Tortles have a Dex-based chance of avoiding getting decapitated by ducking their head back into their shell.

If the iron chain connecting you to your ball is corroded or rusted, it is easier for you to break with a hammer.

An object property “of rust”, applicable to weapons, which causes its target’s gear to rust and, eventually, get destroyed.

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.

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).

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).

When a python is resurrected, it gets a special message “The python stops pining for the fjords” as a Monty Python reference.

Physical explosions (those from a gas spore) should blow away doors that are in the blast radius.

The Iron Ball of Liberation should smash iron bars that it is thrown at or dragged into the square of.

Magic traps can toggle much more types of intrinsics than just invisibility or see invisible. Probably not all intrinsics but at least many types of resistances.

Stun grenades, which work similarly to regular grenades except they explode for zero or a token amount of damage, and inflict stunning and other types of status effects on things in the blast radius. For instance, there could be a flashbang grenade which stuns and blinds its targets.

Dynamite in SLASH’EM should be changed so that it uses a digging explosion, and carves out tiles in its blast radius, rather than just a really powerful fiery explosion that doesn’t affect terrain. It should probably also create pits randomly in the blast radius.

Also, Archeologists should start with some dynamite (though perhaps they, or at least Lawful ones, ought to get alignment.penalties for using it, since blowing up your dig site is poor archeological practice).

Alternative Necromancer role, because its implementation in SLASH’EM winds up being a rather halfhearted version of Wizard with some elements of Priest and Archeologist. Note: This was written for a hypothetical variant that does not have a Necromancer role, rather than as an update to SLASH’EM’s.

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

The system may want some simplification since it may be clunky to have the player navigate through menus to choose souls from all the different ones they have accumulated. Possibly, souls from a given species just combine, so you would be shown something like “souls of gnome kings (12 total monster levels)”. An extreme simplification would cut out the entire soul-storage system and just replenish Pw when you collect one.

Gifts from your god (including gifts not from sacrifice, such as spellbooks) should have their blessedness identified, since your god is very explicitly blessing them.

Trollsbane should be the second artifact gift for the Geek role.

Have Zeus’s lightning bolts as an item or artifact you can throw. If an artifact weapon, it should automatically return like Mjollnir; otherwise, it could be an item that vanishes after striking a target but deals immense shock damage to that target.

Track all alignment violations according to their source, which means when you anger a peaceful you tick up an “angered a peaceful” counter, when you rob a grave you increment “grave robbed”, etc. Enough incrementing in any counter (which may vary based on your role and alignment) starts to make your god angry and priests unfriendly. The idea is that if you have a large number of alignment violations but they’re spread out across multiple causes, you might skate by, but repeatedly and happily doing a bad thing will get you punished (and will allow your god to actually vocalize what you’ve been doing wrong). It would also be nice to show in the dumplog what your worst sins were.

Occasionally when fighting in melee with a weapon you are Expert in, not twoweaponing, and there is no special artifact effect already in play, you get some special benefit of that weapon type. ( Ideas:

• Some of the longer swords allow parrying monsters’ attacks.
• Mace or flail or morning star could stun or confuse targets
• Stiletto gives you automatic counterattacks sometimes.
• Spears can skewer through an enemy and hit another one directly behind it.

Sometimes, if there is space and there is no intersection with another corridor, a closet will extend 2 more spaces back (for a total length of 3). The middle space will be a secret corridor (or sometimes plain stone), and the second space will be a regular corridor with a chest with random contents.

A “repulsion” intrinsic. This prevents monsters that fail a resistance check from moving next to you (specifically, where they believe is next to you) on their turn by making their AI consider it an invalid position. However, if you are in melee range, it does not make them step away from you or refuse to fight you, nor does it prevent them from making ranged attacks.

This intrinsic could come from some new artifact or spell, but two possible sources for it that already exist are reading the scroll of scare monster and casting the spell of cause fear.

Variant of Fort Ludios that contains Midas instead of Croesus. Midas has a petrification touch, but instead of turning you to stone slowly, it turns you to gold and creates a gold statue of you. Midas uses gold golems for his forces instead of dragons.

Magic bookshelf dungeon feature, which is heavily inspired by and is functionally similar to the TNNT swap chest, but only involves spellbooks instead of all items (and is not itself an object).

Looting while standing on it gives you a feeling you should put a book on the empty shelf, and if you do, you magically find other books on the shelf. You can see the identities of these books but do not permanently learn them if you didn’t previously know them. Once you take a book from the shelf, it vanishes.

Left up to the implementor whether the books would actually come from other players like the TNNT swap chest does (in which case it might end up filled with low-value or common books; if so, there are various ways this could be mitigated such as the shelf not accepting a book type it already has, or adding in randomly generated books) or whether the books would just be a pool of random ones selected at the start of the game.

An additional possible detail is that you can only see books on the shelf of equal or lower level than the total level of books you yourself have put in. So if you put in a level 1 book, you will only see other level 1 books, but if you then add a level 3 book, you will see books of up to level 4. Or, you always see all books, but only books below this threshold show you the spell and others appear as “a spellbook”. identities

Fortune cookies will occasionally generate in gold vaults, containing money-based rumors.

You should be able to jump to the location of a saddled pet, which causes you to attempt to mount it. If you fail the mount check, you fall off to a random adjacent square and may take extra damage on top of the normal amount for failing to mount a steed.

