On the level you visit after killing Lucifer, you are confronted with every demon lord who has not yet been killed. But when they appear here, they have special AI: they cannot covetous warp, and grudge each other as well as you.
Artifact book (novel?) that when read teaches you one level of any skill. This may include skills you are restricted in (though it might only raise it to Unskilled) and skills past your role’s cap.
Provide some ways for Vecna to come back after being defeated:
Mud terrain should follow the same rules as lava regarding stuck in it and sinking in, except without the fire damage or eventual death (you can’t get submerged completely in it). Also, you can apply a towel to it repeatedly to suck out the water, which dries it up into normal floor, producing the message “Your towel gets filthy!”
It should appear starting in the early-to-mid Dungeons of Doom, so that monsters like giants can smack you into it and get you stuck.
Wearing the Mitre of Holiness removes the spellcasting penalty from wearing a shield.
A spellbook will teaches you one of 4 ways to cast the spell, randomly chosen and deterministic per-spellbook:
Various conditions prevent you from casting a spell if you are limited in how you can cast it: choking and being polymorphed into a form incapable of speech (etc) prevent you from casting a spell you only know how to cast verbally, and being held or stuck to a monster or having both hands welded to cursed gear (etc) prevents you from casting a spell you only know how to cast somatically.
You can read additional spellbooks to “upgrade” your casting ability in addition to refreshing your memory: e.g. if you can cast force bolt somatically but don’t need to speak, and you read a spellbook of force bolt that teaches how to cast it verbally but not somatically, you become able to cast it fully at will.
The motivation for this is to make large quantities of obtained spellbooks containing many duplicates of already known spells more interesting.
Not specified how the hero knows how to cast their starting spells; obvious options are:
When a mind flayer removes the grease from your helm, its round immediately ends because it has to clean off its tentacles before attacking again.
Some monster (a boss? The Wizard of Yendor? Imps?) will use custom taunts against you that are taken from checking the logfile for the last three or four ways you died.
This could also be implemented as non-verbal taunts where the monster uses the way you died against you - e.g. if you died to a zombie, they will summon zombies; if you fell into a pit, they will create a pit underneath you, etc.
When a python is resurrected, it gets a special message “The python stops pining for the fjords” as a Monty Python reference.
Occasionally when you try to attack a python in melee, you instead swap places with it and get the message: “It slithers around you; S, @ = @, S.” (replacing the @ with the hero’s glyph if they are different). This is a reference to multiple variable assignment in the Python language.
If the hero can be represented by S themselves, the displacement never happens, because S, S = S, S is not syntactically correct in some versions of Python (though it is in current versions).
Mithril dragon, a dragon which spawns only if you (or possibly any creature on the level) is carrying over 75 aum of mithril in open inventory. It eats mithril items (and only mithril items, rather than being generally metallivorous).
Rust dragon, a type of dragon which breathes and makes melee rust attacks. It eats all types of metals. As with other metallic dragons, it is lawful.
An object property “of rust”, applicable to weapons, which causes its target’s gear to rust and, eventually, get destroyed.
Tortles have a Dex-based chance of avoiding getting decapitated by ducking their head back into their shell.
Shambling horrors can always engulf adjacent monsters (rather than it only happening some of the time) and add their special attacks. Though this works only for the shambler that engulfed the monster, it does not propagate to all the other ones.
Every time you kill a shambling horror, every other one in the game gains the same additional random ability or attack.
When you stethoscope or probe monsters that have names, they are referred to as “[Name] the [species]”, e.g. “Status of Fluffy the large dog:”
Shorten Gehennom drastically, paring it down to a few mandatory levels (the Valley, the Wizard’s Tower (containing Vlad’s Tower entrance), the vibrating square level containing the fake Wizard’s Tower to portal into the real one) with no demon lord lairs and no filler. In exchange, once you start escaping the Sanctum with the Amulet, any level you reenter for the first time gets partly overwritten with Gehennom elements – rivers of lava, twisted mazes, and in particular, the demon lords. However, enough areas of the map will be left in their original states so that it remains recognizable. In particular this is aimed at making sure any stash you have made may not survive the process.
There are several motivations for this:
Some of the non-guaranteed demon lords (provided they aren’t prematurely summoned into the game) show up randomly in Gehennom on the ascension run.
A new race whose primary feature is that it eats minerals: gets nutrition mainly from rocks, may be able to eat metals, and gains limited spell-like abilities based on the last precious gem they consumed. A couple non-comprehensive examples:
The abilities could be triggered using #monster, and would probably have a finite pool of uses, after which they can no longer be used. Eating another gem before this pool runs out would swap in new abilities and either give a fresh pool of uses or add to the existing one.
