like in ADOM.
Attempting to move healers out of the petmastering role: they should have skilled medical knowledge that enables them to hit monsters in melee with a scalpel or knife to inflict a “bleeding” status effect which will cause the monster to lose HP continuously. Any role is able to do this with a scalpel, but the effect is much more limited for other roles than it is for Healers. This means that for a Healer, combat now consists of hitting a monster to make it bleed, then disengaging and keeping away from it in the hope that it dies on its own. The Staff of Aesculapius no longer drains, instead it heals the damage it would have dealt (unless the Cyclops has it, in which case it drains life like normal.)
Additionally, the Staff of Aesculapius should no longer have level-draining powers. Instead it should have a drain HP attack that heals the wielder.
Add more non-magical ways to get pets that are better than what your starting pets can level into. Such as pet stores with figurines, or being able to tame watchmen by paying them money, or by healing a monster at low HP.
Polymorph traps should not instantaneously polymorph you; instead they should start a short timer during which the player has time to either stop the polymorph from occurring (through healing potions, or prayer, or some other decently common consumable) or put on a ring of polymorph control or amulet of unchanging. However, magic resistance no longer protects against this effect.
When you ascend, you should receive an elaborate role-specific message with your quest leader congratulating you (if they are still alive).
You should be able to teleport dungeon features (except high altars, of course.)
The game should ask to confirm when you try to throw something that is not intended to be thrown (for example, if you unwielded your bow and are now trying to throw arrows).
Levitation cast at Expert skill, or a blessed potion of levitation, should grant flight instead of levitation.
Alternatively, add a higher-level spell of flying.
The Master of Thieves should have a stealing attack that allows him to choose intelligently what to steal.
Sitting on a trap should trigger the trap while ignoring any magic resistance you have, so that you don’t have to disrobe.
When rock-eating is implemented (or in variants that already have it), eating a luckstone should give you -1, +1, or +2 Luck depending on the beatitude of the stone.
Unicorn horns should no longer cure afflictions completely; they will only reduce the duration of one.
Change the sickness instadeath to a HP-based form of damage, since it is very obscure about how long you have left to live and can be drastically reduced.
A lamp with the same unidentified appearance and base cost as a magic lamp. It is a charged magical tool (has a lifetime, comparable to an oil lamp) that sheds no light, but instead detects unseen in its range whenever it is turned on. This includes invisible monsters, secret doors, and all traps. It also allows vision to penetrate through clouds.
You should be able to #force boulders where there is a monster behind the boulder to displace it, or crush it if it is in/on a pit or a hole. Based on Strength, and only works if monster is medium or smaller. Always displaces unsolid monsters, of course.
New store type “sushi restaurant”, which sells sea monster corpses, kelp fronds, various sushi rolls, and sushi mats, tools which allow you to combine kelp and sea monster corpses into higher-nutrition sushi rolls. Sushi rolls include kraken sushi, eel wrap, and shark tempura.
Bed, a red \ which if you sit on it makes you fall asleep for d10 turns or you have fully recovered your health. While sleeping on the bed, you get the same effects as hungerless regeneration. Found in barracks and some special levels. Breakfast not provided.
Farlook should allow you to see a list of all items on a square as if each were the only item on that square. Items hidden under others are not obscured. Also works if there is a monster standing on the square; you can still see the items under it.
Every hit with a wielded weapon, up to 20, should decrease the chance of being given a non-weapon artifact.
A priest-friendly artifact that is a potion or tool that acts as a “holy water well” - maybe it slowly but infinitely fills up with holy water, up until it is full.
Gods’ “Prove thyself worthy or perish” message should be flavored as “Prove thyself worthy, because I can do no more for you”. On the Planes, the gods’ balance of power should prevent your deity from granting you any extra help (apart from sending angels when you arrive in Astral). If this were not the case, one would expect to be able to breeze through the Planes, with your god smiting down any enemy that might threaten you getting them their Amulet. Prayer will not work, though it will still break atheist conduct.
Give the player a slightly different warning if they attempt to go up on the DL1 upstairs after handling the Amulet, if they do not have the real one.
Cut all map sizes in special level files down to at most 20 lines tall, so that there is extra space for messages and status line in an 80x24 terminal. Few levels currently use all 21 lines.
Erosion should have more than four states, though it still only displays as “eroded”, “very eroded”, or “thoroughly eroded”; different rusting sources can cause different levels of rust (e.g. dipping a long sword in a fountain or getting hit by a rust trap would probably only cause a small amount of rust, whereas a rust monster might cause a lot.) This would enable a more fair way to have things “erode away completely” like they do in Grunthack, since you would be able to disengage any thoroughly eroded piece of gear before it was at serious risk of vanishing.
Add a scroll of air (as well as the scroll of flood, which should be renamed to the scroll of water) so that there is one scroll for each element. When read normally, it could give a message “You feel a fresh breeze” and either reset your strangulation counter or give you temporary breathlessness. (Breathlessness seems like a potion effect more than a scroll effect, but then again, during those times when you need emergency breathlessness, you’re probably not capable of quaffing a potion.) If you read any of the water, earth, fire, and air scrolls while confused, it summons elementals, whose tame/peaceful/hostile state depends on the beatitude of the scroll. If you read it while on the Plane of Water, it either creates a new air bubble if you’re not in one, or expands your bubble permanently if you are in one. If cursed and in a bubble, the bubble shrinks to one space.
