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).

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.

• It would presumably only generate in well-defined room areas.
• The trap would cause instadeath to any creature caught in the crush, except unsolid ones, leaving no corpses.

The Rogue level should exclusively generate monsters from Rogue which don’t otherwise appear in NetHack.

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:

• Completely disables spellcasting both for the player and for monsters.
• Monsters behave as if cancelled, as do you if you are polymorphed.
• Enchantments do not add to AC or weapon to-hit or damage.
• Magical extrinsics are suppressed.
• Potions have no magic effects (so non-magic potions like acid work the same, but e.g. drinking a potion of object detection would consume the potion and do nothing else).
• Scrolls do nothing; they won’t disintegrate when read but won’t do anything else either. “You pronounce the formula, but nothing happens.”
• Wands do nothing; they won’t consume a charge when zapped or engraved with, and can only engrave in the dust.
• Artifacts have no special powers.

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.

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.

Add a generic monster, which at the start of each game is assigned a species name randomly from the list of hallucinatory monster names.

A challenge game mode called “Midnight Run” in which the time of day according to the game is permanently locked to midnight.

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.

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.

Provide “organic” lighting to dark rooms via a luminescent fungus:

• Level 0 monster, with a 0 difficulty rating.
• Sessile, has no movement.
• Has no attacks (not even passive ones).
• Sheds light in a radius of 1 or 2 around it.
• It would only be able to generate on a square that is dark, but would have special cases to generate out of its ordinary expected depth since most dark rooms spawn later in the dungeon. Still, they would ideally taper off
• Since it is completely nonthreatening, it would be level 0 and worth 0 experience points, but killing it would still break pacifist conduct.
• The corpse could function as a light source, but that might be too annoying to implement.
• If the idea is to have a lot of them, they should probably have pretty low corpse nutrition, to avoid unbalancing the nutrition balance. The corpses would rot anyway, but they would be vegetarian and suitable food for horses and other such pets. Alternatively, the corpse could be poisonous.
• Might need special pet checks to prevent pets from killing the 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.

Overhaul the dungeon as follows:

• The endgame is extremely dangerous, to the point where it will kill most heroes by default no matter how well-prepared they are.
• Every branch you complete removes an aspect of the endgame’s danger. (Not specified if the existing dungeon branches count towards this, or if they should only be new branches.)
• Branches are themselves dangerous, and each one requires a non-renewable resource to “unlock”. Not specified if this resource is the same or different for different branches.

The idea is to create different choices and tradeoffs, and to force the player to take uncomfortable or unanticipated routes.

If you turn into a monkey as a monk, you get a YAFM: “You feel especially monky.”

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.

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:

• When you eat a bony corpse as a kandra, you are given the opportunity to turn into that monster.
• You might otherwise have the opportunity to digest the flesh but keep the skeleton (which would be a new item using corpsenm to track which monster species it’s a skeleton of) in order to wear it later. Skeletons would have to be heavy or bulky enough so that carrying lots of them around wouldn’t be feasible, and potentially corpses should rot into skeletons instead of completely vanishing.
• You can only achieve a perfect imitation of a monster by eating its fresh corpse. Wearing a skeleton at any other point results in a poorer imitation that would be penalized in some way: it could deal less damage, have terrible Charisma, and so on.
• When perfectly imitating a monster, other monsters might not attack you.
• Eating and replicating a corpse also takes time, which would be implemented as an occupation. If interrupted, your new form is imperfect. Possibly, the time needed to assume a shape from a skeleton decreases as you get more experienced and gain more levels.
• You can exist without any bones, but this means you are a weak, slow ooze monster (perhaps kandra should be in the “b” class).
• Hunger might not work the same way. Kandra in Mistborn do not need to eat, but for gameplay balance there should probably still be some need to keep seeking out food.
• Might be able to store some smaller items inside your body, protecting them from theft, damage, and destruction.
• Can pick locks with your “hands” by selecting “-“ as a lockpicking implement.
• Sources of acid would be especially damaging.
• These are a lot of advantages with few disadvantages; some special disadvantages might need to be created, such as certain types of elemental damage disrupting your body and forcing you to drop your skeleton.
• The system of Blessings in Mistborn (two magical spikes which all kandra must keep within their body at all times) could be used. Somehow losing the Blessings would be an instadeath.

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.

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:

• Reduce the monster’s to-hit, so it misses more often.
• On some low percentage of attacks that would hit, negate all damage from the attack and produce a message indicating you parried it.

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:

• solving a special puzzle involving moving iron bars or walls and levers/buttons
• bribing or seducing the guards
• using stealth to sneak past the guards
• or just waiting a certain amount of time without dying.

Pleather armor, an object that is mostly identical to leather armor, but is made out of plastic.

