Add two new elemental planes, those of Positive Energy and Negative Energy.

The Plane of Positive Energy:

• The full level is lit.
• Has lots of yellow lights, trees, and whatever plant-based monsters exist in the game.
• Everything is treated as if it has regeneration. The player can regenerate current HP past its maximum, but if this gets too far past the maximum, they instantly die from being unable to contain the energy (there are warning messages to this effect as you approach this point).
• Items in the player’s and monsters’ inventories can randomly get blessed, enchanted, or charged - even if this runs the risk of overenchanting and destroying them.
• Eating any food restores HP as well as nutrition.
• All exercisable attributes are exercised at regular intervals.
• All sleep effects are negated.

The Plane of Negative Energy:

• The full level is dark.
• Contains lots of undead.
• Everything constantly loses hit points. If you have regeneration, it either nullifies or only partly nullifies this effect.
• Items in the player’s and monsters’ inventories can randomly get cursed or lose enchantment or charges (going negative on things which are capable of being negative).
• You lose several times as much nutrition per turn as normal.
• All abusable attributes are abused at regular intervals.

Rogues wearing the randomized “fencing gloves” should be able to sell items to shopkeepers which they have stolen from somewhere else at full price, as a pun on “fencing” stolen goods.

Telepathy currently sees things with minds. Change it (or perhaps change only the amulet of ESP, leaving other telepathy the same) so that it sees things with souls instead of minds. Mostly this corresponds with the same monsters (with a few exceptions such as mummies which are animated by the soul of the dead person), but if a monster with a soul is polymorphed into a form that normally doesn’t, it retains its original soul, and shows up as its original form to ESP.

Additionally, ESP shows the spirit of a humanoid with a soul just after you kill it if you’re blind, making some angry or resigned gestures before fading away.

Ravens are always generated peaceful for Valkyries (or maybe only neutral Valkyries, since they follow Odin).

Rogues automatically see rings as “low value”, “moderate value”, or “high value”, roughly (but not exactly) corresponding to their base price.

Knights get an additional Wisdom-based saving throw against foocubi removing their clothing, flavored as keeping their virtue.

Archeologists automatically see a semi-randomized description of the quality of any mummy wrapping that comes into their inventory (“excellent specimen”, “wretchedly poor”, “slightly damaged”, etc). This gives them a clue as to its enchantment and beatitude.

Monsters carrying a potion of acid as well as some other potion that they would normally drink may accidentally drink the acid by mistake.

Various effects for armor pieces based on their randomized description:

• Buckled boots and old gloves: cost (and sell for) twice as much in a shop.
• Hiking boots: prompt before walking into known pits or holes.
• Mud boots: autocurse when worn.
• Padded gloves and visored helmet: +1 to AC.
• Tattered cape: -1 to Charisma.
• Ornamental cope: +1 to Charisma.
• Opera cloak: some sort of bonus when using musical instruments.
• Plumed helmet: +1 to Charisma, -1 to Dexterity (or have these adjustments multiplied by its enchantment).

Additional YAFMs that may replace the “You hear your heart beat” message for applying a cursed stethoscope at yourself:

• If hallucinating, “You hear a soothsayer with the weather forecast.” This is followed by either “Gehennom will get a rain of burning pitch later today.” or “The dungeon will be cool, with a stony gray overcast.”
• Otherwise, if undead, “You hear the ocean’s roar.”
• Otherwise, if a Wizard, “You hear yourself mumbling curses.”
• Otherwise, the usual heartbeat message.

Hallucinatory alternative to the typical you’re-about-to-die messages: “You hear the fat lady warming up.”

2% of the time after getting the “Blecch! Rotten food!” message as a Tourist, you get one of the following YAFMs:

• “This is not as the travel agency described it!”
• “The native cuisine is not entirely to your liking.”
• “Definitely authentic native cuisine.”
• “Ugh! The local food explains the dispositions of the locals.”
• “This must be that ‘hate cuisine’ you read about.”
• “Where’s the garlic and steaks you heard about?”

Gloves of skill (or “gauntlets of weapon mastery”): magical gloves which raise your effective skill level in your wielded weapon by 1.

• If you’re Restricted in your weapon, this only treats you as Unskilled, not Basic.
• If you’re Expert in your weapon, they do nothing.
• If the gloves are cursed, they instead reduce skill level by 1, and if they become cursed while wearing them and wielding a weapon, you get a message about how you find it more awkward to wield your weapon.
• Also, you get a message about holding your weapon more confidently when you put them on and your effective skill is raised. This automatically identifies them as well.

Attacking Famine with food should produce some slight effect, like minimal damage, the food disintegrating, or possibly no more than a YAFM about Famine looking offended.

Eating healthy foods (fruits, vegetables, royal jelly?) should exercise Constitution, and eating unhealthy foods (candy bar, cream pie, etc) should abuse it.

Celery, a comestible which uniquely has negative nutrition (because in real life, it takes a human body more calories to digest the celery than are in the celery.) The main use of this negative nutrition is to unsatiate yourself so you can continue eating other food.

