Artifact helm of telepathy, neutral aligned, that either enhances or blocks telepathy level-wide based on whether you have it from some source other than the helm (or alternatively, it’s not a helm of telepathy, and just bases things on whether you are telepathic), and grants a Charisma-based bonus to your armor class.

If you do have telepathy, all other monsters get telepathy too and you can sense them, and they will be affected by telepathy-targeting effects, including yours if you have any psionic abilities.

If you don’t have telepathy, all other monsters will be treated as if they are not telepathic, even if they are; they will also be blocked from using any mind blasts or other psychic powers.

Eating a mummy corpse that gives deadly illness uses a different message than other too-old corpses, about it being contaminated with toxic embalming fluids.

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

Parrying Dagger, an artifact dagger which when wielded may automatically counterattack an incoming melee weapon attack, deflecting it so it doesn’t hit and making an attack with itself that does sneak attack damage.

When monks are weak from hunger, they don’t lose any Strength, due to being experienced with fasting.

In variants with percentage-based intrinsics, see invisible is no longer a binary attribute. Eating invisible stalkers now gives you various percentages of the intrinsic. While extrinsic see invisible still works like it does now, allowing you to see any invisible monster in line of sight, intrinsic see invisible shows you invisible monsters in line of sight within a certain radius from you. The radius increases with the percentage, possibly the square root of the percentage (so 64% see invisible is a radius of 8, and 100% is a radius of 10 - note that 100% still is less powerful than extrinsic see invisible’s unlimited range).

In variants with percentage intrinsics, intrinsics granted by one’s role need not be binary. For instance, monks tend to gain a lot of elemental resistances by leveling up, so rather than having those be all-or-nothing cutoffs at fixed levels, spread it out so that they gain a decent percentage of the resistance with each level near the original cutoff.

This would complicate the enlightenment display, since now it would have to disclose something like “You have 76% fire resistance: 45% from corpses and 31% from your priest levels”.

A SpliceHack spell to make splatters of blood have a use case. It causes blood splatters in a area scaling from 3x3 to 7x7 around the caster (depending on skill) explode, dealing physical damage to things caught in the explosions. Blood splatters on the floor are cleared, and new blood being caused by something dying might be suppressed if it becomes too easy to repeatedly cast this for lots of explosions.

As proposed, this would be a level 5 attack or matter spell.

An artifact mask Mask of Many Faces, neutrally aligned. When invoked, you are prompted to target an adjacent creature. If that creature fails a monster magic resistance check, or a d(its maxHP) roll is lower than its current HP, it is instantly killed, dropping its possessions but no corpse or other special drops, and the mask changes to that creature’s form.

Subsequently donning the mask, or having it worn when invoking it, merges it into your skin and polymorphs you into that monster’s form, starting a timer (not the usual polymorph timer) after which the mask will turn blank and the polymorph ends. Lower level monsters than the player will produce a longer timer, and higher level monsters and uniques will produce a shorter timer. You can also invoke it again while wearing it to end the polymorph early.

Minesweeper implemented as a themed room: a certain fraction of spaces (probably 10% or less) have a land mine placed on them. Every space adjacent to a land mine bears an engraving of the number of adjacent mines; mines themselves are engraved with “X” or “BOOM”. Spaces with no mines adjacent have no engraving.

Invoking the Tsurugi of Muramasa causes a fear effect similar to reading scare monsters and gives a temporary effect equivalent to increase damage (possibly only on hits made with the Tsurugi, possibly with any weapon).

It was also pointed out that triggering a temporary effect by invoking could get tedious. Another suggestion was to give it some sort of passive fear-causing effect when wielded (in addition to the one-time scare when invoking it).

Werecreatures should show up on farlook as either “human” or “giant rat”/”jackal”/”wolf”, instead of being plainly visible as a werecreature, until you see them transform, at which point farlook begins describing them as werecreatures.

