Monsters which are monarchs (gnome king, Elvenking, etc) should be able to use thrones as summon engines. Such monsters would be able to, and would prefer to, spend their turn to “use” a throne on their current space instead of moving. This has a 2/3 chance of doing nothing, but a 1/3 chance of summoning d10 throne room monsters around the throne. This should never have the chance of making the throne vanish, but there should be some sort of limit on it so it can’t be abused for farming, possibly a cooldown similar to the one casters have for summon insects.

Their AI should be changed to make maximal use of this behavior: if they are already on a throne, awake, and hostile, they should attempt it at every opportunity to summon more allies. If they are not on a throne but there is one on the level unoccupied by another monarch, they should avoid engaging the player in combat and try to pathfind to the throne. Possibly they should still attempt to find and occupy thrones even if they won’t use them because they’re peaceful; that could create interesting interactions.

Turn the #dip command into a more general #craft command, which allows you to craft items together - not necessarily to produce items that have magical properties greater than the sum of their parts, but more for things like affixing a blade to a bow so you can get better damage for hitting monsters with it.

To balance the 3.7.0 rule change in which monsters don’t death-drop comestibles, add a new monster, gingerbread man.

• It is a golem made of cram rations, which it drops on death.
• Its stats are unimpressive combat-wise, but fast.
• It might have a special “can’t catch me” AI rule that always tries to flee from the player.

Add a wand of roll boulder, which if zapped at a boulder will cause it to roll away in the direction of the zap.

A new conduct that prevents you from using digestion instakills, either personally or by using pets. In-game, the feedback from #conduct would be “You have never willingly allowed a creature to be digested”.

An artifact rock of detect ants, which conveys warning of all a-class monsters (or possibly only ants) when carried. If it enters your inventory and there are ants on the level, or you enter a new level containing ants when the previous level had none, you get a message “You feel antsy”. There are corresponding messages “You feel less antsy” for when you no longer detect any ants.

Nazgul should exhale actual clouds of sleep gas that cover an area, rather than a reflectable ray of sleep.

An amulet or a ring of sickness resistance. It would likely be better balanced as an amulet, but more convenient as a ring.

Boomerangs should fly in a straight out-and-back line so they are more practically usable than they are now.

Touching a disenchanter’s body or corpse should be risky like a cockatrice is: it will cause you to lose a random intrinsic, the same as if you ate the disenchanter.

This should also happen if a disenchanter touches you and randomly picks an armor slot to disenchant that you aren’t currently wearing anything in.

You should be able to wield a disenchanter corpse and hit monsters with it to cancel them.

A worn apron should grant sickness resistance as well as poison and acid.

There should be a scroll of charging in the Castle chest accompanying the wand of wishing.

Give Cavemen a benefit to how nutrition works. Since they are used to a “feast or famine” lifestyle, they should never choke on food, and just stop eating at their upper limit. Possibly, the upper limit is even increased so if they eat a lot, they can go for longer without getting hungry (or, conversely, slow the nutrition clock when they are hungry so they take longer to get to Weak/Fainting status). Also, they should never get “Blecch!” rotten food effects since they are adapted to eat food that isn’t in the best condition.

In order to improve the usefulness of quest artifacts that are weapons, monsters’ theft attacks should not be capable of stealing wielded weapons, and perhaps not any equipped items.

Cavemen should start the game with an aklys instead of a club.

Add a means of enchanting terrain features to work to the player’s benefit. For instance, enchanted doors could open automatically as you approach them, then lock themselves behind you to stop monsters who are chasing you. Enchanted altars, meanwhile, could move nearby corpses onto themselves so there is no need to carry them or finagle killing very heavy monsters exactly on the altar.

If you find a bones file with a ghost and corpse and successfully resurrect the dead player by drawing the ghost back into its body, the game should save its current state with the NPC and hero swapped so the player character is now the one who had died, change the “owner” of the save to the previous player, and make the save file available for the previous player to continue on in. The save is not made available to the finder of the bones, who can keep playing their game as normal.

There should be a way to command your pets to leave a specific item on the floor alone so they stop picking it up. Possibly if the item is a treat, they will not obey this command, or will only obey if they are sufficiently tame.

It should be possible for Gehennom levels other than the one above the Sanctum to contain vibrating squares; you would be able to perform the invocation on any vibrating square, but all it does is give you an alternative route to the level beneath it. The uinvoked and demigod flags are not set unless you do actually open the stairs to the Sanctum.

The dumplog should contain your spell list. Unlike many of the other things in the dumplog, though, it isn’t necessary to offer to show the spell list to the player since there’s no hidden information in it. So it should be left out of the end-of-game disclosure, but appear in the dumplog.

There is a problem when examining the circumstances of someone’s death in a dumplog: when the player does something that prompts for a direction, the action they are trying to do does not appear in any messages except those that result from the action, so if it doesn’t produce any useful messages, this remains unclear.

To resolve this, the getdir prompt should take an optional prefix string, changing from “In what direction?” to “[Cast/zap/apply X] in what direction?”

One potential issue with this is that if X is an object, it could contain a user-supplied name which has a higher character limit than for prompts. The object name could be truncated if it’s really long.

If you quit while on the Astral Plane, your game creates a special type of bones file which only contains the details of your character and their possessions (minus a real Amulet of Yendor, with a fake one added).

When other players reach Astral, their games can load this file to create an NPC of your character replacing one of the generic player monsters on Astral.

Amulet of contingency:

• When you are reduced to critical HP, it auto-uses itself and crumbles to dust, and teleports or warps you away to get away from whatever threat you are facing.
• Teleportation makes a bit more flavor sense, but warping allows it to be effective even on non-teleport levels.
• The destination could be the up stairs, but that could be abused on the ascension run. If the amulet is uncommon enough, this could be OK and using them to get through a few levels could be a viable tactic. Otherwise, they could send you to a random destination, or a random destination from among the set of places with no imminently threatening monsters.
• If you die without passing through critical HP range (i.e. any non-HP death, or getting hit with a very powerful attack) it does not trigger.
• Possibly, the amulet slot is the wrong one for such an item because most people would still probably prefer life saving over it. It could possibly be a piece of magical armor, or else be a charged amulet, good for multiple uses.

A role that starts with a wand of wishing that can provide exactly 2 wishes, and nothing else in terms of spells, skills, or equipment. The flavor background is you had 3 wishes and used the first to go on an adventure.

Wearing gauntlets of power should allow you to wield a two-handed weapon in one hand. This does remove a big downside of two-handed weapons - the danger of them becoming cursed - though; most late-game characters wielding a two-handed weapon are probably wearing gauntlets of power already.

The Minetown Watch should grudge orc-class monsters, in order to both give them an opportunity to actually do something in some games and to hint at enmities between Minetown and orcs that in some universes led the orcs to pillage Frontier Town and take it over. They should probably not be hostile to the player; it would makes for more consistent flavor if they did, but in practice this would probably make Minetown and the lower Mines inaccessible to early game orc players and would therefore be too mean.

If you anger a peaceful monster, then change into a different form (either polymorphing into something else, reverting to your normal form, or undergoing a stat-shuffle polymorph) while the monster can’t see you, the monster should revert to being peaceful because it doesn’t know you are the same creature.

Invert the behavior of the “context.nopick” flag for better pacifist play, which basically makes the game act as if you are prefacing every movement you make with the m prefix. It’s not perfect, as there are some odd corner cases with digging, but it works great at preventing you from accidentally attacking monsters.

Rogues should get experience points for robbing shops, possibly not by pets since that’s hard to track and isn’t a “direct” theft, possibly proportional to the zorkmid cost of the stolen goods.

Triggering an anti-magic field with a wand of cancellation in open inventory makes both the wand and the trap explode.

Limit vault guard farming by making sure they don’t get any consumable potions, scrolls, or wands; or limit the amount of guards per vault that will appear to some low number like 3 - if you tell a guard you’re Croesus 3 times and have no other way out of the vault, too bad.

Do not make the hitpointbar blink uncontrollably when the hero is at critical HP. Instead, do one of the following:

• Provide a default status hilite of hitpoints/criticalhp/red&blink in the default config file.
• Make a status hilite target of “hitpointbar” that can have its blinking configured separately from the HP display.

Pets should never hide, whether that’s on the ceiling, under an object, in water, whatever.

Vampires should not be able to enter rooms they did not generate in unless someone invites them in.

Add giant ravens, a stronger and more threatening counterpart to the raven, primarily so the raven-pacifying side effect of wielding a bec de corbin will be more relevant.

If a monster generates on the level while you are asleep, you dream of it. Possibly only if you have telepathy, and if the monster can be seen via telepathy.

When you quit, you should be offered a prompt to enter the reason why, which will either be livelogged or appended to the “quit” death in the xlogfile.

New monster spell that gives the player intrinsic levitation for a few dozen turns. The levitation can’t be canceled (possibly unless the player drinks a blessed potion of levitation or casts levitation at Skilled or Expert to gain control over when they land). The spell possibly would not require being cast at melee range, and could occur at a distance. The intent here is to create more tactically interesting situations where the player is prevented from getting anything on the ground.

When polyformed into a vampire, or when playing as a vampire in variants that implement that: Engraving on the ground in a scrawl of blood should expend nutrition proportional to the number of characters engraved, probably just 1 nutrition point per character.

Spell of flash: upon casting it, you are prompted to choose a direction in which to hurl a “ball of light” object.

• The ball belongs to the venom class because it is insubstantial; it does not ordinarily deal any damage.
• It possibly has no maximum range and can fly across the entire map if there’s a clear path.
• Upon hitting something, it bursts and permanently lights up a 3x3 area. If it hits a monster, the monster is blinded. If the monster is a gremlin, it takes extra damage from the flash.

It’s not clear which spell school this should be in:

• Divination, because it is similar to the spell of light?
• Attack, because it can be used as an attack?
• Enchantment, because it debuffs stuff?
• Clerical, because light-based attacks fit the flavor?

