When you perform a controlled polymorph, you are only able to turn into monsters which have HD equal to or lower than your level. If you are using a mask, or if you are polymorphing randomly, it treats you as being 10 levels higher than your actual one.

Lycanthropic and vampire shapeshifting polymorphs are exempt from this restriction.

Pets that are a higher level than you gradually untame over time, though they will always turn peaceful when they untame unless you have abused them.

The Soul Forge: a single-level branch off Gehennom that contains a smith. The smith will take two items of the same type and forge them together into one; in technical terms this destroys one of them and imbues the other with whatever object properties the destroyed one had. They cannot both be artifacts, and if one is an artifact, it will not be the one destroyed, so the properties from the other one will be transferred to the artifact.

The smith’s price is based on how many object properties the resulting item will have, increased if it will be an artifact. In dNetHack, the smith would require payment in soul coins, but in variants without those, they may just ask for gold or some other valuable. If paid in soul coins, the requested type of coin would be random but deterministic based on the object IDs of the two items.

New “flooded stairs” terrain type. They act normally as stairs, but are also treated as three-dimensional water (that you cannot fly over and must be submerged in, like on the Plane of Water). This would not be very useful on its own but would be a building block for quests or other special levels that are entirely underwater.

Artifact bronze plate mail The Pact Eternal. Autocurses when worn. When invoked, it summons a tame copy of you, with copies of your armor and wielded weapon (which only works on a wielded weapon), drains 1 level from you, and reduces your maximum HP by half.

If you die while the summoned copy lives, you get lifesaved, the max HP penalty becomes permanent, the copy is unsummoned and you are relocated in its place (to produce an overall effect of it becoming the “real” you.)

If you take off the armor, the copy is unsummoned.

If the copy dies or gets unsummoned by any means, its gear vanishes along with it, and your missing max HP is restored (though your current HP does not get restored).

Artifact chaotic helm Helm of the Underworld, modeled after Hades’ helm. Grants drain resistance, invisibility, magic resistance, and passive detection of buried objects (or phasing, if this is too difficult to implement) when worn. When invoked, it does a stronger version of the chaotic turn undead effect (rebuke or tame undead).

Artifact cloak of invisibility Death’s Embrace, which grants phasing, immunity to death effects, and half physical damage, but reduces speed.

Artifact quarterstaff Staff of Battle. Deals double damage to everything and grants very fast speed when wielded.

Rings of regeneration should drain your Pw instead of your nutrition. When you’re at 0Pw, you stop regenerating.

New artifact The Golden Knight, a gold small shield that has the following properties:

• Sets strength to 25 when worn like gauntlets of power.
• Cannot be invoked directly, but if you fall below 25% of your HP maximum when your invoke timeout is good, it automatically invokes itself to take half of your current Pw points and heal you for that much HP.

If this doesn’t seem powerful enough, remove its strength effect and make the base item a shield of reflection instead.

New artifact Staff of Agni, a quarterstaff with the following fire-based properties:

• Can be zapped if its enchantment is positive for the same effect as casting a spell of fireball.
• Invoking it sets its enchantment to 3 + your skill in attack spells. (No effect if the enchantment is already higher than this.)
• Grants fire resistance when wielded.
• Deals double fire damage in melee like Fire Brand.
• Acts like a robe for reducing spellcasting failure, but only for the spell of fireball (and fire storm, if that is a separate spell).

An alternate ending where you are a cultist of a god that has no place in your role’s pantheon, and instead of offering the Amulet of Yendor to that god, you offer the cult’s holy symbol on a high altar to kick that god out of the pantheon and replace it with yours.

Controlled polymorph does not ask you what you want to turn into. Instead, it picks a random monster and asks you whether you want to turn into that, and you can only say yes or no.

New artifact Gauntlets of Throwing: unspecified base type, adds +1 to the multishot cap for thrown missiles only (not ammo fired from a launcher). When multishooting, only one actual item is thrown; the rest are temporary summoned copies of the one thrown with the same stats, which vanish after their flight is complete.

Jousting is treated as a bonus action which does not cost the player anything, and does not strictly require making a melee attack. In order to joust, you must be 1) riding while wielding a lance, and 2) move in the same direction twice in a row with an enemy lined up at the end of the 2nd move. When this happens, the enemy is attacked automatically.