Paralysis should halve your speed and give you a 30% chance of not moving on a given attempt, rather than just being “sleep but harder to resist and you can’t wake up”.

Add a game mode that spawns you in Sokoban on the stairs to the main dungeon. No monsters or items generate in this mode, it is just for practicing the solutions to the puzzles.

Aligned priests in a coaligned temple attempt to pick up corpses lying around and sacrifice them.

In order to prevent nymphs stealing your entire inventory while you disrobe, make their charm-steal attack not steal anything if you are immobilized due to taking off armor. Or make their armor-removal immediate like a foocubus, or give you a chance per turn to resist the charm, based on a Wisdom save.

Chaotic Archeologists gain alignment for taking historic statues and moving them off-level. Neutral Archeologists gain alignment from bringing historic statues into their quest home. (Lawful ones get nothing, because it’s right for them to leave the statues where they were.)

Whenever a fire attack “partially vaporizes” a water-based creature such as an elemental, there is a chance a steam vortex will be spawned adjacent to it.

Free action enables you to move on turns you would normally miss due to being turned to stone, effectively giving you more actions to save yourself.

You should be able to wish for figurines of unique monsters. If they activate, they will have no effect , so they would just exist to be something you can wish for as bragging rights.

Expand the behavior of the ‘unpaid’ object flag so that it tracks items that you have stolen from shops or looted from shops with the shopkeeper absent or had a pet steal. Unpaid items outside their shop can render as “stolen” in the object name, and attempting to sell them inside a shop (even if not the same one it was stolen from) will just cause the shopkeeper to claim it and give you no money.

With greasy fingers, you are incapable of playing flutes or harps, which require fine finger control. Attempting to do so just gives a message “Your fingers slip on the strings/valves”.

Possibly, attempting to play any instrument with greasy fingers makes you fumble and drop it, since even things like horns and bugles which don’t require finesse still need to be held.

Runeswords appear as a “runed black blade” when they are unidentified.

Assuming a monster intrinsics implementation: When a gremlin steals an intrinsic, it gains that intrinsic (if monsters having that intrinsic is coded).

Using #monster while polymorphed into a queen bee makes you secrete a lump of royal jelly. For balance, this should cost a lot more nutrition than the royal jelly contains, or have some other limiting method so you can’t use an indefinite food source to produce indefinite royal jelly.

While you are hallucinating, any parrot corpses you come across are rendered as “ex-parrot” instead of “parrot corpse”.

Metal and stone chests can’t be kicked open to break their lock.

Replace Cavemen’s quest artifact with scales from the Chromatic Dragon (their quest then becomes “kill the dragon that is terrorizing our people” instead of “fetch the artifact from the dragon who stole it”). The scales only drop when she is killed, rather than her being generated with them (thus, they can’t be stolen). The scales could either be implemented simply as a base item akin to chromatic scales in UnNetHack which provide a cocktail of resistances, or as an artifact. If implemented as a non-artifact, the Caveman role will have no associated quest artifact.

The scales should NOT be enchantable into scale mail. The pile of resistances is good enough.

Ghosts, shades, and any other incorporeal monsters can’t wear armor or wield weapons. (With a possible exception if it’s cursed.)

Wandering peddler, an always-peaceful, randomly-generated monster that aimlessly wanders the dungeon. (Possibly, these could be implemented as shopkeepers that are detached from any shop, but that may be too complicated.) Chatting to them causes them to try to sell you items from their inventory, which they generate with several of. The items are mostly those eligible to generate in a general store, but with certain weight and possibly cost caps. Killing them either doesn’t drop their items, or it does but carries the normal drawbacks of murder and having to overcome a shopkeeper-quality monster.

In order to prevent farming items off them through create monster, these might have a low extinction cap of 20 or so.

You can’t dip successfully for Excalibur if water nymphs are genocided (and maybe extinct, as well). Not because you killed the Lady of the Lake, but because she’s mad at you.