Spell of dimension door, a level 2 or 3 escape spell that is intended as a weaker version of teleport away: it randomly teleports you, possibly suppressing your teleport control, and if you do successfully teleport, two bidirectional teleport traps are created on your starting and ending position. The traps last only a few turns before disappearing, but monsters will be able to follow you through it until then.

The Longbow of Diana should be usable for firing arrows without actually wielding it, but this reduces the amount of multishot you can get out of it. This could be flavored as the bow hovering on its own and magically pulling the arrows from your quiver. The main motivation for this is to bring the Longbow to parity with throwing darts, which require no launcher.

The Longbow of Diana should put a floor on the amount of multishot arrows fired from it, so you always get a good multishot. The floor should maybe even just be set to the maximum possible multishot you can achieve.

Objects that you kick loose from being embedded in a wall should actually hit the floor, which means that non-gem glass objects should break.

Boost the sacrifice value of hill orcs, so that when you conquer Orctown you can get better artifacts from sacrificing them.

Change the message for branchporting to something other than “You are surrounded by a shimmering sphere”, which sounds more like some sort of protection spell.

Frost Brand instakills water elementals it hits by flash-freezing them.

If you have high enough natural to-hit (i.e. not considering Luck), you should be able to consistently shoot small ammo through iron bars.

There should be more birds in NetHack, particularly weird ones which could have nonstandard AI, such as peacocks, birds of paradise, and Canadian geese.

Add a “classical mechanic” monster as a counterpart to the quantum mechanic. It has a unique attack strategy; if it’s not in melee, it will rush towards you all at once and send you flying when it collides. This is an elastic collision that conserves momentum, so how far you are sent flying depends on how far it traveled to reach you and your relative masses.

If it is in melee range, it has a melee attack that drains your magic energy to make itself stronger, but if you subsequently kill it and eat its corpse, you regain exactly as much energy as you lost (conservation of energy). They also mutually grudge quantum mechanics.

Monsters should never read scrolls of earth in Sokoban, given the high chance of messing up the puzzle. Possibly, they could be allowed to read it after the puzzle is solved and the penalties go away.

Shattering a luckstone (presumably by rubbing it on a cursed touchstone, which should currently be the only way to bring this about) should bring seven years of bad luck, represented in-game by setting luck to -10.

Potion of hazardous waste: never randomly generated, but can be created as a possible byproduct of random alchemy. Its effects are unspecified.

A potion that is not primarily intended to be quaffed, but rather to be hurled at enemies to make a guaranteed explosion. The potion of oil already behaves like this, but it is fairly weak; this potion should be a solid option for area-of-effect damage.

If a potion of booze shatters in a sufficiently hot circumstance (hitting a fiery enemy, landing on lava or on the ground in Gehennom), it creates a fireball expplosion on its space.

The game should only contain a few polearm objects, but there should be about 100 possible polearm names, a few of which get randomly assigned to the base polearm stat blocks in each game.

To avoid confusion, the “Ghost of an Adventurer” themed room with a realistic fake bones pile should not generate if you have the bones option turned on.

One potential fix for resolving a connection hangup when a player is being prompted for a wish (a surprisingly common problem): there should be a variable in program_state which is set to true when the player is prompted for a wish, and set to false when they receive the item from the wish. If the game is restored and this flag is true, the player should immediately be prompted for a wish.

In variants that have multiple sources of life saving: Avoid the problem of the code’s assumptions that if you get lifesaved multiple times it means you are in wizard mode, by burning up all of your active life saving sources upon the first thing that kills you, so getting lifesaved twice does still mean you’re in wizard mode.

If you turn into a monkey as a monk, you get a YAFM: “You feel especially monky.”

Every floor of the Gnomish Mines should have a small chance of generating a “mining accident”: a smallish area containing scattered rocks and boulders, at least 1 dwarf corpse with regular starting inventory, and 50% chance each of a digging tool and a potion of booze. Ideally, this will be near or against a wall rather than out in the middle of an open area.

It should be possible to push a boulder over a mimic imitating an object or dungeon feature. The mimic should not react in any way until the player tries to occupy the space themselves.

The only exception is if the mimic is imitating a boulder, which would then be large enough to stop you from pushing another boulder into its space.

Mimics that are awake and moving about should be able to ooze past boulders and occupy their space, since they can change shape enough to squeeze through openings.

Huge and Gigantic monsters should be able to travel more than one space per action during their turn. Rather than basing it entirely on monster size though, there should be a “long strides” permonst flag, applied to monsters with legs such as giants. Only monsters with this flag would be able to travel extra spaces.

Add the following events on Halloween:

• The normal “midnight” effects should begin at 6 PM.
• Intelligent monsters may generate peaceful and with candy bars, which they will give to you when you chat to them. Or possibly, this only happens with monsters that have “homes” such as shopkeepers, priests, and peaceful Minetown inhabitants. (Not specified what happens if a monster generates with a candy bar, but you save the game and come back to talk to them once it’s no longer Halloween.)
• Other monsters have a higher than normal chance of generating with attack wands.

When a container explodes due to a trap, its contents should be scattered around similar to how an exploded bag of holding scatters its contents.

Cockatrice corpses when eaten should have a chance of conveying permanent stoning resistance.

Poison gas trap, which creates a cloud of poison gas around its space. It has a short life, only triggering a few times before it runs out of supply. You might be able to untrap it to get a scroll of stinking cloud or potion of sickness.

This is a narrower version of #4453 which doesn’t require any refactoring or new types of gas clouds.

Using too many adjectives on a wish (e.g. “fixed”, “blessed”, “greased”) should have a risk that only some of them, selected randomly, will be respected. This is intended to encourage choosing only the most important adjectives rather than wishing for everything that could possibly matter.

Not specified whether adjectives that are part of an item appearance (i.e. the “red” in “red potion”) should count.

You should be able to wish for “identified” on an object, which makes the object arrive identified. For instance, wishing for an identified magic marker would mean you already know its charges and don’t need to spend some other identification resource on them.

This is intended to accompany #4914, so that the player doesn’t always just wish for identification because they sometimes have more important things to put on the wish.

Wand of jumping. When you zap it in a direction, the beam finds the first square in that direction you can’t occupy because a monster, boulder, wall, or edge of the map is blocking it, and moves you to the square right before it. There is no maximum range, meaning the “jumps” could be very long and might be better off flavored as teleports at a certain distance. Liquids count as a square you can occupy, so zapping it at e.g. a wall on Medusa’s level with water preceding it would result in you falling into the water and possibly drowning. Not specified what the behavior would be if you tried to zap it diagonally through an open door.

There is the potential issue of using this wand on the Astral Plane to zip around much faster than usual and without needing to spend resources on jumping boots or the spell. One possible solution is to make this wand very rare, about as rare as the wand of enlightenment, so you find about 0-2 of them per game.

If you turn to stone by hitting a cockatrice with a bare-handed attack, the death reason should not be “petrified by a cockatrice” which makes it sound like the cockatrice’s attack did you in, but should instead be “petrified by punching a cockatrice bare-handed”.

If you put too many wands in the same place (inventory, bag, stash, floor pile, etc), there should be a risk that the magic in them will reach a critical mass that sets them off and blows some of them up. This would destroy only wands, not any other type of objects stored with them.

The intent is to address a balance issue with wands where the player steadily accumulates them over the game and has a huge arsenal of them, many of which aren’t even that useful, by the late game.

Disenchanters should have a non-zero monster magic resistance, because it’s weird that they’re a magic-draining tough enemy to beat… unless you have a wand of polymorph or cancellation, in which case they become trivial.

Allow the Oracle to tell you where certain unique monsters are currently located. Internally, this works by setting a variable that represents the floor the monster was last sighted on, which gets set when you leave a level with that monster on it and the monster does not follow you. When the Oracle is asked to find a monster, the code first scans through the migrating monsters list to see if the monster is heading to a specific floor, and if it appears on the list she just tells you that level. But if it’s not on the list, the code checks the last-seen variable for that monster, and if it has been set, she tells you that level. If it has not been set, you have never been on the same level with the monster and can’t have encountered it yet.

Vary the list of prayer boons by alignment. For instance:

• Lawfuls can get a boon that makes them a light source for a fairly long time.
• Chaotics can get nasty poison on all their weapons, even melee ones.

This list is very incomplete. Another idea is to vary the list of boons according to the individual gods and their mythologies, but that would require an even bigger list of boons.

Overhaul the dungeon as follows:

• The endgame is extremely dangerous, to the point where it will kill most heroes by default no matter how well-prepared they are.
• Every branch you complete removes an aspect of the endgame’s danger. (Not specified if the existing dungeon branches count towards this, or if they should only be new branches.)
• Branches are themselves dangerous, and each one requires a non-renewable resource to “unlock”. Not specified if this resource is the same or different for different branches.

The idea is to create different choices and tradeoffs, and to force the player to take uncomfortable or unanticipated routes.

Make it so that you never forget spells, but you have a hard limit on the number of spells you can know at any time (except possibly for Wizards; the limit could vary from role to role). Not specified if you could still learn new spells and forget old ones to make room like move sets in Pokemon, or if you’re locked into knowing the first N spells you learn in the game. It’s also OK for amnesia effects to cause spells to be forgotten.

Wizards should never forget spells over time. Amnesia would still reduce their spell retention, but nothing would otherwise do that.

Picking up objects manually should be a free, repeatable action. This is because autopickup is a free action, so it is optimal and tedious (but relevant if you are trying for a low-turncount game) to look at what’s on the square you’re about to move to, go into the options menu and adjust pickup_types and autopickup exceptions so you will pick up the things you want on that square, and repeat constantly every time you would have used the manual pickup command.

However, this does not fix the issue where autopickup will still allow you to pick up objects on squares you are going to be forced off, such as the gray stones on levelporters in Mines’ End.

Add a “coil of rope” object, a tool which can be used to act like a snare, and is dropped by rope golems.

If you would get no benefit from using Elbereth because you are a vampire or otherwise evil, you should be prevented from engraving it.

You should be able to craft or apply dragon scales to a body armor piece, which gives it a partial resistance to whatever the scales protect from, but only 1% partial resistance per set of scales. However, different types of scales can be mixed and matched, allowing you to get quite a good piece of armor if you kill enough dragons.