You can attune pets to the Lyre of Orpheus (possibly only if you are a bard and it’s your own quest artifact). Attuned pets that die near the harp leave no corpse (so they can’t be resurrected twice via undead turning), but can be resurrected later by invoking it. This replaces its current invoke power.

For a more balanced implementation (so you can’t let multiple pets die over thousands of turns and then invoke it to get an instant army), it will only resurrect one pet, possibly allowing the player to pick which.

For a simpler implementation, only the last attuned pet to have died near the Lyre gets resurrected.

Replace the whole speed system with the one from Tales of Maj’Eyal, another roguelike. This has a strict concept of a “global speed”, i.e. a number of movement points you are given every global turn. Every possible action has an associated movement point cost, which allows for things like zapping a wand to take less time and be done more frequently than making a melee attack. This gets rid of the weird existing system where, in ToME terms, your most recent action defines how much global speed you get, particularly if riding is involved.

One way to start implementing this is to have all the action functions that currently return 0 for no time taken or 1 for time taken to instead return a bitmask of all types of actions taken: “moved”, “attacked”, “cast a spell”, etc. Then the main loop code that handles these return values deducts movement points corresponding to the slowest action in this bitmask.

Slope terrain, which is a terrain that appears like walls but does not block line-of-sight. It blocks movement unless levitating or flying, and cannot be dug down on or into. If you somehow get onto slope terrain (such as by stopping levitation while on it), you can move off it in any unblocked direction. This would allow interesting level designs like pyramids and switchbacks. Is still a bit problematic without implementing actual height values for the terrain, since for things like a large pyramid, you would be able to see straight over the top of the pyramid and down the back side.

Advanced spell forms are slightly problematic. Certain spells (fireball and cone of cold) which have advanced versions automatically kick in when the player is Skilled or above, and can’t be cast using the lesser form even if the player wants to.

• Some variants give you the choice of casting the basic or advanced form, but this suffers from an interface annoyance (an extra y/n prompt) and the fact that the advanced form counts as the same spell level so it is not actually any more difficult or expensive to cast.
• Advanced forms are castable even at Basic skill, but have a higher failure rate.
• The advanced form appears in the Z menu once you are Skilled.
• The advanced forms are implemented as higher-level never-generated spellbooks, e.g. “fire storm” and “frost storm”. Reading the basic spellbook automatically teaches you the advanced spell as well. This is dNetHack’s approach.
  • This allows you to balance them separately; in the case of fireball and cone of cold, the lesser spells could be dropped to level 3 or so and the advanced forms elevated to level 6.
• The advanced forms are broken out into completely separate spellbooks that must be discovered and learned separately.
  • This makes the balance of spellbooks a concern, since it would add more books of a certain school.
  • Both of the ideas that involve higher level spellbooks may create a problem with the Z menu only allowing 52 different spells if more advanced forms come along, not that that can’t be worked around.
• Skilled+ casting does nothing to the actual spell effects, but allows you to cast the spell mentally: you do not need to be able to speak or move to cast it.

The current resistance system is unsatisfying, because most resistances separate the effects of something into a binary outcome: worse effects with no resistance, totally ignorable effects with it. Most resistances also are get-once-and-be-protected-forever, which is uninteresting in the long term.

Proposed solutions to this generally assume that there will be some distinction between resistance and immunity, which offers better (or total) protection but is not normally obtainable as a permanent intrinsic effect. This also enables partial resistances (as found in SporkHack) to be used, though some ideas still treat them as binary - either you have it or you don’t.

• Extrinsic immunity isn’t as good as inherent immunity.
• Resistance halves HP damage and cuts attribute loss down to 1 point.
• Role benefits should probably only be resistance and not immunity.
• For partial resistance, damage is easy enough to do (express your resistance as a percentage and cut damage by that percentage), but many effects, particularly those protected by MR, are binary, and will be tricky to adapt.
• Resistances could start at 100% when you get them, but decrease by 1% every time it protects you from something.

An Alchemist role, revolving around potions and alchemy, and likely requiring overhauls of several systems.

