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

Add a Druid role: intended to be a more balanced form of SLASH’EM’s doppelganger race, druids are highly attuned to nature and possess innate shapeshifting abilities.

• You begin the game with polymorph control and get polymorphitis at XL 5 or so.
• Possibly you start with a wand of polymorph, or potions of it.
• Inventory could be severely restricted, so you have to figure out how to do most things through polymorph.
• You have the power to change into a tree, which will make most monsters ignore you. While in tree form, you are immobile but regenerate HP and Pw faster. Orcs might attack you with axes, a la Tolkien.
• Without extrinsic polymorph control, your polymorph control limits you to changing into forms with the M1_ANIMAL flag.
• Possibly have limited access to #polyself outside of wizard mode, so they can change intentionally and not randomly. Would work best as an ability with a timeout, or cost Pw outside of wizard mode.
• Possibly, the monsters you can polymorph into must have a certain base level or difficulty that’s tied to your XL somehow (maybe XL/2). If their base level is too high, you can’t polymorph into them.
• Your controlled polymorphs always succeed - you will never accidentally fail and “feel like a new woman” with the 20% chance that all other roles have.
• You are seriously bad at combat in your regular form, having very little weapon skill (nothing can be advanced to Expert, possibly not even to Skilled), and physically weak in your normal form. Combat in a polyform should be incentivized enough so that it isn’t really worth it to wear any armor. Maybe you should get to-hit and damage bonuses while in a wild form?
• Diminishing returns on polymorph time limit that prevent you from reusing the same form(s) over and over and over again. (This may actually be applicable as a general YANI for polymorph control).
• The critical balance needed is to make polyselfing powerful and awesome to play with and use for typical combat, but simultaneously polyselfing needs enough restrictions that it doesn’t just turn into Master Mind Flayer: The Game.
  • One proposed restriction: you can only turn into monsters you have already encountered, or if that is too lax, into peaceful or tame monsters adjacent to you at the time. The druid should be able to pacify most animalistic monsters to take advantage of this (temporarily?)
• The starting pet is a woodchuck (or wolf). Pantheon is probably drawn from Celtic mythology, though hopefully not overlapping with Knights.
• Some heavy polymorph / monster / player as monster tweaking is probably required, in the sense that there should, ideally, be valid reasons to exist in any given polymorphable form.

Several elaborations on a system for more reliable (and less tedious) gifts from altars:

1. Your god will always give you a gift on the first sacrifice from a given coaligned altar (not if attempting to convert an altar). But after that, they will not give you any more gifts on that altar no matter how much you sacrifice. (Other sacrifice effects will still happen as if you failed the die roll for a gift.) This eliminates all the tedium associated with altar camping for gifts (though not all altar camping in general), but is a significant change since getting one corpse to an altar is much easier than getting multiple ones, and streamlining the game to this extent may be undesirable.
2. As above, but the gift will only be given for the first monster whose difficulty is above a certain threshold (possibly partially dependent on depth, and also with some random factor). Thus, if you sacrifice and get no artifact, you know you have to try a harder monster.
3. The total difficulty of monsters sacrificed is accumulated; the first sacrifice to put you over some threshold (say, 30 cumulative difficulty) is guaranteed to give you a gift. The totaling may or may not be per-altar.
4. Your god has a set list of rewards, each of which is tied to some monster difficulty level. Some of these rewards are artifact gifts; others may be things like luck. You only get a gift when you sacrifice a monster of the requisite difficulty, and thereafter monsters of equal or lesser difficulty to that are ignored by the god for reward purposes (they may still be used for mollifying and decreasing prayer timeout). If you make a sacrifice that earns you multiple rewards at once, you either get them all at once or you get the biggest reward and the smaller ones on subsequent sacrifices. This would enable game developers to fix a number of artifact gifts (say, 3), by encoding that many rewards for them. This system might have problems in games with no deep usable altars where it is harder to get randomly generated difficult monsters.
5. Variation of the above: at the beginning of the game, three random monster difficulties are chosen (with some limiting on ranges). Sacrificing a monster of a difficulty above any of these thresholds automatically gives you a sacrifice gift and removes the highest remaining threshold you met.