SpliceHack has since implemented the scroll of air as an burst of wind that shoves adjacent monsters away in all directions.
Add in master lichens as a real monster, which are only a bit more threatening than normal lichens (maybe speed 2 or 3, have a passive sticky attack like mimics) but have an increased difficulty so that they generate deeper in the Dungeons, and are a source of nonrotting corpses. Possibly, the passive sticky attack should also be given to regular lichens.
If ability score changes from exercise and abuse are blocked due to the ring of sustain ability, they should accumulate, and once you take the ring off they should all gradually apply over the next few exercise cycles.
Zapping a corpse with a cold ray should increase its decomposition timer (making it take longer to rot). If the corpse is already rotten, it only gets reset back to rotting age.
Make permaconverting harder to do by accident, since confusing the actions of rededicating an altar and rededicating yourself seems unlikely. Maybe make it happen if you sacrifice or pray on a crossaligned altar while confused.
Lawful and neutral gods should be angered (or do something angry) if you consort with a foocubus on their altars or in their temples.
Rename the amulet of restful sleep to the amulet of narcolepsy.
Gods should be more likely to give gifts for higher-monster-difficulty sacrifices.
(Note that this is not the same as the NetHack 3.7.0 feature in which higher-difficulty sacrifices have a larger, better pool of artifacts that can be given.)
If the Wizard of Yendor’s monster ID is a multiple of 1000, he should be named the “Warden of Yendor”.
Decide once and for all whether alignment record should be god-specific or god-agnostic, because NetHack currently tries to do both and fails. Things like the massive penalty for killing a Quest leader make way more sense for lawfuls than chaotics.
In variants where you can kill your quest leader to unlock the Bell of Opening: If you have permanently converted alignment already, killing your Quest leader does not give you a massive alignment penalty.
You should be able to go to the Astral Plane early, and by waiting around there long enough, eventually a player monster will spawn with the real Amulet, at which point you must prevent them from ascending and claim the Amulet yourself.
Add a chemistry golem, which spawns with some potions that it will either throw at you or quaff.
Attempts to analyze good instadeaths versus bad instadeaths (loosely defined as ones that are instant hard-to-avoid deaths that aren’t really similar to running out of HP):
Blessed potions of polymorph, when quaffed, should grant you immediate polymorph control over just that one polymorph either 50% or 100% of the time. To compensate, cursed potions of polymorph should ignore changing into a dragon and will try several times to roll a monster that will make you break out of your armor. Or the cursed potion could have a wildly variable duration, so you have no idea when it will end and cannot rely on it.
If the hero has see invisible while ascending, the line “An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance…” should be swapped out for some other YAFM. Perhaps even something as subtle as “A visible choir”.
Lawful and neutral gods should respect any conducts you currently have when giving you stuff:
Meanwhile, chaotic gods will ignore these rules and give you whatever.
Sickness resistance should negate the effects of potions of sickness. However, a cursed potion of sickness should give you fatal illness instead of the normal poison effects.
Possible gentle relaxations for the quest XL requirement:
Invisible monsters wearing a mummy wrapping should show up as an I (you don’t get to see what they actually are), but an I that moves and doesn’t persist on the map.
Player monsters, crossaligned priests, and hostile angels on the Astral Plane should be able to steal the Amulet from you. If they get it, they will try to make a beeline to their high altar to sacrifice it.
The player is also able to steal the Amulet back, though, and wearing the Amulet acts as one turn of protection against it being stolen: an attempt to steal it will just remove it from your neck.
If something else ascends, your game ends in an escape. However, the crowd of Astral monsters are hostile towards the Amulet-bearer, not you; so if it gets stolen from you, the pressure will let up a bit.
Wearing a cloak of displacement should allow you to displace pets 100% of the time and also peacefuls; this still works if you are confused, stunned or hallucinating.
Level teleport in the Quest should prevent you from going down unless you have beaten the nemesis and should prevent you from going up unless you have shown the artifact to your quest leader.
Knights should begin the game mounted, or else should be trained enough to reliably mount their horse on turn 1.
Elves should be able to squeeze between two trees diagonally.
Pool rooms, a special room type that consists of a perimeter of normal floor surrounding an area of water taking up the rest of the middle of the floor. It is populated with sea monsters and some sunken treasure. It could also contain a fake bones pile, a pun on “bones pool”.
Monsters that are in a “wait for the player” state should use different AI for decision-making (i.e. not using their teleport control to attack the player).
Cancelling shades should remove their incorporeal ability to not be hit by anything, and they should then be hittable normally.
If you try to eat an artifact and it blasts you to death, the death message should contain YAFM: “killed by trying to eat the [artifact]”.
Rebalance armor so that all “mail” armor and most of the iron body armor in general is not useless. Ideally, the worst iron armor (orcish chain mail) should be considerably better than studded leather, but they are equivalent. The ideal balance, keeping leather armors and all weights constant and not accounting for to-hit or damage reduction, is probably something like the mails going up to 9 or 10 AC, and splint and plate getting up to around 14, but this is not possible to implement without changing the combat system.
Make the Magic Mirror of Merlin give slotless reflection instead of magic resistance; this is more thematic and makes for more interesting strategy.
Change the Knight quest artifact to be the Holy Grail. When quaffed from, something good happens; perhaps it needs to have charges or invoking it fills it up so you can drink from it (and you don’t have to drink from it immediately, allowing strategic choices). Should give magic resistance when carried. Possibly gives the effect of a random potion when quaffed: always a “good” potion when blessed, a random one if uncursed, and a “bad” potion if cursed. Or it blesses items dipped into it.
