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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 cast the spell of create grass while underwater, it should create kelp fronds in surrounding water squares.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reading a cursed scroll of gold detection while confused should punish you, but create a gold ball and chain instead of an iron one.
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.
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.
On critical hits, there should be a chance of dealing double damage. This chance increases with higher skill in whatever you are attacking with.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gnolls should be able to generate riding leocrottas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Spell staves should have active or passive effects that scale up with your skill in the stave’s spell school. For instance:
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 get intrinsic polymorph control when they are at XL 30.
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.
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.
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.
Neothelids should be able to spawn randomly, albeit rarely, for illithid players, rather than only appearing in a few guaranteed places.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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 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.
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, or a hypothetical new shaman role:
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:
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.
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:
