Artifact-like system for monsters that applies a new set of stats on top of an existing monster’s stat block. The monster is not G_UNIQUE, but only one of it can spawn in a game.
A simpler solution would be just to add unique monsters to the monster list and figure out a way to allow these monsters to spawn randomly.
Change dipping into existing water to a standard multiturn action. If you are on top of water that you can dip into, you are now asked immediately after typing #dip if you want to dip things into it. If you say no, you are prompted for items to dip into each other like normal. If you say yes, you are presented with an inventory selection menu that allows you to select multiple items. Then you dip each of those items once into the water, handled automatically as an occupation. If something interesting happens, like a fountain effect or a monster moves nearby, the occupation is interrupted like normal.
Unspecified how the player should communicate their intention to dip items multiple times. For instance, when diluting potions in a fountain which might dry up, it’s desirable to double-dip all potions one by one in case it dries up part way through, but it’s unclear how the interface should handle this.
Throwing holy water at demons should be buffed way over its current 2d6 damage, because it’s a fun interaction. Instead, it should severely weaken them, cancel them, stun them, and/or do a large amount of damage (perhaps 50% or some proportion of their max HP, possibly exempted for demon lords whose fights it would trivialize).
In variants where the spell of cure sickness can be cast directionally, casting it at Pestilence has some detrimental effect on him, probably hitting his HP and possibly stunning or even cancelling him.
Exempt the healing-potion-on-Pestilence interaction from doing a roll versus monster MR, because in practice his MR is so high that it means healing potions are useless.
Allow the player to cut down the trees in the Ranger quest home level to traverse the level more easily, but give an alignment penalty for doing so.
Artifact ring of searching that protects you completely from triggering a trap you didn’t already know about.
A potion of growth (or “embiggening”), which lets you temporarily lift boulders, and a potion of shrinkage, which lets you get through narrow diagonal gaps if you would normally be unable to.
Throwing “attack” potions (sleep, paralysis, blindness, etc) should either always hit the target, or hit the floor at the target’s feet (causing vapor effects) if it fails the to-hit roll.
New artifact Bolt Boots, jumping boots made out of copper or metal. Conveys shock resistance when worn. Does double damage on kicks, which is treated as shock damage that may destroy rings and wands in a monster’s inventory.
When jumping with the boots, you may pass through monster’s squares (but still have to land on an open square); any monsters passed through will take damage as if hit by a wand of lightning.
Variant of Fort Ludios that contains Midas instead of Croesus. Midas has a petrification touch, but instead of turning you to stone slowly, it turns you to gold and creates a gold statue of you. Midas uses gold golems for his forces instead of dragons.
Track all alignment violations according to their source, which means when you anger a peaceful you tick up an “angered a peaceful” counter, when you rob a grave you increment “grave robbed”, etc. Enough incrementing in any counter (which may vary based on your role and alignment) starts to make your god angry and priests unfriendly. The idea is that if you have a large number of alignment violations but they’re spread out across multiple causes, you might skate by, but repeatedly and happily doing a bad thing will get you punished (and will allow your god to actually vocalize what you’ve been doing wrong). It would also be nice to show in the dumplog what your worst sins were.
Alternative Necromancer role, because its implementation in SLASH’EM winds up being a rather halfhearted version of Wizard with some elements of Priest and Archeologist. Note: This was written for a hypothetical variant that does not have a Necromancer role, rather than as an update to SLASH’EM’s.
The system may want some simplification since it may be clunky to have the player navigate through menus to choose souls from all the different ones they have accumulated. Possibly, souls from a given species just combine, so you would be shown something like “souls of gnome kings (12 total monster levels)”. An extreme simplification would cut out the entire soul-storage system and just replenish Pw when you collect one.
Dynamite in SLASH’EM should be changed so that it uses a digging explosion, and carves out tiles in its blast radius, rather than just a really powerful fiery explosion that doesn’t affect terrain. It should probably also create pits randomly in the blast radius.
Also, Archeologists should start with some dynamite (though perhaps they, or at least Lawful ones, ought to get alignment.penalties for using it, since blowing up your dig site is poor archeological practice).
Stun grenades, which work similarly to regular grenades except they explode for zero or a token amount of damage, and inflict stunning and other types of status effects on things in the blast radius. For instance, there could be a flashbang grenade which stuns and blinds its targets.
Magic traps can toggle much more types of intrinsics than just invisibility or see invisible. Probably not all intrinsics but at least many types of resistances.