It should be a large amount of negative nutrition in order to be worthwhile, but at the same time shouldn’t be instadeath for unsuspecting new players by immediately starving them. To that end, special case it so that it does not harm you if you are Hungry or worse, is worth -30 nutrition if “not hungry”, and is worth more negative nutrition if Satiated, possibly scaling up the more satiated you are.

Depending on implemenetation, it could either be safe or unsafe to eat when oversatiated - realism dictates it should be unsafe to eat, but gameplay dictates it would be useful in fewer situations unless it is always safe to eat. Or have it count as a small positive nutritional value assessed before maybe choking, followed by a large negative nutritional value assessed after you didn’t choke.

Knights still incur alignment penalties for eating celery while satiated.

The celery also crunches loudly whenever eating it, so it wakes up nearby sleeping monsters.

Bribeable humans may refuse an initial sum of money you throw at them, with 50% chance. Usually they say “It would take [some number of] zorkmids for me to abandon my duty!” which you can then provide if you wish.

You can dip oil into booze or vice versa to create a new type of potion (“potion of firebomb” or “potion of molotov cocktail”) that is never randomly generated, which is primarily intended to be lit and thrown like oil, but results in a much more powerful fireball than oil alone would produce.

Effects when drinking this potion are unspecified. Since oil has minimal effect when you drink it, it likely just works like booze or diluted booze.

Enhance Minetown with a bunch of new NPC denizens:

• Dwarven trainer: found in a largish room.
  • Chatting to him makes him ask if you want to train, for a fee. If you say yes and pay it, he shouts “Defend yourself!” and begins to fight with you. This lasts until you chat with him again. While you are in this training fight, neither of you deal damage to the other one, though you can still deal damage normally to other things.
  • If you don’t want to train, he offers to teach you how to disarm for a large sum of money. Disarming is a technique you can use with the #disarm command after you have learned it from him. Possibly, it unlocks a “disarming” skill that you can’t get elsewhere. When you use the disarm command, you are prompted for a direction to pick an adjacent monster. The monster must be wielding a weapon, and you must have some minimum amount of skill in your weapon (which can be martial arts). The chance of success is 20% base, +1% per point of Luck (or -1% per negative Luck), +5% for every skill level above Unskilled you are in either your weapon skill, or the disarm skill, +2% per level you have over the monster, and -2% per level the monster has over you.
• Elven enchantress: Mutually exclusive with the trainer. Chatting with her prompts you for an item to enchant.
  • Items that are not naturally enchantable with enchant scrolls get refused.
  • Artifacts or items at their maximum enchantment get refused; she gives a line about how it is already surrounded by powerful magic and she dares not attempt it.
  • If the item is damaged, it gets repaired, for a modest amount of money per level of damage.
  • If the item is undamaged but not blessed, it gets blessed, charging a slightly higher amount of money.
  • If the item is blessed and undamaged, its enchantment is increased by 1, charging a larger amount of money that scales in direct proportion to the preexisting enchantment on that item.
  • She possibly fooproofs the item if it’s at maximum enchantment.
• Dwarven innkeeper: also found in a large room.
  • Chatting to him has him offer you an ale, for either 5 zorkmids or the appropriate buy cost of a potion of booze, and accepting produces the effects of an uncursed potion of booze, as well as identifying the potion of booze. 50% of the time, he also gives you a random rumor as if from an uncursed fortune cookie. (Criticism of this is that on-demand confusion makes several early-game challenges involving confused effects of scrolls trivial.)
  • He will also offer you a room to stay the night if the Watch is not angry at you, for either $50 or the cost of a potion of full healing. Accepting fully heals you (or produces the effects of an uncursed potion of full healing, without identifying the potion since one wasn’t involved). Not specified how it should deal with the time you are sleeping, whether that means literally putting you to sleep or something else.
• Old gladiator: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn; chatting to him produces some old battle stories and a request for an ale (same price as if you were buying it yourself). The first time you buy him an ale, he will teach you a random weapon skill. Subsequent times he only thanks you drunkenly for the drink.
• Aged traveler: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn, mutually exclusive with the gladiator; chatting to him has him offer to tell you the depth of the Oracle level for 50 zorkmids, or offer to “teach you some things he’s learned in his travels” for 1000 zorkmids, which acts like a blessed potion of gain level, but is not available after you get it once. Alternatively, he could teach you several random item identities.
• Dirty drunk: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn, mutually exclusive with the gladiator and traveler.
• Bar brawler: found in the inn, interacting with him in any way will make him angry and start a fight. You’re allowed to fight but not kill him (which would anger the Watch), and you can pacify him by putting him to sleep, paying him off, beating him close enough to death to make him give up, or whatever. If the fight breaks out in the inn you owe the innkeeper money for broken furniture.
• Criminal or mugger: chatting to them makes them aware of you and they will try to steal from you later.
• Merchant: Wanders around Minetown, slightly weaker than a shopkeeper. Will sell you food rations at the standard price. Criticism of this is that an unlimited source of food rations is unbalancing and makes a delicatessen obsolete. To add balance, he might have a limited quantity of them to sell, but then he is still kind of pointless.
• Beggar: Has one randomly generated item, which he will sell at either its standard price or a discount. Most of the time this won’t be useful, but occasionally it could be something good.
• Bureaucrat: sits alone in a small room. Chatting with him makes him sneer at you, “I’m busy”. However, if the Watch is angry, he will offer to take a large amount of gold from you to pacify them.