The game should encourage certain character combinations over other ones until the player reaches certain in-game milestones, without actually locking players out of playing the discouraged ones.

In variants that allow dragon-scaled body armor: Cavemen should have the ability to add dragon scales to other pieces of armor, so they can get a lot of powerful extrinsics. However, few slots besides body armor itself should provide any secondary extrinsics when dragon-scaled.

If playing a Caveman, the dungeon should generate according to rules from previous versions of the game, with any attendant bugs and features.

Marathon mode should use an automatically-adjusting Elo system: initially, all marathon mode games start with, say, 10,000 HP, but it shifts down as players win games with that amount of HP, and shifts up (probably more slowly) as players lose games with that amount of HP.

Mincer role: the core mechanic is you grind corpses into mincemeat and bake it into mince pies or put it in tins; sapient monsters are frequently or always peaceful because they want to buy these from you, but if you can’t provide them with what they want they will get hostile.

Artifact camera that can somehow trap and hold monsters that you use it to take pictures of.

When a god smites you, the pool of possible smites should vary according to the god’s alignment. Some examples:

• Chaotic god: melts your flesh with acid.
• Lawful god: blinds you with light.
• Lawful god: your armor gets turned white and cancelled, possibly made nonmagical.
• Chaotic god: they send an avatar to “seduce” you (unresistably), injuring your legs for several hundred turns.

Create a pool of unique “miniboss” monsters who do not randomly generate, but are eligible to spawn on the throne in throne rooms of sufficiently high level difficulty. The throne room audience could possibly also consist of monsters themed to whichever of the uniques generates in it.

Provide “organic” lighting to dark rooms via a luminescent fungus:

• Level 0 monster, with a 0 difficulty rating.
• Sessile, has no movement.
• Has no attacks (not even passive ones).
• Sheds light in a radius of 1 or 2 around it.
• It would only be able to generate on a square that is dark, but would have special cases to generate out of its ordinary expected depth since most dark rooms spawn later in the dungeon. Still, they would ideally taper off
• Since it is completely nonthreatening, it would be level 0 and worth 0 experience points, but killing it would still break pacifist conduct.
• The corpse could function as a light source, but that might be too annoying to implement.
• If the idea is to have a lot of them, they should probably have pretty low corpse nutrition, to avoid unbalancing the nutrition balance. The corpses would rot anyway, but they would be vegetarian and suitable food for horses and other such pets. Alternatively, the corpse could be poisonous.
• Might need special pet checks to prevent pets from killing the fungus.

Gauntlets of corpse lugging: with them on, any corpses you pick up have their weight reduced by 90% or 99%.

Artifact piece of armor (the exact slot is unspecified) which, when worn, ensures you have at minimum 10 points of AC. So for instance, if the artifact’s base type grants 1 AC, and it’s +0 and you wear only it, your AC is 0. If you put on 9 AC more worth of armor, your AC will still be 0. But if you subsequently put on 1 additional AC worth of armor so you have 11 total points, your AC will become -1 and the artifact will have no further effect.

This is intended explicitly as an early-game artifact.

Divide the artifacts into two tiers, endgame quality and non-endgame quality. There is some milestone in the game, possibly receiving or completing the Quest, before which you are much more likely to get non-endgame-quality artifacts and after which you are much more likely to get endgame-quality artifacts.

Alternatively, rather than making it a fixed milestone, allow the player to expend some sort of midgame-level resource to “bless” or “consecrate” a coaligned altar which guarantees that the next gift you get from it will come from the endgame-quality tier. There should be some limit on the amount of times this can happen, though. The resource is unspecified, but could be some sort of non-randomly-generated “ancient holy water” that appears in a few guaranteed places.

Engraving with a bladed weapon in a dirt floor should degrade it more slowly than in a stone floor, requiring 6 characters to lose 1 enchantment point instead of 2 characters.

Kicking towards a pit while standing on dirt floor should fill the pit.

You should be able to wear only one of a pair of gloves, getting half of its benefit, but allowing you to wear a different type of glove on the other hand for half of its benefit.

Make it so that a standard key cannot open chests and large boxes. Instead, any time either container is generated, a key should be generated that will open it somewhere else on the level or on a nearby level, possibly in a monster’s inventory.

Potions of phasing should themselves phase, and therefore should only be able to be handled by magic. Any that generate or get dropped should immediately phase through the floor and fall to a lower level, unless the current level has an undiggable floor. (This means they would keep falling down from level to level until finally arriving at one with an undiggable floor).

Add a griffin monster with the following statblock:

• Difficulty 14, base level 11, speed 24, 10 points of natural AC.
• 10 monster magic resistance.
• Neutral aligned.
• Medium sized.
• Has a 2d6 physical claw and a 1d8 physical bite attack.
• Counts as an animal.
• Omnivorous.
• Oviparous.
• Flies, and can be saddled and used as a steed.

Scroll of fusion, which allow you to combine charged items of the same type together, summing their charges (for instance, two 0:7 wands of digging will fuse into a 0:14 wand of digging). They can only generate in Gehennom to keep them a decidedly late-game object. Not specified if they should bypass ordinary rules around items that explode when overcharged.

Incantifiers attempting to drain magic items should get better at it as they level up. That is, the odds of the item resisting the drain should decrease as experience level increases.

The Nazgul should each have a name and personality that slightly affects its behavior, sort of like the ghosts in Pac-Man.

Dungeon levels should “restock” when you’re not on them. During the process of arriving on a previously visited level, the game should check to see if you’ve been gone a long time, and spawn monsters in if so, adding more the longer it’s been (but with some sort of limit so the level can’t become crammed full of monsters).

A challenge game mode called “Midnight Run” in which the time of day according to the game is permanently locked to midnight.

There should be a guaranteed spellbook of change metal to wood in the Druid quest somewhere, because it’s a cool spell for them but it’s hard to find as a random spawn.

If you get seduced while standing on a square that would be dark if not for a light source you are carrying, the foocubus should make the same Charisma-based check to either extinguish it or ask you to.

Add a generic monster, which at the start of each game is assigned a species name randomly from the list of hallucinatory monster names.

While wearing the Mitre of Holiness, you should be able to sacrifice anywhere (not just on altars, though doing it on an altar may still boost the odds of good effects), and/or when you get a reward for sacrificing or a prayer boon, you should be presented with a menu allowing you to choose from available options. (In the case of sacrificing, this may not allow you to select a specific artifact; it could be implemented as choosing between getting some gift that your god chooses, getting a point of luck, or other rewards).

A spellcasting buff system for Wizards, in which learning a new spell grants you a point on a metamagic skill tree. Most options available on this tree provide incremental buffs to spells you cast with each point invested, with a maximum of 5 points. There are also capstone buffs that are binary.

The exact shape of the tree is not determined, but a list of potential incremental buffs is:

• More damage.
• More explosions.
• Increased ray or beam range.
• Reduced Pw cost of casting.
• Bonus movement points when you cast any spell.
• Temporary bonus to AC when you cast any spell.
• Temporary to-hit or weapon damage bonus when you cast any spell.
• Suffocating magic; shut down dissimilar magic to the spell that you just cast for a few turns.

Possible capstone buffs include:

• You can smite-target spells without needing to see the space.
• Elemental casting that substitutes the damage types of certain ray and explosion spells.

There should be a way for the player to throw a potion in such a way that it deliberately smashes on the ground at a monster’s feet, rather than hitting the monster.

Restructure elemental resistances so it’s no longer possible to have a full 100% resistance to any element.

Instead of having gradual percentage-based resistances that you can build up over time, classify resistances into 4 discrete steps:

1. No resistance.
2. Resistance from eating things. Reduces 50% of damage from that element, and your items are still subject to being destroyed if it’s fire, cold, or shock.
3. Resistance from role or race. Reduces 75% of damage from that element, and your items are still subject to destruction.
4. Resistance from an extrinsic source like a ring or dragon armor. Reduces 90% of damage from that element, and your items are shielded from destruction.

A possible fifth step is immunity to the element, at which 100% of damage is negated and your items are shielded. This should either not exist at all, or if it is, it should only come from very rare sources, like a few artifacts.

When you make a wish, the item should not appear directly in your inventory, but it should instead get delivered to you some turns later by a mail daemon.

When you level up as a Binder and gain access to new spirits, you should be shown a message indicating which spirits you now have access to.

A monster which creates anti-magic fields around itself.

Address the problem of the hero having most or all of the resistances they need before ever entering Gehennom, by adding a new tier of resistance that you need in Gehennom and can only get inside it.

A Quest where instead of finding your nemesis on the last level, you kill them at the start or very early in the quest, but they repeatedly respawn like the Wizard of Yendor until you fulfill the quest which stops them from respawning.

Add more alternate Medusa level variants with unique monster threats: Echo and Synesthesia. Both monsters should be equally as threatening as Medusa, with a corresponding weakness to something fairly common by late midgame (as Medusa is weak to reflection and blinded heroes).

One proposed effect (for either Echo or Synesthesia) is to be stunned or damaged by loud noises like drums. Another proposal is that noise is Echo’s strength: she is alerted by noise and turns any noise around her into damage thrown at the hero.

If your god attempts to gift you your role’s first sacrifice gift and can’t because it already generated, they should tell you where and how it generated so you can go find it.

Make the Castle chest protected by a magical lock that is connected to one of the gems in the storeroom. The chest can only be opened by having the gemstone no longer be on the level (throwing it down a trapdoor, carrying it off-level, destroying it, etc) or by having the gem in your inventory when you try to open the chest.

Level flags and level-flag-like things such as Sokoban rules should be tied to wardstones, a new type of gray stone. If there is no wardstone providing a level rule anywhere on the level, those rules no longer exist on that level.

Removing the gray stone from the level where it generated shatters it. However, the player can also cancel a wardstone, in which case moving it will not shatter; there should also possibly be a way for the player to reapply the same or different “enchantment” on a wardstone which will then start enforcing that level rule on whatever level it’s activated on.