While hallucinating, the entire map (or at least the parts you can see) should be rendered in rainbow colors. If your terminal supports 256-bit color, it uses a very fine-grained rainbow rather than the simple 16 colors.
You can pay the Oracle to ask what level Fort Ludios can be reached from, if you have already visited the level containing its portal. (If not, there are technical issues with how the dungeon generates preventing her from telling you.)
Cavemen receive a spellbook of fireball as their crowning gift, which they can always cast with 100% success rate. Flavor-wise, this ties into “discovering fire”.
Your god may give you useful non-artifact items as sacrifice gifts, such as a stethoscope or bag of holding, so long as you aren’t carrying one of them already.
A slightly more advanced system that wouldn’t require carrying a bunch of items to avoid getting duplicates would be to track the last time you picked up or put down each type of object, and if you have never touched one or it’s been a sufficiently long time, you are eligible to get that item as a gift.
A non-magical book like a novel that describes how to do the invocation.
Intrinsics that you can gain from eating that do not give you some increment of a percentage (for instance, teleport control) are impossible to gain as a permanent intrinsic. Instead it will always time out.
If you are Skilled or above in divination spells, you can passively sense when an item is magical like a Wizard can. (Wizards keep this benefit and don’t need to have Skilled divination for it.)
If you give an item-using pet an amulet of unchanging, they will recognize that you want them to wear it and put it on.
A carrion-eater conduct in which your only source of nutrition is allowed to be corpses. No permafood, juice, prayer or anything else.
Killing a mindless pet does not incur any penalties to alignment record or Luck.
On occasion, a small mimic poses as a spellbook so persuasively that it actually is a spellbook item, and you can pick it up and carry it around. Attempting to identify, read, throw or kick the book reveals it as a mimic. (If mimics have been genocided, this silently doesn’t happen.)
Internally this is stored using the book’s otrapped flag.
A headless race, “Akephalos/oi”, which has no head and its face on its chest, so it is incapable of wearing helms, and is blinded (and cannot drink potions) if a shirt or body armor is worn.
Also a dullahan/cephalophore race which Knights can play as. They are also headless and cannot wear helms, but they carry their head as an item and can place/throw it elsewhere. Vision is based on where the head is, so it is possible to leave the head somewhere and have the body moving around blindly in a different area of the map.
Sokoban puzzles that have no spare boulders by default can have a little attached room containing several easily retrieved spare boulders, but it incurs a Luck penalty to open the door to this room.
The debug fuzzer, when it levelports, should pick a random level from the entire dungeon rather than using random levelportation logic, since this tends to lead to it bouncing around the upper levels of the Dungeons of Doom rather than actually going anywhere significant and into new branches.
Or to make this a bit more configurable, there should be an additional iflag added that controls this levelporting behavior which can be enabled in a debugger similar to how iflags.debug_fuzzer is.
Vow of poverty as a conduct. It is broken by ever having money in inventory (with a grace period of a few turns at the beginning of the game for roles that start with money, or define the conduct as never having money enter the inventory so you can spend initial gold, or a roleplay option similar to nudist that prevents you from generating with any money).
Non-Infidels can permanently convert to Moloch if they find one of his altars, effectively becoming a weaker Infidel, but they then somehow have to play out the rest of the game as an Infidel, which means finding the Idol of Moloch and getting to the Astral Plane with it.
When examining a corpse in inventory, you are told whether it is vegetarian/vegan and whether it counts as the same race as you.
Change the game progression significantly so that the player cannot descend below the castle without all the invocation items; once they do, they must perform the invocation at the Castle and fall directly into Moloch’s Sanctum. Exploring Gehennom after that is therefore done for the first time and from the bottom up.
If you controlled levelport to level -10 or higher as an infidel, you don’t get admitted into heaven; they reject you and possibly shove you out to fall to your death on the ground.
A silence spell for either players or monsters or both. Not specified whether it would be area-of-effect or targeted at specific creatures. The main function of silence effects would be to prevent spellcasting. Not specified whether this would also affect reading scrolls (though probably not since you can “cogitate” the formula on scrolls if polymorphed into a speechless form).
However, this may require defining certain existing spells as not requiring speech, because it does not seem entirely fair to take away all of someone’s escape or healing spells with fairly low level magic.
Sacrificing the Eye of Vecna zeroes any alignment abuse you have accumulated.
A variant monk role, or a “specialization” picked at some early level such as 3 or 5, which is a weapons-using monk. Has the same or a slightly reduced capacity for spellcasting and gains weapon skill caps at the expense of reducing martial arts’s cap to Skilled or Expert. Still has a body armor penalty.