• If you somehow eat it, it counts as vegan.
• It’s much lighter than leather armor.
• If it gets exposed to extreme cold, it can become brittle and break.
• If it gets exposed to fire, it can melt, causing extra damage to the wearer.

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.

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.

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).

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A system where your god grants you cool abilities, but only if you actively obey randomly generated edicts they put forth. Examples:

• “I declare the wearing of leather forbidden!” (persistent)
• “I declare Abipoppo the Shopkeeper must die!” (one-time)

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.

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.

Some Medusa buffs:

• Allow her to swim. (She can already fly, so this may not do much.)
• Give her a wrapping attack, flavored as crushing coils, which could possibly drown you.
• Her gaze has a reduced effect if you have reflection and not blindness, but not zero effect. Perhaps it begins slow-stoning rather than instant stoning.

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.

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:

• The weapon occasionally turns on you when you try to attack with it, hitting you instead.
• The weapon occasionally deals an extra 1d8 shock damage to you and your opponent when it hits, possibly breaking rings.
• The weapon wakes up any sleeping monster you get near. Doesn’t actually identify as cursed until it wakes something up.

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.

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:

1. You have some chance, maybe 1/3, of failing to ascend when offering the Amulet to your god, as Mephisto claims your soul (the god still gets the Amulet but cannot raise you to immortality, so it’s a weird “win” that is not an ascension).
2. While ascending through Gehennom with the Amulet, he may reappear and try to take it and everything else for himself. All buffs he gave you are instantly removed and perhaps some debuffs are even applied. Possibly, defeating him in this circumstance could yield your soul back.

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.

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:

• The mysterious force, as it exists in vanilla.
• When you try to ascend the stairs, they vanish and several illusory copies of stairs appear across the level, along with one real one which you have to find.
• Walls extrude from existing walls around the hero in random directions, never entirely closing off, via a cellular automaton that looks for walls with a 3x2 area of walkable spaces in front of them, with the space directly in front a regular floor space - the effect of this given enough iterations turns the terrain around you into a maze.
• Generic damage over time, not severe but enough to provide a headwind. Or partial or total disabling of natural regeneration.
• Asmodeus: Some damaging cold effect that happens periodically, or your cold resistance is nullified and replaced with a vulnerability to cold effects, or a slowing effect (flavored as due to cold).
• Baalzebub: Something to do with insects, either periodic summon insects from nowhere or stronger/more frequent insects. Or buffed insects that routinely spawn around you.
• Juiblex: You may randomly become ill, or have your regeneration dampened or something
• Geryon: Hordes of buffed q generate and rampage periodically.

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.

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.

All monk techniques should have shorter timeouts, but if a technique is used in chained blitz, it has a one-off very long timeout.

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:

• You are carrying any food in your inventory or in containers.
• There is any comestible, anything at all, that you can see on the map.

Possibly, it acts as a club when wielded, though being a cram ration it can’t be enchanted.

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.

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.

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).

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.

If you escape the Black Market by branchporting, One-eyed Sam will pursue you on the ascension run.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Crude (orcish) items should never generate with valuable metals (gold, silver, platinum, mithril) as their material.

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).

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.

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.

Enchanted boomerangs (or magic boomerangs, if implemented) can gather items from the floor and return them to you.

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.

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.

Amulet of reincarnation: when you die, it prevents your game from ending, but it permanently polymorphs you into a different form.

Spells can be “bound” together so that they can be cast simultaneously.

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.

Subspace branch, which has many entrances and exits to various parts of the dungeon for quick traversal. However, it’s populated with nasty monsters.

Shepherds’ crooks: a wooden multi-purpose weapon-tool.

• Damage is a little less than a quarterstaff. Should probably not weigh as much as a quarterstaff; it would be hard to justify 40 weight any way you slice it.
• Can be applied to give a menu offering to do one of three things (and unlike grappling hooks it never does the wrong thing):
  1. Hit a monster at polearm range (skill-dependent).
  2. Attempt to hook a monster at polearm range. Tame monsters are always hooked. Peacefuls are always hooked, but may be angered. Hostiles might be hit instead of hooked. If the monster is hooked, it will be pulled towards you, or you will be pulled towards it if it’s much larger than you.
  3. Grab the top item from a square, even if the square is a trap or water square.
• Wielding one passively gives a boost to the radius in which pets will follow when you change levels.
• Wielding one also makes pets follow you as if you had a treat.
• Can be applied to a monster two squares away to yank it towards you, which may stun the monster.
• Binders in dNetHack could start with one. Peasants in dNetHack could generate with them.
• Two-weaponing a crook and a flail should do ‘‘something’’ (from Egyptian pharaoh iconography).