Lava gremlins: a different gremlin species that reproduces in lava instead of water. It has at least one physical damage attack and at least one fire attack, and the regular gremlin intrinsic-stealing attack, except they steal intrinsics during any time that is not night.

Rainbow sphere, a monster that appears and behaves as if it were any other type of sphere with an exploding attack, but it does not die when it explodes; it becomes a different, random sphere type. There are two possibilities for how it can be killed: it could be brought down to 0 HP like normal, or it could have a limited number of incarnations, after the last of which it explodes and dies normally.

Internally, it should use newcham to handle its transformations; possibly it could be implemeted as a shapechanger capable of turning into any explodable e monster.

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:

• You are carrying any food in your inventory or in containers.
• There is any comestible, anything at all, that you can see on the map.

Possibly, it acts as a club when wielded, though being a cram ration it can’t be enchanted.

Engraving with a wand of create monster on top of a single-letter engraving has a chance of creating a monster of that letter class. (If it fails to do this, it will create random monsters as normal for the wand.)

Possibly, the chance of it succeeding depends on the engraving type: dust engravings almost never work, carved only seldom, burnt or graffitied offering the best chance.

Rename the lance skill to “jousting”, and make lances not count as polearms for the purpose of applying them at range.

The game should award an achievement for ascending with a full set of dragonhide armor (a dragonhide piece of gear in all six armor slots).

Invoking the Longbow of Diana gives you light arrows. These are a special object, weightless, created with the same enchantment as the Longbow, but attempting to enchant them further will fail (maybe making the enchanted arrows evaporate). If they leave your inventory for any reason, they will vanish. As a weapon, they are very powerful (to the point of probably instakilling most weaker monsters they hit). To prevent the player stockpiling them, the invoke effect will only top up the amount of them in your inventory to 5.

When a light arrow strikes a target or falls to the ground (and vanishes in the process), it permanently lights up the surrounding area.

Sacrificing a lamb should guarantee a gift, or at least have a very high sacrifice value.

Vorpal Blade (and other vorpal things in variants with them) can only instakill a monster with less than 400 HP. Otherwise, they merely deal double damage.

Items underneath a cloak of magic resistance in an object pile are immune to being polymorphed by a beam zapped over that pile. (This gives you a way to protect your stash from accidental polymorph.)

Damage from kicking a monster is increased if your boots are metal.

Decapitation is not protected by an amulet of life saving, since the amulet just falls off your neck. Alternatively, keep the life saving, but give a special message about the amulet crumbling to dust as it falls off your neck.

If you enter the temple of a god who is angry at you, all monsters on the level become awakened and aggravated. This should print a more menacing message than the standard “forbidding feeling” one. (Note that a proper implementation of this requires that gods’ anger levels be tracked separately for each god.)

Crysknives don’t revert if you’ve killed a monster with it since the last time you picked it up.

Ring hunger is increased for rings that have high amounts of charges. For each ring you are wearing that is +4 or above, you lose two points of nutrition for it when its ring hunger is deducted, rather than one point.

If you get hit with multiple illness attacks in the same turn, the second one functions like Famine’s attack, draining your nutrition, rather than speeding up your delayed instadeath.

A monster whose attacks scale in direct proportion to your Luck - the luckier you are, the more damage it deals.

For all “matched pairs” of scrolls and spellbooks (remove curse, fire and fireball, identify, etc), identifying the scroll automatically identifies the spellbook. Possibly vice versa instead, where learning the spellbook automatically identifies the scroll, or both.

All angelic creatures should be immune to death rays.

The spell of protection, rather than giving you a golden haze, gives you a “spectral shield”. It weighs nothing, and automatically equips into your shield slot if your offhand is free. It provides around 3 or 4 AC, and this does not degrade over time. However, the shield is temporary and will dissipate in a hundred or so turns.