A secondary proposal is to make some of the denizens who teach you things actually useless a random amount of the time. For instance, the gladiator is a liar who’s good at spinning stories and not much else, or the aged traveler is a charlatan who gives misinformation, abusing Wisdom or sapping your experience points.

Two new objects, spiked gauntlets and spiked boots. Both are nonmagical and made of iron. Spiked gauntlets give a large damage bonus to unarmed combat and also give more AC than standard gloves. Spiked boots give a large damage bonus to kick attacks, and allow you to walk on ice without slipping, the same as snow boots do.

The “Construction Patch”:

• When digging out stone (not necessarily walls) with a pick, rocks may fall on your head with a lowish chance, about 10% per dug square. These deal the least damage if you are wearing a dwarven helm, and a little less than normal if you are wearing some other hard helm. Dwarvish characters have a high chance of dodging the falling debris entirely. Possibly also allow a boulder falling on your head from digging similar to when monsters tunnel.
• You can apply rocks at an adjacent floor square to build a wall. It takes 50 rocks, or 25 if there is a boulder in that square. (If the space is marked as being wall-nondiggable, this either doesn’t work, or flips the space to being diggable.) It takes 1 turn per rock to build it. In the process it creates an immovable object or dungeon feature called “partially-built wall” on that space, which tracks how many rocks are part of it. If you move onto the space, you can dismantle the wall and retrieve the rocks.
• You can apply rocks at an adjacent pool or moat to attempt to fill it. The more rocks, the higher the chance of filling it. This takes only 1 turn.
• Stone to fleshing diggable wall turns it into huge chunks of meat.
• Force bolts from striking wands or the spell scatter rocks off diggable walls they hit, and in roughly 5 shots the wall is destroyed.
• Digging a pit or hole puts a pile of rocks on a random adjacent square.
• When you dig a hole and fall down to the next level, you are usually accompanied by a shower of rocks falling on and around you. Dwarves are more adept at dodging and getting hit by fewer rocks.
• When using a pick to dig a square of natural stone where the four orthogonally adjacent squares are all dug out already, you are asked if you want to carve out a boulder. If you say yes, a boulder is deposited on the new space.

Note that the two boulder-creation methods above run the risk of being exploited for abusable quantities of food if you have stone to flesh available, and the stone-to-flesh-walls method explicitly invokes this.

Leprechauns should sometimes wake up when someone is moving near them carrying a large sum of gold. Their awareness doesn’t extend to the precise location of the creature, it’s just enough to shake them awake.

The chance of this happening and/or the distance at which this happens should be dependent on the amount of gold carried.

Slipping on ice should carry a chance of uncontrollably stumbling onto an adjacent square, introducing the possibility that you slip and fall into water, or onto a trap, or something.

Weapons have a very small chance per hit of breaking, to make it a memorable event when it happens.

• Blessed, positive enchantment, or an artifact: never breaks.
• Uncursed and +0: 1/32000 or 1/32768 chance of breaking.
• Cursed or negative enchantment: 1/1000 chance of breaking.
• Chance is multiplied by 20 if the weapon is thrown and did not hit a monster.

There is a chance when setting a bear trap or arming a land mine that you mess up and trigger it on yourself. This is done by checking to see if you would fail had you been untrapping it. If you would fail, then there is a 1/5 chance you trigger the trap on yourself.

Blows that do 10 or more points of damage have a 1/1000 chance of knocking a worn helm off the target’s head (presumably onto the floor beneath them, but it could also be sent flying as well.)

Wizards can talk to the apprentices in their Quest home level to pay them for learning (possibly only low-level) spells. These are provisionally priced at 50 times the spell level times the player’s level, and is intended to serve as a dilemma for whether to buy spells or protection. (However, a single point of protection would cost the same as 8 total levels of spells, so the cost may need to be raised.)

Levitation and flying allow you to untrap falling rock traps.

If you throw food at a hostile animal, it may stop to eat the food even if it’s not possible to pacify or tame with that type of food or that species, allowing you to escape.

Eating a mimic corpse typically makes you mimic some object besides a pile of gold, giving you an opportunity to identify it if you don’t already know it. You get the message “You can’t resist the temptation to mimic a [object]” with that object’s randomized description being appended if it was previously unknown.

The odds of getting an object you haven’t discovered are controlled by your Luck.

• If Luck is 0, you mimic the first random object type the game picks.
• If Luck is positive, the game rerolls up to Luck times to try and find an unidentified object type.
• If Luck is negative, the game rerolls up to Luck times to try and find an identified object type.

Remove the ability of unicorn horns to cure hallucination, as otherwise it’s a trivial status effect to fix once you have one.

When digging a pit, there is a (10 - (Luck/2))% chance that you break through to the floor below, creating a hole instead and falling through.

New object type “boots of burden”, magical boots which increase your carrying capacity by 50% when worn.

