Add a system for casting ritual spells: more powerful and more expensive spells which have some esoteric effects you can’t get otherwise. The main differences between ritual and normal spellcasting are that they consume valuable, hopefully non-renewable components, take a number of turns to cast instead of taking effect instantly, and may require you to be in or set up certain circumstances.

Various ritual spells that have been proposed:

• Ball spells which consume a gem as focus and create a ball of elemental power that hits surrounding squares but not you. (Long casting times would probably make rituals infeasible for combat though.)
• Temporarily increase your carry cap by a great amount. (Other new intrinsics as required.)
• Resurrect a corpse as a tame monster (necromancy).
• Grant temporary intrinsic life saving.
• Single controlled polymorph with a greatly increased duration.
• Summon a demon, demon lord, or demon prince. Requires 5 cursed candles and a marker (to draw the classic pentagram). If summoning a named demon lord, it’s either random or there’s some expensive way to control who shows up. The demon lord could be peaceful, but with current behavior this is useless. Possibly summoning them allows you to make a pact with them.
• Remove the graveyard status from a level (would need to be expensive, and perhaps involve the Book of the Dead, and multiple different headstones).
• Grow a tree. This consumes at least a piece of fruit. For anti-farming the tree should probably not produce fruit or bees when kicked.
• Create a portal between two levels of your choice (doesn’t work with the Amulet obviously, but otherwise works)
• Create an artifact (that is, you somehow imbue an item with properties it can’t normally get).
• Bless items. Consumes a blessed scroll of remove curse.
• Genocide a genocidable monster. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other costly things.
• Reverse genocide a monster. The monster may or may not have to be normally reverse-genocidable. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other moderately expensive things.
• Charge something. Requires a rare ingredient - perhaps a dilithium crystal.
• Summon tame elemental(s). Among other things, ingredients include: a potion of water, any beatitude (water); a rock (earth); lit candles, a lit oil lamp, or a lit potion of oil (fire); an amulet of magical breathing (air).
• Create a magic lamp. Needs an oil lamp (of course) and a figurine or mask of a djinni (or possibly a nearby live djinni).
• Make the current level non-teleport. Requires a scroll of teleportation and that the caster be standing on an anti-magic field at (?) either the start or the end of the ritual.
• Create a fountain. Requires a statue of a medium-sized or larger monster, which gets destroyed (by turning it into the centerpiece of the fountain). There may be potential for wishing abuse; perhaps the fountain should be flagged so that it can’t produce a wish-granting water demon.
• Turn a regular knife into an athame. Components include other bladed weapons with positive enchantments adding up to 20 or something; all of these charges will be drained to +0 in the creation of the athame. The resulting athame is +0, regardless of the charges on the component weapons or original knife.
• Create a tame golem or golems. Requires a large amount of total weight of objects made out of the golem’s material.
• Summon a coaligned angel or other minion of your deity as a pet.
• Create a tame wood nymph from a tree (only once per tree).

Ritual spells come in spellbooks like usual, but aren’t stored in your spell list. Instead, reading the spellbook prompts you if you want to begin its ritual and tells you the necessary ingredients and circumstances you need to satisfy as preconditions. If you meet all the conditions and answer yes, you initiate the ritual. (For simplicity, this should probably burn up / expend all the components instantly.) You cannot begin a ritual while in the process of casting another ritual; this should probably be implemented as a precondition.

Apart from the component cost, rituals act as a constant drain on your Pw until the ritual is complete. If something distracts you in the middle of the ritual, you can go take care of it and then resume the ritual as long as you have the Pw left to finish it. (You could also drink gain energy during the ritual.) The only way for a ritual to fail, possibly backfiring with bad effects, is for you to run out of Pw while it is incomplete.

In addition to its preconditions, each ritual also has some postconditions: common to all rituals is that you have been casting the ritual for at least some length of time, but there may be others, such as standing on the square where you began the ritual, or have another item, or kill a monster, or something. There may also be other conditions such as “moving off the space where the ritual started breaks and halts the ritual”.

Every time you stop casting a ritual (whether it succeeded or failed), it increments the spellbook’s spestudied field; the book will eventually disintegrate after casting it a certain number of times.

Instead of making all trapped doors explode and stun the player, add more varied door traps. The trap should be determined based on depth. It should also be selected deterministically based on the coordinates of the door (a convenience so that a trapped door will always have the same trap effect without having to store which trap it is.)

Additionally, new traps can also be used with more door states, rather than have all traps trigger by trying to open the door. Nondestructive traps could also remain on the door until the door is untrapped, rather than vanishing.