The game should not assume heroes all carry an unlimited invisible box of matches to light candles and lamps with. Doing that should require a fire source, whether that is Fire Brand, lava, a fire trap, the wand of fire, the fireball spell, or an already lit candle, lamp, or potion of oil. There could also be a new “lighter” tool which enables you to light things, but can get lost or run out of charges.
Wearing rings that correspond in appearance to wands double, augment, or otherwise enhance those wands’ effects, including possibly turning a beam into a cone shaped blast.
This could also extend to drinking potions with matching appearances to worn rings, such as drinking a ruby or emerald potion while wearing a ruby or emerald ring.
Every ogre that gets killed by Ogresmasher gives it a “charge”, which is separate from enchantment. Charges can either grant it damage bonuses, or there is something you can do by applying Ogresmasher to expend charges for a unique effect.
Add a frustration counter to certain boss monsters, which increments every time they want to close to melee distance with you but are unable to. Once this gets sufficiently high, they become capable of dispatching or shoving aside monsters (even if they aren’t normally) and breaking boulders to get to you. Different bosses have different thresholds for when this happens.
This prevents you from trivially using a boulder fort to shut down bosses like Master Kaen while you slowly whittle them away with ranged attacks, but allows you to employ strategies like that for a limited period of time.
Monsters that hatch from eggs should be specially flagged as being ineligible to death-drop items, since the only explanation would be that the item was with them in the egg, which makes no sense.
Stone of pacification, which when you carry it in open inventory prevents your pets from attacking peaceful monsters. (It does not affect hostile monsters, nor does it stop pets from attacking hostile monsters.)
Track whether or not you have ever worn an armor piece in each slot. When you receive a non-artifact sacrifice gift, slightly bias towards slots for which you have never worn armor.
Artifact towel that acts as a magic carpet: invoke it to start flying on it. Doesn’t work if you’re currently wearing the towel, and trying to wear the towel either doesn’t work or ends any flight.
Applying an athame to an item with an object property magically severs the property, which then “falls” and attaches to the topmost eligible item on the floor beneath it.
A way to permanently mount a spell staff on a square. This makes it unremovable but it permanently provides its casting benefits to you while you are standing on that square, without having to wield it.
Pits created by freezing water and then digging out the ice gradually and randomly fill back in with water. But if you then try to frost walk on them (with water walking boots and white dragon scale mail), you get the following: “The water crackles and freezes under your weight. The ice breaks under your weight! You fall into your pit!” creating the pit anew on the space.
When riding, a lance will count for much less weight than it will normally, because your saddle is presumed to have its own stirrup for the lance. When wielding the lance, it reverts to its full weight.
Give Thoth Amon sleep resistance or higher monster MR, because right now it’s too easy to just zap him with sleep and finish him off trivially.
Allow more monsters to summon monsters friendly to them, but make them have to do a signaled multi-round behavior that can be interrupted by damaging them. E.g. printing a message that a monster is going into a summoning trance, or moving in a certain pattern.
A statue-like object which should be fairly destroyable (should probably be breakable by force bolts and maybe even attacking it with a weapon enough times) which provides a level-wide buff to certain monsters.
Mithril items cannot be forged. It’s too good of a material to apply to arbitrary items, and there is lore which would back up it not being a material an amateur is capable of smithing.
Arcane monster spell that reduces your memory of a single spell by a few thousand turns.
The number of turns you can remember a spell is directly dependent on your Intelligence, and possibly Wisdom (at the time of reading the book). The default 20000 turns is a baseline for maybe 12 Int and 12 Wis; more of those means you get more turns when you learn the spell or refresh your memory, and less of those means you get fewer turns.
Lemures have some sort of debuff that they give you such as sapping your nutrition when nearby. This stacks with other lemures, so it is insignificant if you are facing only one or two, but can get perilous if you are surrounded by a lot of them, as may happen in Gehennom.
You can throw cursed aklyses, because the tether is still welded to your hand. Because of this, they always return – which means there actually might be some circumstances where it’s beneficial to wield one versus a non-cursed one, for example attacking monsters in water or lava.
To compensate for this a bit, the cursed aklys could have an increased chance of hitting you when it returns.
Artificer role themed around turning items into different or differently powered items.
A carrion-eater conduct in which your only source of nutrition is allowed to be corpses. No permafood, juice, prayer or anything else.
Scavenger conduct: never take an item from a shop or a chest (notably, this means you cannot take the wand of wishing).