• The main form of combat is to create phials of potion (where 1 potion splits into many phials), which can be tossed at enemies to cause potion effects on them. The main potions used are things like acid, paralysis, (lit) oil, and confusion.
  • Phials come in all the same types as normal potions but have somewhat weaker effects.
  • You can dip a stack of empty phials into a potion to fill them with that potion (up to some maximum).
  • Thrown phials have the same exact splash damage effect on things as throwing the potion would produce, but drinking it is a small enough dose to only cause the splash damage effects to the drinker. Requires some balance so that splash damage is useful against monsters but not useful for the player to drink for beneficial phials.
  • Phials can be dipped into potions, but nothing can be dipped into phials.
• The quest artifact is the Philosopher’s Stone.
  • The quest leader is Nicolas Flamel and the nemesis is an Avatar of Death (like Death, but weaker).
  • Fun possibilities for transmuting materials here if the object materials patch is in effect.
  • Its base item type could be a ruby (but perhaps not because dnethack makes the Heart of Ahriman a ruby) or a garnet, based on its color in Harry Potter, or an opal.
• Can also create alchemic gizmos: smoke bombs from potions of blindness, firebombs from potions of oil, all lighter and more numerous and useful than the base potions.
• Start with all potions identified.
• Could start with an alchemy kit, which is a rare tool find for other roles. NeroOneTrueKing proposed a set of mechanics for an alchemy kit:
  • Has 3 compartments. The first accepts only potions/phials of polymorph (or perhaps it just has charges and you can recharge it by using potions of polymorph).
  • The other compartments must each only contain items of the same material.
  • A success chance is displayed based on the amount of polymorph potion available, the weight ratio of the two compartments, and the materials themselves (metal can transform into metal relatively easily).
  • A successful use swaps all of the materials of the two compartments.
• Needs mechanics such that in an Alchemist’s hands, no potion is useless.

The invoke effect of the Philosopher’s Stone is heavily debated.

• It creates potions of the Elixir of Life. This potion cures disease and restores lost attributes, but most importantly it grants temporary intrinsic lifesaving. If you die with intrinsic lifesaving, you lose the remaining time for the intrinsic.
• Creating potions is way too powerful since the player will be able to bank them, so nerf this: perhaps you can only get Elixir of Life by dipping the Stone into a potion of full healing, or something. Or Elixir goes bad after a while and reverts to water, making it usable for before a fight but not for stashing.
• The Elixir should not be more powerful than a potion of full healing, or the invoke effect of the Staff of Aesculapius - healers should be the best at actual healing. Probably, getting lifesaved from intrinsic lifesaving will only restore enough HP to stay alive a little longer.
• The Elixir gives a large temporary boost to HP regeneration.
• No Elixir of Life; it instead turns potions of sickness into (extra? full?) healing.
• The Stone can turn metal objects into gold or can turn rocks into gold pieces when rubbed on them.
• When dipped into gain level or gain energy, transforms the potion into polymorph.

A really great Alchemist implementation would probably involve a full alchemy overhaul which adds herbs and fungi, harvesting ingredients from corpses, cooking, and interesting ways to combine everything. The challenge with making this is how to make it useful for other roles and not just the alchemist, and at the same time not overcomplicating the game with the new additions.

Differentiate spellcasting greatly for the different types of spellcasters:

• Intelligence casters have a spellbook limited by their level, where higher level spells take up more space.
  • Specifically, they can store up to (10 + XL) levels of spells.
  • Higher skill in a spell’s school provides a discount: 1 level for Basic, 2 for Skilled, and 3 for Expert.
  • So for instance, a level 5 character has 15 spell levels available. If they know force bolt and are Unskilled in attack spells, that takes up 1 level. If they know cancellation and are Skilled in matter spells, that takes up 5 levels (7 - 2 because they are Skilled).
  • When they learn a new spell that cannot fit into their existing spell list, they are prompted to forget known spells until they have enough space, or decline to learn the new spell (which still uses up a read charge on the book).
• Wisdom casters always have all the spells they have learned available so long as they haven’t forgotten them, but are strictly limited in whether they can cast a spell of a given level by their skill in its spell school.
  • If Restricted in a spell school they can only cast spells of up to level 1. If Unskilled, up to 2. Basic, 3; Skilled, 5; and Expert, 7.
• Charisma casters (which only exist in a couple variants) always have all spells available to cast, but can never cast spells twice in a row; there is always a cooldown of (5 - skill) * 2 * spell level. (Skill ranges from 0 at Restricted to 4 at Expert.)

You can use a crystal ball to search for an artifact. It will not tell you where it is, but it will show you a “cloudy” image of the artifact if it already exists, and an “empty” image if it does not yet exist. Maybe also tell the player explicitly “It means this artifact is/is not anywhere in the dungeon right now.”