Several improvements to the level-defining des files:
Make candle stacking for more light actually useful and realistic: the number of candles required for another square of radius increases quadratically instead of exponentially, so 1 candle gives radius 2, 4 give radius 3, 9 give radius 4, 16 give radius 5, etc.
Later extended into a more general idea allowing light sources of any type to stack: candles each give 5 lumens (because a single candle’s light reaches up to sqrt(5) squares from the center), lamps give 10 lumens, potions of oil 2, and the full Candelabrum gives 20. To compute your total light radius, add up all the lumens and take the square root. (Note that this exact formula might scale too fast: 4 candles equals the Candelabrum).
If you ascend with your alignment mismatching your align0 (meaning you changed alignment at some point), your game-end reason should be recorded as “ascended in dishonor”.
Foocubi should levelport away instead of teleporting on the same level.
Cancelled mind flayers should not be able to use their tentacle attacks.
Services center: a special type of shop containing shopkeepers who offer services but have no goods to sell.
Allow taming of player monsters in bones with one prerequisite: you must tame its ghost, draw the ghost over the corpse, and then revive the corpse. To facilitate this, killing a player monster should always generate a ghost over the corpse, possibly with a gravestone and 80% of inventory being cursed.
There should be one major monster of each alignment that is ungenocideable: Archon for lawful, deep ettin for neutral, arch-lich for chaotic.
Add rare drops to some monsters, with a very low probability (around 0.1%). These could be artifacts or otherwise unattainable items.
Djinni (except on the Plane of Air) should have a chance of dropping a scroll or wand of wishing when killed. But when you kill a djinni, all future djinni will spawn hostile.
Candle additions:
Mummy traps, a new trap type that generates with a very desirable item: highly enchanted gear, magic markers, items with object properties, etc. However, when you pick it up or interact with it in any way like teleporting it or having a pet collect it, a bunch of mummies appear around you (they would obviously need to be more threatening than they are right now). Also can have a “mummy room”, a special room that contains one mummy trap and nothing else.
Liches should drop or be generated with fairly good magical items, like potions, scrolls, spellbooks and even wands, to incentivize not genociding them.
Replace Venus with Diana and Mercury with Apollo in the Ranger pantheon. This is nice because Apollo and Diana are actual gods of archery, and it removes the Mercury/Hermes conflict with the Healer pantheon.
Add some region code preventing monsters from generating in (or even better, moving into) the pit corridors in Sokoban until the level is solved.
Land mines should blast the player away in a random direction, not make them not move and fall into a pit.
Elaborations on the Fort Ludios minesweeper proposal by ais523:
Add a Barbarian rage mechanic (possibly an effect on Cleaver replacing its current damage bonus) where a damage bonus is assessed based on how long ago you last killed a monster. This idea was originally a buff to Vorpal Blade where it beheads anything it hits if the last behead was N turns ago, but this is unbalanced.
Reduce the cost of a major Oracle consultation; the current price could be too high for unspoiled players to consider it worth it.
Pets should eat at a consistent rate that does not depend on their speed, so the number of turns to eat something depends only on corpse size. Pets should also stop eating when hostile monsters approach.
Closets that are accessible via a secret door should have a small chance of containing a monster on level generation.
Attempt to address the problem of ascension kits always converging on the same few usually wished-up items by making the highest-tier, really good quality, +8 or +9 gear be generated on the toughest monsters or even bosses deep in Gehennom. The high enchantment makes it incredibly hard to get through normal means, even if the base gear is wished for elsewhere. Overall end-game difficulty would need a bump if the average player is expected to pick up and use some of this gear.
There should be a potion equivalent of extra healing for magic power, or else some consumable way to recover 20-40 power in one go; the normal potion of gain energy is currently more useful for raising maximum power than it is for restoring it. This new thing need not be more effective than gain energy is at raising maximum energy. (Perhaps make it the “potion of restore energy”, which does not raise maximum at all.)
Skeletons, or any monster with the MS_BONES sound, should rattle their bones periodically, which frighten the player into helplessness for a few turns.
Poison should be either changed or extended so that it is a lasting status condition that gives you negative HP regeneration, or some other source of this property is added.
For Luck balance, there should be some Luck-based effects that are really good at low Luck but get kind of uninteresting at high Luck.
Luck should factor into the chance of successfully getting the enchantment you wished for on an object.
If you eat the corpse of something and a monster of that same class sees you eating it, it should become angry. (This is from ADOM).
You should take fire damage from standing next to lava, levitating or flying over it, or walking on it. Damage from standing next to it is (number of adjacent tiles)d8, whereas being over or on lava has rather higher damage. Fire resistance does not prevent this damage completely.
Ankh-Morpork levels in the Tourist quest should be populated with some peaceful humans, dwarves and trolls. However, the levels should also then avoid having lots of narrow corridors so it’s not incredibly frustrating to traverse them. (Or implement peaceful displacement).
Implement a strangulation or “can’t breathe” timer, which unifies strangulation, suffocation, food choking, rope golem choking, and drowning, and also provides a clean way for monsters to have a suffocation attack.
Make all magic portals on the Elemental Planes immediately visible. The challenge should be surviving for long enough to get to the portal, not wandering around till you find it. This is because “Hunt for the Magic Tile” already exists on the vibrating square level, and is not very compelling.