Snow golems occasionally drop one or more of the following when killed:
A paranoid cannibalism option, which prompts you to confirm when you are about to eat something that would be considered cannibalism (including dogs and cats if they would incur the same penalties).
After a pet removes a shop-owned item from a shop 5 times, the shopkeeper stops permitting pets in the shop.
Items generated in or sold to shops are marked as being property of that shop, and when you buy it properly, this marking is cleared. When you attempt to sell an item to a shop that is currently marked as the shop’s property (meaning it was not properly paid for), the shopkeeper just confiscates it without paying. This prevents you from directly or indirectly stealing the same item over and over again and getting paid for it every time.
Add a #notes command, which opens up a blank text editor window where you can type anything you want. The notes are saved along with the game and can be referenced anytime from within it.
To prevent this being a hugely complicated undertaking (basically implementing a text editor in the game, which won’t mesh particularly well with players used to other text editors), one suggestion is to use the shell’s default editor, but then this becomes akin to just using out-of-game notes anyway.
Another suggestion is to implement it using a system similar to autopickup exceptions: the player can add, edit, list, and delete one-line notes, which doesn’t require implementing any text editing capability the game doesn’t already have.
In variants that have withering, add a ring of withering: causes extrinsic withering when worn, and is one of the rings which is usually generated cursed.
Replace poison instadeath with a system where poison sticks around in your system for a fairly long time, allowing multiple doses to build up and eventually kill you if you’re careless. This means when faced with a swarm of poisoning monsters or orcs with poisoned arrows, you still have incentive to flee, but won’t cheaply die to the first one or two.
A nonmagical ring called a “regimental ring”, which when worn makes soldiers peaceful (unspecified whether higher ranking officers should respect it or not). It possibly appears as rare loot in barracks or rarely generated in the inventory of high-ranking officers.
Ring of quick change, which decreases the amount of time needed to put on and take off gear.
This could be a chargeable ring, which makes the decrease proportional to its enchantment (and a negatively charged ring making gear changes take more time). If implemented as non-chargeable, gear changes would most likely take a constant 1 or 0 turns.
One side effect of wearing this is that nymphs that charm you into taking off armor get fewer or no turns to make additional thefts while you are disrobing.
Conceptually separate breath weapons from rays, making them not trivially reflectable. Make it possible to suffer reduced effects from a breath weapon, with the size of a worn shield a factor in that reduction.
Possibly make dragon armor of the same type as a given breath weapon (e.g. red dragon armor versus fire breath) reflect that breath weapon, and only that one.
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.
A ring which gives you effective Basic skill in all weapons when you wear it. (Not specified exactly how the #enhance interface would display your skills when using the ring.)
Coaligned (or unaligned) intelligent artifact weapons let you use them as if you had Basic skill, even if you don’t have it. Flavored as the weapon helping you out.
Remove most specific skills for ranged weapons, reducing them to a set of bow, crossbow, sling, and “thrown” (including darts, boomerangs, thrown rocks, etc). When wielded, missiles are always treated as unskilled.
Attacking with a boomerang in melee should use the club skill rather than the boomerang skill.
Instead of spellbooks having 4 read charges, they store “400% memory” - enough magical power to give a reader full knowledge of the spell 4 times over, which is functionally identical to how many times they can be reread now but more granular. Reading a book to restore memory of a partially forgotten spell only consumes the missing fraction of memory required to bring you back up to 100% retention.
Example: The hero reads a spellbook of knock, bringing themselves to 100% memory and the spellbook down to 300% memory. 10000 turns later, the hero, now with 50% memory, rereads the book. This restores their memory to 100% but the spellbook is only decreased to 250%.
This would allow events that degrade spellbooks (reading it and polymorphing it) to degrade it by a randomized degree instead of a flat, predictable 1/4 of its use every time.
Greased items should be immune to getting stolen out of the inventory (except perhaps if it’s a greased armor piece and the stealer is a nymph that charmed you into taking it off).
Remove the scroll and spellbook of identify, and in place of them add in items that work like a touchstone: each such item is useful at identifying the type of items of a particular object class, like touchstones are for gems. Also like touchstones, certain roles and races have affinities or advantages with various of these identifier items.
Dragonhide gear resists attempts to enchant it a significant percentage of the time, so it takes more resources overall to enchant it up to the same level as a non-dragonhide piece of gear.
A tinning kit for pets, or some other way to create tins that are not designed to be eaten by the player but instead opened with an adjacent pet that will always eat whatever it is in the tin, so you can give them resistances in a controlled manner.