The start-of-game “Shall I pick character’s race, role…” screen is replaced with one that presents a random race/role/alignment/gender combo and asks if you want to play it. Answering yes starts the game, no rolls a new one, and quit brings you to the manual selection screen.

Consolidate Fire and Frost Brand (or allow them to be combined in-game) into a new artifact named something like “Frostflame Brand”. This weapon deals either fire damage or cold damage alternately on every hit.

A boss that, when first angered, takes no moves for 10 turns, and is invulnerable, though any damage you decide to do to it is tracked. After the 10 turns expire, the boss is given a HP maximum and other stats directly proportional to how much damage you did while it was invulnerable. If you kill it, it gives rewards also proportional to this amount of damage.

Ring of clarity, which makes you immune to confusion when wearing it. If you happen to eat it, it will cure any temporary confusion you have.

Luckblade’s enchantment always equals your current Luck. (Enchanting it or engraving with it would then presumably do nothing since these do not affect Luck.)

Amulet of Storms, an artifact amulet of flying that additionally grants shock resistance when worn, and allows you to pacify true v monsters (i.e. not alternative forms of other monsters that happen to be turned into a vortex as a defined alternative form, such as vampires and the Wizard of Yendor, but counting shapechangers such as chameleons) when chatting to them.

When a monster dies and leaves a corpse, they may make some noise that wakes up other monsters. The odds and radius of the sound increase with the size of the monster.

Extrinsic properties are stored as an int rather than a bitfield, so that the game can count how many sources of an extrinsic you have at once, allowing interesting things such as letting regeneration items stack with each other.

Jousting happens automatically when moving directly at a monster while riding and wielding a jousting weapon. You don’t have to be next to it to initiate the attack (and indeed, jousting will not happen if you start your turn next to the monster).

Elementals on their respective home Planes life-save and teleport away from you when you kill them. (Or, alternatively, another one just spawns somewhere on the edge of the map not near you.)

Some falling rock traps (particularly deeper in the dungeon) contain one or more boulders instead of rocks.

“The Amulet of Vitality”, an amulet of drain resistance that provides poison resistance and hungerless regeneration when worn and also increases your HP maximum by 20%.

Note: this could be implemented in a game that doesn’t have the amulet of drain resistance by instead making its base item the amulet versus poison and giving it drain resistance when worn.

Randomly generated statues and figurines (and masks in variants that have them) should use a higher effective difficulty when choosing the associated monster species, because using low-level monsters is boring and typically useless to the hero.

This should probably also apply to statue traps, since they are not very threatening at the moment.

Fireable ammo (that which is only capable of being used by launchers) cannot be enchanted. It instead uses the enchantment of its launcher as the enchantment.

You can read the Staff of Aesculapius to read spells. (Not specified if this should be possible to fail like a spellbook could, with the same or different effects, or if it depends on whether or not the Staff dislikes you as a non-healer.)

A level 5 or 6 “mass healing” spell, which basically casts extra healing on yourself and all tame creatures within a certain radius.

Healers, who can see monster injury status, should see the injured status of a monster when it is healed from any source. E.g. instead of “The foo looks better” print “The bruised foo looks better.”

Every 5000 turns, the monster generation difficulty increases by 1. Effectively changing the formula to be (your XL + dungeon level) / 2 + (turns / 5000).

An artifact mask Mask of Many Faces, neutrally aligned. When invoked, you are prompted to target an adjacent creature. If that creature fails a monster magic resistance check, or a d(its maxHP) roll is lower than its current HP, it is instantly killed, dropping its possessions but no corpse or other special drops, and the mask changes to that creature’s form.

Subsequently donning the mask, or having it worn when invoking it, merges it into your skin and polymorphs you into that monster’s form, starting a timer (not the usual polymorph timer) after which the mask will turn blank and the polymorph ends. Lower level monsters than the player will produce a longer timer, and higher level monsters and uniques will produce a shorter timer. You can also invoke it again while wearing it to end the polymorph early.

New artifact The Stage Magician’s Gloves: some form of gloves, possibly special-cased to appear white. They allow you to use wands like a stethoscope, with one free zap per turn, and also confer magic resistance when worn. When invoked, if you are wearing a non-cursed hat or helm, you pull a random item or small or tiny monster out of your hat. If not wearing a hat you get YAFM.