If the shield is unequipped but kept in your inventory, it hovers around you and tries to block things on its own, but it only provides about 1 or 2 AC in this form. If it leaves your inventory for any reason, it dissipates. Casting protection again while you are already carrying a spectral shield resets its dissipation timer; it doesn’t give you a second one.

The shield has a price of 0, so you can’t sell it.

An enchanted spell stave will boost your spellcasting in its school, with a greater boost the higher the enchantment is.

Glowworms, a w monster that emits light in a radius of 1. Maybe they have a blinding bite attack, but that may be taking the light theme a bit too far.

If you are wielding a non-artifact weapon, and happen to get gifted an artifact whose base type matches your weapon, your weapon will be converted into the artifact (keeping its existing enchantment).

Implement a player fear system that unlike many other proposals, does not take away agency from the player by paralyzing them or forcing them to flee using a predefined algorithm. Instead, it incentivizes the player to flee by making continued combat unattractive.

Create a new intrinsic called “Panic”/”Panicking”. Sources of fear (including existing sources of paralysis-fear, e.g. ghosts) give you temporary amounts of this intrinsic. While you are panicking:

• You have a large to-hit penalty, possibly making it so that you can only land a hit when rolling a natural 20. (Directly subtracting a large number from to-hit could still be overcome by wearing rings of increase accuracy and would be hard to balance the exact number.)
• You deal half damage for any attack you can make land.
• Ranged attacks have a high chance of misfiring in the wrong direction.
• Spells not in the escape school or designated as emergency spells (or healing spells, for variants that remove emergency spells) have a higher failure rate or are uncastable.
• Your skills may be treated as if they are the levels you started the game with.
• Your speed is slightly boosted (if possible, only your movement speed, not your general attack/item use speed).
• If you die, your death reason will have a “while panicking” appended to it.

Temporary pit trap: it fills itself in after a certain number of turns. A monster in it will be buried. It could either use a timer to decide when to fill itself in, or be tied to the monster id of its creator, triggering after a certain amount of time if the creator is still on the level. Also a good candidate for creating during an earthquake, rather than a permanent pit.

A worn oilskin cloak protects you from the amnesia effects of Lethe water.

Define gods as having an associated holy animal (e.g. crocodiles are Offler’s). If you sacrifice that type of animal to that god, it immediately angers that god.

Assuming a compound maximum HP system with a “miscellaneous bonus/penalty” factor (like the one described in #392) is implemented, make it a major trouble for prayer if this miscellaneous factor is deeply negative (e.g. -20 or below).

Change the Mitre of Holiness’s invoke effect to immediately make another artifact invokeable, zeroing its cooldown timer. This effect also happens passively if it is being worn: if you try to invoke another artifact which hasn’t cooled down all the way yet but the Mitre has, it will automatically invoke itself to zero the cooldown timer of the artifact being invoked so that the invoke will succeed. It gives a message when this happens.

Wearing a blessed ring of sustain ability lets you exercise attributes, but not abuse them. A cursed one lets you abuse attributes, but not exercise them. It continues to block all other sources of ability score change. If wearing two rings of sustain ability, determine what happens by averaging the beatitude of the two.

Healers start with a very high Constitution score.

You can read the label on a can of grease. This reads “Yendorian Grease. Caution: water-soluble.”

Zombies destroyed by turning never leave corpses, or the corpses they do leave are incapable of reviving.

Excalibur starts out much weaker than it currently does, but you can perform further feats to enhance its power and give it more abilities as the game progresses. Such feats include: slaying a dragon, returning to King Arthur having finished the Knight quest, getting crowned as a lawful, re-dipping it into a fountain at a high experience level.

Object property “curing”: allows the item to be used like a unicorn horn to cure ailments.

Merge the wand of enlightenment into the wand of probing: probing gives enlightenment when zapped at yourself.