If you eat a lizard’s brain while turning to stone, it cures your stoning.

Hitting a tree with sufficient cold damage makes it explode. The explosion type could be either physical, like a gas spore, or cold itself (which could possibly set off a chain reaction causing other trees to explode).

Water elementals’ HP (and Pw, if applicable) regeneration is boosted when they are on a water-containing space such as a moat or a fountain. Possibly, they can also suck up the water to regain a large quantity of hit points at once, which removes the water terrain if it is expendable (a fountain or pool or puddle of shallow water will dry up).

In order to make them more interesting in combat, their AI may favor hanging around sources of water and trying to find a path to the nearest water when they are injured.

If you have telepathy, you should hear the quest leader’s telepathic summons message more clearly than its current garbled state (perhaps “m..ic transporter”), and if you have extrinsic telepathy, you should hear it with perfect clarity.

“Bowling alley” themed room, a fixed size (either 5 in width or height, longer in the other dimension) with six statues arranged in a triangle at one end of the room as “pins” and one or more rolling boulder traps for the “ball”.

Make hunting the wumpus into an actual step in the progression of the Ranger quest, rather than just having a level inspired by it. For instance, the wumpus that appears in the quest is much more powerful and can kill the player in one hit, and must be slain in order to progress beyond its level (even if the justification is as flimsy as “It isn’t safe to proceed while the threat of the Wumpus remains”).

Add a throne effect which either copies the confused noncursed effect of a scroll of taming, or mass-tames monsters in the current room. Either of these gives the player an incentive to sit on the throne without killing everything in the room first.

When you pass out from eating rotten food while standing on a staircase, you fall down the stairs (likely petrifying you if you are carrying a cockatrice corpse) and “find yourself at the bottom of the stairs” when you come to.

If a monster that is capable of summoning nasties has successfully rolled to avert conflict, it will avoid summoning nasties for a little while if conflict remains active (even if it succumbs to conflict itself later on).

Human (and possibly humanoid) monsters killed by a vampire’s drain attack (not its weapon or physical bite damage) should have a long timeout set on their corpses to revive them as a vampire. If the player or a pet was the one that killed them, they should revive tame.

Divine speech by Offler (the Tourist chaotic god) should contain lisping on all ‘s’ sounds.

Drinking an identified potion of hallucination or eating a corpse or tin of a hallucinogenic monster as a Knight carries an alignment penalty.

When wielding Sting, you should be able to untrap adjacent webs and monsters stuck in those webs with 100% success.

When a nasty is summoned by a lich, and its monster type has a zombie counterpart, it will instead be replaced by that zombie counterpart.

Strangulation protects you from drowning, since you cannot inhale water if you can’t inhale at all. It also prevents potion vapor inhalation effects and the inhalation effects of gas clouds. Basically it works like magical breathing except you die in 6 turns.

Add a unique lich or demon lord enemy who may appear as a side effect of raising the dead with the Book of the Dead. Not specified if this is the only way this monster can ever appear, or whether other mechanics like demon gating could bring them in as well.

You can apply the Master Key of Thievery to an iron chain you are shackled to, which unlocks it and unpunishes you. Possibly, if your god is smiting you while you have the Key, they will avoid choosing punishment since you can easily escape from it.

New artifact Bolt Boots, jumping boots made out of copper or metal. Conveys shock resistance when worn. Does double damage on kicks, which is treated as shock damage that may destroy rings and wands in a monster’s inventory.

When jumping with the boots, you may pass through monster’s squares (but still have to land on an open square); any monsters passed through will take damage as if hit by a wand of lightning.

Mjollnir will evade your grasp and refuse to be picked up if your alignment record is less than pious, similar to how it can only be wielded by the worthy in the Marvel universe. (Though this might mean it should be changed to a lawful artifact rather than a neutral one.)

New artifact Staff of Agni, a quarterstaff with the following fire-based properties:

• Can be zapped if its enchantment is positive for the same effect as casting a spell of fireball.
• Invoking it sets its enchantment to 3 + your skill in attack spells. (No effect if the enchantment is already higher than this.)
• Grants fire resistance when wielded.
• Deals double fire damage in melee like Fire Brand.
• Acts like a robe for reducing spellcasting failure, but only for the spell of fireball (and fire storm, if that is a separate spell).

New artifact The Golden Knight, a gold small shield that has the following properties:

• Sets strength to 25 when worn like gauntlets of power.
• Cannot be invoked directly, but if you fall below 25% of your HP maximum when your invoke timeout is good, it automatically invokes itself to take half of your current Pw points and heal you for that much HP.

If this doesn’t seem powerful enough, remove its strength effect and make the base item a shield of reflection instead.

On the Plane of Fire, run a rudimentary cellular automaton to make the lava slosh around, with a couple rules like “won’t encroach on radius 1 or 2 from the portal” and “there should be no net gain or loss of lava across the whole level”. It being static and the same every time except for the portal location is rather boring.

Allow for gas clouds of different types (confusion gas, hallucination gas, etc) by passing an additional argument to create_gas_cloud.

Allow downstairs to be marked as “secret” so that they don’t show up unless searched for or by stumbling onto them (in which case you fall down them). Use this specifically for early hidden branches, like Goblin Town in EvilHack.