Combine force bolts and digging beams. Specifically:

• Remove the wand of striking and the spell of force bolt.
• Roles that start with force bolt instead start with magic missile and at least 10 maximum Pw.
• All current environment interactions of force bolts (breaking boulders and statues, crashing open doors, etc) are moved to digging beams.
• Make digging beams affect monsters, with a guaranteed hit and fixed 6d12 damage from the spell (since it would be level 5), less damage from a digging wand.

All gods simultaneously exist in the game. Normally this has little effect, but bones files can contain an altar to a god that is not part of your normal pantheon, allowing you to convert to them (and in the process basically ejecting the role’s god of their same alignment and taking their place in the role’s pantheon).

5% of killing hits with Fire Brand, on a monster that can leave a corpse, never do leave a corpse. This is accompanied by the message “The [monster] freezes solid and shatters!” or “The [monster] burns to ash!”

Note that this idea is NOT for the Brands to instakill monsters 5% of the time. It just blocks a corpse drop 5% of the time.

Add a monster spell, only cast at range 2 or 3 away from the player (not adjacent). A successful cast means the monster makes a single melee weapon attack against you. (Probably any passive attacks by the player should not happen.)

Artifact The Poisoner’s Chalice, a chalice that can be dipped into types of potions that form poisonous coatings on weapons. When this happens, it gains charges and additionally gains the ability to coat weapons in that type of poison indefinitely. When a weapon is dipped into the chalice, it expends a charge and coats the weapon in the current type of poison. Invoking it switches the poison type to any of the ones it already has.

Thrown boulders behave like boulder traps: they keep moving even after they hit something rather than stopping and falling to the floor at that location. Possibly this is flavored as the boulder hitting the ground on the first target and continuing to roll in the same direction.

The player (and probably all creatures Large size or smaller) gets knocked back 1 tile when hit by a boulder (thrown or rolling).

New artifact The Scorpion Carapace, a suit of scale mail (made of chitin in any variant that has that material) that grants a 1d4 poison sting to the wearer’s attack chain and confers poison resistance when worn. Enchantable to +7 safely.

You can’t levelport down past a demon lord lair if the demon lord is alive and well on that level. (If it hasn’t been generated yet, it’s assumed that they are.)

With polymorph control, you can only polymorph into creatures that you have seen before in the game. You can still opt to not choose something to turn into, which could still give you a random form.

In wizard mode, the #polyself command (and only that) enables you to polymorph into a non-allowed form, with a confirmation prompt and/or warning message.

The travel command should select a magic portal, if one exists, before any other trap when the user is at the prompt to pick a destination and presses ^.

A polymorphed monster will turn into a monster of similar difficulty to its current form, rather than a monster of difficulty appropriate to the current dungeon level.

Cursed two-handed weapons only weld to one hand at a time, allowing you to do things with the other hand. The only way to have no free hands at all is to wear a cursed shield and wield a cursed weapon.

A force bolt beam stops at the first monster or boulder it hits. Breakable items in the path of the beam do not impede it, though.

The bearer of the Master Key of Thievery cannot be seen with infravision while they carry it. (This is more useful in variants where monsters use infravision to spot the player).

A magical type of mummy wrapping (or maybe an artifact mummy wrapping) that provides curse resistance when worn.

Your discoveries list is presented as a menu rather than a fixed list of every single thing you have discovered. The menu contains the subcategories that the current long list is organized into (weapons, scrolls, gems etc), which will let you view that subset of your discoveries. There’s also an option provided to view all the discoveries at once if you want to view that. Possibly this feature should be controlled by an option.

Implement a player fear system that unlike many other proposals, does not take away agency from the player by paralyzing them or forcing them to flee using a predefined algorithm. Instead, it incentivizes the player to flee by making continued combat unattractive.

Create a new intrinsic called “Panic”/”Panicking”. Sources of fear (including existing sources of paralysis-fear, e.g. ghosts) give you temporary amounts of this intrinsic. While you are panicking:

• You have a large to-hit penalty, possibly making it so that you can only land a hit when rolling a natural 20. (Directly subtracting a large number from to-hit could still be overcome by wearing rings of increase accuracy and would be hard to balance the exact number.)
• You deal half damage for any attack you can make land.
• Ranged attacks have a high chance of misfiring in the wrong direction.
• Spells not in the escape school or designated as emergency spells (or healing spells, for variants that remove emergency spells) have a higher failure rate or are uncastable.
• Your skills may be treated as if they are the levels you started the game with.
• Your speed is slightly boosted (if possible, only your movement speed, not your general attack/item use speed).
• If you die, your death reason will have a “while panicking” appended to it.