Spell of probing, in the divination school, that probes monsters based on skill:

• Unskilled limits it to touch range and gives minimal information on the monster’s status, possibly only showing HP like a stethoscope.
• Basic is still touch range but gives the usual amount of information.
• Skilled shoots a probing beam and gives some additional information.
• Expert allows you to select any space or monster in your line of sight within a radius, and gives the same information as Skilled.

The wand of probing is raised to be on par with the Skilled effects.

When a Priest is gifted an artifact weapon, they are unrestricted in its skill and their skill cap in it is set to Skilled, rather than Basic.

Oilskin cloaks prevent you from getting entangled in webs. Greased cloaks do too, but the grease may wear off in the process.

Anyone who wields Sunsword can perform the #turn command, which is flavored as brandishing the sword threateningly.

Different death texts for if the quest nemesis is paralyzed or sleeping when they die.

Artifact unaligned touchstone called Grinder: rubbing it on or applying it to an object repairs one level of rust or corrosion but decreases enchantment by 1 (which can go negative). Invoking it cancels a single object.

Frisbees, a plastic weapon using boomerang skill. Deals only 1d2 damage, but can fly in a straight line at extremely long range. Frisbees thrown at dogs might tame them.

Monster spell (or song, for bard-patch variants) that temporarily causes allies to grow up by one growth stage, regardless of its level (e.g. a little dog under this effect will become a dog, a demilich will become a master lich).

Candles and lamps “burn brightly” when blessed and just “start burning”/”is now on” when uncursed. Lanterns don’t change their messages. Note though that this makes it trivial to tell when a potential magic lamp is blessed.

Rust monsters are only hostile towards you if you are wearing or carrying iron or are an iron golem.

Rename mattocks to ‘cutter mattock’ and pick-axe to ‘pick’ to make them less ambiguous.

Give the Magic Mirror of Merlin an invoke effect of enlightenment.

Remove the special damage bonus skill tables for bare-handed and martial arts combat. In place of them, scale up the die size based on skill: bare hands damage is a d2 at unskilled, a d3 at basic, etc. and martial arts doubles this die size, for a d4 at unskilled, a d6 at basic, and so on up to a d14 at grand master. Note that this still gives pretty poor damage output. Possibly it should be 2 dice being rolled (with the die size changing as described here).

If a cloak is on top of an item pile, it will protect anything underneath it from burning up in a fire blast on that space (though the cloak itself might burn).

You scuff engravings less when wearing elven boots because you are walking very quietly.

Lightning spells:

• The most common suggestion is for a level 5 attack spell that creates a lightning bolt, implemented as a simple ray. Possibly, it causes an electrical explosion on the first target it hits if cast at Skilled and Expert.
• Alternatively, a spell of lightning bolt could be a melee range spell that deals heavy shock damage.
• Chain lightning is a spell that forks off and hits adjacent targets in a breadth-first search (see here for how it might work). Possibly, the lightning bolts can only chain off at 135 or 180 degree angles (maybe 90, too). Chain lightning can still be reflected, but becomes a straight ray.
• Lightning storm, which causes an electrical explosion centered on every monster in your line of sight (possibly with a decreasing chance of doing so as it gets further from you). Or if this is too overpowered, just strike these monsters with an individual lightning bolt that does not cause an explosion.

When you get lifesaved, a ghost with your name may be created next to you.

Add Acid Brand and Storm Brand (lightning damage) artifacts. Ideally make these all different base weapon types.

Healers receive an alignment penalty from using poisoned weapons.

Random amulet appearance “necklace”, which apart from its regular amulet effect boosts Charisma when worn.

Randomized clan names for samurai player monsters (or a single randomized clan name applied to all enemy samurai in the Quest).

Crystal gear (wands, plate mail) occasionally comes in a certain gem type.

Breaking a wand of wishing will wrest it if possible.

The Longbow of Diana has different effects based on which alignment you are (or perhaps it’s just different artifact bows, only one of which appears). Lawfuls get an Apollonian bow which shoots gold arrows which have higher base damage. Neutrals’ bow fires silver regular arrows. Chaotics’ bow automatically poisons fired arrows.