Saddlebags, a rarely generated container that can be applied to a saddled mount and then have gear put into it, allowing the player to offload some of their weight onto the mount. While they are as nonmagical as a sack, they have a higher base cost and weight. You can loot it on an adjacent mount by using the directional #loot command. Knights may start with one.
Thrones should not disappear in a puff of logic unless at least one interesting effect from sitting on them has happened.
New artifact Aegis: is a bronze roundshield (which is supposed to have Medusa’s or another gorgon’s face impressed on the front). Can be invoked sideways at a monster, which petrifies it or, failing that, causes it to flee (regardless of difficulty or monster MR). Can be invoked downwards to burn a Gorgoneion in the floor. Possibly grants stoning resistance or gaze resistance while equipped.
Soldiers should occasionally drop piccolos, which act similarly to wooden flutes (but are made of metal).
This could also be done in the object materials patch without adding a new item for piccolos, by simply having them drop metal flutes.
Remove the bell from the list of musical instruments that Elf characters can receive at the start of the game. This is because it’s atonal and its only half decent use is to attract pets (note that elves can’t get tin whistles, so clearly summoning pets is not important enough to qualify something for initial inventory).
In UnNetHack and other variants with a black market, you should never hear “You hear someone cursing shoplifters” in the black market, unless you have angered One-Eyed Sam.
Shop generation chance should increase for every level with no shop, and it should decrease or be reset when one is generated.
Finger of death should be renamed to touch of death, and it should work equivalently to the monster spell (melee range only, and it may fail). Because of this, its level should be reduced, which for some people means that there should be a replacement level 7 attack spell (ball/ring spells might work here).
You should be able to invoke the Amulet of Yendor exactly once for a wish, with some unspecified major drawbacks.
Following the 3.7.0 change where touching the Amulet of Yendor for the first time grants a wish with no drawbacks, it has also been proposed that it should require invoking the Amulet instead, but only after it has been fully identified.
Since boulders are round (clearly so; any character regardless of low Strength can roll it easily), and corridors are presumably not round, you should always be able to squeeze yourself into the opening between the boulder and the corner of the passage. Inventory weight does not matter, because any reasonable character would push their knapsack through the opening first, rather than trying to go through while carrying it.
Change the message for gaining intrinsic shock resistance to be “Your current health feels amplified!”
Invisibility should work completely when the invisible monster and the detecting monster are far apart, but when within 5 (or 4?) squares of each other, its location should be known to within 1 space (fuzzing the real location by 1 space in all directions). When the invisible monster takes a direct offensive action, or with some probability when it is adjacent, its position should become known. It should still appear as I, but the I will move wherever the monster goes until it becomes 5 or more spaces away, at which point invisibility should once again work fully. This could work differently if the invisible monster is stealthy.
Several possibilities for fixing lycanthropy:
Implement “spoiler novels”, cheap books like 3.6 novels that contain spoilers. (Not described in what form the spoilers would be. Several true rumors?)
Ideas around a system in which you can cook corpses:
Make Quest nemeses death-magic resistant.
Split curse resistance off from magic resistance. Curse resistance should be granted only as an extrinsic by a couple of artifacts, including Magicbane, and ‘‘maybe’’ some mundane item that isn’t any good otherwise (a mummy wrapping?), and behaves like Magicbane’s curse resistance does currently (“You feel a black aura surround the [item].”) Half spell damage without curse resistance no longer helps limit the number of cursed items, and a curse may still manage to bypass resistance, with current probabilities. There could also be an amulet versus curses.
Change zombies’ and possibly mummies’ claw attack to a bite attack.
Race and polyform should not be distinct; they should be merged into a single permonst or corpsenm-like variable. Role should remain independent of race, and perhaps every monster should be described with a monster/role pair, with the role being null for most monsters (i.e. gnomish wizards are gnomes that are also wizards, but jackals aren’t any particular role). This might eliminate the entire concept of player race, internally, but transferring some of the racial effects on players (e.g. elves’ sleep resistance at XL 4) might be tricky.
There should be nonwishable unique items or artifacts that would be “nice finds” in the dungeon.
The xlogfile should record whether the game was likely a startscum, for analysis purposes. It’s easier for the game to track things like fountain quaffing and using obvious dangerous items. How exactly this would happen is not determined; the game probably shouldn’t try to make a decision itself, there will be some false negatives and positives, but storing fields for everything like “number of times quaffed from a fountain” is probably bad too. Also, if players are aware of a scum-detecting algorithm, some will deliberately work around it.
More monsters should be locked to the grid and only able to move orthogonally, like grid bugs.
All characters should start with a minimum of 11 HP, so they don’t get one-shot by a falling rock trap on turn 1.
The ring of protection from shape changers should apply to the wearer as well as other monsters; if the wearer has lycanthropy, they will not transform; if the wearer is a different shapechanger like a vampire, they cannot transform.
King monsters should spawn with an entourage of monsters; e.g. a gnome king should create several other gnomes around him upon generation, with preference given to gnome lords and possibly gnomish wizards. If monster pets are implemented, they should behave as the king’s pets, and the king may generate with a magic whistle.
A Word of Recall spell, which after a sizeable delay (3d5 or 5d6 turns) levelports you to one of several possible locations: Minetown, dungeon level 1, the Oracle, the Castle, the Quest. You will not travel anywhere you have not already visited. Does not work if you have the Amulet.
When trying to descend stairs while stunned, and possibly confused with some probability, you should fall down the stairs.