An interesting addition would be if doors were made restrictedly or completely untrappable, in order to prevent optimal strategy from being attempting to untrap every door that the player comes across. Or possibly an attempt to open or close a door should do a cursory trap check.

List of door traps in rough order of minimum depth necessary to generate them:

• The hinges screech loudly when opened or closed, waking nearby monsters.
• Door closes and locks itself.
• Electric shock from the knob, dealing 1d(DL*2) damage, that doesn’t destroy items.
• Bucket of water falls on your head and causes water damage to several items in inventory.
• Your hand is stuck to the knob, causing you to be unable to move for the next few turns.
• Hingeless door: either falls on top of you and deals 1d(DL/2) damage, or (more likely) falls the other way and you fall over on top of it. Either way, you are stunned for a few turns. The door becomes “broken”.
• A boxing glove swings out from behind the door and punches you, dealing damage and causing you to stagger/hurtle back a few steps.
• Object falls out of the ceiling on the player’s head (copying an ADOM trap).
• Knob burns your hand for 1d(DL) damage and causes you to drop your weapon. Gloves reduce damage and prevent the drop.
• Door that explodes in a fireball: possibly no stunning, but burns inventory as it does in GruntHack.

Monsters that exist in groups are currently completely individualistic and try nothing more complex than charging towards the player and hitting in melee once they get there. This makes it easy for the player to cheese what would otherwise be tough battles, e.g. by standing in a doorway and killing them one by one, or by kiting them. There are some proposals for smarter AI:

• If a single monster in a group is next to the player, try to pull back until allies can get next to the player.
• Avoid doorways and narrow corridors; if you are in an open space, stay there unless you decide to move to another open space, and hang back from the doorway where the hero is, forcing them to enter the room in order to pass.
• Groups of intelligent monsters also try to stay out of the way of ranged fire if possible.
• If the current strategy is to defend a certain area, form ranks to block the player from reaching it.
• Pincer maneuvers; some monsters of a group will split up and try to get behind the hero or attack from another side. If the pincering group hasn’t gotten in position yet, the other group will fall back until they catch up.
• Wolf pack: the monster of the class with the highest level, or failing that the highest max HP, “leads” the pack, and all other members key in on this leader and follow it. This means if you get the leader to flee, the rest of the pack will flee as well.
• The Yendorian Army can form a phalanx, which is an ordered rectangle of soldiers. Will stick to wide open areas, try to stay out of the range of ranged attacks until they can swarm around you. Enemies forming a phalanx could receive to-hit and AC boosts.

Add a Craftsmen’s Guild to the game, as a method of advanced crafting (unlike the player’s simplified crafting such as alchemy crafting potions into other potions, or combining a blank scroll with a magic marker to make magic scrolls). The guild either has its own dedicated special level, or occupies part of a preexisting special level.

• The guild is populated with master craftsmen who work on the principle of “valuable junk items + very large sums of gold = desirable items”. They can also do some things available to the player, like increasing weapon enchantment, without needing the specific consumables needed for the player to do it.
• Would serve as a replacement or stand-in for the black market. Resolves some of the problems with balancing black market shopkeepers: if you kill the black market staff, you can have every item in the market, so black market staff must be insanely powerful. If you kill a master craftsman, however, you don’t get anything of value. Therefore, master craftsmen don’t have to be insanely powerful, or even good fighters.
• Not as good as wishes; there are some things they cannot make for you, like magic lamps, and many magical tools. You cannot specify enchantment or blessing either. For items for which enchantment doesn’t matter, the material cost will be higher.
• The interface works by #chatting to them. They will ask you what you want to create, and you enter it (using the wish parser logic to extract the proper object class), and then they will tell you the items and gold they will need for it. These could either be randomized or use certain fixed ingredients with some randomization or use completely fixed recipes; if randomized it will be deterministic for that item for that craftsman in that game. You are then prompted to select the items from your inventory.
• For gold and other balance reasons, this would probably work better the farther it is into the game; maybe it could even be found deep into Gehennom. Maybe you even have to liberate it from a demon lord.
• Craftsmen might include:
  • Metalworkers (see below)
  • Wandmakers (produce wands)
  • Scribes (produce scrolls and spellbooks)
  • Alchemists (produce potions)
  • Toolsmiths (produce mundane and some magical tools)
  • Jewelers (produce rings and amulets)
  • Sculptor (produce statues and figurines)
  • Leatherworkers (produce leather items and saddles)
  • Chefs (produce food)
  • Arcanologists (transfer charges/enchantments from one item into another, consumes only gold and not items)

Metalworker notes

Metalworkers are probably the most important sort of craftsman for many characters. There could be multiple types, each specializing in one type of metal, or just one type that does everything.