You can use #monster while riding a steed with a breath weapon to make it use its breath weapon. You get prompted for the direction.

A magic arrow spell, modeled off a similar spell in GnollHack. It is a level 1 spell that shoots a magic arrow at a single enemy for 1d6 damage and never misses. Possible variations include boosting the damage to 2d6 but allowing it to miss, or allowing it to be smite-targeted at any enemy in a radius with a direct unobstructed path.

Because Vorpal Blade delivering random, unpredictable instadeath is not fun to be on the receiving end of, replace it (or just replace its instadeath effect) with a “chaos blade” that has a bunch of random unpredictable effects, including some that may backfire on the user.

Such a new artifact would almost certainly be chaotic rather than neutral.

Wishing for a “mystery box” gives a large box containing 4 (or however many is balanced) completely random items. (Using just a regular mkobj() call; it won’t generate items which are not normally generatable because this is likely to cause bugs.)

New branch named “The Ancient Library”. It is likely accessed by portal from the main dungeon rather than stairs. It contains some spellbooks and a smaller number of scrolls, which serve as the main loot of this branch, but there aren’t too many of them in order not to be unbalancing. The level design makes it still visibly a structure, but fairly ruined with collapsed walls and such.

The branch is populated by monsters of a new species that either serve as the guardians of the library, or have moved in to inhabit it after its decline. They make for a difficult fight, and compounding the problem, taking a book will awaken and anger all of them on the current level. (Or the books spawn embedded in the walls – bookshelves, and you need to kick the walls to get them out, which triggers this.) There is no singular boss monster in the branch, nor is there any singular reward item.

If bookworms (#1793) are implemented, they also appear in this branch.

Reduce the spell level of magic mapping, but also reduce its utility: instead of mapping the entire level at once, you choose a point to center your divination on and a circular or square area, with a radius dependent on your divination skill, gets mapped. After this change, it might be similar enough to clairvoyance to be merged with that spell (the difference with clairvoyance is that it currently always centers on the player; perhaps the new merged spell could instead scale with skill by having a fixed mapping area, but the distance you can target it at increases with skill level.)

This does not change the scroll of magic mapping behavior, which still maps the whole level.

If you are polymorphed into a nymph and are lawful, you suffer an alignment penalty for stealing items from other monsters.

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.

You can genocide the Wizard of Yendor (possibly only once, in his initial incarnation). This will leave the Book dropped in his tower, but since this counts as killing him, harassment begins immediately. When he returns after being genocided, he says “So… thou thought thou couldst genocide me, fool.”

Fort Ludios has a constant level difficulty, of perhaps 20, not varying based on where the game internally decided to place its floating branch.

Projectiles of any sort that pass over a web space may stop there and drop on the space, getting “caught in the web”.

A blessed scroll of create monster will create monsters out of line-of-sight to make it safer for the player.

While you are wielding Stormbringer, you gain alignment for killing peacefuls and pets (rather than losing it).

Livelog when you obtain the wand of wishing from the Castle.

Objects that currently generate cursed 90% of the time instead generate cursed 100% of the time.

Make indirect identification more common and reliable through the game, but make the scroll of identify less likely to identify multiple items and impossible to identify your entire inventory. Thrones can still identify your whole inventory as a random effect.

Some way to close off the double-slow-digestion loophole by which you can survive indefinitely without food, by abusing the fact that ring hunger is counted on certain different turns for the left and right hand. Suggestions include:

• Ring (and amulet) hunger is always counted on every 20th turn. This prevents the slow digestion trick, but makes it somewhat easier to avoid ring hunger from most other rings (though not significantly harder).
• As above, but the hunger is offset by some random phase, determined by a hidden value that is constant in your game, such as ubirthday.
• As above, but the random phase is different every 20 turns (e.g. by deterministic hashing of turns/20). Effectively, one turn in every 20-turn chunk will cause ring hunger, but it’s not possible to figure out which.
• Have a random 1/20 chance of each ring causing hunger on every turn.

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).

