Change the atlatl into a launcher that throws spears. This means that Xiuhcoatl is no longer a weapon in its own right. Re-buff it by making it give fire damage to all spears thrown from it, and also reduce the weight by half of all spears in main inventory, or make them weigh 10 like daggers.

Ice devils should have a slowing attack, like they do in D&D. Most likely, this should be like a lichen’s temporary slow in EvilHack, rather than a permanent speed-loss like a shade or skeleton has. Free action could reduce or negate this.

Getting amnesia can strip your knowledge of (and therefore ability to write) Elbereth.

The scroll of gold detection, if read when confused (and cursed, possibly), detects silver items instead of gold pieces.

It’s probably desirable to keep the existing effect of trap detection in some form, so it’s a bit tricky to decide exactly which combinations of cursed and confused should keep that and which should detect silver.

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.

• When playing as a Necromancer, dying monsters may drop “soul” objects, which can then be collected by the player.
  • Souls only exist as an object for the purpose of occupying a space on the map before being picked up. They are weightless and do not actually occupy space in inventory, nor can they be stolen after being collected. A Necromancer can have an unlimited amount of them.
  • If a soul drops adjacent to the player, it is automatically collected.
  • Souls drop 100% of the time from monsters the player kills, less for monsters that die otherwise. Never for monsters that kill themselves.
  • Monsters ignore souls and cannot pick them up. (There is room for an extension where certain undead like a barrow wight or a lich can collect souls to become more powerful, but that is not required for this.)
  • Souls vanish after being on the floor for around 10 turns or being moved off level, preventing the player from sitting back while pets or conflict mop up a large crowd of monsters and then obtaining all their souls with no effort.
  • Souls can also be offered on an altar to gain alignment points.
• Souls are used to fuel the casting of necromancy spells, an entirely new spell school. Necromancy spells consume some Pw like normal spells, but also consume souls, and generally are more powerful than non-necromancy spells of the same level. Various spell ideas:
  • Reanimate creature: which consumes a soul of some creature and reanimates a corpse of that same creature, bringing it back as a pet. (It may be flagged as undead, if the variant supports this).
  • Soul blast: Consumes multiple souls and produces an attack whose power is proportionate to the total monster difficulty of the expended souls.
  • Empower undead: Temporarily buffs all nearby pets, scaling up with the more souls you expend. This is intended to be one of the primary ways a Necromancer takes care of enemies, so it should be a pretty good boost.
  • Spell which consumes 5-10 souls of one monster type and create a tame monster of that type without needing a corpse.
  • Spell which consumes souls to regain HP or Pw.
  • Spell which infuses your weapon, armor, or other gear with souls, making it more effective for a time.
  • Spell which consumes souls of one species and polymorphs you into that monster.
  • Charm undead: Tames undead. Low cost compared to general charm monster.
  • Create wight: Works like reanimate creature but the resulting creature gains level-drain abilities.
• A good guaranteed starting combination of spells for the Necromancer might be reanimate creature and empower undead, since this will enable them to kill monsters, bring them back as pets, and boost them with the souls from more kills.
• Most undead (at least the mindless undead) generate peaceful to Necromancers.
• If desired, there could also be an “amulet of necromancy” which, when worn by non-Necromancers, causes souls to drop (less frequently than they do for Necromancers) and enables the hero to cast necromancy spells. However, not many other roles would be non-Restricted in necromancy spells, and any Lawful hero would be harshly penalized for casting them.
  • In order to avoid this being a useless item for Necromancers, it could improve soul drop chances for them.
  • Non-Necromancers wearing the amulet might also be limited in the amount of souls they could have at one time.
• If desired, Valkyries could be able to collect souls natively, but the only thing they can do with them without penalty would be to offer them on altars for alignment points.

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.

When you complete the Quest and get recognition from your leader, you get 5-10 points of Charisma, because now you have a great reputation as a hero.

Paper golems occasionally drop non-blank scrolls.

Something to prevent autounlock from automatically forcing a chest you want to open. This probably takes the form of a new option, either an “autoforce” boolean option or a new paranoid confirmation flag which would add a prompt (or turn the existing prompt into a “yes” confirmation) before you force a chest with autounlock.

Beverage tins, which contain a potion instead of meat from a monster. Randomly generated ones always have potions with the “bubbly”, “fizzy” or “effervescent” appearance.

When you eat such a tin, it “opens with a loud hiss!”, making noise in some radius. It always takes 1 turn to open regardless of beatitude. Then you are shown its appearance. If you are not blind, you see it directly (“It contains a bubbly liquid”); if you are blind but have identified the potion, you recognize the potion by the smell; otherwise you get a generic “It feels like some liquid is inside”. Then you’re prompted to drink it, like with any other tin. If you do, you experience the same effects as you would from a potion of the corresponding beatitude.

Tinning kits could possibly convert potions into homemade beverage tins, but there needs to be some sort of downside which hasn’t yet been proposed. As it stands, you would be able to convert a 20-weight potion into a 10-weight unbreakable potion. The existing downsides are that it expends a tinning kit charge and the resulting potion can’t be dipped, alchemized with, or thrown, but for the sort of potions one would want to turn into tins, these aren’t really downsides.

Probing will reveal the contents of tins it hits (and mark the tins as identified so they stay revealed).