Dragonhide gear naturally deteriorates gradually over time, and the only way to prevent this is to rub large quantities of gold on it, which destroys the gold.
After killing certain type(s) of monsters (such as the monarch of a throne room), a timer may start that spawns an avenging posse of related monsters nearby.
To slightly encourage the use of underused types of dragon scale mail, have Fire Brand synergize with worn red dragon scale mail by allowing it to be invoked for a fireball, and have Frost Brand synergize with worn white dragon scale mail by allowing it to be invoked for a cone of cold.
A system termed “named non-artifact properties”. They are unique properties that never generate on more than one item per game, and confer some artifact-like qualities, but are not tied to a specific type of object, and can generate on multiple types of base item. This type of property cannot be wished for, even if properties can otherwise be wished for.
A couple examples:
Rather than having dragonhide items be generically “dragonhide”, let them each be a certain dragon color, which cannot be specified by wishing. This item does not confer the same extrinsic it would if it were body armor. Instead, when you are wearing dragon scales or mail and a dragonhide item of the same color in another slot, you gain a very powerful extrinsic which cannot be gained otherwise. E.g. cancellation immunity for gray dragon armor.
The idea is to discourage everyone continuing to wear gray or silver dragon scale mail: if you find or wish for dragonhide gear and get some other color, it may be attractive to wear dragon scale mail of that color instead in order to get the powerful extrinsic.
Spell staves should remove a much greater share of armor penalties for spells of their associated school than they currently do.
Another possible bonus they could have to make them more worthwhile is to treat any spell of their associated school as cast at one higher skill level than your current skill in it (does nothing if you are already Expert, since defining Master effects for spells is likely out of scope).
Some ways to scale some spell effects with skill. Generally, this consists of nerfing unskilled and basic casting rather than adding even more powerful high-skill effects.
Scroll of census: when read, you are prompted to name a monster species. It then tells you how many have been generated and how many are left to extinct the species. When blessed, you are instead prompted to name a monster class, and you get this report for every species in that class.
Remove holy/unholy water’s ability to bless/curse items. Instead, make blessed and cursed oil serve the same functions. Dipping a stack of uncursed oil in holy/unholy oil will bless or curse the stack, as currently works, but since oil is significantly less easy to get than water, this makes mass-blessing of items harder to accomplish.
Anointing an item with holy or unholy oil ignores effects that would normally happen because of the oil. For instance, dipping an oil lamp in holy oil will just bless it, or do nothing if it was blessed already.
Priests now start with a stack of 4 holy oil.
Water doesn’t get outright removed - other things still dilute to it and turn into it in random alchemy - but it’s not much use anymore except for on-the-go dilution.
Not specified whether you could pray to get a stack of oil potions on an altar blessed, or whether this wouldn’t work.
Add a quiver item, which is a lightweight container which can only store projectiles. The first projectile item placed inside determines what projectile is valid to put in after it (i.e. you cannot put arrows into a quiver followed by rocks for a sling). However, you can either empty the quiver, or put different types of projectiles into other ones. They can also hold stackable throwing weapons like darts or spears.
You can put a quiver in your quiver slot, and then using the #fire command will shoot ammo from the quiver in first-in-last-out order.
Allow the player to configure what warning level a given monster species will show up as. If they’re terrified of floating eyes, allow them to be warned of them as 5s on the map.
This has the disadvantage that the player can manipulate it to get warning of a few limited sets of monsters, giving them extra information about the identity of the monster they cannot yet see. In the worst case, if these values are allowed to change after the start of the game, a player could reassign warning numbers until a particular monster changes to find out what it is.
A new artifact weapon (possibly wielded by a demon lord) that causes you to drop items when it hits you. Possibly it can even knock a couple items out of bags from time to time.
An artifact weapon (possibly wielded by a demon lord) that drains a charge from every chargeable item in your inventory when it hits you.
Rather than giving each demon lord a fixed weapon with a fixed set of artifact effects or object property, create a set of powerful weapons that each demon lord randomly gets one from when they generate.
This might not apply if a demon lord has a strong lore reason for a specific weapon, such as Yeenoghu wielding a flail.
When you wish for anything made of dragonhide, there is a chance that an incensed Tiamat shows up to kill you over it. The more things you wish for that are dragonhide, the higher the odds of this happening.
A new magical gray stone provisionally called a “curse-eater”. If you are carrying one in your main inventory, every time you are hit with a curse items effect, the gray stone absorbs the curse instead and loses one level of beatitude. If it absorbs a curse while already cursed, it crumbles.
Carrying multiple stones will make a curse items effect hit only one of the stones, chosen randomly.
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.