Scrolls can be “corrupted” or “misspelled”. This basically acts as a toggle on whether the confused behavior of the scroll activates: reading a corrupted scroll while not confused will produce the confused effect and reading it while confused will produce the regular effect. There is no way to restore a corrupted scroll to normal.
Possibly, an unidentified corrupted scroll will have its label deterministically garbled similar to engravings, e.g. “scroll labeled FO0B|E BLe7Ch”. If identified it would simply show as “corrupted scroll of X”.
Writing a scroll while confused will make the result corrupted. Also, scrolls hit by water damage or produced from polymorphing other scrolls may be corrupted.
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.
Blessed loadstones boost your carrying capacity by more than their weight, allowing you to carry more than if you were not carrying the stone at all. The stone would probably still curse itself upon leaving inventory, however.
Dragonhide bags of tricks only spawn dragons. (Though this would include baby dragons, so it would probably at least approximate being level-appropriate).
Scrolls of enchant armor should prompt the player to choose a piece of armor to enchant rather than picking randomly, since in nearly all cases they are used on a single specific piece of armor by removing all other armor anyway. It should also say “This is an enchant armor scroll.” and auto-identify itself if not previously identified.
An artifact luckstone which increases or decreases Luck by 5 rather than the ordinary 3 for a luckstone when carried. (Luck might still be capped at -13 and +13 for technical reasons, rather than being allowed to go to +15 and -15.)
The magic portal to the Ice Queen’s Realm should always be placed in a closet. Optionally, the closet could contain a cloak and the level could contain other references to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
Breaking a wand of wind creates a stinking cloud centered on its space, because it’s “breaking wind”. Possibly only when cursed.
Roles with a randomized pantheon can sometimes get a pantheon using player names from the high score list. (For better realism, the players have to have ascended, and their godly alignment must match their character’s alignment.)
Amulet versus magic, which gives magic resistance when worn but also makes it difficult for the wearer to use magic, translating to a sharp penalty in spellcasting rates and, depending on the implementation, reducing or nullifying the effects of magic items.
Detect food sources additionally detect potions of fruit juice, and possibly potions of booze.
While you are in a tended shop, items in your inventory are automatically displayed with their sell price appended to them, so you don’t have to go dropping them to find out what they will sell for.
Make the Gnomish Sewers Mines’ End in EvilHack less aggravating for the player who lacks teleport control: instead of having to jump into teleport traps and teleport around the level randomly until winding up in the hidden luckstone room, make one specific teleport trap always direct to that room.
You can get at most 1 sacrifice gift from any given altar. It can still be used for sacrifices and everything else, but you will never again get a gift from it.
Create a new branch that contains the player’s role’s first sacrifice gift at the end of it; their god will no longer grant that artifact as a gift. Roles currently without first sacrifice gifts must have artifacts created to take this place.
Collection of vague ideas around a new “chef” role:
Loadstones operate more subtly: they increase their weight every time you pick up a new item (one that you haven’t touched yet in the game). At some weight threshold, it autocurses and becomes undroppable.
By wielding a floating eye corpse and either applying it at monsters or hitting monsters with it, you can paralyze the monsters, provided they can see you. As a potential downside, you might paralyze yourself if you stumble or fall into a pit while wielding it while non-blind.
If you are a centaur (via polymorph or some variants’ centaur race), you can joust things without needing to ride another monster.
When you do something to anger the Minetown Watch, they become hostile but will demand that you pay a fine when they come face to face with you, and will only attack after you refuse or are unable to pay the fine.
Artifact magic lamp that behaves like normal until after the djinni is released: then, it does not turn into an oil lamp, it remains as a “cancelled” magic lamp that will produce no more djinni but is still an infinite light source.
An option to have your starting pet assigned a random name. The name pool would probably come from a hardcoded list (or even a text file like engrave.txt).
The “falconry gloves” random glove appearance has some side benefit involving training pet falcons (or possibly all birds) to attack your foes.
Sometimes Medusa’s Island is replaced by a new level Circe’s Island. Circe has a nasty polymorph touch attack (or perhaps can even cast it as a spell, at range), and may be accompanied by sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis.
A tree hit by a fire ray or explosion should instantly incinerate, provided it’s not marked non-diggable (petrified). Likewise, a tree hit by a disintegration blast should disintegrate.
Potion of acid resistance, which true to its name confers temporary intrinsic acid resistance.
The Oracle can under some circumstances give you information about the stats and attacks of a shambling horror in your game.