New room-joining algorithm for regular Dungeons levels and levels which use des.random_corridors:

• Pick one random room and consider this room to be “the set of connected rooms”.
• Repeat the following until every room is in the set of connected rooms:
  • Pick 2 random rooms, one from the set of connected rooms and one from the set of not-yet-connected rooms, and pick a random point in each room.
  • Draw a straight line between those two points. Route the line around intervening rooms if necessary.
  • If the line intersects with an existing corridor, dig only the part of the line from that intersection up to the unconnected room. Otherwise, dig the whole line out.
  • Identify the points where the line crosses the outer walls of the rooms, and make doors. If it enters or exits at a corner, shift it to an adjacent wall space.
  • Add the unconnected room to the set of connected rooms.

Add “royal blue” as one of the randomized potion descriptions, for two reasons: 1) so that the monarch of a throne room can be given a royal blue potion as a pun, 2) so that there can be a potion that uses the “blue” color, which currently none do.

Knights who have never consorted with a foocubus have a permanent +1 intrinsic increase damage bonus, which they lose when they do consort with one, with the goal of it being something that is not a huge difference to lose, but does add up over the long run, and which will not stop pacifist knights from using foocubi to achieve the Quest level. This is based on Lancelot and Galahad in Arthurian legend.

Mind flayers (or possibly only master ones) can use telekinesis to drag you a space or two closer to them so they can eat your brain.

Even if they have a headache, foocubi should interact with rings of adornment (the typical way; succubi take it and incubi put it on your finger). When they have a headache, they will do this “petulantly”.

Attacking a dead tree with a weapon of fire, or an artifact with fire damage, will burn up the tree.

Greasing an item slightly increases its weight. If the grease wears off, it reverts to normal weight.

There are adverse effects if you swim within a certain amount of time after your last meal, because of the traditional advice that it’s dangerous to swim less than an hour after eating.

If you kill an enemy on a coaligned altar, you get a small alignment bonus and a message “Shimmering droplets of blood ascend into the realm of [deity]!” (Not specified what it should say if the dying monster doesn’t have blood.)

If in a variant that has Secespita, making the killing blow with that also decreases prayer timeout by a few turns.

Throwing “attack” potions (sleep, paralysis, blindness, etc) should either always hit the target, or hit the floor at the target’s feet (causing vapor effects) if it fails the to-hit roll.

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.

A potion of growth (or “embiggening”), which lets you temporarily lift boulders, and a potion of shrinkage, which lets you get through narrow diagonal gaps if you would normally be unable to.

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.

The Longbow of Diana should still provide reflection when it is in the offhand slot and not actively wielded.

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

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

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

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

Ice devils have a “hellfrost” attack that can damage you even when you have cold resistance (though possibly not if you have extrinsic cold resistance).

A spellbook will teaches you one of 4 ways to cast the spell, randomly chosen and deterministic per-spellbook:

• Verbal and somatic
• Verbal but not somatic
• Somatic but not verbal
• Neither verbal nor somatic (fully at will).

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:

• Always fully at-will
• Always requires verbal and somatic components
• Randomly chosen from among the four options

In the options menu, the player can select something which forces a reload of all non-birth options from the config file, in order to refresh annoying options which are saved with the game and do not pick up on when someone fixes them in their config file.

Artifact dart that has a 100% break rate when thrown, but if it’s carried in main inventory, it will periodically replicate itself and increase its stack size, to a maximum of 50.

Cursed potions of invisibility remove any permanent intrinsic invisibility you have, but still give you the normal cursed duration of temporary intrinsic invisibility, so after that duration you will become visible again. Thus, they are a controllable way to remove the permanent intrinsic and are also still useful for characters without invisibility yet.

Wearing the Mitre of Holiness removes the spellcasting penalty from wearing a shield.

Artifact ring of searching that protects you completely from triggering a trap you didn’t already know about.

Artifact tooled horn Horn of the Wild that summons a number of difficulty-appropriate tame animals to fight for you. (They might untame or despawn after a while.)

The line-editing functionality currently provided by compiling in EDIT_GETLIN should be moved to a boolean option on all platforms it is supported, because about half of all players will not like it whether it is forced on or forced off.

Monks are given some benefit or ability that enables them to get more benefit out of the ring of increase damage. This could be:

• Letting them multishoot projectiles
• Multiple attacks for martial arts at high levels
• Other rings of increase damage and accuracy are doubled

Make enchantments on launchers relevant without making them overpowered by adding their enchantment to damage (because projectiles already add their enchantment to damage): the enchantment determines the likelihood of getting +1 to multishot, unaffected by role or skill. This chance is given as either enchantment/(enchantment + 1), or enchantment/8.

If the enchantment is negative, the same formula is used on the absolute value of the enchantment to determine if multishot should be decreased by 1. If it is decreased to 0, you fail to shoot anything and waste your action.

Solve the problem of pets wasting their hard-trained apport by picking up and dropping objects randomly all over the dungeon, by triggering them only to use it when the hero plays any instrument (or maybe any non-magical instrument). Bonus points if the player can train the pet by playing an arbitrary sequence of notes (chosen by the player) on tonal instruments.

Throwing gold into a fountain (by standing on it and throwing it downwards) makes the gold vanish, and has a (gold/1,000,000) chance of giving you a wish.