New Biologist role, which revolves around polymorphing monsters, brewing potions (probably non-alchemically), and possibly collecting samples from monsters.

Possibly, they start with a number of potions of booze, but are penalized for drinking booze; it’s intended to use for brewing with samples. They also possibly have a guidebook describing recipes (other roles can do this too, but lacking a guidebook they won’t be able to do it very well).

Starting equipment may contain:

• Alchemy smock
• Gloves, probably leather but maybe padded
• Goggles, a new eye-slot tool made of plastic that protects your eyes from splashes and spits just like the visored helmet
• Knife
• Walking shoes
• Wand of polymorph (questionable)
• Tripe and vegetables to tame monsters

One take on the quest: it sees you fighting the Black Mold (a mold that constantly multiplies itself and attacks with random elemental damage, including possibly disintegration, when touched). The quest artifact is the Elixir of Immortality, but this is not possessed by the nemesis; instead you have to brew it yourself using an ingredient found on the goal level and which will be destroyed by the Black Mold if you don’t get there first. The Elixir isn’t needed; the quest is counted complete if you destroy all the Black Mold.

They can get Expert in only a few skills, including knife.

They are penalized for “animal testing”, which is polymorphing or otherwise abusing living peaceful or tame monsters. Or possibly it’s okay as long as the subject isn’t killed. However, they are rewarded for other forms of experimentation.

Streak mode that prevents you from having more than 1 save file at a time.

If you have at least Basic in martial arts, you cannot injure your leg by kicking.

Some monsters can block being detected by your telepathy, either innately (disenchanters, perhaps) or as a monster intrinsic conferred by armor (such as a tinfoil hat) or spellcasting by an ally. Also, possibly allow for area-of-effect “telepathy dead zones”.

Chatting with a shopkeeper makes them offer to appraise your inventory; if you accept, they will automatically type-name all your unidentified and un-type-named items (that they would be willing to buy) with the price they would buy it for.

When a monster disappears by becoming invisible (and you can’t see it anymore), place an I on its square.

In an effort to make unicorn horns not infinitely usable but also preserve their other good qualities: Split the unicorn horn into two items, the horn, a simple tool which now has a number of charges, and a “unicorn spear” / “hardened unicorn horn” which is a weapon.

Both items have the same base damage, are two-handed, and use the unicorn horn skill, but reading a scroll of enchant weapon while wielding a unicorn horn will transform it into the weapon version like how crysknives work. The weapon cannot be used to cure ailments.

New mode for #terrain that hilights spaces you or a pet have stepped on. (There is also popular demand for a NetHack4-like display of this on the regular map.)

Bats flee upstairs whenever possible in Gehennom, because they are bats outta hell.

When you step onto a pit or hole, your chance of falling in is based on your Dexterity rather than being the usual flat 20% chance for traps.

Alter the player’s corpse weight based on how hungry they were when they died.

Dragonbane behaves like in DCSS: it gains enchantment, safely and for free, upon killing dragons, maybe up to a higher maximum than usual.

Procedurally generate the game-equivalent of Elbereth each game (the literal string “Elbereth” does nothing special anymore), and make it fairly likely to appear somewhere in the Dungeons of Doom.

Wishing for “world peace” pacifies all non-unique monsters on the level, possibly subject to monster resistances.

Karma stone: a type of gray stone that, if it is blessed or cursed, can be rubbed on another item to transfer the blessing or curse to that item, making the stone uncursed in the process. Cursed karma stones in inventory eventually transfer their curse to a random item on their own; the stone might remain cursed after doing this. The loadstone in the Mimic of the Mines is replaced with one of these.

Giantslayer kills all insects adjacent to the player for a possible “Seven at one blow” effect.

Track monsters that you have named. If you genocide a class of monsters that contains any you have named, notify the player of their death.

Orcish characters will never be able to tame elves, and elvish characters will never be able to tame orcs.

Remove the possibility of “Blecch! Rotten food!” from uncursed non-corpse comestibles.

If Mjollnir is thrown and would hit a valkyrie player monster wearing gauntlets of power, they catch it instead.

When viewing skills with #enhance, show the maximum skill caps for all listed skills.