Zapping probing at a shambling horror should tell you information about its randomized stats and attacks.
Shapechanging monsters are cognizant of when they’ve turned into a form that’s much stronger than their usual; if they happen to have an amulet of unchanging, they will wear it when in such a form.
When hallucinating, pass all messages through a thesaurizing routine, replacing most words with an offbeat synonym, before printing them.
Some pieces of armor may actually be small mimics, but they don’t reveal themselves until you’ve been wearing them for a while (at which point they bite you for high damage).
Monster which is a shapeshifter, but regardless of what form it takes it always has an engulf attack. This is because it’s actually a variety of mimic in its normal form.
Rather than being hardcoded as swords, Fire Brand and Frost Brand instead have a random base item type every game, chosen from the pool of melee weapons. Possibly the two Brands will always be the same type.
Artifact gloves that allow you to shoot your fists in a direction when you F-attack in that direction, letting you do your normal barehanded melee attack at a distance. This does not harm you; they automatically return afterwards.
New shop type “boutique”, which only generates in very small rooms (otherwise it’s converted to a general store) and sells not-very-useful items at highly inflated prices. Also, other sorts of shops that are suitably small and have no useful items in them may be converted to boutiques. They have unique level sounds, such as “You hear a watch ticking” and “You hear someone pouring a cup of coffee”.
Proposals to address the situation where all the candles needed for the invocation are guaranteed in Vlad’s Tower. The current situation removes frustration but many players feel that it’s trivialized, whereas the system in 3.4.3 was frustrating because it was a common occurrence to have to backtrack to the Mines for candles after forgetting they needed to be collected, or worse, having to wish for them because the game didn’t generate 7 of them.
You can twoweapon pick-axes to dig super fast.
Non-chaotic monks should suffer a Luck penalty for eating meat, not just an alignment penalty.
Zombie arm, which is occasionally dropped by zombies. It can be wielded directly as a club, or you can equip it with a weapon which gives you the ability to melee targets from a little farther away. Eventually rots away with the same timer as a corpse.
When opening a tin with a tin opener, the beatitude of the tin opener is added to the tin similar to how markers and scrolls work (e.g. a blessed tin opener opening an uncursed tin will treat it like a blessed tin).
Give a special message when you fail to tame a dragon as a knight (for whom it’s impossible to tame dragons under any circumstances).
Ghosts and djinni can emerge from any bottle, not just potions with the randomized smoky and milky appearance. The rate at which they emerge is cut accordingly.
Artifact cloak Mantle of the Manta Ray, inspired by a similar D&D cloak. It confers magical breathing and swimming when worn.
Potion of astral vision, which confers temporary astral vision. To give this some use, also add some sort of being that appears on the Astral Plane and is only visible with astral vision.
New artifact Pandora’s Box, a large box that, whenever it is opened, ungenocides all genocided monsters and spawns one of each genocided species somewhere on the level.
The ability to specific-name objects you can see on the floor. (It is already possible to type-name them.)
Giftless conduct, which is broken when receiving divine gifts from sacrificing. Possibly also when receiving an artifact via crowning.
Give starting pets some form of protection against zombies’ instakill bite attacks, likely by having them start wearing a hard helm or allowing the player to put one on them.
Artifact saddle, that when invoked creates a “spirit steed”, which is automatically wearing the saddle and which you can ride.
Cut the length of Sokoban in half by excising the two middle levels. It is now a two-level branch consisting of a small, easy first puzzle level, followed by a tougher level with a zoo and prize.
New side branch, which is extremely difficult. At the end of the branch is an artifact crown, which causes you to become crowned when you wear it. Since crowning titles are bestowed by your god, it is unclear whether this should force the god to crown you and thus break atheist, or merely confer all the effects of being crowned without actually granting you the title.
Extend the warning scale up to level 9 (and possibly down to level 0) to offer more granular information on warning threats. However, provide an option to keep the scale at its old 1-5 for players who want to assign monsters to the 6 through 9 glyphs.
Make the start of the dungeon (level 0) a Minetown-like affair with peaceful shops. (Very possibly you can’t reenter this level once descending into the Dungeon, unless you have the Amulet.) When you reenter it on the ascension run, it is in ruins, with a portal to the Planes newly created there.
Artifact blindfold The Double Eyepatches, which has the normal effects of a blindfold plus radius 2 astral vision.
Wresting a wand of wishing is guaranteed to work on the first try.
An artifact wand of nothing or wand of cancellation which has no special powers other than that it will absorb curses like Magicbane.
