Mjollnir will evade your grasp and refuse to be picked up if your alignment record is less than pious, similar to how it can only be wielded by the worthy in the Marvel universe. (Though this might mean it should be changed to a lawful artifact rather than a neutral one.)

Water elementals’ HP (and Pw, if applicable) regeneration is boosted when they are on a water-containing space such as a moat or a fountain. Possibly, they can also suck up the water to regain a large quantity of hit points at once, which removes the water terrain if it is expendable (a fountain or pool or puddle of shallow water will dry up).

In order to make them more interesting in combat, their AI may favor hanging around sources of water and trying to find a path to the nearest water when they are injured.

Occasionally when fighting in melee with a weapon you are Expert in, not twoweaponing, and there is no special artifact effect already in play, you get some special benefit of that weapon type. ( Ideas:

• Some of the longer swords allow parrying monsters’ attacks.
• Mace or flail or morning star could stun or confuse targets
• Stiletto gives you automatic counterattacks sometimes.
• Spears can skewer through an enemy and hit another one directly behind it.

Add two dice objects: a magic die and a plastic die. Both appear as “game die” when unidentified, are made of plastic, and weigh 2. Dice can be rolled by applying them or throwing them (upward or downward).

Magic dice are chargeable. They start out with 3-5 charges; uncursed charging adds 1 and blessed adds d3, up to a maximum of 7. The die can only be recharged twice.

Rolling either type of die produces a message “The die spins around and lands on [number].” Plastic dice and non-cursed magic dice use a d20 with even probability; cursed magic dice bias the result towards lower numbers such that the probability of each possible roll is proportional to 20 minus that roll (so there is a 19/170 chance of a 1, an 18/170 chance of a 2, etc.)

The effects are:

One possible alteration is to do away with both the instadeath and the wish, because it’s been pointed out that nearly all the negative effects are recoverable. The player has an incentive to hold off on rolling the die until they have the wherewithal to recover from most of the negative effects, and then roll it as much as possible in hopes of getting a wish, while suffering few permanent issues. Giving the die a chance to just unavoidably end the game to compensate for wishing abuse may be unsatisfying.

Wielded, lit lightsabers should confer reflection, either partial or full, at a certain skill level. Not helpful against missiles or beams, but useful against rays.

Add a potion of milk, working along the same lines as milk in Minecraft, which cancels potion effects (or since not many potions have lasting effects that you’d want to cancel, it cancels various temporary good and bad status effects in general, like confusion, stunning, and invisibility, but not nausea since drinking milk usually makes nausea worse in real life.

New monster “vapor cloud”, similar to the fog cloud, except it is made up of potion vapors and instead of doing damage, it causes the uncursed vapor effect of potions to happen to you when engulfed. (There probably has to be something preventing a vapor cloud of paralysis from paralyzing you eternally.)

When it moves over a potion, it consumes the (topmost if there are multiple) potion and changes. With 50% probability, it either switches to the potion consumed, or rolls for alchemy as if combining its existing potion cloud with the new potion (probably rerolling events like turning to water, evaporating, and blowing up in an alchemic blast, though it would be funny if it blew itself up).

Hostile vapor clouds will intentionally seek out harmful potions to consume and will avoid beneficial potions.

Blade vortex (v), which is a whirlwind of spinning blades. It has two engulf attacks that deal 2d4 physical damage each, and is difficulty 12. Apart from generating normally, it can be created by polypiling a sufficiently high number of blades at once similar to how golems are created. When killed, it drops an assortment of bladed weapons, mostly smaller ones like knives, daggers, and short swords, and possibly a chain or two. It can be harmed by thrown potions of water, rust traps, and rust attacks.

Another iteration of the proposal is to make its blades its inventory rather than just assumed to be part of the monster, with the following interesting implications:

• Rather than just the monster dealing damage, it actually makes attacks with randomly selected weapons against an engulfee, which could do things like silver damage if the vortex has silver weapons whirling around inside it.
• Could have 6 attacks, each of which must use a different weapon. (If it only has 3 weapons in its inventory, it only gets 3 attacks.)
• It would also have to generate with an inventory of a few blades, selected randomly from the set of bladed weapons under a certain weight (no giant battle-axes).
• If it passes over blades lying on the ground, those are sucked into its inventory (which would make it even more deadly if it attacks with weapons it holds).
• Also, hitting it with thrown blades will result in those blades being sucked in (and possibly dealing no damage since it’s obviously not harmed by its own blades).

You can get some rare intrinsics by eating artifacts that confer them. For instance, eating Excalibur could give level-drain resistance, or eating Grayswandir could give hallucination resistance.

The chance would be much less than 100%, possibly even lower than the standard odds of getting an intrinsic from eating jewelry.

You can occasionally find flyers in the dungeon (especially on the earlier levels) advertising shops on certain levels. Or else the mail daemon will occasionally deliver you a scroll of mail which is one of these flyers.

You can wish for armor with a greater than +5 enchantment and be guaranteed to receive that enchantment, but doing so causes the armor to do a possible vaporization roll immediately.

Items in a bones pile, in addition to being cursed, could be subject to additional degradation such as erosion, loss of magical charges, or blanking. (Though since a new player will arrive in the bones level apparently immediately after the death, it could be a bit of a stretch to have the items degrade so much.)

Zapping a wand of digging sideways while you are in a pit creates a line of pits along the floor where it’s zapped. Not specified what happens when the beam hits a wall.

A more in depth stealth mechanic. Involving hiding in containers, possibly on the ceiling if you can levitate, making monsters behave as if they can’t see you even in line of sight, creating illusions or using displacement to make diversions.