Certain deaths (i.e. most HP deaths, but not things like disintegration or sliming) should let you scrawl a bit of player-chosen text in the dirt with your finger which persists in the bones file. This engraving is of blood if your current form has blood, and dust otherwise.
This is slightly technically complicated because the bones file gravestone also stores an engraving and there cannot be two engravings on one space; one solution is to engrave the message on an adjacent square.
There should be a way to remove confusion from pets. One simple way to accomplish this would be giving you a way to directly feed a lizard corpse to your pet, by making pets prioritize eating a lizard corpse when confused. Though this would not work for herbivorous or inediate pets.
A pet dog named Huan will one-hit kill any lycanthrope, as a reference to the dog of the same name in The Silmarillion.
Artifact sapphire Ice-9. When it is dropped into water, it freezes the square and all adjacent squares into ice, and remains on top of the new ice.
When you read a scroll of fire inside an engulfing monster, the fire explosion hits it 8 or 9 times instead of just once.
In variants where your god can gift non-artifact items: Track which items have been gifted, and never gift “duplicates” - e.g. don’t gift a suit of armor if one has already been gifted in the current game, or a second battle-axe.
It is possible to leave bones on Astral. If this happens, instead of a ghost, there will be a fourth resurrecting Rider, War, with all the equipment of the dead player, 100% of it cursed.
Make it possible to define a “retreat point”, or a set of retreat points, for a warping boss monster. They will warp to that point to retreat, rather than always picking the upstairs. Possibly, if they have multiple retreat points, they will only ever use the first one they randomly select.
A new object or, more likely, an artifact which is a ring of enlightenment. Wearing it increases Intelligence and Wisdom by 1. Additionally, when you perform the #attributes command, you are shown your fire, cold, shock, poison, and sleep resistance statuses. Possibly it can be invoked for full enlightenment.
Some mechanism, maybe a new object that you can place on the ground or a spell you can cast, that drives peaceful and tame monsters several spaces away from you.
Track the total number of potions, scrolls, wands etc generated over the game’s lifespan and report that number at the end of the game and/or in the dumplog. Or to go even more in depth, track the number of each individual object type generated.
You can apply Ogresmasher to an adjacent vacant space to smash it into the ground and create a pit there. This burns excess nutrition approximately in line with jumping.
If there’s a monster on the targeted square, this just attacks it normally.
New artifact Apiarist’s Veil, a cloth hat, perhaps an elven helm or fedora, that gives warning of all insects and pacifies nearby bees.
New artifact Regicider (or Regicide, Usurper or Royalbane): a sword of some type that isn’t already overrepresented in artifacts that has bonuses and warns to monsters with the M2_LORD and/or M2_PRINCE flags. Maybe it would also work on demon lords, depending on if they are considered nobility, or just overlords.
On a somewhat sillier note its attributes could also extend to queen bees and also have some ability to detect royal jelly on the map (invoke effect?)
The hero gains levels twice as fast, for instance by putting a new level cutoff between each existing set of cutoffs (10 for level 1’s 0 to 20, 30 for level 2’s 20 to 40, etc). However, the player must choose with each level gained whether to take most of the effects of gaining an experience level - HP and Pw increases, etc, but NOT a skill slot - or a new skill slot.
The blessed effect of the scroll of amnesia allows you to choose the skills (and spells?) you want to forget, which allows you to reskill more efficiently.
Possibly only do this if your Intelligence is sufficiently high.
A fake Fire Brand artifact, which looks and acts like Fire Brand but burns out in a couple thousand turns and thereafter works like a regular sword. It could be generated with gnome royalty in the Mines.
Ghosts (and technically other player remnant monsters such as wraiths, ghouls, etc) found in bones levels are empowered with additional abilities that normal monsters don’t have.
Dowsing rod, an item that you can engrave the name of an item on. Assuming the engraved name is a real object, it glows when one of those objects is on the same level as you, getting brighter the closer you are to it. (It doesn’t actually emit light on the map.)
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.)
When you attempt to polymorph an item that has polymorph magic (wand/spell/potion of polymorph, tin of meat that may cause a polymorph when eaten, etc) it explodes and creates one or more monsters affiliated with polymorph magic, such as polymorph vortices (see YANI #3669), genetic engineers, or similar.
Polymorph vortices, a monster which has a passive polymorph attack (i.e. hitting it in melee polymorphs the attacker; hitting it with missiles polymorphs the missiles) and once per turn polymorphs either one random item from its inventory, a monster it has engulfed, or a random item from that monster’s inventory. Player-style magic resistance prevents the effects to a creature or its possessions that would otherwise be affected.