New artifact Imaginary Widget: The base object is randomized among non-polearm melee weapons each game. Deals double damage to monsters that don’t exist in real life (e.g. foxes and mastodons and giant eels are real; wargs and mumaks and krakens are not).

When you’re hallucinating, show the Black Market as “Sam’s Club”.

Unless you are blind, all boxes are obviously locked or unlocked once you see them. There is no need to first loot a chest only to learn that it’s locked.

Dipping potions deliberately into a large water source (anything but the potion of water) turns them into water in one go, without a need to dip twice. You get a message about pouring out the old potion and filling the bottle with water. Being submerged underwater is not necessarily deliberate so it does not instadilute potions to water all at once.

Rather than making weapons train 1-to-1 on all successful hits, make them train differently:

• Weapons train only when their natural damage die rolls a 1 / rolls a max (ignoring other weapon damage bonuses), so that weaker weapons train faster than stronger ones, and weapon skill for stronger weapons comes in later in the game rather than having all players reach Expert relatively early in the game. This has the oddity of incentivizing orcish weapons over regular, elven or dwarvish though.
• Make the enchantment of your weapon irrelevant to training or even make training slower with a positively enchanted weapon; if the weapon has magical homing assist technology, you’re not really building skill in how to use it that much.

Monks get a small amount of free bonus movement points when they kill a monster bare-handed, and also gain a small amount of free bonus movement points while making movement actions and not wearing body armor.

A command that you can prefix some action with to voluntarily make that interruptible action uninterruptible.

The travel command automatically opens doors as you go.

If you escape the dungeon, a short blurb prints describing your post-dungeon career. This factors in your material wealth (gold, gems, and other things you escaped with), deity anger (they will be mad at you for abandoning the mission regardless, but if already angry before your escape you will not live long outside the dungeon), and alignment record (bad alignment could cause you to get spurned by your peers), along with possibly more factors, such as if you escaped with a fake Amulet.

Breaking a wand of wishing will wrest it if possible.

General artifact-stealing attack; like the Wizard’s quest-artifact-steal attack but applicable to all artifacts and without Amulet of Yendor theft baked in. Archeologist player monsters might use this (“That belongs in a museum!”).

F corpses can be dipped into potions to make different potions: juice + violet fungus = booze, juice + yellow mold = sickness, water + green mold = acid. (Note the existence of the Brewing Patch, which dissolves most F in juice to produce confusion, hallucination, booze, sleeping, and healing.)

Later suggested recipes which involve dipping a corpse in acid to dissolve it:

• Wraith corpse → potion of gain level. (Does not always succeed, to compensate for the fact that a wraith corpse doesn’t always grant a level. Maybe it even has a lower success rate than getting a level from a corpse.)
• Newt corpse → potion of gain energy.
• Floating eye corpse → potion of levitation or possibly monster detection.

Seduction (possibly for nymphs as well as foocubi) may not work if the seducer is invisible.

Whether an artifact has or hasn’t yet cooled down is visible to the player.

The hood on a worn dwarvish cloak will protect your helm from getting rusted.

When you throw ammo without the proper launcher, the game makes it clear that you’re doing it wrong, e.g. “You clumsily throw the arrow”. This also abuses Wisdom.

Bluff monster: a shapeshifter that is biased towards powerful forms and nasties, but it actually retains the weak attacks and HP and AC of its regular form.

When either 1) you are hallucinating and hit something well enough to have gotten a ! on the hit message or 2) hit something with a type weakness (fire versus cold-resistant, cold versus fire-resistant, electricity versus water, etc), an additional “It’s super effective!” message is printed.

New artifact spellbook Akashic Records:

• Read for enlightenment
• Can be applied like a stethoscope to probe adjacent enemies, doesn’t cost a turn
• When carried, gives extrinsic monster detection. Farlooking reveals enemy HP.
• Invoke for precognition: for the next 100 turns, your attacks never miss, and enemies roll twice against you and use the lower result.
• If you would be killed from HP damage from an attack during precognition, you will dodge the killing blow and all subsequent attacks on that round. Immediately ends the effect.
• Might mesh well with the other encyclopedia idea, using it as a base item type.