Fire and cold rays should both work as a cone, and should spread out over distance and possibly hit multiple targets, but with damage decreasing over distance.
Rays should reflect erratically or not at all from non-wall rock terrain. Walls are smooth, but rock is rough.
A new “illusion” or “disguise self” monster spell, which makes the caster or an allied monster appear as another monster of its choice until something disrupts the illusion (it gets attacked, otherwise takes damage, or it makes an attack). Monsters specifically cast it when you cannot see the target monster. It might be possible to implement this spell to be player-castable as well, but this would be less effective. (you could use it to fool monsters into thinking you’re another hostile monster so they don’t attack you, but not much else).
The illusion favors nasty monsters, but low-level spellcasters may only be able to create illusions of somewhat higher-difficulty monsters. A potentially evil addendum is that high-level spellcasters may use the spell to make themselves or other powerful monsters appear to be weaker monsters. Any bosses that use this spell may use it to make themselves appear as a weak monster so they can take you unawares.
Perhaps if you have extrinsic see invisible (and only extrinsic), you can see through such illusions.
A colorless or colorblind conduct, settable with OPTIONS=colorblind or something similar at the start of the game, as a permanent affliction. When you are colorblind, it is as if the color option is forced off, and any items with colorful random appearances cannot be distinguished from one another (all gems are just “a gem”; all colored potions, though not ones such as fizzy/bubbly/white/black, are just “a potion”; ditto for colorful spellbooks) until formally IDed. Figuring out how calling object classes works might be tricky, because having it work as it currently does would mostly nullify the identification challenges of being colorblind.
Quest artifacts, and probably all artifacts, should blast other monsters when they enter their inventory, subject to the same checks and chances as the player (however, the artifact will never evade their grasp). This is most likely to be observed when a quest nemesis or the Wizard of Yendor steals a quest artifact from the player.
Reduce the amount of gold generated on the floor, and probably also that buried under the floor and in rock so it doesn’t incentivize the player digging out a level. This is an attempt at gold rebalance.
The sum total of gold generated in monster inventories should be tracked by the game, and the amount of gold monsters generate with should tail off after a while.
The list of monsters that ignore Elbereth should be increased, but the list of monsters that ignore scare monster should remain the same or decrease (3.6.0 Quest nemeses excepted). Perhaps scare monster should be renamed to “scare creature”, as it scares humans and elves, which are not really monsters.
You should be able to loot trees to get less fruit than you might by kicking it, but with a much lower chance of getting bees. Looting the tree might fail, in which case you might fall out of the tree and abuse Dexterity or something similar. If you are polymorphed into a Y, it has a 100% chance of success; if a human or elf, probably 80%; if an orc, 40-50%; if a gnome or a dwarf, 1-5%.
Disintegration blasts shouldn’t reflect from a wall; they should dig it out instead. If the wall is undiggable, the ray merely stops - it never reflects unless it hits a creature who has reflection.
If you die with zero points, end-of-game enlightenment should say “You were a noob.”
The Watch should turn hostile when you apply a cursed tin whistle within earshot of them (because it produces a shrill whistling sound).
Add bards as a hostile monster or monster template. They spawn in a group of same-race monsters with a (sometimes but not usually) magical instrument, and they keep their distance and play songs to buff their allies.
Getting lifesaved should give you experience points (because it’s a near-death experience). So should having a out-of-body experience from getting hit with death magic while hallucinating.
Getting lifesaved should have permanent detrimental effects. Perhaps it reduces your maximum, as well as current, Wis or Con (Con is preferred, because it impacts both carrying capacity and regeneration), and if the ability score it would reduce is 3 or below, life saving does not work at all. It could also possibly drain 1d3+1 levels.
Replace Charisma with a “morale” stat, which decreases when you die and get lifesaved, eat terrible food, and so on, and makes you lose the will to go on if it gets low enough. However, it would need some other effects to be fully fleshed out.
Add a spell of summon pets, a level 2 or 3 matter spell that duplicates the effects of a magic whistle. The name needs work.
Remove instances of “bad RNG” contributing to forms of instadeath or a disproportionate bad effect for a RNG decision made mostly or completely independently of the player’s decisions, because they just add randomness or variance to the outcome of the game:
Add a dragon which has slowing breath (or convert the orange dragon to use it). The effect stacks with previous effects of slowing breath.
Sphere conjurer: a monster who creates hostile spheres.
If the metal spellcasting penalty were to be removed entirely for one armor slot, it should be the boots slot, because your feet are very distant from the magical casting part of your body.
Player monsters should always resist conflict.
Add barbed orcs, which are more deadly than regular orcs.
Whenever a player is killed by a mind flayer, they should become a thrall in their bones file. In FIQHack, this means they leave an active hostile player monster in the bones with 100% chance instead of 33%.
Mind flayers should seek out your pets to eat their brains and turn them into thralls, which makes them effectively a pet of the mind flayer instead.
Tourists should be able to swim. Alternatively, tourists should specifically NOT be able to swim, but other roles might.
Carried loadstones should prevent knockback, including Newton’s Third Law effects. Possibly they should prevent levitation entirely.
Murder penalties should not happen while you are causing conflict, because you acted in self-defense.
Fumble boots should cause you to toss and turn in your sleep if you are sleeping, making you wake up sooner.
Blessed potions of gain ability should allow you to choose which stat to increase. Possibly, since this would be a nerf compared to its current behavior, it should max that stat or give you a few points in it.