Add “collapsed corridor” and “cracked wall” terrain types. These act mostly like solid rock and solid wall, except that if you attempt to move onto it you can, if you would be capable of squeezing past a boulder. Would be more useful if a light, stealth-based character build that ordinarily carries little enough stuff to squeeze past boulders were viable.

Not specified which characters these would use in text-based windowports.

In variants that have differently-sized objects and inability to use items of the wrong size: An artifact armor piece, possibly gloves, that allows you to wield things that are one size larger than your current limit.

Archeologists of any alignment should get experience for digging up graves, rather than penalizing Lawfuls.

Archeologists should get experience points for using their touchstone to identify gems.

Rework or create a lightning bolt spell that interacts with an electrical or conductive coating on the floor that makes it easier to zap monsters. Either it creates this coating, or it spreads along the coating, or both.

Replace the wand of teleportation with a potion of teleportation (leave the ring and scroll, and possibly the spell of teleport away, as-is). You could still teleport monsters, but possibly not objects any more, by throwing the potion of teleportation which would then randomly teleport everything that it gets on or which breathes its vapors.

This also is intended to make the Astral Plane more difficult by removing easy zaps and snaps of the wand, making it a much more limited resource.

Region of reverse gravity: while inside the region you gain levitation if you don’t have it, or lose levitation if you do have it. This means if you want to pick something up off the floor, you would quaff a potion of levitation. If implemented as a separate effect on top of levitation, you might have no control over your movements, as you do on the Plane of Air - magical sources of levitation give you control over your movements there, but in order to be levitating in a reversed-gravity area you cannot have any levitation magic.

Not specified what effect would create the region.

Implement antimagic fields as a region. They are a static, possibly invisible region inside which magical effects cannot function, including all of the following effects:

• Completely disables spellcasting both for the player and for monsters.
• Monsters behave as if cancelled, as do you if you are polymorphed.
• Enchantments do not add to AC or weapon to-hit or damage.
• Magical extrinsics are suppressed.
• Potions have no magic effects (so non-magic potions like acid work the same, but e.g. drinking a potion of object detection would consume the potion and do nothing else).
• Scrolls do nothing; they won’t disintegrate when read but won’t do anything else either. “You pronounce the formula, but nothing happens.”
• Wands do nothing; they won’t consume a charge when zapped or engraved with, and can only engrave in the dust.
• Artifacts have no special powers.

The anti-magic field trap could be repurposed into casting one of these rather than draining energy, which could be split off into a different trap type.

New “Kobold Caves” branch based on Tucker’s Kobolds. The branch is populated with ordinary weak kobolds, but the main challenge is in their deviousness, not their fighting strength. It contains lots of nasty traps such as cockatrice corpses atop pits. The kobolds themselves frequently carry nasty items such as potions of paralysis and cockatrice eggs.

Shuffle trap: randomly relocates all the traps on the level.

Not specified whether traps with a specific position defined in the level (such as the Castle trapdoors or Valley dart traps) should remain fixed in place and only randomly-placed traps get shuffled. Also not specified if rolling boulder traps should have their boulder move to an appropriate place or not.

It should be possible to trigger some types of traps by throwing or shooting an object onto them. This does open up the possibility of chain reactions, such as triggering a land mine and objects flying around and landing on other traps, so care should be taken when implementing it.

Whether each trap type should be triggerable by object requires deciding what the triggering mechanism is. For most of them, “pressure plate” would work.

Cyclops smiths, who can (for pay?) create weapons with object properties and, in variants that implement differently-sized objects, large sizes. They should probably not be able to make artifacts.

The Rogue level should exclusively generate monsters from Rogue which don’t otherwise appear in NetHack.

You should be able to fill an empty bottle with water by wielding it and triggering a rust trap until your wield slot gets splashed. Or, more generally, any time an empty bottle would take water damage, it should become a potion of water.

Clean up a potential continuity error in most quest texts - the message for acquiring the artifact usually says you have to return it to the quest leader, but the quest leader may be dead by the time you see the message.

Fix this by defining two additional messages: an alternate artifact-pickup message that prints if your leader is dead and which doesn’t mention returning the artifact to the leader, and a message that always shows when the leader dies about how your telepathic connection to them was suddenly severed.

A trap that, when it’s triggered, makes the wall or ceiling crush together over a few turns to squish the target. Ceiling might be more ideal since it wouldn’t involve terrain moving around.

• It would presumably only generate in well-defined room areas.
• The trap would cause instadeath to any creature caught in the crush, except unsolid ones, leaving no corpses.

If you fall asleep in Vlad’s Tower, a vampire should get generated who will try to drink your blood.

Lava demons, which are based on water demons, but are always hostile. Instead of giving you a wish, they have a nonstandard ranged attack in which they wish for one of your items each time they see you. The wish attempts to pick the highest-value item out of your inventory.

The intended balance for the sight requirement is that you can sneak up on or blind them before they can wish for anything, but it’s not feasible to hide around a corner and wait for them to approach, because then they will get more wishes.

On Halloween, ghosts should be able to generate randomly.

Archeologists should be able to do experimental archaeology with any artifact weapon to unrestrict its skill. Effectively, this would allow them to train the skill up from restricted to unskilled, which takes as long as going from unskilled to basic does.

Cooking system in which you apply a knife to corpses to turn them into raw ingredients, then combine them over a hot surface such as a campfire or lava to turn them into food items that are superior to raw corpses, whether that’s by having increased nutrition, conferring temporary slow digestion, boosted intrinsic odds, raising attributes, or other benefits. One specific recipe mentioned is combining a cockatrice’s heart and potion of acid to produce a food that cures stoning and gives temporary stoning resistance.

The lack of cooking gear in the game (other than dented pots) means there might have to be some sort of fixed “cookpot” dungeon feature found at various places which acts like the ones in Zelda: Breath of the Wild; a specific place to combine food items together.

If the cooking system uses fixed recipes, there should be cookbooks containing various recipes so they don’t require spoilers to find out.

One major flaw pointed out with a cooking system is that it has to somehow establish itself as better than merely eating corpses, so it either has to deliver amazing benefits from eating the food or nerf corpse-eating, while still allowing it to be practical to play vegan or foodless. One possibility is to remove most roles’ ability to eat raw corpses (Barbarians and Cavemen could retain this ability as a role benefit).

Lead shield: when equipped by a monster, it prevents you from using probing or a stethoscope on them.

A system in which dwarf heroes gain experience by carrying a lot of gold, or lose experience by carrying little gold. More specifically, if your total number of experience points is less than the amount of gold pieces you are currently carrying, you gain 1 experience point per turn, and if greater, you lose 1 experience point per turn. You gain or lose an experience level as normal whenever this brings you across a threshold for one.

Add a “misfortunate” conduct, enabled with a roleplay option that must be set before the game starts. When this is set, your base luck is negative and it can never be 0 or higher.

If you are riding a silver dragon (or any mount that has reflection), you should also get reflection. At least for incoming rays; it’s not clear things like gaze attacks should reflect if you don’t have your own source of reflection.

When your only reflection source is silver dragon scale mail, the fire beam is passing through the cloak slot, reflecting from your body armor, and passing back through the cloak slot again, so having reflection should not protect your cloak from being burnt, and in fact it should get 2 chances to burn the cloak.

When you read a scroll of mail, you should be prompted to “reply?” and enter a message that will somehow be delivered back to the original sender.

If you are polymorphed into a fire elemental, there should be a way to burn through a closed door. Probably via force-fighting the door while bare-handed.

The reason for this is since a fire elemental lacks arms and legs to open or kick the door with, a closed door is an impassible obstacle.

Shopping cart, a mobile container that can be used to hold and transport other objects. When it contains at least 1 object, attempting to move onto its square instead pushes it as if it were a boulder. If you m-move onto it or attempt to push it into an obstacle, you instead move on top of it. Since you are not personally carrying the objects in the cart, they do not add to your carry cap.

The main drawback is that it’s unsuitable for taking down stairs. If you push it onto a downstairs, it will fall down the stairs, spilling its contents on the floor below and possibly breaking fragile ones. It can be carried down or up stairs, but this will of course be impractical if you’re trying to move a lot of items.

You should be able to wish for demon lords, which will instantly summon that demon lord.

Replace the scrolls of enchant armor and weapon with a potion of enchantment. You enchant weapons and armor the same way, by dipping them into the potion. The existing confused effects of the scrolls to erodeproof could probably be replaced by using a cursed potion of enchantment.

There should be some way to use the corpse of a disenchanter which had in life stolen some enchantment points from gear to “recycle” the magic. Possibly a ritual that recharges or reenchants items, or simply dipping it in a potion to turn it into a potion of gain energy.

Remove bag of holding explosions when a wand of cancellation is put into them. (Keep the explosion mechanic if a second bag of holding is put inside.) In exchange, make it so that whenever the hero is carrying a charged wand of cancellation, either in open inventory or in a container, it interferes with any bags of holding and prevents them from reducing the weight of items.

Temples should always be lit up.

It should be possible to build up a resistance to a potion by drinking or inhaling fumes from it too frequently, making it work less effectively on you or not at all. This goes for both negative potions, which is good because monsters can’t use them as effectively against you, but also positive ones, which is bad because you will stop getting as much benefit out of them.

Vorpal bunny, a magenta r monster with a deadly bite: it decapitates you if your HP is at 50% or less, and bisects you otherwise. Probably a reference to the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

It should probably only generate in Gehennom, or be unique and generate in a specific area or off-branch of Gehennom, or be psuedo-unique by giving it a birth limit of 1.

Executioner beetle: an insect whose bite has a chance of decapitating its target.

Firefly, an insect which emits light and has at least one attack that deals fire damage.

Memril, a fantastic insect (so in the x class rather than the a class) which has two bite attacks, each with a chance to decapitate the target. It never generates randomly until the Wizard of Yendor starts harassing the player. It may be a valid target for summon nasties.

Wendigo, a high-level Z-class monster which normally hits using cold damage, but if the target is resistant to cold damage, it instead hits with Famine’s hunger-inducing damage type. If you commit cannibalism, you may polymorph into one (permanently?) as a side effect.