A realistic implementation would mean the boots cease to work when you begin levitating or flying even if you are still wearing them, but this may be too tricky to implement given that the carry cap change may need to prevent the hero from leaving the ground in some circumstances, and the game needs to concisely tell them why.

Attempt to fix the broken alignment system by tracking positive and negative alignment incurred separately. Then, make all alignment checks based on the ratio of one to the other, rather than the difference. (So for instance if you pray, your god will check to see if you have e.g. 50 times as many positive points as negative, and if you don’t, they will not answer your prayer.)

Remove the ability to accidentally enter y or n on a confirmation prompt when trying to use those keys to move; instead, have all y/n confirmation prompts require you to input capital Y or N.

In an effort to reduce the number of low-importance y/n confirmation prompts in the game, make applying a lock pick or key scan the hero’s inventory, the floor underneath them, and 8 surrounding spaces for doors or containers that the tool can be used on. If there is only one such thing, automatically use the tool on that thing without prompting. If there are multiple, either prompt for each one in sequence or offer a menu of things to use the tool on.

This has a problem in that heroes may end up accidentally locking doors they want to go through. The problem may not be that important, since they can just unlock it again. Another suggestion is to make the map symbol for a locked door different from an unlocked one.

On the level below the Quest portal, there is another magic portal to part or a whole of another role’s Quest. Possibly this leaves off the home and goal levels, consisting of only the filler and locate levels, or only the locate level as a single-level branch, or else it removes the nemesis and artifact, removes the restriction on going past the home level, and gives the quest leader some insulting lines to offer to this competitor for the Amulet.

In order to add variability between different games, at the start of every game, “theme” objects and monsters are selected, which are outsizedly likely to generate. For instance, one potion type becomes the “theme potion” of the game, and then 10% of all randomly generated potions are that potion, and a wand type becomes the “theme wand” and 10% of random wands will be that wand.

Three theme monsters are picked, one low level, one medium level, and one high level. The probability for them generating when a random monster generates should probably be lower than 10%.

In 10% of games, gremlins are capable of stealing intrinsics regardless of whether it’s night. This prevents you from classifying them as chaff that is unworthy of your attention.

Alternatively, do this for 10% of gremlins in any game, not 10% of games.

Vary the damage bonuses of the artifacts from game to game, in order to prevent there from being clearly defined top-tier artifacts that players should always try to obtain, and bottom-tier artifacts that players should ignore.

For instance, this means that in a given game, Mjollnir might deal only 1d6 bonus lightning damage, while Snickersnee deals 1d12. Or Mjollnir could deal 1d18 and Cleaver deals 1d7. The only way to get an idea would be to use a stethoscope to identify how much damage is being done.

This does not address artifacts whose bonuses only apply to a narrow set of monsters and are often considered inferior for that reason.

Stone shield, a magical shield made of stone that provides stoning resistance, but is quite heavy.

Wielding Mjollnir (or potentially any artifact) after it was gifted by your god requires the god to spend constant divine attention on powering it. In game terms, this means that your prayer timeout will never drop below some minimum of a few hundred turns, because the god will not take kindly to requests for more assistance after they are already constantly giving you it.

Fire Brand gives you extreme vulnerability to cold damage, making you take quadruple damage from it. If you have cold resistance, this only reduces it to triple damage.

Frost Brand works the same way with fire and fire resistance.

Adjust the AC values of dragon scale mail (or possibly, the maximum amount to which they can be enchanted) to even out their general utility to the player. Specifically:

• Ones that give powerful extrinsics such as silver and gray should have their AC substantially nerfed.
• Really underutilized ones that give redundant common extrinsics such as green and orange should have their AC raised.

Make it impossible to have fire and cold resistance intrinsically at the same time. If you eat a corpse that gains you one, you lose the other. Things like crowning that give you both now do not give either (unless perhaps you have neither, in which case you get a random one).

Extrinsic fire and cold resistance are not affected. This makes it valuable to have those extrinsics from a ring, underused colors of dragon armor, or an artifact.

All polymorphable monsters that currently resist both fire and cold must have one of those resistances taken away; otherwise you could have both at once by polymorphing into them.

Greasy floor, a new type of terrain (or perhaps a trap?) that applies grease to any boots you are wearing and almost always makes you slip. Slipping on greasy floor (which can also happen by walking barefoot or with already-greased boots on) causes you to drop random items, some of which may get greased.

The player can create greasy floor by smashing a potion of oil or applying (multiple?) charges from a can of grease to the floor.

Creatures that move onto a greasy floor patch may “slip and slide and struggle to stay upright”, losing their next turn 70% of the time. This also happens to a creature standing on a greasy floor patch that tries to do something involving footwork (combat, moving off the square, etc) 30% of the time. Or for a more simplified implementation, the trap doesn’t have to cause loss of turn when moved onto (though it might still produce a message), but has a 70% chance of making the creature lose its next turn regardless of the action (still need to keep your balance to take out a scroll to read or zap a wand, for instance).