The player is able to do some sort of ritual that involves sacrificing 25,000 gold pieces to open a portal to Fort Ludios if one has not already been generated. Possibly this would have to be done in a vault. If a naturally generated portal does already exist, the gold is still expended but the attempt to make another one fails.
Add a “purple crayon” tool, which is used by engraving on the floor with it. If you engrave the name of a monster species, a single monster of that species is created, possibly ignoring reverse-genocide restrictions. This is a reference to the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon.
A cursed magic lamp may generate a demon lord (possibly pacified) instead of a djinni when rubbed. Possibly you could read the lamp to see the name of the demon lord it contains.
Any item can be dipped into a potion of levitation to permanently reduce its weight by 20%. This uses up the potion, and it will only affect the item’s base weight, not the weight of any contents (i.e. a bag of holding thus dipped will weigh 12 + contents instead of 15 + contents).
Randomize the set of “critical” extrinsics and the base items that provide them in each game. I.e. instead of every game having a cloak of magic resistance, ring of free action, and amulet of reflection, the game could have a ring of reflection, a cloak of free action and an amulet of magic resistance.
An artifact cloak (the base type is unspecified, likely a normal nonmagic cloak) that you can apply towards an adjacent monster. If that monster has less HP than your current experience level, it dies and is consumed by the cloak, which can grant the cloak extrinsics it confers to the wearer. Every additional extrinsic added may remove out one or more existing extrinsics on the cloak.
Not specified whether you need to take the cloak off to apply it at things.
Vortex monsters can occasionally suck you a square in their direction when they’re not next to you, which can of course pull you onto dangerous terrain or a trap.
Balrogs could also do this if wielding a whip, at a closer range.
A monster passive ability (possibly for shambling horrors or beholders) that unmaps its surrounding. This would be most useful when the monster also has something that incentivizes blinding yourself when near it, such as gaze attacks.
However, this can be negated by player note-taking of the map before the monster wipes it, so care should be taken not to make that worth doing.
A cursed scroll of fire should create a pool of lava underneath your feet. Possibly only in certain circumstances like with negative Luck.
The game should store the reason for your first alignment violation, so that when your quest leader tells you that you are not worthy to keep the quest artifact they can give a reason for it.
Add a side branch that can only be entered by dying in a certain place such as the Valley of the Dead, or by life saving not working. When you die, you appear there with no inventory and have to fight your way out to return to your body. Monsters are also subject to this and appear in that branch after dying to the same conditions. However, it only works once - if you die again you die for good, even if you successfully got back to your body in the process.
A horseshoe item that can be equipped on any equine creature (including player centaurs), in the boots slot. Horseshoes could deal a small amount of additional damage in kick attacks, and also deal damage based on their material, e.g. silver damage to silver-haters if the shoes are silver.
New erosion type “moldy”, which can be dealt to inventory items (or possibly only weapons) when meleeing fungi. The mold does not appear instantly and maybe does not even provoke a message when it appears. It does not have multiple erosion levels, only the one “moldy”, but at certain intervals of about a couple hundred turns, moldy items in main inventory or carried containers have a chance of turning another erodable item moldy as well.
It can be fixed by either standard methods of erosion removal, being subject to fire damage, or possibly by smashing a potion of booze on oneself.
Artifact pear that gives you +2 current and maximum Charisma when eaten.
Artifact whose main purpose is to soak up water and apply it to other things. It removes a pool or moat square or dries up a fountain when applied to one (moats may refill), gaining a charge each time. You can apply it to spend a charge blanking a scroll, erasing an engraving (any type, not just dust), cleaning your face or hands, and extinguish fiery monsters such as a flaming sphere (possibly instakilling them).
The initial idea was to create a “sponge” object as the base item type, but since it’s undesirable to make a new object just to be the base of an artifact, it could instead either be a “spongestone” gem, or just an artifact towel, since towels can already soak up water. (If implemented as a towel, the towel would only gain one charge of wetness when immersed in water, and could attempt to dry up that square immediately.)
A new magical candle object. Zombie corpses within its light radius will not revive.
Ring of opening, which unlocks locked doors and boxes instantly while you are wearing it and try to unlock them. If blessed, it additionally untraps doors and boxes when you try to interact with them, but there is a fixed chance it unblesses in the process every time it untraps something.
“Unstealable” object property, which makes an item with that property incapable of being stolen.
Object properties, one per spell school, which each give you a casting boost in their spell school when the item is equipped (it only generates on equippable items). Should be rare compared to other object properties, and unwishable.