Any randomly generated large box in the dungeon may become named “Pandora’s Box”. It works like Schroedinger’s Box in that it’s a normal non-artifact box which is never trapped, and the special behavior when it’s opened is to spawn a bunch of nasty monsters around the player and subtract 2 Luck (and interrupt the normal box-opening process). However, there is something good for the player inside.

If you chat to a straw golem, it will say a random strawman argument, e.g. “If the priests give two bits to every beggar, nobody will want to work anymore.” or “The straw golem completely misrepresents your argument.”

If you are illiterate and receive some mail, the mail daemon will offer to read it to you.

When a leprechaun teleports after taking gold so they can bury it, if there is a leprechaun hall on the level, they will always pick a random unoccupied space in that room to teleport to. (If no space is unoccupied, they will teleport randomly as normal.)

Your god will not give you random prayer boons until after you have received a sacrifice gift from them. (They will still fix troubles when you pray.)

Buff the axe, because its damage is fairly low for its weight, in one of two ways:

• Treat the axe as a normal wood-chopping axe, and reduce its weight.
• Treat the axe as a designed weapon, and keep its weight but raise its damage.

Rings of regeneration should drain your Pw instead of your nutrition. When you’re at 0Pw, you stop regenerating.

Artifact quarterstaff Staff of Battle. Deals double damage to everything and grants very fast speed when wielded.

Artifact cloak of invisibility Death’s Embrace, which grants phasing, immunity to death effects, and half physical damage, but reduces speed.

Artifact chaotic helm Helm of the Underworld, modeled after Hades’ helm. Grants drain resistance, invisibility, magic resistance, and passive detection of buried objects (or phasing, if this is too difficult to implement) when worn. When invoked, it does a stronger version of the chaotic turn undead effect (rebuke or tame undead).

Artifact bronze plate mail The Pact Eternal. Autocurses when worn. When invoked, it summons a tame copy of you, with copies of your armor and wielded weapon (which only works on a wielded weapon), drains 1 level from you, and reduces your maximum HP by half.

If you die while the summoned copy lives, you get lifesaved, the max HP penalty becomes permanent, the copy is unsummoned and you are relocated in its place (to produce an overall effect of it becoming the “real” you.)

If you take off the armor, the copy is unsummoned.

If the copy dies or gets unsummoned by any means, its gear vanishes along with it, and your missing max HP is restored (though your current HP does not get restored).

Priests tending an altar should repair the walls and doors of their temples if they are damaged, like shopkeepers do. (In NetHack 3.7, peaceful monsters avoid digging temple walls, but the temple can still be damaged by other monsters or the player.)

The first delicatessen generated in the game will always stock food aligned with whatever food-related conducts you have kept up until that point, except for foodless, in which case it stocks only decadent food to tempt you into breaking it.

Gas spore explosions should knock back any creature caught in them.

When a player is killed by a giant spider and leaves bones, there will be a web trap placed on their square, and occasionally one or two giant spider eggs.

A demon lord who occasionally summons demons (or some other sort of minion) and, when killed, will possess the body of one of his minions, so you need to kill all of the summons before he can be finally killed.

In the owned artifacts patch, wishing for dragon scales or scale mail may instead spawn a dragon of the requested color, who is still wearing the scales.

Since crystal chests are difficult to open compared to regular containers, random ones should generate with commensurately good contents.

Zapping a wand of locking or casting wizard lock at a pile of rocks will turn it into a wall, or possibly a boulder if creating walls is too powerful.

Dipping a corpse into a potion of polymorph “keys” the potion to that specific monster type: if it is used to polymorph the player or a monster, they will be turned into the same monster type as the corpse used. The corpse and potion are not consumed by being dipped.

If the monster is no-polymorph, nothing happens.

If the potion is used to polymorph an object, it does not do anything unusual, unless the object is a type for which species matters, in which case the potion changes its species to the keyed type, which can be useful for changing a figurine to something specific.

If in a variant that has potions of specific monsters’ blood, this can also be created by dipping polymorph into monster blood or vice versa.

Cavemen have a lot of experience traversing tight spaces in caves, and thus are always able to squeeze through a diagonal space (except possibly in Sokoban).

Alternatively, they are able to squeeze through diagonal spaces while carrying much more weight than other roles.

Magic flutes have a roughly 1% chance of generating as gemstone (or glass).

If you manage to anger your god to the point of them sending a minion while still an atheist, and your crowning artifact does not yet exist, there is a very small chance that one of the minions will be carrying the crowning artifact.

Artifact amethyst that when dipped into fruit juice turns it into booze, the reverse of what usually happens.

When hallucinating, randomize dragons’ colors and glyphs among all dragon colors/glyphs, and allow messages about them to use hallucinatory colors, e.g. “The mottled dragon bites!”

New “scroll of limited wish”, which grants a wish that is restricted in the following ways:

• No artifacts.
• No magical items (thus no scrolls, rings, wands, etc.)
• No enchantment, must always be +0.
• No blessing or curse.

A new single-level “heaven” branch, reachable by levelporting to a negative level, that is filled with angels guarding the “Holy Scepter”, a new artifact with unspecified properties. There is an exit portal on the level, and the angelic guards are peaceful unless angered or the Scepter is taken. If you steal the Scepter, you can sacrifice it on Moloch’s high altar to get a bad ending to the game.