Chupacabra, a canine-class monster that is vampiric, with some sort of draining bite. In a reference to how some real-life sightings of it have turned out to be mangy canids, it may appear at first as a coyote.

Prevent wands of death from generating before a certain level difficulty in order to prevent unfair instadeaths for early-game characters from them. This could be implemented so they only don’t generate in monster inventories and can still be found randomly on the ground, or not anywhere at all.

There should be some way for the player to get a warning that a monster has a wand of death before it zaps it at the player and kills them.

Shimmering dragons’ breath attack should be a “tractor beam” sort of thing, which pulls you towards the dragon most of the time, but occasionally pushes you back. This can pull or push you over dangerous terrain.

An artifact flail that is chaotic and has some decent unspecified offensive ability. If Yeenoghu is generated and this flail has not yet generated, Yeenoghu gets this artifact instead of the ordinary flail he currently gets.

Shorten the time-to-instadeath of digestion attacks significantly, in order to make monsters that have those attacks a significant threat to the player and not a non-threat where the player can weather the HP damage and attack the monster’s stomach repeatedly until it dies.

Alternatively, remove it as an instadeath on the principle that the instadeath does not make for fun gameplay, and have the “timer” be HP, with a large amount of acid damage dealt each turn. The flaw with this is that acid resistance would nullify it, so if you’re not afraid of a couple turns’ worth of acid damage you can just carry an alchemy smock and equip it. It would also mean that, logically, digesters should not be able to instakill anything that’s acid resistant.

If you try to equip armor that is too big for you, the game shouldn’t just tell you “it is too big for you to wear”; instead, it should allow you to wear the armor piece, but it falls off after a turn or two. If the armor is boots, when you move, you should leave the boots on the square where you started.

The menu for putting items into containers should mention which container you are putting items into rather than just saying “Put in what?” because in cases where you are trying to put bag-of-holding-dangerous items into a stash chest, you want to be really sure you are putting them into the chest.

An option that causes the game to show you a test screen before going into character selection options. This test screen should have your default terminal background and show monsters of every possible color, so you can see if any particular color is unreadable on the background (dark blue and dark gray are common culprits for this) and adjust your settings as necessary.

All the Bane artifacts should have the same invoke power: it powers up the weapon, causing it to instakill the next monster it hits that its bane effect applies to.

Rocky terrain, which is difficult enough to walk on that you must go around it or levitate or fly over it, but permits magic and items to pass over it.

On critical hits, there should be a chance of dealing double damage. This chance increases with higher skill in whatever you are attacking with.

Don’t have an open 2x2 space in the Gnome King’s Wine Cellar where all the gems and luckstone are stored. Leave the gems where they are, but embedded in solid rock. Possibly, there should be an engraving or two on the ground saying something like “we have almost reached the mother lode”, to compensate for the lack of an obvious reason to mine into that area when magic mapping will not show anything. Also, guarantee a pick-axe on the level, possibly only if no dwarf generated there with a digging tool.

This is intended to replace the current solution of guaranteeing a teleport scroll in the 2x2 space, which is intended to prevent the hero getting stuck there with no way out, but isn’t a perfect guarantee. (A monster could spawn there before the hero arrives, pick up the scroll, and use it after the hero arrives, or the hero’s teleport could be incredibly unlucky and randomly pick one of the spaces in the 2x2 area as its destination).

A shop type, or occasional lower-level shop, that is guarded by a drawbridge over a 1-square moat rather than by a regular door.

• While you are inside the shop and carrying unpaid items, the shopkeeper shuts the drawbridge, and reopens it once you are no longer carrying it.
• If used to squash monsters, it should have a chance of breaking every time it squashes a monster so it can’t be used infinitely; however, if the shopkeeper is operating it and not you, you don’t get any experience points for the kill, but you do if you used magic to close it.
• If you do cause the drawbridge to be broken (on your turn rather than on the monsters’ turn), the shopkeeper charges you for the cost of repairs even if they were the one operating it.

A potion of magic resistance, which conveys magic resistance intrinsically for some temporary, but fairly long-lasting, duration.

Write a Lua script that involves orcs spawning en masse and sacking Minetown - after an ordinary Minetown has already generated, so the attack happens during the game rather than before it. The neat thing about it is that it would be generic enough to be used in any Minetown, rather than being limited to the existing Orcish Town.

Casting knock at a tree should behave as though you kicked the tree. Not specified whether a wand of opening should also do this, since it doesn’t have “knock” in the name.

If you totally destroy a container by forcing it with a blunt weapon, and one or more potions shatter as a result, they should cause vapor effects around the chest’s area (which will always affect you, of course).

If a potionless conduct is implemented, this should break the conduct.

If a vampire in a non-normal form sees that you are helpless, it should shift back into its normal form, because it’s much more powerful in that form.

An artifact, possibly a polearm, which induces (rather than blocks) hallucination while equipped. It should have some unspecified great benefit to using it which makes it worth the hallucination.

Hallucination should block touches of death (via an out-of-body experience) even if it’s being suppressed by wielding Grayswandir.

It should be possible to define anti-spawn regions in a level, like how monsters will not generate in the Sokoban hole corridors but more general. It should still be possible for monsters to appear in specific places within such regions that are specified in the level definition, but monsters specified to appear in random places won’t, nor will any monster that generates after the level is created. This could be done by checking the anti-spawn regions in the makemon_rnd_goodpos function.

Wearing fumble boots and gauntlets at the same time should result in them canceling each other out, and removing fumbling.

When a bones file gets loaded, a copy of it should get made and stored somewhere which will prevent it from being loaded in another game - until Halloween. On Halloween, any level that is eligible to generate bones and for which a bones file exists will generate one from this special pool.

New role whose unique game mechanic is that it can dip magical items into corpses to change them into other magical items.

• As an example, any magical ring dipped into any nymph corpse would turn it into a ring of teleportation.
• The “recipes” would probably be fixed rather than randomized each game.
• The intent is to create a different play style for this role since they can effectively guarantee finding important items.
• To balance this out, items should randomly generate at a much lower rate for them.
• Alternatively, when you remove a piece of equipment that you created via this method, it disintegrates, or just rings and amulets if this proves too annoying to do with magical armor.
• It could be flavored as various things, such as “crafting” or “imbuing”, but dipping (in the blood of the corpse) avoids having to add a new command.
• An important element is to make sure the differentiation lasts through the whole game. If this role ends up converging on building a standard ascension kit by midgame and then not changing it much through the rest of the game, it will be both poorly differentiated and it won’t use its core benefit much.

You should be able to wield amulets to get the same extrinsic as you would get wearing them. Not specified if they should weld to your hand when cursed, as this would otherwise let you identify them easily. It’s also not clear how an amulet of strangulation would strangle you while you wield it.

A game mode that makes you play a Wizard and guarantees you start with a “polyrunner” kit - wand and ring of polymorph and ring of polymorph control. (Maybe also potions of polymorph). This can be startscummed for, but of course takes many games to get this exact kit, so the game mode circumvents this. To balance it out, random objects don’t generate, or generate at a very reduced rate.

Vorpal Blade should always decapitate Medusa. When this happens, it produces a “Medusa head” comestible, which is a unique, unwishable item which could either confer stoning resistance when carried or, like in the myth, be used to stone monsters at range.

An alternative, to make it more broadly accessible, is to allow any bladed weapon used in melee to decapitate Medusa, and only her, on a critical hit (while Vorpal Blade will decapitate on any hit that lands).

In general, interesting and dangerous behaviors should be spread over more monsters rather than crowded onto a smaller set. For example, mind flayers have 3 unique things: a long-range psychic blast, a stat-reducing attack that causes instadeath (that uniquely ignores life saving) if it reduces the stat too much, and amnesia; any 1 of these things would make a monster species interesting by itself, but packing them all into mind flayers just makes them a genocide target.

If you do not talk to your quest leader by a certain turn count, a peaceful same-role player monster NPC named Chad, Stacey, Kevin, or Jennifer should appear on the quest start level, with the implication that they already did the quest.

• The NPC is equipped with ascension-level gear which includes your role’s quest artifact and a wand of death missing at least one charge.
• When you chat to the NPC, their lines consist of humble-brags and passive aggressive insults about your gear.
• The quest leader’s lines are replaced with glowing praise for the exploits of the NPC.
• They do not have the Bell of Opening; the nemesis still has it. The implication is that the interloper made a backroom deal with the nemesis to make your own game harder.
• The quest leader will allow you to enter the quest to get the Bell, since they are aware it is needed for getting the Amulet of Yendor, but the levels of the quest will not generate any floor objects, while still having all or most of their monsters - the implication being the NPC looted everything already.
• There should be a TDTTOE case for when the hero is already named Chad or Stacey.

You should be able to throw food at Watch members to pacify them, since they regularly complain that “The food’s not fit for Orcs!” The odds of pacification could increase with increased nutrition of the food (making food rations effective), increased quality of the food (making e.g. candy bars effective and possibly a 0% chance of pacification for corpses or any food that is “bland”), or some combination of the two.

Make the prize for Sokoban a guaranteed amulet of reflection, and guarantee a bag of holding to generate elsewhere. It could be in any of:

• On Mines’ End, not replacing the luckstone but along it.
• Somewhere below Minetown, not necessarily at Mines’ End.
• In a vault in the Dungeons of Doom, not in the first few levels.
• Somewhere at or above the depth of Mines’ End, which could be in any branch.

However, guaranteeing the existence of a reward item like the amulet of reflection risks funneling players into a single standard strategy.

The Longbow of Diana should create arrows on-the-fly as a passive effect when it is fired, rather than creating a stock of +0 arrows as an invoke ability. The arrows could be ordinary arrows with an enchantment equal to the Longbow’s, but it’s probably more interesting to clone arrows from your quiver (assuming the thing you have quivered is suitable to be fired from a bow), as this lets you keep multishot bonuses from using same-race ammo or use silver arrows and preserves the incentive to have well-enchanted ammo. Cloned arrows should always be destroyed when they hit the ground, so you can’t use it to create hundreds of highly-enchanted arrows.