Throwing a cockatrice corpse into water should petrify it, turning it into a hard floor, or possibly ice, with the corpse buried in the new floor.
You should be able to wish for object properties in FIQHack, but only on items whose base types aren’t inherently magical.
Moving in Sokoban by jumping or hurtling from a thrown iron ball doesn’t actually work to bypass boulders, so it shouldn’t incur a Luck penalty.
Change the impossible() message (in NetHack 3.x and variants) so that it doesn’t imply the user should quit the program (thus destroying their save file).
NetHack4 impossible() should not imply that the save file is corrupted, and the distinction between impossible() and panic() should be less blurry.
80% of locks on containers, determined by the object id of those containers, should be unopenable by a credit card because they’re a latch or padlock or something that can’t be jimmied open. Perhaps Tourists should get a bonus that allows them to open more locks.
T-shirt messages shouldn’t depend only on their object id, so that two shirts generated shortly after one another don’t have predictable messages.
Silver weapons should be rarer than they currently are outside Gehennom and fairly common inside it.
Add a silvery potion, either as a random appearance or a dedicated potion like dNetHack’s potion of silver starlight, which will silver ammunition dipped into it, perhaps temporarily. It might also silver other weapons (spears, daggers) or other items. Random appearances have the possible problems of the potion potentially having a defined dip effect already (polymorph, for example), and it potentially not appearing in the game if there are extra random appearances.
Dipping fragile silver items, like silver arrows, into a potion of acid could create a silvery potion.
Grandmaster skill in martial arts should allow you to shatter enemy weapons like two-handed weapons do.
Add a dogcatcher, who will come and impound your pet if it misbehaves (stealing from shops, killing Minetown citizens) and you don’t get it leashed before a certain amount of time has passed.
Shopkeepers should be aware of when you use your pet to steal from their shop, and they should raise their prices to compensate, eventually not letting you reenter the shop. Alternatively, the shopkeeper should simply block the entrance as long as any monster in the shop is carrying unpaid items, but this could be circumvented with a magic whistle.
Stethoscopes and probing on a pet should show when that pet is satiated.
There should be some circumstance in which keys break, in order to solve the problem where you only ever need 1 key in the whole game. Perhaps a cursed key would have a chance of breaking when you try to use it.
However, this should not go the SLASH’EM route of allowing any unlocking device to break, since that just makes the player carry around extra keys. Skeleton keys should be made of bone and can break. Perhaps add a new key that is not breakable but is rarer than skeleton keys (stealing some of skeleton keys’ probability).
Lock picks and credit cards should possibly be able to break too.
Move enchant armor/weapon scrolls to the 200-zorkmid tier.
Add shallow water to the Gnomish Mines (not GruntHack’s deep water).
The preparation method of tins should be deterministic, so that tins that stack together will have the same method.
Armor should make use of its corpsenm (monster index) for efficiency and to do interesting things that are not currently done. For example, this would allow dragon scales and scale mail to be merged into two items that use the various dragon monster indexes to figure out its special effects, and it would allow for fireproof low boots created from polypiling a crocodile corpse to be flavored differently. In variants where applying dragon properties to other pieces of armor is being considered or planned, this would provide an easy way to do so.
Also see dtsund’s dragon scale mail proposal.
The helm of opposite alignment should be able to turn lawful or chaotic characters neutral, instead of always converting to lawful or chaotic.
Your starting cat should be able to have kittens.
You can jump over swimming monsters in water, and over tiny monsters.
Amulet of zombification: increases your zombification counter while you are wearing it; taking it off cures the zombification.
Searching should find everything immediately adjacent to you, but is an occupation that takes multiple turns. The s command by default takes some constant number of turns (somewhere from 10-20) and will either tell you about all the hidden things around you or tell you that there is nothing interesting; you can specify a numeric prefix to search for less than that if you want.
Archeologists should start with searching rather than having to get to XL 10 for it. To compensate, they now get stealth at XL 10 instead of 1.
Greed, a new object property for containers: the container will refuse to open 80% of the time, costing a turn. Either any gold put into the container vanishes permanently or gold weighs nothing when in the container.
Blessing a corpse should prevent it from being tainted or from giving you the “Blecch! Rotten food!” effect when eaten.
A monster that stands helpless if you can see it with normal vision (not infravision, or telepathy, or detect monsters or anything else), and attacks viciously if you cannot.
Add “MSGTYPE:replace” to the list of available message types. A message that matches this MSGTYPE will get replaced by another one, specified along with the message.
The game should allow you to reread a spellbook and relearn the spell whenever you want. The prompt should be “You know [spell] quite well already. Read the book anyway? (yn)”
You should be able to flush amulets down toilets to identify them.
The effectiveness of the protection spell should depend on how your off-hand is being used (open is better than carrying a shield, which is better than using it to wield a weapon). If your off-hand is free, the spell gives you a “spectral shield”.
Applying heat to loadstones should demagnetize them and turn them into flint stones.
Magnet traps: they attract metal items out of your inventory, but also attract loadstones and are a means of getting rid of them.
You should be able to apply an amulet of strangulation to an adjacent monster that has a head and neck, which will strangle it in 5 turns. Possibly only if the monster is sleeping or paralyzed.
You should be able to invoke a worn, identified ring of hunger to make yourself more hungry immediately so you can eat dragon or giant corpses.
Maybe rather than having all rings of hunger capable of doing this, have it be a single artifact ring of hunger. Suggested names for this artifact include Overeater, Bottomless Pit, Cookie Monster, Glutton, and The Hungering.