If implemented as a trap, it cannot be untrapped (except probably by the standard method of digging a pit on it), but will eventually wear out after a slightly randomized number of times it affects something. (This prevents you from setting a single one in Ludios and then standing back to watch the whole army get greased and fall over themselves.)

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.

Replace blessed genocide’s class genocide effect with one that lets you name multiple species not from the same class.

Backstabbing can additionally occur if you are stealthy and the target monster does not correctly know where you are.

Magic missiles, and possibly other rays, stop at the first creature they hit and don’t continue to other creatures behind it. Possibly this should only happen on the first magic-resistant creature and “the missiles bounce off” (they clearly aren’t bouncing off in the same exact direction they were traveling before hitting the target, and the message implies they scatter harmlessly).

Vortices, or possibly all whirly monsters, scatter items to different squares when they pass over them (using the throwing code, so items may shatter and creatures may be hit by them). Possibly only objects under a certain weight.

More evilly, they could be able to scatter unequipped items from your inventory when they engulf you.

The three unoccupied corners of the Castle contain mimics mimicking chests.

You can fill a pit by dumping sufficient rocks in it.

Eating a disenchanter corpse sets Pw to 0.

Armed bear traps and land mines can be teleported away if hit with a teleportation beam.

Fragile items get smashed by falling to the ground while dying or passing out or falling downstairs.

Padded sack: bag that protects its fragile items from breaking.

Cavemen get a small alignment penalty for writing or using complex tools.

Penalty (alignment? luck? aggravate monster?) for eating a coaligned unicorn.

Track, and report at the end of the game in the dumplog or xlogfile, how many times the player prayed and sacrificed.

Monks can forcefight or kick boulders and break them with high enough Strength.

YAFMs (both regular and hallucinating) for sitting on the Vibrating Square. Something to do with a vibrating chair massage.

Decorative objects/furniture for atmosphere: sarcophagi, (inanimate) skeletons, rubble in corners, mist, shafts of light that illuminate small areas.

Vomiting erases any dust engravings on your current square.

Boost healers’ starting Dexterity; they should be better at delicate surgical procedures than the minimum Dx:7 implies.

Add fruit in tins as an alternative to spinach or corpses.

When you are both hallucinating and weak from hunger, monsters start appearing as % instead of regular hallucinatory glyphs.

You get a small Pw boost (similar to newts, or perhaps not boosting max Pw)? by eating the corpse of a spellcasting monster.

Exercise or abuse Charisma as a result of consorting with foocubi.

Booze is a customizeable name in the options like fruit/slime mold.

Hitting monsters with a passive shock attack doesn’t hurt you if you’re hitting with a non-metallic weapon or your hands with non-metallic gloves on.

Wind trap: when you step on it, your wielded weapon and any items on the square are blown upwards by a gust and fall back on your head.

Forest rooms, which contain a scattering of trees.

Phoenixes: birds with fire resistance and who may automatically resurrect on death, or else revive from their corpse/ashes similar to trolls.

Thunderbirds: birds with lightning breath.

Rocs: large, rideable, fast and powerful birds.

A Big Room variant that is an idyllic scene with a nice river cutting through it with some scattered trees and maybe a couple fountains and a lake. Idyllic except for the usual bunch of monsters, of course.

Rooms are generated dark much more often when your luck is negative.

Message for when a nymph finishes stealing something from you: “The [nymph] giggles and vanishes.”

Ice boxes occasionally contain potions of booze or fruit juice in addition to corpses. A proposed frequency is 1% of ice boxes, and they contain d3 of either type of potion (possibly both).

Falling rock traps are reflavored as thwomps from Mario if you are hallucinating.

Water lily terrain: can be walked on, but if burned, rotted, or dug on, it turns to water.

If you pray at low HP with a single hostile monster in the vicinity, your deity might decide to “fix” the problem by smiting them to death.

The rocks generated by smashing a boulder or statue should never weigh more than the boulder or statue.

When you or a monster digs a hole to a level below, rocks/boulders are created on the square you fall into.

Digging downwards destroys any existing engraving on the square.

Message for when a pet (that you can see) gains a level.

Swimming skill: how well you can swim on top of water and carry weight at the same time. At Unskilled you can carry very little, but it quickly increases beyond that.

A troll killed by fiery or acidic means (including Fire Brand) cannot revive.

The wish parser accepts “anything”, “something”, and “surprise me” as valid candidates for a wish for a random object.

Dipping a wand of lightning in a pool of water electrocutes nearby monsters in connected pools of water, and possibly you.

Farlooking monsters tells you whether they are asleep, paralyzed, or fleeing.

You have a small Dexterity-based chance of catching a potion thrown at you instead of having it break on you (this chance is zero if you cannot see the thrower.)

Tinning the corpse of a named creature transfers the name to the tin.

Swarm monsters which are invulnerable to weapon attacks (or else take extremely reduced damage from weapon attacks, making weapons a last resort) and instead must be hit with area-of-effect attacks. Given the relatively low availability of area-of-effect attacks, the swarm should go down in one or two hits from one.

Tigers occasionally drop tiger eye rings.

Rings of regeneration are chargeable. While positively enchanted ones drain nutrition to increase your life, negatively enchanted ones sap your life to increase your nutrition.