A slightly different way to take this idea would be that arrows don’t get created on the fly, but automatically return to your quiver when they hit the floor. This means that any arrows that get eroded by hitting a rust monster or something will return to you eroded, and any arrows that get mulched will still be lost, preserving the ammo management aspect of the ranged combat game. On the other hand, it could be argued that removing ammo management for the player is a great benefit for a quest artifact to have.

A monster with a wand (or wand-like attack that requires being lined up with it) that always kills you - no matter what extrinsics or intrinsics you have, like a souped-up wand of death - but cannot or will not use it until you have seen it for a turn, to make it not an unavoidable instadeath.

Orcus is a possible candidate for this, if his wand of death is either turned into a special “Wand of Orcus” artifact or it’s just more powerful when he’s the one zapping it.

When an item is auto-added to the discoveries list by you seeing it for the first time, also mark on the list which level you first saw it.

A monster that has a passive area-of-effect power that works like the wizard-mode monpolycontrol option: if you (or other creatures, possibly) polymorph around it, it controls what you turn into, possibly overriding any polymorph control you have.

Cavemen should have a mugh higher natural Strength cap, perhaps all the way up to 25.

Take the “Caveman’s role strength should be having stats through the roof” idea to an extended version: not only should they have higher physical stat maximums than pretty much everyone else, but they should also get an increased melee damage bonus, a higher HP maximum, and a higher carrying capacity.

To compensate for this, they could be made illiterate by being incapable of reading anything.

Cavemen should be able to enhance club skill to Grand Master.

Cavemen should have “intrinsic cave awareness” - meaning that they “just know” the layout of the floor they’re on. This could be implemented a couple ways: auto-mapping the rooms on the level but not the corridors when you get within a certain distance; giving you a sort of persistent, limited clairvoyance which maps any walls within a certain radius of you (but not any floors, corridors, or other terrain) every turn, or being able to see walls in line of sight at any distance - but not the floor between you and the wall, if it’s dark.

Cavemen should be able to see in the dark, because they’re accustomed to caves and are used to darkness.

The gameplay effects of this are: if they’re moving around in a darkened area, they will still accurately see and map all the floor in that area, all the walls and other terrain at the edge of that area, all the monsters and objects, etc, but the area won’t actually be lit up - floor will still render as dark room.

Cavemen could be buffed in the early game by starting with a dog or large dog instead of a little dog. Or, to make the buff significantly stronger, they could start with a pet mastodon.

Buff Cavemen by giving them “natural magic” or “primordial magic” - while keeping their existing low Intelligence, they could have the best growth rate of maximum Pw and the best base spellcasting success rate among roles. They could also possibly start the game with knowledge of some spells, or have a mechanism of learning certain early-game spells without needing to find a book for them.

Buff Cavemen by making them especially good at taming monsters, possibly giving them an exclusive mechanism to tame animals without a scroll or spell, in reference to how early humans domesticated many animal species.

This probably works best as ordinary taming, but a wackier take on it would be turning monsters into a domestic form, such as taming a jackal and it becoming a dog.

A role, intrinsic, or other mechanism that gives you a stone to flesh aura: any stone objects that come into your inventory (or possibly even near you) get stone-to-fleshed. Originally conceived as a gimmick for Caveman but it doesn’t really make thematic sense.

Cavemen should be particularly good at tracking monsters to eat them, so they should get one of the following:

• Telepathy
• Warning of herbivores
• Something that displays on the map showing where monsters have been recently, but not necessarily where they are right now.

Cavemen should have enhanced hearing compared to other roles: non-silent monsters you can’t see appear on the map with a warning-style symbol showing not their severity, but the amount of volume they are making. Possibly, having too many monsters in one place would confuse this system.

If the problem of differentiating cavemen as a role, both in flavor (e.g. having no clear inspiration from outside the game that is realized in the game) and in gameplay (e.g. not being good at anything that some other role isn’t already better at) proves intractable, the role should simply be removed.

Add a crafting system, but only Cavemen can use it since in real life no one was manufacturing gear and they had to make things themselves. Examples of this include:

• Whittling a quarterstaff or club with a knife creates other wooden weapons, like boomerangs.
• Combining a quarterstaff or spear with an obsidian stone to make a high-damaging obsidian-tipped spear.

Cavemen should be able to tame baluchitheria, and possibly other “ancient” q-class monsters, by throwing food at them like how it currently works with domestic animals.

Cavemen should be able to use flint stones to “enchant” clubs, and maybe spears, by embedding them in the club to make it spiky. Their starting flint stones would have to be removed, though, to stop them from immediately getting a club at +7 or whatever the limit of adding flint to it would be. Alternatively, don’t remove it, and make the starting club +7.

Another option is to use obsidian stones for turning a club into a higher-damaging “spiked club” or macuahuitl, and to avoid the issue of obsidian simply not randomly generating in some games, it could be guaranteed to appear at Mines’ End or certain other points in the Mines.

Cavemen should be able to wear corpses like a pelt, or else be able to obtain an actual pelt object from a corpse which won’t rot away. The effects of wearing one or more of them are unspecified.

Cavemen being illiterate makes a lot of sense, but forcing them to be illiterate is unlikely to make them fun to play when they’re already one of the least fun roles to play. So instead, the role should have mechanics that make them compatible with illiterate and a good choice if one is trying to win an illiterate game in particular. But they can also be prodded towards being illiterate by having them abuse alignment every time they read something (possibly only scrolls and books, not things like fortune cookies).

Because giving Cavemen a way to get good weapons makes the role less differentiated, and because the roleplay experience of a Caveman is perceived to be best when using a club, they should be restricted in nearly all weapons except for the “caveman basics” such as club, spear, sling, and boomerang.

It might be necessary to make them exempt from getting their skill unrestricted by their god, because if they could still do that, most players would probably just use the same old artifacts at Basic skill, again hurting the role’s differentiation.

Forcing them into using primitive weapons might make them interesting by virtue of incentivizing using attack wands much more to deal with threats; an interesting gameplay change would be for cavemen to get more uses out of attack wands than other roles, but that would make little flavor sense.

Of course, this would require their quest artifact to be changed to either a non-weapon or to one of the types of weapons they are allowed to use.

Wielding a beam or ray wand and hitting a monster with it should zap it for a distance of 1 in that direction (so the monster gets hit), and there should be a chance that it does not consume a charge.

Add two new magical shields: a shield of drain resistance and a shield of shock resistance. They are intended to make a sword-and-shield endgame build more competitive compared to twoweaponing.

Most characteristics of them are unspecified, such as if they should be light or heavy, bulky, conferring 1 or 2 AC, have randomized appearances, or whether possibly they should just be added to existing shields rather than making new object types.

Boots that act like the Hover Boots in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. They do not actually make you levitate like boots of levitation will, but will instead delay falling for a turn or two, so you can cross holes, pits, and 1 or 2-square wide liquids like water. If you stay still on the space without support and let the timer run out, you will fall. In order to mislead the player into thinking they might be water walking boots, they may give no special message when activating.

Not specified if this should be an ordinary random piece of magical armor, or a minor artifact.

There should be a Dexterity saving throw against taking fall damage when you fall through a hole or trap door and land on a different floor.

Remove or greatly reduce the chance of monsters to get a wand of teleportation, on the basis that the vast majority of the zaps that monsters are given with these wands end up in the player’s hands, allowing them to bring a pile of them to the Astral Plane and use them to make that level significantly easier. If they do not generate in monster inventories, a full game might see about 3 or 4 wands appear on average.

Remove scrolls and potions from dragons’ starting inventory, because they are incapable of using them and it’s odd that they get offensive and defensive items they can’t use.

Reading a cursed scroll of gold detection while confused should punish you, but create a gold ball and chain instead of an iron one.

Revamp the sacrifice and artifact-obtaining rules as follows:

• Your first two artifact wishes will always succeed (except in standard cases such as the artifact existing already or being your own quest artifact).
• Your god will only ever gift 3 artifacts. The first will still always be your role’s first sacrifice gift if your role has one and it doesn’t already exist.
• In variants where gods grant non-artifact gifts, they will only ever gift 10 non-artifacts.
• When you would be given another gift but you have already hit these limits, you get a final gift: a scroll of mail with a message from your god saying something that amounts to “please stop sacrificing”.

Any themed room design that contains a prisoner NPC should also contain a strong, nasty monster who is guarding them.

When you get crowned, the crowning artifact already exists, and you are not indicating you would like a weapon skill unrestricted by wielding an appropriate weapon, your skill cap in the crowning weapon’s skill should be increased by one, up to Expert. For instance, if you are Lawful but your role normally can only advance long sword to Basic, you will then be able to advance it to Skilled.

You should be able to wield a spellbook when you get crowned to either unrestrict its spell skill if you were restricted in it (the same as it works for weapons), or raise your role’s skill cap in its spell skill by one level, to a maximum of Expert.

In order to preserve role differentiation via different skill distributions, gifted artifacts shouldn’t unrestrict their weapon’s skill; the only way to unrestrict a skill should be crowning. To compensate, your god will somewhat favor giving you artifacts you aren’t restricted in.

When you’re hallucinating, your money display on the status bar should be prefixed with a pound sign, £ instead of a dollar sign $. It could also cycle through a bunch of different currency symbols.

If you chop down a tree, any dog named Idefix who saw you do it should become hostile, in reference to how Idefix in the Asterix comics is distressed whenever a tree is damaged.

Cap all roles’ skill for clubs at Basic. There is no such thing as being skilled in a weapon whose essential use is “swing at opponent hard”.

Paranoid swim and paranoid trap should not be 100% reliable, but should have a chance of failing to prompt you based on your Intelligence and Wisdom. Or possibly Dexterity instead.

Rogues should be awarded experience points for directly robbing shopkeepers (in a way that angers them, not via a pet, which would be difficult to track and the rogue isn’t doing most of the work there anyway).

Druids should have some of their spells influenced by moon phase. As a simple example, their attack spells could do more damage during a new moon, and their healing spells could do more damage during a full moon. But a full implementation would probably provide special effects for all 8 phases.

Rather than wood materials being described as “wooden” all the time, wooden objects should have the material adjective randomized among like “oaken, ashwood, blackthorn”, etc, deterministically based on the object ID. The type of wood does not change anything mechanically about the item, it’s purely cosmetic.