Shambling horrors gain their own mextra struct which contains details of their statblock, rather than overwriting the shambling horror’s own statblock in the mons[] array. This allows horrors from a bones file to retain the characteristics they had in the bones game, alongside horrors from the current game that have different characteristics.
It may be possible to look up the attacks and abilities of a given shambler on the map by farlook.
Monks have ki-empowered strikes, which means they can strike incorporeal beings such as shades bare-handed.
New artifact, The Dwarf Bread, or possibly, The Battle Bread of B’hrian Bloodaxe. It is a cram ration, and if the object materials patch is present it is made of stone. It cannot be eaten; if you try you get a YAFM about how you really aren’t that hungry. Its main effect is that while carried with no other apparent food available, your nutrition will not decrease if it is at or below the threshold of going from Hungry to Weak.
You are considered to “have food available” if:
Possibly, it acts as a club when wielded, though being a cram ration it can’t be enchanted.
A cursed potion of enlightenment grants you temporary darkvision.
The blast from an artifact is doubled if the artifact deals double damage to your current form (e.g. if Ogresmasher blasts you while you’re polymorphed into an ogre, the blast damage is doubled).
There is a small temple-like structure around the Vibrating Square (not an actual temple) which gets destroyed during the invocation.
Make indirect identification more common and reliable through the game, but make the scroll of identify less likely to identify multiple items and impossible to identify your entire inventory. Thrones can still identify your whole inventory as a random effect.
Remove covetous warping entirely. However, a change like this would need to take into account that it makes the vast majority of boss fights a lot easier and more boring in that they would tend to consist just of the hero and boss standing next to each other hitting each other until the boss dies, so it would need to come with some improvements to boss fights, such as more interesting tactical AI where they will disengage momentarily and multiple forms (i.e. you “kill” it and then it becomes stronger before finally being defeated).
Address the spell of magic missile being overpowered for such a low-cost spell by scaling its number of dice on skill level rather than experience level. One solution is to give it 2d6 per skill level, though this means that starting Wizards can cast it for 4d6 damage, which is rather high. Another option is to make it scale on powers of 2: 1d6 at Unskilled, 2d6 at Basic, 4d6 at Skilled and 8d6 at Expert, which has the same respectable maximum as the linear system.
Note that a 4d6 magic missile at Basic for 10 Pw may not be considered too powerful for an early game Wizard (it’s statistically slightly better damage-wise than force bolt but also has the benefits of being a ray), but this is contingent on the existing Pw regeneration formula, which keeps Wizards from casting spells much in the early game, remaining as is.
On Easter, randomly generated user-nameable fruits will generate as “easter egg” rather than slime mold or whatever the user has customized them to be. Despite the name, it remains the exact same item in game and does not break vegan conduct.
Calculating whether a given day is Easter is a complex but solved problem; see here.
Confused genocide doesn’t necessarily genocide your own species; it chooses a random genocidable species (which might be your own) and genocides that. If blessed, it picks a random monster class containing at least one genocidable monster (including @) and genocides that.
Another option is that confused genocide automatically picks a monster you have probably been thinking about, such as the nearest monster you can see (if you can’t see any other monsters, you can still see yourself!) or the last monster you saw or killed.
If you get paralyzed by reading a spellbook, there’s some message indicating that you got paralyzed. Currently just getting “You can move again” is weird.
If you are not fully healed by a potion of full healing, it prints some other message than “You feel completely healed”, like “You feel vastly better” or “You feel much, much better.”
Add nets, on the basis that NetHack needs to have nets in it. You can throw them in pools to fish with, and throw them at small monsters to trap them in place. There could also be a trap that catches you in a net. You can also mess up throwing them and tangle yourself instead. Possibly, nets would be their own skill too.
For simplicity of implementation, they should create a temporary web on the player’s space (with a flag set so that it uses “net” in its messages instead of “web” and is probably harder/impossible to tear through at high Strength). Either nets would generate in stacks of 11-20 and get destroyed when the monster escaped the net, or they would drop themselves (most of the time) when the monster escaped the net and destroyed the trap. Either way, they should be fairly light.
If you’re hallucinating and get the “You can’t handle [artifact]!” message, it gives a YAFM referencing A Few Good Men (presumably “You can’t handle the truth!”).
New artifact The Phial of Galadriel. It is a potion of water (potion of starlight in dNetHack) that acts as an infinite light source which scares giant spiders and Nazgul that come into it, and can be invoked to bless 1 item. May need more powers to make it better, and behavior for what happens when you drink it, but these are unspecified.