Rogues get backstab bonus against any incapacitated enemy (sleeping/paralyzed) in addition to fleeing ones.

Fish scale mail; awful AC but grants magical breathing.

Water elementals have an active rust attack.

If you are lifesaved after dying from attribute loss, it restores the attribute to its base value instead of 3.

Mummy corpses never rot away.

If a zombie finds a mummy wrapping, it will pick it up and transform into a mummy of that type.

Creatures in pits are very hard to hit with projectiles.

Occasionally, sitting next to a tree will cause an apple to fall on your head.

You can carve statues from boulders with a pick-axe.

Soul selling: when you summon a demon lord, there is some opportunity for you to sell your soul to them in exchange for a wish.

• Selling your soul both angers your god and suppresses all interaction with them.
• You may be able to recover your soul by killing the demon lord; for balance the demon lord should go far away when you sell your soul, though not out of the game.
• Alternatively, unless you wish for nothing (which makes the demon lord vanish forever), the demon lord will immediately become hostile, making it an unlikely tactic in the early game.
• Entering a temple without your soul will immediately anger the priest.
• Your quest leader won’t let you go on the quest while you are soulless.

If you are completely armorless, shopkeepers will block their door and prevent you from entering.

A diving helmet item which confers magical breathing when worn.

Being a male Valkyrie is a minor trouble when praying and will be divinely fixed by reverting you to female.

When a force bolt hits a huge chunk of meat, it turns into a bunch of meatballs (using the same formula for how many rocks are produced from a boulder).

Nurses rarely generate with stethoscopes.

Barbarians feel angry (not sad) for a moment when a pet dies.

Vaporizing gear by overenchanting it abuses Wisdom.

Quest leaders verbalize their confusion at the player’s change of gender if the player has changed from their original gender.

Cavemen, Barbarians, and orcish players don’t get the message “An urge to take a bath overwhelms you” from fountains.

Dipping a blank scroll or spellbook into a potion of gain ability turns it into some random scroll or spellbook. The beatitude of the resulting object uses the same formula as magic markers. Could also do this for wands of nothing, which become some random wand, without changing their charge count.

Polymorphing a crocodile corpse makes fireproof water walking boots instead of fireproof low boots.

TDTTOE: If it’s possible to fooproof arbitrary items, fireproof candles are unlightable.

Give cursed wands some bad effects other than rarely exploding, such as a cursed wand of fire also hitting your own inventory.

Ideas about nerfing the player’s ability to scare off a large group of Yendorian Army troops at once:

• Non-fleeing troops grudge fleeing ones (they’re deserters).
• Troops are immune to fleeing (possibly only immune to fleeing triggered by low HP, and still capable of fleeing from other causes) if they can see a higher-ranking military monster nearby.
• It’s harder to scare troops if there are others nearby (they have effectively a higher resistance).
• Troops recover faster from being scared if there are others nearby.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be only the Yendorian Army; the rule could be extended to all monsters being “supported” by other monsters of their same species, with some special cases for things like all orcs supporting each other.

Potions of oil heal iron golems when quaffed.

Attempting to light a cursed lamp or candle may burn your finger, dealing a little bit of damage: “Ouch! You burnt your finger!” (No damage if you are fire resistant).

Stealing or destroying a Nazgul’s ring instakills it. Or possibly stealing reduces it to 1 HP.

Leprechauns do massive damage to gold golems.

A boulder that falls on top of an altar destroys that altar.

Destroying a charged camera may spawn one or more yellow lights (or black lights if it is cursed).

Dipping cursed unicorn horns into harmless potions turns them into harmful potions.

When a pet eats a teleportitis-granting corpse, it randomly teleports (if possible).

You can dip fruits (slime molds) in a potion of acid (or potion of water?) to turn it into a potion of fruit juice (consuming the fruit).

The blessed potion of gain energy gives temporary sleep resistance.

Whacking monsters with certain types of wielded scrolls may have certain effects on it (and may consume/shred the scroll in the process): fire burns them, confuse monster confuses them, scare monster scares them.

Flying is voluntarily controlled, not automatic (i.e. you tell the game when you want to start and stop flying). While flying, you burn nutrition faster.

Placing a fake Amulet of Yendor into any container blows it up.

Chaotic same-race sacrifice demon summoning causes the demon to give you a nice item or some gold when they appear.

When you crush a monster who is carrying a wand with a drawbridge, the wand explodes.

Gradually, over time, you lose points of Charisma due to accumulating dirt and scars and generally looking worse. This can be fixed with the usual restore ability methods, by entering water (possibly sitting on fountains should do this), by getting hit by a rust trap (this only restores one point at a time), or by #wiping with a towel (which may have limited effectiveness).

If you are a Caveman, you get telepathy or clairvoyance while you are hallucinating.

The helm of opposite alignment has no effect on neutrals (except autocursing). Alternatively, some helms may turn lawful and chaotic characters neutral.

Wand breaking effects that depend on the number of remaining charges use (charges+1) instead of (charges), to account for the wrest charge.

Erosion on rings and amulets makes their effect intermittent.