The ability to chat with intelligent pets and give them basic strategy directives, such as what type of attack they should be favoring, or whether they should stop attacking and stay by your side. Opinions vary as to whether this should be limited to intelligent pets or not.

Reach gloves: let you pick up items from adjacent squares and grapple monsters.

In Orcish Town, there should be peaceful orcish racial shopkeepers with actual shops (who will happily sell you the human shopkeeper corpse on their floor.)

Saltwater or murky water, intended as a nerf for “just dilute most potions”:

• Potions of saltwater behave exactly like potions of water, except that they cannot be used to bless or curse things. Holy (and unholy) water must be pure.
• All in-game sources of water except for magic fountains (possibly regular fountains as well, but they might be too plentiful) are saltwater. Diluting potions in them will yield only potions of saltwater.
• Can also get pure water if a unicorn horn dip would already result in water.
• Not specified what cancelling potions should do. Possibly most potions just cancel to saltwater, juice or sickness. It’s weird because flavor-wise it shouldn’t produce anything but pure water, but it obviously won’t fix the current problem if you merely have to cancel potions instead of diluting them.
• If called murky water instead of saltwater, the “murky” randomized potion appearance should change.

Alternatively, don’t actually make saltwater a separate potion; just use saltwater as a flavor reason for why the player can’t intentionally dilute potions to water. (Can use a separate flavor argument, that potions are generally corked while not used, to explain away the lack of dilution for water damage.) Also, make most potions cancel into non-water base potions (such as confusion and hallucination to booze), with the notable exception of polymorph. It’s also harder or impossible to get water from random alchemy or polymorph.

A third option is naming blessing-capable potions “purified water” and leaving the mundane potion of water as it is. Things such as unicorn horns can neutralize toxins but can’t actually remove them, so the resulting water isn’t purified.

Resolve the problem of having to double-enchant launchers and ammo and get double bonuses in one of two ways:

1. Make the double bonuses at higher cost a feature of ammo-based fighting. You can now enchant rocks and flint stones, though all randomly generated ones must be +0.
2. Make ammunition unenchantable (but still fooproofable), and the launcher enchantment affects to-hit and damage bonuses like normal. This is good because it means that ammo stack management is less annoying.

Mjollnir confers shock resistance.

New unaligned artifact dagger Almagest: uses the powers of scrolls to augment itself, and bears a scroll label signifying which scroll ability it is imbued with. Opinions vary on whether this label should be randomly generated by the dagger (and the player may choose to read it, upon which it gives the uncursed scroll effect and disappears for 1000 turns, eventually returning with another label) or whether the label should be deliberately imbued by the player by rubbing it on a scroll. It gains +d4 to damage and +d4 to hit when it has an inscription.

There are additional special effects if the player has formally IDed the scroll whose label is on the dagger:

• Identify: 25% chance of probing
• Light: +d6 to undead, light source
• Enchant weapon: +d4 damage
• Enchant armor: gives 3 points of AC when wielded
• Remove curse: Protects fully from all curses when wielded
• Confuse monster: 25% chance of confusing
• Destroy armor: Ignores enemy armor when calculating to-hit
• Fire: +d8 fire damage
• Food detection: Enemies are much more likely to leave corpses
• Gold detection: Enemies may drop small amounts of gold when killed
• Magic mapping: 5% chance of activating clairvoyance on hit
• Scare monster: 15% chance of scaring on hit
• Teleportation: 10% chance of randomly teleporting on hit
• Amnesia: Extra mindflayer tentacle attack, no effect when read
• Create monster: 5% chance for create familiar effect on hit
• Earth: 5% chance of creating boulder over enemy
• Taming: 5% chance of charm monster effect on hit
• Charging: Does 2x Pw damage and adds it to your own, 5% chance of cancellation
• Genocide: Instakills as Tsurugi, +1 damage
• Stinking cloud: Permanently poisoned
• Punishment: Weighs 100, deals +d12 damage. Autocurses and triples alignment losses.