• Silvering items (or gilding, or copper-coating) should require you to use up junk silver items equal to some amount of weight proportional to the weight of the new item. The zorkmid cost of silvering should be very high.
• A forge room type (probably containing lava and maybe some junk items like iron chains) could be added which has one or more smiths in it (silversmiths, goldsmiths, blacksmiths).
  • Goldsmiths seem rather pointless right now, since there is only one gold item (the ring). They would be more useful if gold equipment existed and conferred some benefit.
  • Blacksmiths don’t have much to do as far as turning items into iron goes, but they could produce iron weapons of a type the player wants, or repair and improve iron weapons and armor (increasing its enchantment).

Having an Elbereth square fade under you in 3.6.1+ makes the square permanently unengravable.

Various ideas to prevent powerful bones generated on a level’s upstairs from instakilling a player:

• Don’t generate bones if the player died on the upstairs.
• Going downstairs doesn’t use a turn, but going up does.
• When saving the bones, set all monsters’ movement points to 0.
• If the player died on the upstairs, swap the upstairs and downstairs locations.
• A way to “peek” up or down the stairs without going there.

Clubs may stun monsters that they hit. Perhaps the chance increases with skill, such as 0% unskilled, 10% basic, 20% skilled, 40% expert.

Ring or amulet that causes your spellcasting to draw on HP instead of Pw, possibly only when your Pw is zero, or possibly not requiring a ring. Each point of HP is worth 2 Pw points. If cursed, doubles spell Pw costs. If blessed, energy regeneration will regenerate HP until full before regenerating Pw. Casting from HP too much may decrease your HP maximum. If implemented as an artifact, possibly flavor it as an evil counterpart of the Eye of the Aethiopica.

Note that a couple variants have implemented this as a “ring of blood magic” or similar items.

Wraith corpses cannot give food poisoning, though they can still rot away.

Saltwater or murky water, intended as a nerf for “just dilute most potions”:

• Potions of saltwater behave exactly like potions of water, except that they cannot be used to bless or curse things. Holy (and unholy) water must be pure.
• All in-game sources of water except for magic fountains (possibly regular fountains as well, but they might be too plentiful) are saltwater. Diluting potions in them will yield only potions of saltwater.
• Can also get pure water if a unicorn horn dip would already result in water.
• Not specified what cancelling potions should do. Possibly most potions just cancel to saltwater, juice or sickness. It’s weird because flavor-wise it shouldn’t produce anything but pure water, but it obviously won’t fix the current problem if you merely have to cancel potions instead of diluting them.
• If called murky water instead of saltwater, the “murky” randomized potion appearance should change.

Alternatively, don’t actually make saltwater a separate potion; just use saltwater as a flavor reason for why the player can’t intentionally dilute potions to water. (Can use a separate flavor argument, that potions are generally corked while not used, to explain away the lack of dilution for water damage.) Also, make most potions cancel into non-water base potions (such as confusion and hallucination to booze), with the notable exception of polymorph. It’s also harder or impossible to get water from random alchemy or polymorph.

A third option is naming blessing-capable potions “purified water” and leaving the mundane potion of water as it is. Things such as unicorn horns can neutralize toxins but can’t actually remove them, so the resulting water isn’t purified.

You can engrave on walls or doors. Elbereth on walls or doors doesn’t work. You can read it by standing on the nearest space. Random graffiti, if it generates on a floor square next to a wall or door, may say “Something is written on the wall here.” instead of the floor. Graffiti could render as ~ or something similar.

Resolve the problem of having to double-enchant launchers and ammo and get double bonuses in one of two ways:

1. Make the double bonuses at higher cost a feature of ammo-based fighting. You can now enchant rocks and flint stones, though all randomly generated ones must be +0.
2. Make ammunition unenchantable (but still fooproofable), and the launcher enchantment affects to-hit and damage bonuses like normal. This is good because it means that ammo stack management is less annoying.

Challenge rooms that occasionally get embedded into Gehennom levels. They are sealed off somehow, perhaps with solid stone you need to dig through to enter. They are not intended to be required, and contain some sort of reward. Rooms might include:

• Demon den: one or more demons guarding some gold and gems. (In a cavernous Gehennom, we can expect that most of the mineral wealth has already been mined out by millennia of demon activity.)
• Seminary of Moloch: contains an altar to Moloch, one peaceful priest of Moloch, and multiple hostile priests of Moloch.
• Fake wizard towers: the standard 7x7 footprint consisting of moat and tower, with an amulet in the center of the tower (possibly EPI: this could be a fake Amulet of Yendor), and a few monsters inside the tower. The flavor basis for these is that they are the Wizard’s earlier settlements.
• Hostage room: contains a lot of monsters guarding a prisoner or player monster hostage. The reward here might be that the monster auto-tames when freed.