Wands of wishing always start at 0:1, but now uses the standard recharge and explosion odds of normal wands: it can be recharged multiple times with an increasing chance of exploding, rather than allowing only one recharge and always exploding on the second recharge. Recharging a wand of wishing only gives it 1 charge back, regardless of whether blessed or uncursed charging was used.

The practical effect is that it becomes an interesting choice for the player whether they should wrest the wand when it is x:0 (which gives 1 more wish guaranteed, but that’s it) or risk recharging the wand (with its standard increasing chance of exploding, so it could either give no more wishes at all or give 1 plus the same choice of whether to recharge again.)

When a magic trap tames monsters, it should give a message beyond “You feel charismatic” - the scroll of taming “neighborhood is friendlier” message probably works fine here.

Bisecting a monster with the Tsurugi of Muramasa should have a chance of scaring nearby hostile monsters into fleeing.

Allow the player to cut down the trees in the Ranger quest home level to traverse the level more easily, but give an alignment penalty for doing so.

Cloudy and white potions, in addition to milky potions, sometimes contain a ghost.

Vampires will not enter a temple that has a priest in residence.

To help differentiate bone devils from being boring popcorn monsters with no special attacks or abilities, give them the ability to summon skeletons.

This should come with reasonable limits, such as setting their mspec_used field so that they can only do it every so often, and preventing them from doing it at all if there are a certain number of skeletons around them or on the whole level. Possibly limit it so that if they are not within the “misc item use” distance from the player, they will limit themselves to creating 0 or 1 skeletons.

Monsters that attack your displaced image may “miss wildly and stumble forwards” to move into the spot they thought you were standing in, symmetrically with how the player does for displaced monsters.

Exempt the healing-potion-on-Pestilence interaction from doing a roll versus monster MR, because in practice his MR is so high that it means healing potions are useless.

In variants where the spell of cure sickness can be cast directionally, casting it at Pestilence has some detrimental effect on him, probably hitting his HP and possibly stunning or even cancelling him.

Occasionally, maybe 1% of the time a monster spawns during normal gameplay (not during level creation), select a random stair on the map as its spawning location, even if the player can see those stairs. This makes it appear like the monster is arriving from off-level.

However, first scan the stairs and the 8 spaces surrounding it to see if any monsters or the player are there. If so, do not do this and instead spawn the monster randomly like normal.

If you enter a room containing open pits of lava, print a message “It is hot in here.” If hallucinating, follow this up with “…but it’s a dry heat!”

New spell “seek item”, mid to high level divination. When cast, you are prompted to name an object type (or use the wish prompt to allow more details to be specified - i.e. a +5 broadsword as opposed to any broadsword). Then the entire dungeon is searched for matching items and tells you where they are found, probably just telling you the level for objects not on the current level and showing you the locations of objects a la object detection if they are on the current level.

New “flooded stairs” terrain type. They act normally as stairs, but are also treated as three-dimensional water (that you cannot fly over and must be submerged in, like on the Plane of Water). This would not be very useful on its own but would be a building block for quests or other special levels that are entirely underwater.

The Soul Forge: a single-level branch off Gehennom that contains a smith. The smith will take two items of the same type and forge them together into one; in technical terms this destroys one of them and imbues the other with whatever object properties the destroyed one had. They cannot both be artifacts, and if one is an artifact, it will not be the one destroyed, so the properties from the other one will be transferred to the artifact.

The smith’s price is based on how many object properties the resulting item will have, increased if it will be an artifact. In dNetHack, the smith would require payment in soul coins, but in variants without those, they may just ask for gold or some other valuable. If paid in soul coins, the requested type of coin would be random but deterministic based on the object IDs of the two items.

Add a system of “hell curses”. When you enter a demon lord’s lair, you are afflicted with 2 random curses, which stick around forever until the lord is killed or bribed off.

You can receive at most six curses over the course of the game, requiring you to defeat the lords of the first three lairs you encounter. Further generation of lairs does not add any curses.

A non-comprehensive list of potential curses is:

• healing potions heal only half as much HP
• your speed is knocked down by 2
• your AC is deducted
• your spellcasting failure rates increase
• you are randomly inflicted with confusion every 50 turns or so

Pets that are a higher level than you gradually untame over time, though they will always turn peaceful when they untame unless you have abused them.

Artifact unaligned pair of lenses The Lens of Truth, from Zelda, which grants see invisible when worn.

Iron doors should be able to take water damage and become rusty. Once rusty, it should be possible to break an iron door like a normal wooden one.

Alternatively, iron doors should be corrodable by throwing or smashing acid on them, with it taking 2-3 potions to weaken a door to the point of destroyability.

Artifact dart Safety Pin. It has no special benefits if used as a dart, but instead has a passive carry effect of protecting all your scrolls in open inventory from burning or wetting.

When you perform a controlled polymorph, you are only able to turn into monsters which have HD equal to or lower than your level. If you are using a mask, or if you are polymorphing randomly, it treats you as being 10 levels higher than your actual one.

Lycanthropic and vampire shapeshifting polymorphs are exempt from this restriction.

The room of gems in the Castle should never contain worthless glass. (Unspecified whether it should still contain gray stones, or exclusively valuable gems.)