The game should support poisoned bear traps (that deal extra poison damage much like a poisoned spiked pit does), and it should be possible for the player to manually poison a beartrap item.

Temporary pit trap: it fills itself in after a certain number of turns. A monster in it will be buried. It could either use a timer to decide when to fill itself in, or be tied to the monster id of its creator, triggering after a certain amount of time if the creator is still on the level. Also a good candidate for creating during an earthquake, rather than a permanent pit.

You can offer gold on a coaligned altar as well as giving it to a priest. This gives you a different, weaker, variety of benefits if there is no priest present (and the same ones if there is a priest present). When you do donate to a priest, they offer the gold themselves in a burst of light (which deletes the gold, preventing you from killing them or stealing to recoup it).

Change the Mitre of Holiness’s invoke effect to immediately make another artifact invokeable, zeroing its cooldown timer. This effect also happens passively if it is being worn: if you try to invoke another artifact which hasn’t cooled down all the way yet but the Mitre has, it will automatically invoke itself to zero the cooldown timer of the artifact being invoked so that the invoke will succeed. It gives a message when this happens.

The cost for buying protection is based on your maximum level reached, not your current level, to prevent draining for gain.

Pressure plate traps that cause all the doors of the current room to close and lock (doorways without doors could turn into iron bars or, on deep enough levels, all doors could turn into iron bars). Triggering this automatically removes the trap. Generated very rarely, and has special generation that occasionally makes it appear just inside a door to a throne room.

At the start of the game, three artifacts are selected as potential divine gifts, and you will never get any other artifact than these three by regular sacrificing. These three artifacts must not hate the player’s race and ideally will provide a good balance in terms of power and utility. Gods can also grant non-artifacts as gifts, which no longer count against your odds of receiving an artifact. Also, the chance of getting an artifact is biased against low-level characters who have not made many sacrifices and towards high-level characters who have.

Internally mark all of your starting gear with a special flag; if you die before receiving the quest, any items marked with this flag get degraded when placed into your bones pile: things like magical armor becoming nonmagical, wands lose charges, scrolls may fade, and spellbooks are made too faint to read more than once.

The Staff of Necromancy: an artifact quarterstaff that deals double damage to non-drain-resistant creatures (but doesn’t life-drain them as the Staff of Aesculapius does), grants cold resistance and curse resistance when wielded, and can be invoked to raise one vertebrate corpse on your square as a tame skeleton.

While you are on the ascension run, mimics prefer to disguise themselves as upstairs. It also edits your memories to make you think you remember the stair being where the mimic was (in order to fool the travel command routing to the correct upstairs anyway).

Add some mechanic that allows you to pay for training to unrestrict a skill and bring it to Basic. Players of any role are also able to get riding training.

Lightning spells:

• The most common suggestion is for a level 5 attack spell that creates a lightning bolt, implemented as a simple ray. Possibly, it causes an electrical explosion on the first target it hits if cast at Skilled and Expert.
• Alternatively, a spell of lightning bolt could be a melee range spell that deals heavy shock damage.
• Chain lightning is a spell that forks off and hits adjacent targets in a breadth-first search (see here for how it might work). Possibly, the lightning bolts can only chain off at 135 or 180 degree angles (maybe 90, too). Chain lightning can still be reflected, but becomes a straight ray.
• Lightning storm, which causes an electrical explosion centered on every monster in your line of sight (possibly with a decreasing chance of doing so as it gets further from you). Or if this is too overpowered, just strike these monsters with an individual lightning bolt that does not cause an explosion.

Bringing back different types of keys for different sorts of locks. This is not the old random key shapes and random lock shapes system; the discussion concluded that special keys should be used for a few specific purposes: game progression, a one time use reward, or some non-unique type of door where each key is one-time use or limited use. In particular, this third one could be used in Gehennom to block off areas, with “soul keys” or something similar that open special doors there and are generated with demons. Gehennom doors could also involve a blood ritual requiring some sort of expenditure of resources or damage to the player.

Various ideas to give the bonus from certain sources of speed only as a bonus to movement, not to getting more turns to attack, use items, etc.