If a druid role exists in the game, this should possibly only be shown to them; all other roles would still just see “wooden”.

Antlion, an a-class monster which has a strong bite, has a holding attack, can hide on sand terrain, and can “drown” you by dragging you into the sand.

Spell of control winds, a matter or evocation spell that fires a beam of wind that pushes monsters and objects away from the caster.

Spell of sunray, a level 7 attack or evocation spell that effectively focuses the power of the sun on its target (despite being in a dungeon), dealing either very powerful fire damage or simply instantly disintegrating the target. (A compromise could be powerful fire damage in most cases, with the target disintegrated if it reduces their HP to 0, but with undead always being disintegrated).

It could shoot a ray, but might be better off if it used smite targeting like a blessed scroll of fire to strike a single square you don’t have to be lined up with, effectively trading the ability to hit multiple targets for increased lethality.

Roc, a bird so huge it can swoop you up and drop you onto nearby hazardous terrain or a trap, or if neither is around, just drop you for some minor fall damage. To avoid the difficulty of adding a “you are being carried by a monster” game state, this should happen in a single turn.

Possibly it should only generate only on outdoor levels, or else be unable to use its pick-up attack on a normal dungeon floor.

Consider adding role spell lists like in D&D, in which your role dictates which specific spells you can learn. If you would successfully read a spellbook whose spell isn’t on your role’s list, you get told “[Your role] isn’t allowed to learn this spell”, similar to the message for twoweaponing. This could be extended to races and alignments, but extending it to genders would probably be too silly.

A simple initial way to do this would be to make each role’s special spell exclusive to that role.

Spellcasting should cost more nutrition for members of “non-primary caster” roles (which is determined by if the role starts with a spellbook or not).

Long worms should sometimes generate in areas of sand, carrying a “spice” comestible. If you eat spice, you are granted temporary telepathy, clairvoyance, or both.

Define some monsters (not necessarily all monsters) as diurnal or nocturnal. During the daytime, monster generation biases slightly towards diurnal monsters and away from nocturnal ones, and nocturnal ones may generate asleep when they do generate. At night, this reverses.

All artifacts that have an invoke effect should have a corresponding confused effect which triggers if you invoke it while confused.

The damage bonus for using a blessed weapon against undead should increase for Priests, proportionally to their experience level. To make the change more visible, there should be messages for getting a higher than normal amount of blessing damage.

Make untrapping deterministic based on a hash of the object ID (for containers) or xyz coordinates (for doors), so that you only ever need to search for traps once and there is no benefit to repeating the command.

The computation should amount to finding a number representing how hard the trap, if present, is to find. Any bonuses from your role and experience level can raise the threshold of traps you are able to find.

An alternative way to do it is to define a third outcome: you are skilled enough to find the trap given enough time, but it will take longer than is usual for #untrap to find it. This would be better if untrapping were first turned into an occupation.

The spell of knock, if cast at a container while Skilled or Expert, should disarm any trap on the container. However, this breaks the consumable-renewable principle (a spell that costs 5 Pw being a free untrap for containers is powerful), so maybe it should be given to the wand of opening instead, and to avoid it being better than the invoke power of the Master Key of Thievery, it should still set off the container trap.

Skills that you have enhanced in the past, but haven’t used for a long time, slowly lose their training points and, eventually, revert back to lower skill levels and require you to practice the skill again before you can re-enhance it, similar to how amnesia works.

If you are sufficiently skilled in martial arts and you jump into a monster, you shouldn’t simply stop moving; you instead perform a flying kick that does extra damage or knockback.

Meat objects created from stone to flesh should rot away (and give food poisoning if eaten before rotting away), the same as corpses, rather than acting as permafood.

Possibly the meat stick should be exempt from this, if it is interpreted to be like a stick of jerky that will not rot easily.

There should be a fixed alchemy recipe that produces a potion of enlightenment.

A monster species that has a mayfly-like lifespan compared to regular creatures: it will grow up on its own given some hundreds or thousands of turns, can’t grow up from leveling, and after some hundreds or thousands of turns in its final growth stage, it dies of old age.

Polymorph should use the 3.7.0 system of tracking monsters you’ve seen, and only allow you to turn into monsters the hero has encountered rather than any monster the player knows about out-of-game. Possibly only for controlled polymorphs; uncontrolled polymorphs could still be able to turn you into a completely random monster you haven’t seen before (and presumably, turning into a random monster would inform you that it exists and allow you to turn into it on subsequent controlled polymorphs even if you never encountered one randomly).

For variants implementing a druid role with wildshape, this would follow the same rule.

If you cast the spell of create grass while underwater, it should create kelp fronds in surrounding water squares.

If you are polymorphed into something that is not omnivorous, you should be affected by those dietary restrictions - for instance, if you are polymorphed into a herbivorous horse, you should only be capable of eating non-meat food; if you are polymorphed into an obligate carnivore like a tiger, you should only be capable of eating meat; and if you are polymorphed into an inediate form, you not only don’t need to eat, you can’t.

Permafood is explicitly inedible in a polyform unless your polyform is flagged as omnivorous.

If you die as a Druid while polymorphed via wildshape (probably not polymorphed via other means), you should simply die outright, rather than reverting to your ordinary form. This is based on the idea that the regular polymorph “second health bar” in NetHack is a guard against randomly turning into a weak monster and having no other option than to die, but that doesn’t apply to Druids who chose to turn into something.

To compensate for this, Druids should be allowed to use wildshape without any limit or cooldown.

Spell of elemental fist: after casting it, your next barehanded melee attack that connects causes an elemental explosion centered on the target. This could take over as the special spell for Monks.

Not specified how the element gets chosen, whether there should be multiple different spells each of a different elemental fist type, or whether it should use an alternate set of elements (stones/waters/metals/winds/fire like the Monk rank progression) versus basic NetHack elements like fire, cold, and shock.

Cavemen should be able to make cave paintings on the ground with blood (possibly their own blood, dealing damage to them, if they have a sharp object with which to draw blood). The available paintings are selectable from a menu, and each type grants a unique buff to Cavemen who stand on it, sort of like wards in dNetHack except not necessarily focused on warding off monsters. You learn more powerful paintings as you level up.

There should be a way to feed your mount a treat without getting off; currently it is only possible by dismounting and throwing it the treat. Possibly this could be handled by dropping a comestible the steed regards as a treat while mounted, or else by throwing a treat downwards.

There should be some mechanic that makes roles more likely to get spellbooks that they can get skill in, possibly biasing random generation for spellbooks towards such spells.

Add skill unrestricting or skill cap raising as a prayer boon or sacrifice gift.

Druids’ mistletoe requirement for maintaining good energy regeneration should scale up as they gain more levels rather than being a fixed amount, because as soon as you have that fixed amount there’s no reason to find any more.

One proposed formula is: energy regeneration is halved if you possess less mistletoe than your XL, regular if you have mistletoe equal to your XL, and increased if you have more mistletoe than your XL, possibly with some exception for very low level Druids.

There should be some ritual way to destroy an unwanted artifact that also reduces the amount of artifacts that exist, so that you are more likely to get given another by your god. Destroying artifacts via other methods like a cursed bag of holding shouldn’t do this; only the special ritual way should do it.

Kicking a tree that has no fruit or bees left in it should occasionally give a message that indicates “there is nothing left to get here, move along” to the player.

Werecreatures should not step onto object piles that contain silver objects.

Eating the corpse of a monster that gained intrinsic resistances its species doesn’t normally have by eating things should also have a chance of conveying those intrinsics to you.

It should be possible to combine or merge a certain amount of crysknives into a powerful weapon called a “crysword” or “crysblade”.

Sharply reduce the chance of thrown potions (and only potions) missing monsters, in order to make throwing them a more viable strategy; currently most thrown potions miss and shatter at the target monster’s feet.

Priests should be guaranteed to begin the game with at least one “defensive” spell such as healing or protection, because those make the early game much more enjoyable than a fully random spellbook which may be situational or useless.

Cavemen should be exempt from the small chance that a thrown aklys fails to return.

If you get crowned while having held to pacifist conduct, and you would ordinarily get a weapon gift, your god should instead give you a figurine of a strong monster based on your alignment. Sample monsters might be an archon if you’re lawful or a master mind flayer if you’re chaotic.

Whenever a player dies, whether or not they leave bones, one random object should be selected from their inventory and have its object details written into a persistent file. When this file has some minimum amount of entries in it, subsequent games may generate a new shop type named “trading post” or “rag and bone shop”, which pulls its inventory from the objects in this file. The items could be labeled with the name of the player they came from, e.g. “potion of healing named left behind by Bob”.

There should be some “too strong” objects which aren’t eligible for this, including wands of wishing and quest artifacts (or all artifacts).

The items should be sold at a markup, which could be 2-3 times their ordinary cost or more like 10 times. Highly enchanted items (which are unlikely to be found in a regular store) could be sold with an additional markup.

Possibly, in order to minimize the player’s ability to steal the most valuable items, the shop floor should be small (around 3x3) and the shopkeeper should personally hold the highest-priced items, requiring you #chat to them to get the offers. To signal this, when you enter the shop, they say an additional message: “Ask me about special deals!”

It’s also possible to just have the occasional general store use this mechanic, or to use the “itinerant merchant” idea (#1635) as a dealer of the items.

In variants that implement monster lookup, there should be a “Grows into:” field for monsters that can grow up into something else.

You should be able to #ride hostile monsters to climb atop them, which lets you have a much better chance at hitting it and possible higher damage when you hit it, but the monster also gets a much higher chance of hitting you and can try to throw you off.

There should be some common-sense limitations, like the monster should be big enough to climb on and capable of being climbed, and you should be in a form capable of climbing. Also possibly it should be harder, not easier, to hit the monster with certain types of objects, like cockatrice corpses.

A bag of traps, a chargeable magic tool which creates a random trap on your space. Alternatively, have it be a wand of trap creation, which would be nondirectional.