Cavemen (maybe only lawfuls) get a small alignment bonus for cannibalism, because it is honoring the ancestors.

Vorpal and bisecting weapons don’t get dull when you engrave with them.

Artifact figurine Doppeldoll: when applied turns into a tame clone of yourself with copies of all your weapons and armor.

Luggage pet for Tourists. Has very high carry capacity and doesn’t drop items of its own accord. Fights like a normal pet. Either it is immune to damage but has a low maximum level to compensate, or if overwhelmed, it doesn’t die but instead turns into a normal “luggage” object that will eventually reanimate.

The common suggestion along these lines has been to give tourists the Luggage as their starting pet, but the common criticism of that idea is that it makes Tourists far too powerful from the outset. Instead, a possibility is that you can trade the Platinum Yendorian Express Card to Twoflower in exchange for the Luggage. (The Card then vanishes, so you can’t arrange Twoflower’s death and get both).

New artifact Callandor, a glass long sword or crystal sword in dNetHack. Lawful, provides double spell damage when wielded. Possibly only gifted to male characters (based on its source mythos, the Wheel of Time, where it is a male-magic amplifier).

All acidic corpses, not just acid blobs, never get tainted (but do eventually rot away).

If you’re polyselfed to a lithivore, worthless glass tastes terrible but valuable gems taste delicious. Each gray stone gives a different YAFM: “Yabba-dabba delicious” for flint, “That was a heavy meal” for loadstone, “The stone’s texture is delightful/distasteful” for touchstone, ??? for luckstone.

Different game ending messages than “You die…”. Pull in some from other games: “WASTED”, “YOU DIED”, “FATALITY”, “Game Over”, “Your bones are scraped clean by the desolate wind, your Vault will now surely die”, “Haha noob”

Merge extra healing, cure sickness and cure blindness, and make the resulting spell level 6. Or just merge cure sickness with cure blindness, and call it “cure ailment”.

Monks will only get gifted weapons whose skill they have previously trained at some point.

Make Big Stick (Caveman quest artifact in Fourk) deal two bonus attacks which may or may not hit (but it still all appears to be one hit). If both bonus attacks hit, the target is stunned and confused.

All Banes artifacts are bloodthirsty (disabling the attack prompt for peacefuls, like Stormbringer) versus their respective monster type.

If a pet moves over a square with multiple cursed items, it moves “very reluctantly”.

Remove the extra healing, cure blindness, and cure sickness books. The healing spell scales in the amount it heals with skill level. At skilled it also cures blindness, and at expert it cures both blindness and sickness.

A Gehennom Gnome Fortress, like a demon lair except with gnomes. The gnomes are physically weak but have strong crossbow attacks (and clockwork minions).

If you have divine protection and become near death from a timed instadeath or low HP, some or all of your protection may automatically convert itself into a cure: “You suddenly feel the power of [deity] surround you! You feel limber/cured/much better/etc.” This should probably work for a narrow range of symptoms (probably not HP loss, possibly any major trouble), and the help delivered should be strictly worse than a prayer if possible (because having this trigger will not affect your prayer timeout).

It should also probably not work in Gehennom, and a key factor is that it should not be reliable, either. Possibly, also track which gods you got it from; protection from donating to crossaligned gods (especially Moloch) will trigger less often.

A slightly more extreme version of this idea is to make divine protection no longer grant AC at all.

Reduce the odds that a nonmagical potion polypiles into a magical potion, to disincentivize mass-blanking potions and polypiling them.

Raise the XL threshold of dipping Excalibur for non-Knight roles to around 9-12. Knights can still dip at level 5.

Frost lamp, a tool which gives out a radius 3 cold aura. Water and lava within the radius freeze and then revert once out of the radius. Fiery monsters take damage from being in the radius. Eventually runs out and has to be recharged.