• First, to classify: most agree that speed boots, intrinsic speed, and steed speed should be sources that only give extra movement opportunities, while polyform speed should give extra full turns. Less agreement on magical sources of very fast speed (the potion and haste self), but general opinion seems to be that these should also not be limited to movement.
• Add a second pool of movement points that coexists with regular movement points, but can be used ONLY for moving. Speed boots and its fellow sources add to this pool, and any unused points in it are discarded at the end of the player’s turn. When you make a movement, points are deducted from this pool before being deducted from the “core” pool. Note that this approach can cause core points to accumulate to the point where the player can eventually get multiple non-movement actions on their turn.
• Reduce the movement point cost if you are taking a movement action and have sources of movement-only speed. (This might interact oddly if general-purpose sources of speed continue to add movement points as usual.)

Instakill effects deal a large amount of HP damage rather than instakilling, and give an appropriate message when something survives them.

You can apply a towel to remove grease from items if your face and hands are already clean when you apply it.

Artifact Shade Cloak: cloth cloak that is always tattered (has 1 level of unfixable erosion), confers (not-very-fast) speed and drain resistance. Invoke effect is temporary phasing and the incorporeality of a shade.

Reduce the level of create familiar significantly, and make it only able to create replacement pets and possibly similar low-difficulty monsters, and not work if you already have any pets. Add a 7th-level clerical spell, “create minion”, that summons tame/allied minions of your god.

Glass doors that you can see through and kick to break with ease.

Assuming a scroll of consecration exists: confused scroll of consecration consecrates your weapon, which blesses and fooproofs it and maxes/increases its enchantment with no possibility of evaporating. Possibly, turn it into an artifact as well.

Lesser and greater scrolls of enchant weapon. The lesser enchant by 1 point up to a maximum of +2 (uncursed) or +3 (blessed); the greater enchant by 1-3 points to a maximum of +5 (uncursed) or +7 (blessed).

Float stone, a gray stone which has negative weight. Non-stacking, and rare. If you get enough float stones to more than cancel out your own weight and the weight of any possessions you’re carrying, you levitate. Possibly doesn’t work when put into containers, or at least doesn’t get multiplied by the effect of a cursed bag of holding. May gain positive weight when cursed, or greater negative weight when blessed (or vice versa).

Shimmering dragon scale mail grants see invisible.

Intrinsic see invisible now works only at a range of 2-3 squares. Extrinsic see invisible works at the current see invisible range (unlimited as long as you can see the space normally).

Gnomish characters read spellbooks faster than other races.

Frost Brand is made of platinum and deals triple damage to monsters that are fire resistant but NOT cold resistant. Fire Brand is made of gold and deals triple damage to monsters that are cold resistant but NOT fire resistant.

Tame monsters continue to hold grudges against each other, unless the master’s Charisma is high enough.

Unicorn horns no longer cure afflictions completely; they will only reduce the duration of one.

Change the sickness instadeath to a HP-based form of damage, since it is very obscure about how long you have left to live and can be drastically reduced.

• Instead of a death timer, apply a penalty to HP regeneration rate, with this penalty being variable and slowly decreasing as you recover from the sickness. This is nice because it allows for monsters to have a sickness attack in the early game.
• This penalty can be large enough to make your regeneration rate negative.
• Getting hit by a sickness attack while already Ill not only increases the severity/duration of your illness, it deals some extra damage proportional to the severity of the sickness.
• Severe enough sickness only partially times out - you will need to take some actual self-healing action like quaffing healing potions, praying, casting cure sickness, applying a unicorn horn, etc. to be completely cured.
• Unicorn horns no longer cure the entire illness all at once - they will only reduce the severity (which might cure the illness all at once if it’s mild).
• Being sick for a long time may cause vomiting, Con loss, Str loss, and occasionally hallucinations.
• Sickness will eventually go away on its own if it’s not bad. Maybe look to FIQHack zombification disease for specific mechanics for how this could work.

Gods’ “Prove thyself worthy or perish” message is flavored as “Prove thyself worthy, because I can do no more for you”. On the Planes, the gods’ balance of power prevents your deity from granting you any extra help (apart from sending angels when you arrive in Astral). If this were not the case, one would expect to be able to breeze through the Planes, with your god smiting down any enemy that might threaten you getting them their Amulet. Prayer will not work, though it will still break atheist conduct.

Give the player a slightly different warning if they attempt to go up on the DL1 upstairs after handling the Amulet, if they do not have the real one.