There could be some way to force creation of a specific trap, perhaps by wielding a component which gets consumed, such as arrows for an arrow trap, or a potion of water for a rust trap.

Cavemen should be able to ride certain thematic species of tame monsters, or possibly all tame monsters of appropriate size, without a saddle.

In variants that have vulnerability to elements, especially as a temporary debuff that the player can be inflicted with, you should be able to remove the debuff by doing something that would give you intrinsic resistance to that element (such as eating a corpse or tin).

Another possibility, not mutually exclusive, is that you should be able to stack multiple sources of the resistance to negate or reduce the severity of the vulnerability - i.e. two extrinsic sources of the resistance, or intrinsic resistance paired with an extrinsic.

Casting spells should not train the skill of the spell if they do not accomplish anything. Examples include: casting healing at yourself when you already are at full HP, casting wizard lock in a direction where the beam doesn’t lock anything, or casting an attack spell that fails to hit any monsters.

You should be able to wish for a “shattered” potion, which gives you a potion which immediately splashes all over you. This is primarily so if you inconveniently get a djinni from a potion like full healing, you can still use the wish to get the effects of full healing.

While you’re asleep, you should recover HP and energy faster than normal, possibly even at the 1 per turn rate that the extrinsics give you.

Saddlebags: kind of a fusion between a saddle and a container, which allow you to transport more items around than you can carry yourself. The saddlebags can be applied to any pet which can ordinarily be saddled, occupying the same slot. A pet wearing one can be directionally looted, which moves items in and out of the container. Possibly, they cannot be used to hold any bulky items, and there may be a cap on the overall weight they can contain, determined by the pet’s carrying capacity.

Not specified if they contain a saddle as part of the item, enabling you to also ride your saddled pet while also carrying objects in the saddlebags.

Geckos and spiders should be capable of clinging to ceilings, since they can do this in real life. Spiders, in particular, should prefer a strategy of spinning a web and waiting on the nearby ceiling (possibly hiding on the ceiling, though that probably isn’t feasible for giant spiders) rather than roaming around.

In variants with a vampire race, slow digestion should not affect their nutrition clock, in order to prevent them from using it to practically ignore the hunger mechanics as soon as they find a ring.

This could be flavorfully justified as them being undead and therefore not having a digestion process to slow down.

Hermit: an always-generated-peaceful, sessile human monster. Possibly only one can generate per game. He or she collects books and will ask for books when chatted to. In exchange for each book, they dispense a rumor which is false if the book was cursed and true otherwise.

A more complicated extension is that rather than simply taking the books, they could instead stash them into a magic-chest-like extradimensional space, the contents of which show up in an identical chest in the Wizard’s Tower. The significance of this is left up to the player’s interpretation.

Animated topiary, which disguises itself as a hedge (this idea might be best when paired with hedge terrain; #2137) until you approach it and it attacks.

Several potential additions for the clerical spell school:

• Bless: this could either be a low-level spell that works like it does in D&D where it gives you a to-hit and damage bonus, or it could be a high-level spell that blesses an item. Possibly it could bless items when cast at Skilled or above.
• Sanctuary: a medium-level spell that effectively makes monsters treat the 3x3 area around you like a coaligned temple for a limited time, unless you take a hostile action which ends the spell.
• Command: Drop: forces a monster to drop its weapon.
• Inflict Wounds: medium-level spell that deals damage while being in the clerical school. Damage should probably scale with skill.
• Hold Person: paralyzes a monster (or more strictly, a humanoid); fits right in since enemy priests can already cast this.
• Silence: Temporarily stops a monster from reading a scroll or casting a spell. Not specified if this should be a debuff or create a region of silence.
• Dispel Magic: Removes magical effects from a monster or multiple monsters. May be of limited use unless added to a variant where monster magic buffs are significant.
• Freedom of Movement: Grants temporary intrinsic free action, allowing you to free up a ring slot.

If a gremlin steals an intrinsic that is one of the intrinsics monsters can have, they should gain that intrinsic.

Fog clouds and water and air elementals should be immune to dying from drawbridges. (If the drawbridge is destroyed when they are over the moat, the water elemental should fall into the water but the other two can remain flying.)

Artifact pair of lenses that temporarily increases Intelligence when worn, but permanently decreases Intelligence each time you remove them.

When you formally complete your Quest, there should be some form of “minor abuse reset” that forgives some of your alignment abuse, or all of it if it’s small. This basically allows you to proceed with a clean record if you only messed up one time, for example by angering a bunch of peaceful monsters.

When you sacrifice and your god decides to give you a gift, they should take into account how high-level and in favor with them you are, and if you’re sufficiently beloved, they may offer you your choice of multiple artifacts in a menu. How beloved you are dictates how many artifacts will be randomly drawn from the pool of artifacts they could give you at that time, possibly up to a maximum of 4.

When this number is 1, or if you are receiving a designated first sacrifice gift, the god just gifts you the artifact normally.

It’s unspecified if you should be given the option to decline getting any artifact at all.

This change is intended to cut down sharply on altar farming in the hopes of getting a certain artifact, presuming that if the hero can farm for one artifact they can probably farm indefinitely until they get the one they want.

Potion of vorpality: consuming it grants you a short duration of a new “vorpal” intrinsic. While you are vorpal, any melee attack you make with a bladed weapon acts like Vorpal Blade in that you may decapitate a monster you hit with it.

When you attack the inside of an engulfer with Cleaver, it should do triple damage because you’re still attacking in an arc and hitting the engulfer at each point in the arc.

A zombie killed with a blessed weapon should have a lower chance of reviving.

Ring of wizardry: doesn’t technically provide any extrinsics, but wearing one cuts down on your spellcasting penalties, the same as wearing a robe does (and not stacking with a robe if you also wear that).

Cursed carried sacks and oilskin sacks should occasionally spill out an object at random times. Not specified if this should produce a message so you know about it, or it should be silent.

Rework roles entirely. You start out as a generic adventurer with no special skills, and as you gain levels you choose a path - allowing the progression of your character to follow a branch in a tree structure rather than a single line of progression determined by your role.

The Quest could be tricky to handle in this system, because it has to generate the home level when you first arrive in the branch. After gaining a few levels, your path would be set enough to generate a particular role-like quest, but it’s possible to reach the Quest branch without gaining any levels. One possibility could be if you reach the Quest before choosing enough of your path to specialize, you get a unique “pacifist quest”.

When you engrave with a wand of polymorph and mutate a preexisting engraving into a rumor, the rumor should always be true if the wand is blessed, false if it’s cursed, and random if it’s uncursed.

Shopkeepers give discounts (perhaps treating you as if you had a higher Charisma than normal, to avoid the issue of selling items for less than they would buy them for) on Black Friday.

You should be able to invoke the Amulet of Yendor exactly once for a wish, with some unspecified major drawbacks.

Following the 3.7.0 change where touching the Amulet of Yendor for the first time grants a wish with no drawbacks, it has also been proposed that it should require invoking the Amulet instead, but only after it has been fully identified.

There should be three ways to interact with potions: drinking them, getting them splashed on the exterior of your body (e.g. having them thrown at you and hit you), and inhaling their vapors. These should all be fully symmetric between the player and monsters and have noticeable effects for most if not all potions.

The key missing one to implement is the “topical” potion effects. Currently, the only potion with topical effects is acid, and thrown potions only do vapor effects to the monster they hit, which is often weak and ineffective. Topical effects would probably be best implemented as working the same as quaffing the potion, or a bit weaker. This would also be useful for buffing potions that monsters throw at the hero: the vapor effects of, say, a potion of blindness are so short that it doesn’t make much sense for the monster to throw it rather than doing something else, but if blindness splashing in your eyes causes a significantly longer duration, it makes more sense.

Levitation cast at Expert skill, or a blessed potion of levitation, should grant flight instead of levitation.

Alternatively, add a higher-level spell of flying.

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

Clouds of sleep gas would immediately have a use in Nazgul and orange dragon breath attacks, which are already described as such. They might also be useful for sleeping gas traps, which would emit an actual cloud of sleep gas. Depending on implementation, the sleep gas cloud could have only a chance of inducing sleep rather than always knocking you out, which could make it tactically interesting to navigate/teleport/etc rather than just getting put to sleep and having the cloud gone by the time you wake up.

Potions that boil or shatter (but not freeze) should release a cloud of gas that causes the potion’s vapor effects to creatures caught in the cloud, replacing the existing system where vapor effects can happen at an unclear distance from the site of the potion.

Artifact unaligned pair of lenses The Lens of Truth (or Lenses to avoid oddity), from Zelda, which grants see invisible when worn. Also, while wearing them, you must tell the truth, which primarily affects interacting with vault guards and could be implemented as any of the following:

• You will auto-reply to vault guards with your real name rather than being given the opportunity to lie.
• You are prompted “Give your name?” so you can remain silent.
• You are penalized for lying, much more harshly than losing an alignment point.

When a yellow light explodes, the 3x3 area centered on its explosion area should become permanently lit up. Conversely, when a black light explodes, the same area should become permanently darkened.

Various proposals for things to happen on St. Patrick’s Day:

• Leprechauns should get buffed. There are various ways this could be done; probably the easiest is giving them more starting gold but also increasing the damage of their attacks.
• Leprechauns could spawn with potions of booze (always for individual leprechauns, low percentage chance in leprechaun halls). Ideally, the potion should be green.
• When random gold piles generate, leprechauns should frequently spawn on them.
• Random gems should have an elevated frequency of emeralds and green worthless glass.
• If the game is started on St. Patrick’s Day, the potion of booze is always shuffled such that it’s green.

Ideas for a leprechaun race:

• Gets unlimited gold-stealing attacks that allow you to teleport each time you steal gold from a monster’s inventory or beneath their feet, which allows you to set up teleportations in advance by luring a monster onto a pile of gold pieces. Stealing gold gives +1 alignment record.
• Has weak attribute maximums.
• Can enchant any boots to +7.
• Has naturally better AC from being smaller, or instead you sometimes automatically leap and evade in response to an incoming attack.
• Rigid body armor won’t fit because of the small size.
• Luck either starts temporarily at +1 or times out permanently to +1.