Smoke cloud monster (v), has a mild fire damage attack and a suffocating smoke attack. Generates in fiery areas.

Ring of carrying: new chargeable ring that multiplies the weight of the player’s inventory by (1 - (0.05 * enchantment)) when worn. Stacks with a second ring. Initial charge and beatitude is set the same as any other charged ring.

Healing potions don’t give you different HP maximum increases depending on their beatitude any more. Instead, if they would have taken you above your maximum, your HP maximum is increased by that amount, to a maximum of +1 (healing) / +2 (extra healing) / +4 (full healing).

Disenchanters can eat magical items for food like incantifiers do (i.e. draining the magic out of the item, leaving it as uncharged/cancelled/+0 or turning it into a mundane counterpart). This works for disenchanter pets, and for players polymorphed into them. Not specified whether this should give the player intrinsics.

Possibly, add a ‘magivore’ monster flag to represent monsters that can do this, though if only disenchanters are capable of doing this then it may not be needed.

Magicbane should block random item cursing from a fountain.

Replace the shield of reflection with a “polished shield”, which is nonmagical. It can come in any material, but only brass, copper, silver, and gold are shiny enough to make it also confer reflection. (That is, you can have a polished wooden shield or a polished iron shield, but the material just isn’t lustrous enough.)

Merge the rings of sustain ability and slow digestion into a “ring of stasis”. Double-edged effects: slows down digestion like normal, but also slows down healing, energy regeneration, timer effects like confusion and sickness, any timing-out intrinsics, prevents exercise from happening, blocks or reduces to 1 effects that directly change attributes.

Unicorn corpses are never tainted from age, though they do eventually rot away.

Failed artifact wishes give you the base item type instead of nothing.

The blessed scroll of gold detection also detects gems, and possibly type-identifies any pieces of worthless glass on the level as well (more to prevent interface annoyance than anything else). Maybe rename it to “scroll of treasure detection”.

If the scroll of enchant weapon targets a wielded bow but you have arrows quivered, or you are not wielding anything but have thrown weapons quivered, it may switch to enchanting the quivered ammunition instead.

Erosionproofing projectiles greatly reduces their chance of breaking.

Dragonbane gives 100% reflection versus dragon breath.

Racial shopkeepers give the player discounts. This could be in the form of a direct buy price reduction (must be capped at 50% of the base cost though to prevent farming) or treating the player as if they had higher Charisma. If the shopkeeper hates your race (for example, elves versus orcs), they will also block the entrance to the store as if you were carrying a pickaxe.

New object property, burden. Makes the item heavier than it is normally. Objects with this property generate cursed 90% of the time.

Reduce the level of the spell of create familiar to 2, and give it a dedicated list of summonable monsters based on skill level: Unskilled creates only kittens and little dogs, Basic will pick a random non-fully-grown dog, cat or horse, Skilled will not create kittens, ponies, or little dogs but otherwise will choose any d, u, B, or f that isn’t a unicorn. Expert will choose from the Skilled list, plus any q or w. If not doing that, as a more minor change, don’t create any monster that is always hostile.

Dragons, and probably all MZ_HUGE monsters, can’t enter corridor tiles or go through open doors because they’re too big. (This would probably mean that corrmaze levels in Gehennom would need to be removed or not generate huge monsters.)

Polymorphs from polytraps, on monsters, revert on death/time out the same as player polymorph. This is to prevent the mines having a balrog forever, or your nice pet archon becoming a leprechaun permanently.

Rangers start the game with all types of bows and arrows identified.

When a god decides to give you a gift and you are already wielding a weapon of the same type, the wielded weapon becomes the gift, and retains its original enchantment and beatitude. Erosionproofing is still added if the weapon doesn’t have it.

The chance of breaking items inside a container by kicking it is based on Str - Dex. The idea is that more force is likely to smash something, but more control will make it less likely.