Add an anosmia status condition, in which you have no sense of smell:

• Tins cannot be identified by their smell, unless they contain spinach or are empty.
• Messages involving smell, such as when you cast stone to flesh on rocks, are suppressed.
• Food detection scrolls and the spell of detect food don’t work.
• Food appraisal doesn’t work.

Not specified what things in the game might cause this condition, or if it should be a roleplay birth option.

You can pay a shopkeeper a small fee to go take an item from the floor of his shop and deliver it to you, so that you avoid running into mimics getting it yourself.

Throwing holy water at demons should be buffed way over its current 2d6 damage, because it’s a fun interaction. Instead, it should severely weaken them, cancel them, stun them, and/or do a large amount of damage (perhaps 50% or some proportion of their max HP, possibly exempted for demon lords whose fights it would trivialize).

Don’t allow items to erode past the point where further erosion stops mattering. For instance, a orcish helm can lose at most 1 AC from eroding, so it should not be allowed to become very or thoroughly rusty, whereas plate mail can lose 3 AC from eroding, so it should be allowed to become thoroughly rusty.

A small fraction of closets should contain a skeleton.

The extrainfo patch for servers should store a piece of metadata that indicates whether the player has mail turned on, so that a person spectating a game in dgamelaunch who tries to mail a player with mail turned off will get a message explaining that.

Shock resistance turns ‘!’ at the end of in-game messages into ‘.’.

Shock resistance (possibly only extrinsic shock resistance) prevents you from being paralyzed by a ghost’s sudden appearance even if you lack free action, because you are resistant to being (emotionally) shocked by things.

The Tsurugi of Muramasa should act bloodthirsty like Stormbringer does, because historically all swords made by Muramasa were reputed to be bloodthirsty or traitorous.

You can wield a tooled horn to use it as an ear trumpet, temporarily alleviating deafness for as long as you keep it wielded.

Healers have a reduced chance to engrave a given character in the dust correctly, because of the stereotype about doctors having terrible handwriting.

Reimagine the Rogue quest plot where the quest artifact is owned by a rich guy and you’re sent on a mission to steal it, sneaking into his estate, bypassing all his security guards and systems, and covertly entering his mansion.

Ideally, it would require cunning and inventiveness like the current quest does, not simply being a quest you can slaughter your way through. It could still use the idea of having the entry point and destination on a level be in disconnected areas of the map separated by non-phaseable walls.

The nemesis can be made weak and trivial to kill if you actually get to him (because he is just a fat old rich guy), with the possible exception of if you get noticed by or kill him, he will call in all his backup to stop you.

For this to work, the quest artifact would probably have to be changed from the Master Key of Thievery to something else that a collector would have. Alternatively, the goal of the quest could just be a macguffin, with the quest leader having the Master Key of Thievery and they exchange it for the macguffin when you return with it.

Change dipping into existing water to a standard multiturn action. If you are on top of water that you can dip into, you are now asked immediately after typing #dip if you want to dip things into it. If you say no, you are prompted for items to dip into each other like normal. If you say yes, you are presented with an inventory selection menu that allows you to select multiple items. Then you dip each of those items once into the water, handled automatically as an occupation. If something interesting happens, like a fountain effect or a monster moves nearby, the occupation is interrupted like normal.

Unspecified how the player should communicate their intention to dip items multiple times. For instance, when diluting potions in a fountain which might dry up, it’s desirable to double-dip all potions one by one in case it dries up part way through, but it’s unclear how the interface should handle this.

For every mimic you personally kill inside a shop, the shopkeeper gives you a token fee of 5 gold (or store credit) if you talk to him afterwards.

If you clear the shop of all mimics (with some minimum amount of mimics required), the shopkeeper could give you a free item of your choice.

Shopkeepers value empty wands at 0 and will not buy them.

Restore ability potions can (partially?) cure amnesia effects.

Rather than bugles being tuneless, they should be able to play sequences of notes containing only C, E, and G.

The Oracle becomes angry at you if you dry up all of her fountains.

Vampires shifted into some other form should appear on warning as their true difficulty, rather than the difficulty of their current form. Attentive players are then rewarded for noticing that a wolf or fog cloud is an unusual difficulty 4.

The Amulet of Yendor (and fakes) should have some bright, noticeable color that is not the same as the metal color used by every other amulet type.

Rangers break wands on their knee rather than raising it high over their head, because that’s what they’re used to doing with firewood.

Shops should slowly regenerate new items on empty squares within the shop, because monsters continually spawn and death drop items. Possibly, the items only regenerate when you leave and return to the level, rather than doing it while on the level.

In the curses interface, allow the user to configure a window that is like permanent inventory view but only shows their equipped items, so that they can quickly see that they are lacking a critical piece of gear.

Eating a monster in front of a monster of the same race freaks them out and causes them to flee.

The Wizard can be fooled into stealing a fake Amulet of Yendor if you are wearing it instead of the real one, but this only works once.

A cursed amulet of reflection will behave as an “amulet of absorption”: instead of reflecting rays, nearby ones that weren’t going to hit you get redirected towards you instead. Also, rays that hit an amulet of absorption wearer don’t continue past them.

Alternatively, add the amulet of absorption as its own item, and make it usually generate cursed like other “bad” amulets.