Make monster sleep work more like player sleep, where being attacked / taking damage is quite likely to end the sleep. Then sleep is not basically a duplicate of paralysis.

Jumping either acts on a timeout and can’t be done right after a previous jump, or else it takes a full turn’s worth of movement points (more so than the existing mechanic of reducing movement points to 0).

As part of artifact rebalance: guaranteed sacrifice gifts should probably not be ascension kit quality gear, since otherwise sacrificing for such gear becomes a dominant strategy. (Most important for weapons; you don’t want to be able to obtain a weapon early that will obsolete all other weapons in the game.)

Revamp Astral so that the challenges to player mobility, options, and time don’t all depend on being crammed in by monsters. One idea is to have spellcasters that summon force fields / temporary walls to block your progress.

Convert some of the Gehennom filler levels into ADOM-like greater vaults that contain many challenging monsters and an artifact.

Single-level branches whose portals, found in vaults, disappear after one use; they are subdivisions of the Magic Memory Vault, and modeled after ADOM “vaults”. These are basically challenge levels, smaller and less rewarding than Fort Ludios (the master branch), that contain some nice loot and harder-than-usual monsters. Portals to them can also be found in vaults in Gehennom.

Luck ideas:

• Luckstones don’t remove luck timeout, they merely extend it.
• Luck is much less controllable, impossible to get any clues about except through enlightenment, and various random events (like what?) can give or remove luck. A skilled player would know how to bias the odds towards luck-increasing events. Controllable sources of gaining luck like sacrifice and throwing gems at unicorns are removed. It no longer times out.
• The luck timeout rate is less predictable, and a luckstone will help but it might still time out quickly if the RNG hates you.
• The base number that luck times out to is equal to the total number of luckstones in your inventory (so carrying 2 noncursed luckstones means luck times out to +2). Luckstones’ weight is increased.
• Remove luckstones in favor of an amulet of luck. Luck timeout can no longer be slotless.
• Luck times out at a rate of 1 point per (600*(number of luckitems + 1)) turns.
• Do away with luck timeout entirely in order to make it impossible to micromanage luck. Luck is now conferred entirely by luckitems. The problem with this approach is that NetHack has about two ways to gain timing-out luck and many, many ways to lose it.
• Luck can be gained by enchanting luckstones.
• Different types of luckitems which stack with other luckitems but not with each other, like a four-leaf clover you can get from leprechauns.

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.

The Heart of Ahriman returns to your quiver when slung. Or at least add some returning sling-ammo artifact.

Rebalance Fort Ludios so that it can realistically only be completed after finishing the Castle. One way to do this is to make soldier AI better, another way is to put the entry and exit portals on opposite sides of the level (or put the exit portal inside the fort), so the player can’t return to the Dungeons of Doom when things get hairy. The goal of doing this is to delay a large power spike due to collecting all of its gold until the player is truly ready for it.

The Oracle sells type-identification of any one carried item for a fee.

Make being on fire a status effect, which deals damage over time. (Other obvious things to make into damage-over-time effects: poison, bleeding/internal damage.)

Valkyries only gain wings (and therefore flying) after they are crowned.

“streak_mode” option. Only allows one saved game at a time.

The Oracle has the same item as the prize in Sokoban, so you can pay her to tell you what the prize is (because she’ll have it with her). This opens up a strategic choice where players can decide whether to kill her and skip Sokoban, or not. She will need to be quite stronger than her current abilities are, with passive attacks that work even at range. Alternatively, she could carry the other Sokoban item, depending on how formidable she is.

The Oracle now prompts the user to ask a question. Her oracularities now have associated keywords (a many-to-many relationship); if you use keywords, she will select an oracularity matching as many of them as possible. If she doesn’t know what you’re asking about, she gives you a random oracle (with a slightly different message to rationalize why she’s going off topic). This could even be leveraged to ask about information that’s normally hidden from the player; for example, asking about the Sokoban reward or the location of branch stairs.

Yendorian Army units surrounded by fellow army units have higher AC, to-hit, and damage.

Make the Castle barracks have second doors that open onto the courtyard.

Remove the [yn] prompt for both looting and untrapping. Also maybe streamline the “You carefully open the box… –More–”