Sitting on gold should be comfortable if you are polymorphed into a dragon.

Priest characters get sanctuary in rooms containing unattended coaligned altars, even though they aren’t temples.

You can roll a boulder into the same square as a non-trapped flying monster (which doesn’t interact with it at all).

Any sort of death by explosion should scatter the possessions around, rather than having a single bones pile stack.

Falling boulders (e.g. from scroll of earth) will smash fragile items lying on the ground on the square they drop on. Possibly rolling boulders do this too.

Scrolls of remove curse never generate cursed, and resist becoming cursed.

When you use stairs, not only do adjacent pets follow you, but any pets adjacent to adjacent pets, and so on, also follow you.

Trollsbane blocks intrinsic or extrinsic aggravate monster.

Water moccasins occasionally drop water walking boots.

Moon phases affect the Plane of Water somehow.

Swimming while satiated can cause you to drown from stomach cramps.

Lit candles get snuffed when you move next to an unseen secret door, trap door or hole: “A draft blows out your candle.”

Tallow candles are edible and provide a decent amount of nutrition.

A “money train” - a random event that spawns in a bunch of soldiers and giants carting chests of gold from the upstairs on a level to the downstairs.

Shopkeepers gradually over time replenish their in-inventory gold, but only if Ludios is not yet generated. Any gold that is replenished to shopkeepers is removed from Ludios’ large vault when it generates.

Credit cards act as holding containers for gold. Not literally, but if you have credit in a shop and apply the card towards the shopkeeper, they can put the credit on your card, which you can then use to pay at other shops. Paying with a credit card has a 3% transaction fee, minimum 1 zorkmid. Each card also has a “credit limit” which is the maximum amount of gold you can put on it. Randomly generated cards may have some (small) preexisting balance on them, but you might get the Kops called if you try to pass it off as your own, or if you pay with a cursed credit card. A possible evil extension is that occasionally your card is invalid because the owners took all the money and fled to [other roguelike]. Priests and demon lords cannot be paid in credit. Gold that you have on a credit card doesn’t count towards score. Killing a vault guard zeroes all your credit card accounts.

Leprechauns steal credit cards as well as money.

It costs more money to donate to crossaligned priests for protection.

When Schroedinger’s Box is probed or has a stethoscope applied to it, it either reveals the housecat corpse inside or releases the live housecat as normal. Alternatively, stethoscopes give “You hear a characteristic WOM WOM WOM sound” as a reference to Bob the Angry Flower, and probing gives you “The box contains a cat that is neither alive nor dead nor alive nor dead nor… You resolve to call the YSPCA later.”

Reading a spellbook while confused may teach you a random spell but only set your memory of it to 1000 turns. It can also reduce memory of all other spells by 1000. Alternatively, it has no real effect, and just prints a message “You were holding the spellbook upside down… You learn the spell of ‘kcol draziw’.” (a random spell name printed backwards).

You have a lower chance of genociding monsters, wishing for items, and identifying canned food if you have never seen the monster or item in question.

Artifacts occasionally resist being vaporized from overenchantment (however, if they do, they don’t get the extra points of enchantment.)

Dropping a lit candle on a coaligned altar gives you some message about your standing with your god and your ability to pray safely. The candle is consumed in the process, and possibly the beatitude matters (with a cursed candle plus an angry god ending in a fiery explosion). Some unspecified bad thing happens if you try this on a crossaligned altar.

Rust monster corpses are untinnable, or else attempting to tin them rusts the tinning kit.

Hitting a tin of long worm or purple worm meat with an undead turning beam turns it into a can of worms, which when you apply or eat it creates a bunch of random w around you. Cans of worms can also be found randomly generated.

If you eat a cursed C- or K-ration when hallucinating, you get an MRE YAFM: “That wasn’t a meal, it wasn’t ready, and you shouldn’t have eaten it.”

Brass knuckles, an item that increases damage done with bare hands and martial arts if you are unarmed. There are multiple takes on it:

1. They are a ring-slot item, possibly occupying both ring slots at once, or just one. In this case, you must also not be wearing gloves in order to get the bonus damage, or else you can’t even put on gloves while wearing the knuckles. Can be charged like other rings to increase the damage dealt by them; however, the damage boost even when they are +0 is significant.
2. They are glove-slot armor. This is nice because it means they can be enchanted with enchant armor rather than charging. While the enchantment increases damage, it does NOT provide any AC bonus.

You can polish metallic shields by rubbing a towel on them. While it is polished and erosion-free, it provides reflection; but once it gets hit with some form of erosion it loses its polish and can’t be polished unless the erosion is removed.

Leprechauns steal potions of booze as well as gold.

Drinking multiple potions of booze in a short time span has progressive effects: first confusion as normal, then vomiting, then sending the drinker to sleep or losing some (resistable) HP via alcohol poisoning. Also add in monster (dwarf, orc, leprechaun) booze-drinking behavior, complete with drinking songs as level sounds when a monster is intoxicated.

Zapping a cancellation beam downwards while standing on a magical (magic, teleportation, polymorph, etc) trap will remove the trap.