Bag of homogenization, a magical bag that will convert the material of items placed into it to match the material of a stack of the same object type in the bag, if one exists, so that they can stack together. If this is unbalanced, or it’s desired to make it facilitate stacking even more, it can also remove enchantment and fooproofing from the items placed into it.
Chatting with peacefuls with high Charisma can get them to tell you about what they’re carrying. The stated goal of this is so that the player can learn whether it’d be worth murdering them for their gear.
If you are a Ranger, your pets will specifically seek out missiles you have thrown which are lying on the floor, pick them up (perhaps even collecting multiple ones at a time) and bring them back to your side.
The ring of warning, and only that, should indicate the exact amount of turns you have left to live when afflicted by a timed instadeath such as sliming, stoning, or strangulation. (And drowning and other forms of suffocation in variants that have that.) This feedback is conveyed by the ring vibrating that number of times, e.g. “Your [ring] vibrates twice.” Possibly it should only happen when the amount of turns to live is low because it doesn’t make that much sense for it to vibrate 20 times in one turn and have the hero count that accurately.
A monster (imagined exclusively as a pet) that acts like your shadow in lit places, always being right next to you and possibly dying if it can’t be next to you, but if you’re in a dark area it is free to wander off.
Eating the brains of a spellcasting monster should restore some magic energy, and perhaps even have a chance of learning a spell from its brain. (This latter part would work better in variants such as FIQHack where monsters have a list of player spells).
Spectres should have some method of stealing your spell knowledge, then gaining the ability to cast those spells themselves.
Shambling mounds, a cousin of the shambling horror. Inspired by D&D shambling mounds, but with the key non-D&D characteristic of having a single shambling-horror-like randomized attack. Compared to shambling horrors, they are weaker and appear earlier in the game.
Shallow water shouldn’t be a free and easy method of diluting potions infinitely. Instead, it should have a chance of contaminating or polluting the potion (or turning it to a potion of sickness), where polluted potions can’t just be re-dipped to dilute them to water or cancelled back to water. Or instead of dealing with polluted potions, just have a chance of losing the potion entirely.
There is some ritual you can do that allows you to manually create the portal to Fort Ludios. It requires the sacrifice of at least 10000 zorkmids, possibly some special item that is only generated somewhere below Medusa, and that you be in a vault. If the portal to Ludios already generated, this will always fail (it won’t make a second portal).
You can apply various rings to a wand of nothing to turn it into a wand of something related to the ring (e.g. polymorph ring makes a polymorph wand, increase damage becomes striking, see invisible becomes secret door detection, etc). Or instead of the ring identity, make it so that the wand becomes the corresponding material of the ring, e.g. a steel ring will produce a gold wand.
This gives a message, “As you thread the ring onto the [foo wand] it seems to twist in on itself. You now hold a [bar wand] in your hands.”
Possibly it should also work on any cancelled wand, in addition to nothing wands, which are rare and not always identified.
You can apply a scroll of fire to a greased item to ungrease it. This consumes the scroll.
You can apply a scroll of amnesia to an item to unidentify that one item. This consumes the scroll.
Tins dropped by / generated with hobbits are biased towards high-nutrition preparation methods. Additionally, there can be some high-nutrition preparation methods which only appear on hobbit tins: “wild mushroom foo”, “second breakfast of foo”, “foo for elevenses”, “luncheon foo”, “foo tart”, “foo porridge”, “foo stew”. If hobbit is a playable race, they are capable of making these tins with a tinning kit in addition to the regular “homemade”. And possibly an artifact tinning kit that allows anyone to produce hobbit-style tins.
Monsters can zap wands of opening at you, which causes items to randomly fall out of containers you are carrying. (For symmetry, the hero should probably be able to do the same to monsters that are carrying containers.)
If Frost Brand falls onto lava, it instafreezes the lava rather than sinking into it.
Artifact key that creates a door in a wall wherever it’s applied. (Unless the wall is nondiggable?)
Chlorate candles, which appear rarely. They provide immunity to gas clouds when carried, and stay lit when the hero is engulfed.
Artifact blindfold Mask of Hypnos: provides sleep resistance and detection of sleeping monsters when worn, and can be invoked for a sleep ray.
You can use a forge to combine elemental wands with weapons, destroying the wand and conferring an object property of cold, fire, or shock on the weapon.
If you fall through a hole or trap door onto a level, and there is a trapper or lurker above in the area you are eligible to arrive in (because some levels constrain the region you can arrive in), you automatically land on its space and get instantly engulfed by it (with a message stating as much). This is because the monster was lurking by the shaft in order to catch easy prey.