A shopkeeper who hates you (e.g. for having stolen from them) will be reluctant to serve you and will insist you wear a shirt and shoes before you enter.

In variants with racial shopkeepers, the shopkeeper can also hate you on principle without you doing anything wrong. In variants with Convicts, their striped shirt could be unacceptable for purposes of having a shirt.

Allow the player to have some control over the bubble movement on the Plane of Water with some increased risk, by biasing the direction of the bubble they are in if they are standing on its edge adjacent to water. The bubble will move in that direction.

Skills automatically enhance themselves when you have trained them sufficiently. Also, the skill slot system is removed so that you don’t have to worry about training a skill you won’t want later and wasting its slot.

Artifact-like system for monsters that applies a new set of stats on top of an existing monster’s stat block. The monster is not G_UNIQUE, but only one of it can spawn in a game.

A simpler solution would be just to add unique monsters to the monster list and figure out a way to allow these monsters to spawn randomly.

Some mechanic (maybe involving forges?) that consumes valuable gems to add enchantment to weapons or rings, because gems tend to become useless at a fairly early point in the game.

Chaotic Knights should still have a set of role penalties, not necessarily the same caitiff ones as lawful Knights, and maybe not as many, but still something that emphasizes that a chaotic knight is still a knight and is expected to have some pragmatic self-discipline.

Applying a pick-axe to iron bars allows you to try to pry them apart, but this has an equal chance of destroying the pick or the bars.

When you are “due” for a sacrifice and of a certain experience level, you gain the ability to sense altars from afar.

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.

The Oracle offers a service in which she reallocates some skills of your choice, costing some amount of money. Perhaps she can only skill you up to skill levels you formerly had before forgetting them, or else she can only make you forget skills (but you get to choose which unlike with amnesia).

If an illithid hero attempts to use their psionic abilities on a beholder, it fails and they get confused instead, because the beholder’s mind is so alien that they can’t comprehend it.

If you are an elf, you can read any object with “runed” in the description (e.g. elven spears, daggers, bows, and the runed wand). Though, elves will know the identities of most of these items by default, so they won’t appear “runed”, which might defeat the purpose.

In any case, the message should be something relatively inane, like “Made in [elvish sounding place]”.

Provide some ways for Vecna to come back after being defeated:

1. Allow arch-liches to grow up into Vecna if Vecna does not currently exist.
2. Any humanoid caster that acquires the Hand or Eye of Vecna should instantly become Vecna. Covetous liches should also covet those artifacts.

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.

Sitting on a saddle (on the floor) gives a YAFM if you have sufficient skill in riding rather than the standard “It’s not very comfortable…”

If they are outside of Gehennom, Infidels’ prayers to Moloch are more likely to succeed the deeper they are in the dungeon.

Greasing your weapon prevents monsters from disarming it with a bullwhip (though the attempt may cause the grease to wear off it, like usual).

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.

Wearing a shield of mobility should confer SLASH-style free action: rather than paralysis resistance, you instead have a decent chance of freeing yourself if you get grabbed by a monster or attacked by a mind flayer.

A special container that can hold the invocation items, and only the invocation items. Has bag-of-holding-like properties (or else is an artifact bag of holding). It appears in some hard to reach place in the dungeon.

The Wizard of Yendor can only use Double Trouble once per reincarnation.

Wands should require being wielded before they can be zapped; this way it adds a bit more strategy for the player on when to wield a wand and which one, and balances them a bit relative to monsters. On the other end of the change, you now get a turn or two of warning when a monster is about to zap a wand, because they have to wield it.

When you are in a polyform with a hug attack and attack a monster with it, there is a chance the monster appreciates the hug and becomes peaceful.

A variant cursed effect of a scroll of genocide: it removes most monsters of a given species, but sends the survivors to you looking for revenge.

A “fearless” object property for weapons or equipment which makes the wielder or wearer immune to fear effects. (This is more useful in variants which implement a fear system.)

Make the invoke effect of the Tsurugi of Muramasa enhance it to give double damage for a limited time, but also become bloodthirsty during that time. For an immediate effect, it could also cause fear when invoked.

If you get a full identify insight (either exclusively from a throne, or from any source) but everything in your main inventory is already fully identified, all items you are carrying in containers recursively get fully identified as well.

“Shambling artifact”, which, similar to a shambling horror, combines random aspects from various different artifacts, and is constant over the course of one game.

When running or traveling using the travel command, the hero should not stop to read any engravings or gravestones they happen to pass over.

Breaking a wand of healing or extra healing should heal monsters in the 3x3 area around you.

If an Undead Slayer has maintained weaponless conduct by the time they get crowned, their skill cap in martial arts is raised to Grand Master.

If a worm that walks is slain with Sunsword (and is thus disintegrated), it doesn’t dissolve into maggots like it ordinarily would.

Priests get a +1 bonus to Charisma when they wear whichever cloak has the “ornamental cope” appearance.

An artifact, likely named “The Fast [something]”, which grants speed, but also prevents you from eating because fast also means to refrain from eating.

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

Make it so that firearms are loaded with bullets (they become stored as part of the object) so that you don’t quiver them, which is a weird and unflavorful way to treat them.

Rather than the replacement for techniques being certain roles learning new spells from nowhere once you achieve a certain experience level, have the spells be known from the beginning, but uncastable unless you are above that level.

