Generating Orcish Town guarantees that there will be a priest of Moloch tending an altar on a level below.

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.

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.

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.

Putting a disenchanter corpse into a bag of holding should make it explode.

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.

Higher monster difficulty sacrifices should have higher odds that a sacrifice will be given than lower-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.)

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.

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:

• Sell a limited set of items known to be useful in the endgame such as full healing and gain level potions, genocide scrolls, magic markers, etc.
• Sell items that are highly unlikely to be generated other than via a wish, such as figurines of high-level monsters.
• Create entirely new powerful items, which can only be purchased from those shops and cannot be wished for.

Wearing white dragon scale armor prevents corpses in your inventory from rotting, which enables you to wield a cockatrice corpse indefinitely.

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!”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Draugr should be able to scare non-undead monsters by chatting to them.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you have 25 Charisma, you become capable of declining Graz’zt’s attempts at seducing you.

Certain races should be able to forge using materials other races can’t:

• Dwarves can forge with crystal items, and possibly stone.
• Orcs can forge with stone items. Bone would be more flavorful for orcs, but less flavorful in being something that can actually be forged with.

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.

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 m) that is super strong, but if you somehow manage to kill it, it drops 2 random items that were inside it.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

• You can obtain a pelt by using a knife to skin the corpse of some monster that would reasonably have a pelt. This will probably be an occupation, and either its time or success rate will vary based on your knife skill and if you have a role-specific bonus.
• By using some sort of magic (instead of it being inherent to a role), you can transform into the animal whose pelt you are wearing.
• Pelts confer some benefit when worn as a cloak besides the ability to polymorph, which varies depending on the monster species, such as a boost to damage.

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.

Implement “special abilities” for each role that behave like (or simply are) techniques, but which would probably use the #monster command. These include:

• Monks’ ability continuously doubles their martial arts damage (i.e. x2, x4, etc) for as long as they keep landing hits within one action. Missing or declining to attack breaks this effect.
• Wizards can extract magic from the air, which drains Pw from enemies and gives it to the hero.
• Tourists can throw a party, which pacifies everyone within some range until someone takes damage.
• Barbarians can buff their attack, perhaps by giving any weapon a Cleaver-like arc (though they often get Cleaver anyway).
• Archeologists can detect enchanted treasure (not just all objects) on the level.
• Priests don’t get a new ability because they already have one: turn undead.
• Valkyries can freeze an area near them, freezing water into ice and dealing cold damage to monsters that is higher the closer they are to the hero.
• Samurai can swap places with a hostile monster, dealing some damage and stunning them in the process.
• Cavemen can get a big boost to stone throwing/slinging range and damage, or can get some sort of “primal rage” that boosts speed and doubles all damage.
• Knights can give their steed a free attack after each hit they land on something (which can extend to dragon breathing if they are riding a dragon).

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.

In Cocytus (or possibly any levels with a “cold” temperature), corpses rot more slowly.

An object property that confers slow digestion.

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!”

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.

Tourist trap: a trap that vanishes all of your gold, but only if you are a tourist.

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.

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.

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 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]”.

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).

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.

• Decreases failure rate of the wielded spell (utility spells might need to be made higher-level/harder to cast to maintain balance).
• Or decreases Pw cost of the wielded spell.
• Allows you to cast the wielded spell even if completely forgotten.
• Allows you to cast the spell without knowing it already - the Z menu gets an additional “-“ option to cast from the spellbook in hand if you don’t know what that book is.
  • Casting from an unknown spellbook will immediately check for reading success as if you had read the book: if you succeed, it then moves on to other checks like whether you have enough power, etc and you may cast the spell. If you fail, you get a random failure effect appropriate to that spellbook.
• For attack spells, increase the damage dealt by the spell.

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.

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:

• Black lights are one that already exists; this would invert its current light radius of 1 into darkness.
• A shadow dragon.
• A darkness elemental, which in addition to shedding a radius of darkness, also permanently darkens squares it moves throught by removing the lit state.