Artifact wooden flute that makes humanoid monsters within range begin doing a multi-step dance when they hear it; they can’t escape from the dancing until it finishes, they are unable to take their next step (bad terrain, a trap they know about, etc) or they are hit by something.
Artifact tinning kit that makes special tins out of corpses; the tins when eaten polymorph you into that monster.
Ogresmasher can knock back (possibly entire groups of) small monsters it hits.
Artifact can of grease, the power of which is to grease your entire open inventory when applied (consuming a charge like normal), in zero turns. Or for a slightly less greasy effect, allow the player to pick any subset of their inventory they want to grease in one go.
Rather than having fixed rings and amulets in the game, randomly shuffle the properties conferred by them in one big pool at the start of the game. Opening up all sorts of possibilities such as a ring versus poison, a ring of reflection, an amulet of conflict, an amulet of adornment, etc.
Add paraelemental planes to the ascension run, placed before or after their corresponding elemental plane:
Either a random one of these planes would be inserted along with the four regular planes, or they would all be inserted but there would be mini-quests or objectives in the Mazes of Menace that when completed would prevent those planes from generating or skip over them.
Add a shadow monster, which is always next to you if you are on a lit square, including in walls (via limited phasing that allows it to be on wall spaces adjoining a walkable space but not on spaces not next to a walkable space). It is forced to the opposite side of you from nearby light sources. If you’re in a dark area, it will wander away, but it will immediately return to your side when you reenter a lit area.
Eating artifacts lowers the game’s generated artifact count by 1 per artifact eaten, so that you can wish for more artifacts successfully.
Applying a stethoscope to a monster that has a rusting or corroding passive attack erodes it appropriately.
A moist towel in your inventory prevents scrolls from being burnt up.
When a giant deals you a crushing blow and knocks you back, it can propel you into water you are flying or levitating over, wetting your inventory.
When you enter Gehennom, the Sanctum is right there as one of the first couple of levels. But entering it transforms all the existing dungeon levels irreversibly into Gehennom levels, including demon lord lairs and the like. Everything in the Dungeons of Doom will be lost, and the player now has to work their way through the rest of Gehennom with the Amulet to enter the Planes.
Alternatively, and perhaps more straightforwardly, destroy the Dungeons of Doom when the player goes beneath the Valley of the Dead, and just have them enter the Planes directly from the Sanctum.
A flask item that you can dip into a potion to fill it with that potion, protecting it from fire and cold damage while still allowing you to drink it at a moment’s notice. When you drink from it, it becomes empty and can be reused with more potions. It could be either in the tool object class or the potion object class.
If you are sufficiently skilled at a ranged weapon you are using (perhaps only Expert, possibly Skilled some of the time), you can shoot at non-tame monsters behind your pets and the ranged attack will pass through your pets’ squares silently without hitting them. (If there is no apparent non-tame monster behind the pets, it could either be assumed that you’re trying to hit the pets so the attack would hit them, or more generously it would just continue to pass through them.)
A certain type of chest (not a new object, just a specially flagged chest) that is magically protected; it cannot be opened, unlocked, be forced open, or destroyed until a certain monster on the level is either killed or leaves the level. Once it’s gone, the chest opens normally.
Some method by which you can capture a djinni into a smoky potion or oil lamp (which in the latter case makes it a magic lamp). It should be non-trivial or somehow costly to do (the original idea just suggested applying the object in their direction, which is abusable). If feasible, the djinni should be angry and disinclined to grant a wish when it’s released.
Also, the game doesn’t track whether a given smoky potion contains a djinni (it would mess with stacking), so this would be tricky to implement internally for smoky potions.
You should be informed during the end-of-game summary when and how any wands of wishing that you never touched (as defined by whether they have an invlet set) were destroyed.
You can use booze potions to clean off your wounds, helping you recover faster. Poison wounds, specifically, though this is debatable because 1) the game doesn’t track wounds you got from poison and 2) alcohol can help treat infections, whereas poison isn’t an infection.
Healers should probably be able to do this more successfully than other roles.
Gold dragon armor’s light radius is increased by 1 if its enchantment is above some amount such as +5.
A magical bag which only holds gold and gems, but any gold and gems inside it don’t weigh anything.
A cursed bag of tricks can be applied at monsters to eat them up, which will add one charge to the bag. (The existing behavior of applying a cursed bag of tricks producing a monster like normal is suppressed.)
You can apply a cursed bag of holding (or possibly empty bag of tricks) at a ghost to capture a ghost, which can then be used to recharge a wand of undead turning.
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.