The Orb of Detection grants automatic searching in a region of radius 2.

Weapons can rarely randomly generate as erodeproof.

The Heart of Ahriman grants half physical damage, and Thoth Amon is nearly guaranteed to pick it up.

The Archeologist quest has either a lot of fairly weak artifacts or a lot of mundane items (golden staffs, death masks, sacrificial daggers etc) that are worth a lot of money in the locate and goal levels of their quest.

Bias the probability of bones files to be a general bell curve fixed on around level 10-15.

You can teleport dungeon features (except high altars, of course.)

Sitting on a trap will trigger the trap while ignoring any magic resistance you have, so that you don’t have to disrobe.

A lamp with the same unidentified appearance and base cost as a magic lamp. It is a charged magical tool (has a lifetime, comparable to an oil lamp) that sheds no light, but instead detects unseen in its range whenever it is turned on. This includes invisible monsters, secret doors, and all traps. It also allows vision to penetrate through clouds.

Every hit with a wielded weapon, up to 20, decreases the chance of being given a non-weapon artifact.

Blessed potions of polymorph, when quaffed, grant you immediate polymorph control over just that one polymorph either 50% or 100% of the time. To compensate, cursed potions of polymorph will ignore changing into a dragon and will try several times to roll a monster that will make you break out of your armor. Or the cursed potion could have a wildly variable duration, so you have no idea when it will end and cannot rely on it.

Make the Magic Mirror of Merlin give slotless reflection instead of magic resistance; this is more thematic and makes for more interesting strategy.

Several improvements to the level-defining des files:

• General goal is to be able to get the MAP as close to pasteable into the wiki as possible.
• Interpret < and > on the MAP as STAIR commands for that specific spot.
• Interpret ? on the MAP as “terrain to be filled by this level’s filler algorithm”. (This would allow for things like Asmodeus’ Lair to not have to be chunked into multiple pieces).
• Allow ^ to be placed on the MAP, and it is an error if there is no TRAP command for that space (the parser will assume that ordinary floor should be the type of floor). Same for + and DOOR, and for boulders.
• Allow monsters’ inventory to be specified.
• Allow objects to be specified by random appearance, with a flag that defines whether it will pick a random item or simply fail to generate if that random appearance does not exist in the game.
• Allow the level size to be specified so that ROWNO and COLNO are out of the question.
• Extend 3.6.0’s REPLACE_TERRAIN to work with non-rectangular areas.
• Most importantly, parse the files with something not written in yacc, because this adds an additional layer of complexity to anyone who wants to work with the code. (As of NetHack 3.7, the custom des file format has been replaced with Lua scripting.)
• Maybe even read in the .des files at runtime, so they can be modified without doing a recompile of them and the intermediate .lev form isn’t even needed. This would require giving each level its own .des file and distributing them with the game. This means you don’t get the benefits of using a parsing library, but you no longer have to code for or depend on that library either.

Liches drop or are generated with fairly good magical items, like potions, scrolls, spellbooks and even wands, to incentivize not genociding them.

Attempt to address the ascension kit problem: make the highest-tier, really good quality, +8 or +9 gear be generated on the toughest monsters or even bosses deep in Gehennom. The high enchantment makes it incredibly hard to get through normal means, even if the base gear is wished for elsewhere. Overall end-game difficulty would need a bump if the average player is expected to pick up and use some of this gear.

For Luck balance, there should be some Luck-based effects that are really good at low Luck but get kind of uninteresting at high Luck.

Luck factors into the chance of successfully getting the enchantment you wished for on an object.

New artifact Aegis: is a bronze roundshield (which is supposed to have Medusa’s or another gorgon’s face impressed on the front). Can be invoked sideways at a monster, which petrifies it or, failing that, causes it to flee (regardless of difficulty or monster MR). Can be invoked downwards to burn a Gorgoneion in the floor. Possibly grants stoning resistance or gaze resistance while equipped.