New slot for belts:

• Belts themselves could be armor or tools, but probably armor. They mainly serve to hold items for quick access. It’s not defined whether they are intended to hold an indefinite number of items like any container, or a limited amount. The only problem with making them armor is that they would by default be enchantable for more AC, but belts should probably not be enchantable. If it makes more sense that several magical belts would hold charges, tools would be the appropriate class.
• Items carried in a belt weigh nothing and are mostly or totally protected from destruction, and using them doesn’t take the action it usually takes to get an item out of a bag.
• Types of belts could be scroll-holding, potion-holding, wand-holding, ammo-holding (with a possible “endless quiver” item or artifact), gem-holding (to get partial resistances from certain gems), chastity (providing immunity to foocubi seduction) or no special powers but some moderate AC.
• One randomized belt description could also provide protection against leprechaun theft.
• Randomized descriptions could include: cloth, leather, worn, studded, buckled, braided
• Tourists and Convicts also start off with garish swim trunks/striped slacks, which do the same things as Hawaiian shirts/striped shirts. The swim trunks also allow swimming. Both of these protect from instadeath when you sit on a cockatrice corpse.
• Belts of giant strength, elven grace, and troll toughness. These increase your Str/Dex/Con either to 25 or by +enchantment (if belts can even be enchanted, which isn’t currently defined.)
• Swordbelts/sheathes. These allow you to ready an additional weapon or give you an additional weapon slot.

More belt ideas here.

Wizards who can’t cast spells while crowned (permablind?) receive something other than a spellbook of finger of death.

Samurai can’t use Excalibur, because it’s cross-culture. The Tsurugi should be buffed to be quite good enough.

Water elementals deal active water damage to the player, more broadly than rust monsters: blanks scrolls, dilutes potions, extinguishes candles, etc.

Give all roles a warning when they might fail to read a spellbook, but make the numbers involved much less useful than the Wizard’s warning. (Possibly, just give players “difficult to comprehend” when success chance is less than 100% and nothing else, and buff Wizard warning to add more levels: “somewhat difficult”, “difficult”, “very difficult”, “extremely difficult”).

Zen or illiterate players get spells for free as a prayer boon where they normally would have been granted the corresponding spellbook.

An addendum to ideas where the player starts the game with some random object types identified, without actually starting with such objects. Use a different ID state for these types, so the player will recognize them when they come across those items, but they can’t startscum for “good” discoveries by checking the discoveries list at the start of the game.

New type of book “encyclopedia”:

• Appears as a “hardback book” when unidentified, base price 300.
• Nonmagical and always polypiles into a blank spellbook.
• When read, it adds the appearance of some unknown magical items (1d4 if blessed, 1d3 if uncursed, 1 if cursed, plus 1 if you are an Archeologist) to your discovery list.
• It doesn’t disappear when read, but will set a flag that prevents its effects from happening again. This flag will be cleared when creating a bones file.
• Archeologists start with a special blessed encyclopedia (using a different flag), which is their research (the starting one comes pre-read and isn’t useful to this character). Reading an unread archeologist encyclopedia gives the message “These seem to be an archeologist’s notes. You pore over them intently.”, and type-IDs two unknown scrolls, rings, amulets, and wands, and puts two blessed scrolls of magic mapping into your inventory.
• The Archeologist home level contains another encyclopedia.
• There has to be an incentive for archeologists carrying around their encyclopedia so it doesn’t just get discarded as dead weight. A flavorful way to do this would be to award them extra experience points (say, double or triple) when they learn new object types while carrying an encyclopedia.

Aquaman role/race, which starts with magical breathing, a +1 trident, and an oilskin sack. Only regenerates health when in water. If a race, should be able to walk around on dry land (so merfolk are probably out, perhaps merlings or half-merfolk would work). Can drown surrounding enemies. Starts with scrolls of flood.

Fire and frost horns’ damage scales with the level of its user. (Mainly to prevent a random gnome in the Mines dealing way too much damage with one).

Command (generalization of #tip, or #dump, have both been suggested) to transfer all items from one container into another container without having to temporarily place them in your inventory. It would be better but perhaps harder to implement if you could pick and choose which items were being transferred, rather than all of them.