This also helps disincentivize drain-for-gain tactics, since keeping yourself at a lower level will cut off your access to certain spells.

Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, a chaotic artifact silver war hammer which references the Beatles song. Its powers and details have not been specified.

A death ray zapped over a monster egg on the floor kills it, making it so that it will never hatch.

Possibly, this effect could also be achieved by erodeproofing or canceling the egg.

Silver items never generate in Gehennom, except for non-weapon-and-armor items which are base silver such as the silver wand.

Eating a monster egg (possibly after using some cooking system to prepare it) has a chance of giving you some intrinsics that the monster corpse can ordinarily confer.

Saddles can have object properties that apply to the animal wearing the saddle.

Artifact suit of armor (type is unspecified, perhaps a ring mail or chain mail) that is unaligned and operates like magic armor in the Legend of Zelda. When worn, it drains your gold at a constant rate, and when you take damage, you lose a somewhat randomized amount of gold, in exchange for partially or completely negating the damage. Gold is consumed at some rate higher than 1 per turn, and it is lost for damage at some rate higher than 1 per hit point.

If you have no gold while wearing it, you become either very slow or very encumbered.

Croesus may occasionally generate wearing this armor, along with some gold to supply it. Otherwise it generates like any unaligned artifact.

Amulet of full healing, which heals you completely (or as much as an uncursed potion of full healing) when your HP drops to 0, but does not stave off non-HP-based forms of death.

Add a “randomizer mode”, a non-scoring mode enabled by some option you put in the config file that randomly mutates the stats of each monster – for instance, in one particular game, gnomes could have fewer hit dice and thus lower HP, while soldier ants gain an ice attack.

In the spirit of traditional randomizers, this could also randomize loot, for things like artifacts and invocation items being mixed up and findable in regular chests, monsters generating with and dropping gear they shouldn’t have, etc.

When a yellow light explodes, the 3x3 area centered on its explosion area will be permanently lit up.

If you underpay a foocubus (which includes not having any money in the first place), their chance of getting a headache is increased. This could even be implemented as a sliding scale where they are more likely to get a headache the more you underpay them by.

Glass objects should be eligible for forging, since the temperatures involved in a forge are more than enough to melt and recast glass.

Also, it should be possible to forge pieces of worthless glass together to make decorative ornaments, which are worth either score or can be sold for spare money.

Cancelled, non-unique warpers (and possibly some unique warpers, like non-magical quest nemeses) shuts down their warping. This means that cages in Gehennom can contain liches that are cancelled and thus incapable of warping out.

Allow more fine-grained configuration of when the game should start the player with a pet – for instance the ability to say “if I am a Knight, start me with a pet; otherwise don’t start me with a pet.”

A wielded aklys should not slip out of your hands if you have slippery fingers because it’s tethered to your arm.

New monster ‘chicken’, added to the c monster class, but it is a normal chicken with no special attributes or powers. Eating its corpse gives some chicken related YAFM, and wielding its corpse and hitting a monster with it may make them flee; a comment in the code should indicate that this is because they are “chickening out”.

When you vomit, you are prompted to choose a direction in which to vomit. The space in that direction is then hit with a weak acid attack.

Pale jelly, a j or j that has an engulf attack that causes illness and a difficulty rating appropriate to that. Some may be found on Juiblex’s level.

Juiblex has a spit attack, but due to his covetous warping mechanics he hardly ever uses it. Therefore, special case his spit attack to be capable of hitting any target on the level, not necessarily following a line-of-sight path.

A ring of monster attraction: Each individual ring is associated with a randomly selected specific, common monster species (or possibly monster class), and causes monsters of that species/class to generate disproportionately often while it’s worn. When the type is known, the ring appears as “ring of monster attraction”, but when an individual one is fully identified, it ring appears as e.g. a “ring of newt attraction”.

Depending on the potential for abuse, it should probably not be allowed to wish for specific monsters. E.g. it’s probably bad to allow the player to wish for a ring of wraith attraction.

If you bribe a demon lord for safe passage using Demonbane, they melt it down in front of you while laughing maniacally.

Barbed devils have a passive physical attack that involves you getting pierced by their barbs. Possibly if you are wearing body armor and/or gloves, or wielding a two-handed weapon with longer reach, the passive attack may not always hit you. (Polearms should never incur this attack, but the way passive attacks work by default should already ensure this.)

Convert the sleeping gas trap to just “gas trap”, and make it scale based on the difficulty. Each individual trap releases a single type of gas; which type is partially dependent on the level difficulty. At low levels, they all emit sleeping gas like normal. At higher levels, they emit stunning hallucination gas like container traps, clouds of poison gas, and maybe even nastier gases that reduce speed or miasmas that cause illness.

Add special “reduced” effects for the diluted potion of polymorph.

Objects dipped in it will change their material, but not their type. The material is constrained to non-exotic ones the object could naturally generate with.

Monsters who have it smashed on them or who quaff it will try to polymorph into a different monster of the same class. If none are available, they follow the ordinary monster-polymorph logic.

Add a “save selection” directive in the Lua parser that takes a previously defined selection and saves it into the level structure along with a name, allowing subsequently executed Lua scripts or other pieces of code to use that same selection after level creation is over.