Erosion has more than four states, though it still only displays as “eroded”, “very eroded”, or “thoroughly eroded”; different rusting sources can cause different levels of rust (e.g. dipping a long sword in a fountain or getting hit by a rust trap would probably only cause a small amount of rust, whereas a rust monster might cause a lot.) This would enable a more fair way to have things “erode away completely” like they do in Grunthack, since you would be able to disengage any thoroughly eroded piece of gear before it was at serious risk of vanishing.

Attempts to analyze good instadeaths versus bad instadeaths (loosely defined as ones that are instant hard-to-avoid deaths that aren’t really similar to running out of HP):

• Poison, digestion, lava, death magic, and drawbridge instadeaths can easily be converted into HP damage of max(damage dice roll, substantial % of your max HP).
• Drowning and choking would be well-suited to a breath system, where it becomes a delayed instadeath. Especially so if you can stop the clock by putting on an amulet of magical breathing or praying.
• Intelligence drain and level drain generally can’t happen without the player being given ample time to escape, so they are fine.
• Starvation could be changed to HP loss, but you usually just die from side effects of fainting anyway.
• Instadeaths that almost always have to be intentionally caused by the player (self-genocide, divine wrath etc) are generally fine as-is.
• Instakilling artifacts are problematic, because there is currently no recourse except for the amulet of life saving.
• Eating or digesting the Riders should not instakill without warning, because it is now unexpectedly a bad idea to eat a reviving corpse, whereas it had been a good idea in the rest of the game.
• Good instadeaths generally use unusual resources to fix, or hit the player’s reserves in an unexpected way, and allow the player a chance to get out or stop it before dying.

Liches drop or are generated with fairly good magical items, like potions, scrolls, spellbooks and even wands, to incentivize not genociding them.

New artifact Aegis: is a bronze roundshield (which is supposed to have Medusa’s or another gorgon’s face impressed on the front). Can be invoked sideways at a monster, which petrifies it or, failing that, causes it to flee (regardless of difficulty or monster MR). Can be invoked downwards to burn a Gorgoneion in the floor. Possibly grants stoning resistance or gaze resistance while equipped.

Split curse resistance off from magic resistance. Curse resistance is granted only as an extrinsic by a couple of artifacts, including Magicbane, and ‘‘maybe’’ some mundane item that isn’t any good otherwise (a mummy wrapping?), and behaves like Magicbane’s curse resistance does currently (“You feel a black aura surround the [item].”) Half spell damage without curse resistance no longer helps limit the number of cursed items, and a curse may still manage to bypass resistance, with current probabilities. There could also be an amulet versus curses.

Add a silvery potion, either as a random appearance or a dedicated potion like dNetHack’s potion of silver starlight, which will silver ammunition dipped into it, perhaps temporarily. It might also silver other weapons (spears, daggers) or other items. Random appearances have the possible problems of the potion potentially having a defined dip effect already (polymorph, for example), and it potentially not appearing in the game if there are extra random appearances. Dipping fragile silver items, like silver arrows, into a potion of acid could create a silvery potion.

The effectiveness of the protection spell depends on how your off-hand is being used (open is better than carrying a shield, which is better than using it to wield a weapon). If your off-hand is free, the spell gives you a “spectral shield”.

A side effect of a ring of three wishes: while wearing it, if you die, a wish gets used up and you get lifesaved.

Asmodeus and Baalzebub demand gold proportional to their difficulty or monster level, not the player’s wallet. Possibly, if the player does not pay, they remain on the downstairs and will not move until the player has paid, which allows the player to return with the requisite amount of gold (and may charge interest for the time you spent keeping them waiting). However, they will get angry if you get below their lair in any way (possibly measured by testing your lowest level reached each time you enter the lair).

See invisible operates on a scale that determines what level of invisible monsters the player is allowed to see. (A low-level monster that drinks a potion of invisibility should be visible even with weak see invisible, an arch-lich casting disappear should require very strong see invisible.) Invisibility should do this too and have a scale as well (one notable place on the scale being that invisibility is kept only until the invisible thing takes an offensive action). If rings of invisibility and see invisible are made chargeable, this is an obvious avenue for them.

Blank spellbooks in flooded libraries generate with the “number of times read” counter full, so they can’t be polypiled into readable books.

Monks, or anyone skilled in martial arts, can kick weapons out of an enemy’s hand.