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

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

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

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

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

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

You can apply an amulet to a pet to put it on that pet, assuming it has a neck.

Eating cursed rings or amulets gives the opposite of the normal effect (likely stripping an intrinsic instead of gaining it).

Amulet versus magic, which gives magic resistance when worn but also makes it difficult for the wearer to use magic, translating to a sharp penalty in spellcasting rates and, depending on the implementation, reducing or nullifying the effects of magic items.

Rather than having fixed rings and amulets in the game, randomly shuffle the properties conferred by them in one big pool at the start of the game. Opening up all sorts of possibilities such as a ring versus poison, a ring of reflection, an amulet of conflict, an amulet of adornment, etc.

Any effect from a worn amulet applies also to your steed.

Magic collar, an amulet without a randomized appearance, which you can apply to a pet to make it wear it, assuming it has a neck. The pet then becomes visible to you at all times while it’s on your level (similar to seeing it with telepathy) and possibly tracked in #overview if it’s not on your level. Farlooking a pet wearing a magic collar shows HP and other additional information as if you had used a stethoscope on it.

Not specified what effects there would be, if any, if the player wears the magic collar.

Croesus generates wearing a random gold amulet (probably not change or strangulation, though).

Magpies, a bird that has a stealing attack; unlike monkeys, the stealing attack is limited to shiny objects (possibly based on their material) that are under a certain weight. Under that rule, rings, gems, and amulets are common targets of theirs. They probably have a rather fast speed, too. They should likely generate in small groups.

Magpies would have an alignment of 0 and lack the M2_HOSTILE flag, and thus may be peaceful to neutrals, but angering one makes all other magpies angry as well.

Chargeable ring (or amulet, if it’s feasible to make chargeable amulets) of energy regeneration.

Assuming that some limit has been implemented on the number of pets you can have at one time: New amulet that allows you to have more pets than you normally can.

Amulet of drain resistance, which also gives immunity to death magic. Useful if monsters casting drain life are implemented.

Whenever a lich is created, a special phylactery amulet is created somewhere on the level. When the lich is killed, the phylactery begins a timer to resurrect into the lich again. The player can somehow destroy it to finish the lich off once and for all.

Amulet of reincarnation: when you die, it prevents your game from ending, but it permanently polymorphs you into a different form.

Erosion on rings and amulets makes their effect intermittent.

Am amulet versus thievery, which protects you from all theft attacks including nymphs, leprechauns, foocubi, and possibly even Amulet-stealing attacks.

Amulets can be flushed down toilets to identify them.

More acid resistance sources in FIQHack, to balance yellow dragons’ exploding acid breath. Possibly a ring or amulet of acid resistance.