Wood nymphs, or players polymorphed into wood nymphs, can walk through trees as if they weren’t there.

Kicking a tree may generate one or more angry wood nymphs.

Rangers can chat to certain animalistic monsters to calm them and make them peaceful (but not tame). Possibly generalize this into a skill that can be achieved by Cavemen, Monks and Tourists too.

When two elementals of the same type are adjacent to each other, they may merge into one elemental with a higher level and higher hitpoints.

Option to make the confirmation letter “Y” instead of “y” so that you don’t accidentally hit people when moving in the “y” direction.

Saving saves the previous N messages, so that one can find out what happened recently upon returning to a game after a long break.

Death descriptions distinguish between “killed by a falling boulder”, “killed by a hurled boulder”, and “killed by a rolling boulder.”

The appendage (“foreclaw”) for a paper golem should be “forescroll” or “endpapers” or something.

Apply ‘-‘ for a YAFM: “[Your quest leader] always said you needed to apply yourself!”

YAFM for when polymorphed into a glass golem and you rub a touchstone against “-“.

Zapping a wand of opening down at a bear trap you are stuck in should free you immediately.

If you have slippery fingers, your chance of failing to engraving the text you wanted in the dust is higher.

The quest-text associated with the Sceptre of Might suggests it confers strength. So the +n Sceptre of Might acts like a +n ring of gain strength.

Bear traps injure your legs like xans do.

The various Banes scare their target type of monster on top of the extra damage they deal them.

Fire/water elementals are not only uninjured by fire/rust traps, but are strengthened or healed by them.

Sitting on the floor messes up things written in the dust.

When polyselfed to foocubi of the appropriate gender, #monstering will seduce (i.e. de-robe) @ monsters.

Asmodeus is a “cold” demon, so should not be visible with infravision.

Cavemen get a large damage/to-hit bonus when throwing spears at large mammals, or an alignment bonus for killing large mammals with spears.

The description for the katana says it can be used as a two-handed sword. Maybe twoweaponing could be adapted for this, i.e. use both hands on the weapon for an extra damage bonus based on strength, at the expense of being able to use a shield.

High level spellcasting monsters should have stone-to-flesh in their arsenal. Then they can use it on statues which come to life, always fighting on their side. They should also attempt to cast charm monster on your pets, with success inversely proportional to the pet’s level.

Wands of striking and digging tools deal double damage to all stony monsters like earth elementals, clay golems, stone golems, xorns, and gargoyles.

Hitting vampires or all undead with light should hurt them. Not to the extent of gremlins though.

Silver variants of gear should cost more, and “precious” rings should have some kind of surcharge too, above the base cost of that type of ring.

Shopkeepers refuse to deal with invisible customers completely.

Dragons have a smaller chance of leaving scales if they are killed with a sharp weapon.

Vomiting on an altar should offend its god, as should digging on it.

You get petrified when you faint or otherwise fall asleep while wielding a cockatrice corpse.

Electric eel corpses increase Pw/maxPw to an extent greater than newts.

A digging ray shot into amorphous engulfers (such as green slimes or gelatinous cubes in some variants) splits them instead of reducing their HP to 1. This automatically makes you not engulfed anymore. (Does not change the effect on things like purple worms. Not specified what should happen with unsolid engulfers like vortices and air elementals.)

Allow closets to generate on east/west sides of rooms.

Sitting as a Monk enables meditation, which can have useful effects.

Plumed helmets increase Charisma by 1.

Fizzy potions cure confusion when quaffed.

More harassment effects: the chance of respawning the Wizard is a fixed 1/7 and the rest of the effects are equal probability. Multiple non-duplicate effects may happen at the same time.

• Unchanged: curse items, summon nasties, vaguely nervous, aggravate monsters
• Darken much of the level, and extinguish, destroy, or cut the remaining lifetime of light sources. Maybe also blind the player.
• Drop boulders around the upstairs, or iron bars.
• Spawn pools centered on the player, with sea monsters in them.
• Spawn lava around the level, not under the player.
• Create a hole or pit under the player.
• Create a stinking cloud centered on the player.
• If you are carrying the Amulet, it teleports to a random square on your level or the level below.
• If you are carrying the Amulet, it (and possibly any fake Amulets) becomes heavier. This either lasts until the next harassment triggers, or is permanent but the total amount of weight added to the amulet has some sort of cap on it. This is interesting primarily because it targets carry cap, which is a valuable end-game resource.
• A variety of powerful player debuffs such as dealing half damage, taking double damage, blocking HP or Pw regeneration, super hunger, etc.

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.

Make candle stacking for more light actually useful and realistic: the number of candles required for another square of radius increases quadratically instead of exponentially, so 1 candle gives radius 2, 4 give radius 3, 9 give radius 4, 16 give radius 5, etc.

Later extended into a more general idea allowing light sources of any type to stack: candles each give 5 lumens (because a single candle’s light reaches up to sqrt(5) squares from the center), lamps give 10 lumens, potions of oil 2, and the full Candelabrum gives 20. To compute your total light radius, add up all the lumens and take the square root. (Note that this exact formula might scale too fast: 4 candles equals the Candelabrum).