Rings of three wishes should have this side effect: while wearing it, if you die, a wish gets used up and you get lifesaved.
Cavemen should get a berserking bonus if their pet gets killed.
Electric attacks should deal more damage to monsters in water.
Dwarf kings should have a chance of generating with a silver dagger.
In Orcish Town, there should be a powered-up hostile orc shaman who has taken over from the dead Minetown priest. Possibly it could even have an epri struct attached so that it tends the altar. If you pacify it, you can donate to it as you would a normal temple priest.
Some roles should get food appraisal as a permanent intrinsic. Caveman at level 6 (though level 1 is also a very popular suggestion), Tourist at level 10, maybe Healers at level 1 but they already get poison resistance so maybe not.
Wind dragons, a cyan D whose breath is a wind beam: it doesn’t damage you, but blows you backward, and can’t be reflected. Their scales grant flight, which should confer resistance against knockback and Newton’s Third Law.
It should be possible to learn the enchantment of a weapon without formal identification. This could be accomplished by any of the following:
Add a command (generalization of #tip, or #dump, have both been suggested) to transfer all items from one container into another container without having to temporarily place them in your inventory. It would be better but perhaps harder to implement if you could pick and choose which items were being transferred, rather than all of them.
Artifact arrow that auto-returns to your pack and cannot break. But there is only one of it, so it can’t be multishot.
Add a role whose starting pet, if eaten, confers amazingly good benefits, so that the player has to make a hard choice of whether to deliberately kill and eat their pet and suffer the penalties.
There should be a way to search for hidden passages behind a boulder you are pushing.
Maximum HP should have some ceiling that depends on your race/role combination, proportional to what you would get by leveling up to 30 as that race/role.
Split up the effects of magic resistance, as it is too extensive. It protects against magical force, death magic, teleportation, polymorph, etc.
Add a bull rush command that lets you shove a target monster back one or more squares. The relative size of the monster and hero and the strength of the hero are important factors. The hero might move into the space of the displaced target.
Allow the player to disable things that display on the status bar, like ability scores, gold, dungeon level, and experience level, none of which have to be monitored constantly like HP or Pw do.
The game should display your base to-hit bonus (excluding circumstantial modifiers) at all times, perhaps for both ranged and melee to-hit.
Roles which are good with melee weapons (Bar, Val, Kni?, Cav?) should be able to see the enchantment of their weapon after using it for a while, or perhaps right when wielding it. Alternatively, seeing the enchantment of a weapon should be based on skill: basic will reveal enchantment on 1% of hits, skilled on 10%, expert as soon as you wield the weapon.
Monsters should get bonus AC against attacks coming from allies (hostile versus hostile, or pet versus pet).
Most artifacts should have a negative to-hit bonus, so you’re encouraged to train the weapon’s skill with some weapon that isn’t the artifact.
Put more intermediate levels into the skill system, such as Unskilled, Basic, Competent, Skilled, Advanced, Expert, Master, Grand Master.
Gnomes should get a racial bonus using aklys and crossbow. Should probably be implemented by affiliating an item type with a certain race, adding this as a new object attribute, and only specifying it on racial items (elven armor, orcish weapons, the aklys and crossbow, etc.)
Buff late-game undead, because undead’s significance in Gehennom tends to be pointless since they aren’t scary by the time the adventurer gets there.
Add some effect to Snickersnee so that it’s not just a slightly better katana. Ideas include confusion resistance, stunning resistance, and displacement.
Rust monsters and disenchanters should be q, because they are quadrupeds. (This would leave the R monster class empty though.)
Limit the amount of tamed monsters you can have at once.
If you are a gnomish Ranger, the quest artifact should be a crossbow.
While wielding a polearm and attempting to move in a direction where there is a monster 2 spaces away (and no monster 1 space away), the hero should attempt to attack with the polearm instead of moving. Also attempt an attack for monsters 2 spaces away diagonally if polearms are Expert. To hit a monster a knight’s move away, it still has to be applied. If preceded by the m key prefix, move into the space normally and don’t try to attack.
Give monsters their own XP counters, because the system of “all kills by a monster count as equal experience” is weird.
Any gaze attack which is prevented by blindness (one which is visual in nature) should be prevented by hallucination, or at least the effects are reduced or mitigated. Possibly archons’ blinding gaze should be exempted from this, with the hallucinatory message being “The power of the Aurora overwhelms you!”
Polymorphing a highly enchanted object should vaporize it if it turns into something that normally can’t be enchanted that high.
Luck’s effect on whether a projectile breaks should be nerfed. Instead, the enchantment should be the primary factor, and is more involved than just “+2 or above”.
Tripe rations should not generate randomly very often, but they should appear in the inventories of monsters that like tripe, such as orcs.
Add a conduct for tracking whether the player has not used any of each class of objects.
Bump the cloak of displacement up to MC 2.
New special room “ruined church” that contains ghosts, pieces of glass scattered around the floor, maybe an altar, maybe a spellbook, and blank paper/scrolls of junk mail scattered around the floor.
Uranium wands should glow in the dark (radius 1).
Untrapping a lavender trap should get you potions of lavender essential oil. Ants naturally dislike lavender oil, so ants will flee from a player that has been sprayed by a lavender trap or used a potion of lavender oil.
When invisibility is about to time out, the player should receive a warning message: “You thought you saw yourself for a moment”. If you can see invisible, “You seem to unfade for a moment”; if hallucinating, “You feel introspective for a moment”.
You should be able to wear an empty bag over your head to blind yourself, but this sets charisma to 6. If you wear an oilskin sack on your head, it starts a strangulation timer. If you wear a bag of tricks on your head, you get YAFM and instadeath, or possibly it just constantly bites your head.
Players should be able to polymorph dungeon features by zapping a polymorph beam down at them, with some special cases:
Net gnomes: they wield tridents and have a sticky attack (the net), which causes subsequent attacks to hit automatically.
Instead of pushing pets out of the way as they do other monsters, the Riders should trample over pets, instakilling them.
Several small spellbook additions:
Asmodeus and Baalzebub should demand gold proportional to their difficulty or monster level, not the player’s wallet. Possibly, if the player does not pay, they should remain on the downstairs and will not move until the player has paid, which allows the player to return with the requisite amount of gold (and may charge interest for the time you spent keeping them waiting). However, they will get angry if you get below their lair in any way (possibly measured by testing your lowest level reached each time you enter the lair).
See invisible should operate on a scale that determines what level of invisible monsters the player is allowed to see. (A low-level monster that drinks a potion of invisibility should be visible even with weak see invisible, whereas an arch-lich casting disappear should require very strong see invisible.)
Invisibility should do this too and have a scale as well (one notable place on the scale being that invisibility is kept only until the invisible thing takes an offensive action). If rings of invisibility and see invisible are made chargeable, this is an obvious avenue for them.
The timeouts for intrinsic invisibility and see invisible from eating a stalker corpse should be very long.
The water walking property should protect inventory from water and protect against drowning attacks.
Add gauntlets and boots of reflection.
Chicken eggs should identify as such when you formally ID them, and all eggs of a known type stay identified for the rest of the game.
Add level sounds on every level with a branch stairs. For spoiled players, the main benefit of this is to help locate the stairs to Vlad’s Tower.
Dragon eggs should be usable as thrown missiles, having interesting effects on whatever they hit. Black dragon eggs should specifically have a disintegration effect.
Oilskin cloaks should be MC3 instead of MC2.
Gehennom should be half as long, 10-12 levels, and should be mostly or all unique levels that are randomly chosen from a larger set.
Roditaur: new humanoid monster that has an oversized rat’s head and four arms. Has a powerful bite attack and four weapon attacks.
Pets anywhere on the Astral Plane should always go with you when you ascend, regardless of whether they’re adjacent or leashed to you.
Add more acid resistance sources in FIQHack, to balance yellow dragons’ exploding acid breath. Possibly a ring or amulet of acid resistance.
Add rumors to FIQHack that warn about dragons, which can be fairly dangerous.
Leprechauns should steal anything made of gold, in addition to plain gold pieces. (In vanilla, the only gold item is the gold ring, but variants have other gold items.)
The Bell of Opening should be carried by your quest leader, who gives it to you when you return to them with the quest artifact. This solves the problem of making a game unwinnable by permanently changing alignment, since you can also get it by killing the quest leader. Should the leader leave the level (by levelporting down, for example), they are considered derelict of duty and the player can start the quest.
Add Easter eggs as an actual item, in addition to monster and chicken eggs. Possibly they have a chance of containing a candy bar, or a figurine.
Applying a stethoscope should tell the target’s gender, and if it’s a pet, the pet’s hunger status.
Monster status “discord”, which causes a monster to be seen as a target and be attacked by other enemies. On the player, discord is the same as wielding Stormbringer. Discord is available through the spellbook of discord.
Conflict should affect things in a radius. The ring of conflict is a chargeable item, with the radius being proportional to the charge. Wearing multiple rings of conflict stacks the effects.
Opening a cursed bag of holding should not tell you what has disappeared, or it just says “Things have disappeared from the bag!” without describing them.
A Necromancer role which includes: creating skeleton armies, binding the undead via rituals similar to the Binder, launching rocks that contain small petrified animals that transform into undead animals, bone chains, and encrusting undead minions with different jewels to grant them different powers.
Merge the P and b monster classes, on the grounds that puddings and blobs are both classes of amorphous monsters that are sparsely populated. (Some attempts have been made to also merge the j monster class in.)
New monster: green cube, which combines the abilities of a green slime and gelatinous cube: both sliming and paralysis.
The scroll of detect magic should show magic fountains on the level as well as magical items. Fountains discovered this way are then displayed as “magic fountain” when near or farlooked. Wizards can see them as magic fountains already without needing to detect magic.
Boots of shock resistance, which have a thick rubber sole to prevent you from being grounded.
Note: several other people have commented that since such boots would actually prevent you from being grounded, you should actually take extra shock damage from other things, like touching grounded metal objects.
When attacking into a pit or falling while fumbling and wielding a pointy weapon, you should have a chance of falling on your weapon.
Add a high level monster spell “raise dead”, which resurrects nearby corpses as hostile monsters.
Blank spellbooks in flooded libraries should generate with the “number of times read” counter full, so they can’t be polypiled into readable books.
Engraving with Fire Brand should create a burnt engraving like a wand of fire does (it still degrades the sharpness of the blade, though).
The Watch should start with a small amount of gold, and throw it at a player of the opposite gender while the player is disrobing.
It should be possible to enchant dragon scales into dragonhide gear that is not scale mail.
Monks, or anyone skilled in martial arts, should be able to kick weapons out of an enemy’s hand.
