If you manage to anger your god to the point of them sending a minion while still an atheist, and your crowning artifact does not yet exist, there is a very small chance that one of the minions will be carrying the crowning artifact.
Vary the damage bonuses of the artifacts from game to game, in order to prevent there from being clearly defined top-tier artifacts that players should always try to obtain, and bottom-tier artifacts that players should ignore.
For instance, this means that in a given game, Mjollnir might deal only 1d6 bonus lightning damage, while Snickersnee deals 1d12. Or Mjollnir could deal 1d18 and Cleaver deals 1d7. The only way to get an idea would be to use a stethoscope to identify how much damage is being done.
This does not address artifacts whose bonuses only apply to a narrow set of monsters and are often considered inferior for that reason.
Based on some new code in 3.7 that tracks how an artifact was generated, allow the player to ask the Oracle about the existence of an artifact. The code isn’t in place for her to tell you where it actually is, but she will be able to tell you whether it generated randomly, in bones, from a gift, etc. Possible messages for some of these:
Make more artifacts creatable by naming, with reasonable restrictions based on your role, experience level, alignment, and preexisting enchantment of the weapon, if it is a weapon.
Example: A lawful Priest who is XL 20 can create Demonbane by naming it, provided the mace being named is +5. The enchantment turns to +0 as the magic flows into its new anti-demon powers.
Add a system for casting ritual spells: more powerful and more expensive spells which have some esoteric effects you can’t get otherwise. The main differences between ritual and normal spellcasting are that they consume valuable, hopefully non-renewable components, take a number of turns to cast instead of taking effect instantly, and may require you to be in or set up certain circumstances.
Various ritual spells that have been proposed:
Ritual spells come in spellbooks like usual, but aren’t stored in your spell list. Instead, reading the spellbook prompts you if you want to begin its ritual and tells you the necessary ingredients and circumstances you need to satisfy as preconditions. If you meet all the conditions and answer yes, you initiate the ritual. (For simplicity, this should probably burn up / expend all the components instantly.) You cannot begin a ritual while in the process of casting another ritual; this should probably be implemented as a precondition.
Apart from the component cost, rituals act as a constant drain on your Pw until the ritual is complete. If something distracts you in the middle of the ritual, you can go take care of it and then resume the ritual as long as you have the Pw left to finish it. (You could also drink gain energy during the ritual.) The only way for a ritual to fail, possibly backfiring with bad effects, is for you to run out of Pw while it is incomplete.
In addition to its preconditions, each ritual also has some postconditions: common to all rituals is that you have been casting the ritual for at least some length of time, but there may be others, such as standing on the square where you began the ritual, or have another item, or kill a monster, or something. There may also be other conditions such as “moving off the space where the ritual started breaks and halts the ritual”.
Every time you stop casting a ritual (whether it succeeded or failed), it increments the spellbook’s spestudied field; the book will eventually disintegrate after casting it a certain number of times.
You can use a crystal ball to search for an artifact. It will not tell you where it is, but it will show you a “cloudy” image of the artifact if it already exists, and an “empty” image if it does not yet exist. Maybe also tell the player explicitly “It means this artifact is/is not anywhere in the dungeon right now.”
If you defeat a monster that generates with an artifact weapon, that weapon’s skill is unrestricted for you, so that you can actually use it. Possibly only do this for monsters that are guaranteed certain artifacts, like Kas in EvilHack, rather than extending it to any random monster.
Coaligned (or unaligned) intelligent artifact weapons let you use them as if you had Basic skill, even if you don’t have it. Flavored as the weapon helping you out.
If an artifact produces any kind of message which clearly identifies it, it should be automatically identified as such in the discoveries list as if it had been formally identified. (In practice, the artifact will be clearly named, as well, so this just saves the trouble of having to officially discover it.)
A system termed “named non-artifact properties”. They are unique properties that never generate on more than one item per game, and confer some artifact-like qualities, but are not tied to a specific type of object, and can generate on multiple types of base item. This type of property cannot be wished for, even if properties can otherwise be wished for.
A couple examples:
You can get some rare intrinsics by eating artifacts that confer them. For instance, eating Excalibur could give level-drain resistance, or eating Grayswandir could give hallucination resistance.
The chance would be much less than 100%, possibly even lower than the standard odds of getting an intrinsic from eating jewelry.
Eating artifacts lowers the game’s generated artifact count by 1 per artifact eaten, so that you can wish for more artifacts successfully.
Intelligent artifact weapons reduce their damage (perhaps nullifying any bonus damage given by the artifact, or dealing half damage) if you are crossaligned, have negative alignment record, or your god is angry at you.
Artifacts can always hit shades (and ghosts in variants which treat them similarly), even when non-blessed.
Artifacts have a minimum XL associated with them. You can’t get a given artifact through sacrifice until you are at least its defined minimum XL.
Define a “power level” or a “tier” for each artifact, and when gifting an artifact, use the player’s experience level and other stats to calculate an appropriate tier to gift an artifact from. The only reason it feels bad to get Giantslayer is because you know you could have gotten something much more powerful but randomly didn’t; if the more powerful artifacts were simply not possible to get due to you not having the right stats yet, this might not happen as much.
Remove the feature where being gifted an artifact in a restricted skill unrestricts it to Basic; compensate for this by fixing the balance of artifact base types and the gifting logic so that your god’s first gift to you is never an artifact whose skill you’re restricted in.
If you are wielding a non-artifact weapon, and happen to get gifted an artifact whose base type matches your weapon, your weapon will be converted into the artifact (keeping its existing enchantment).
Change the Mitre of Holiness’s invoke effect to immediately make another artifact invokeable, zeroing its cooldown timer. This effect also happens passively if it is being worn: if you try to invoke another artifact which hasn’t cooled down all the way yet but the Mitre has, it will automatically invoke itself to zero the cooldown timer of the artifact being invoked so that the invoke will succeed. It gives a message when this happens.
Low-level sapient creatures avoid you and will not attack if you are visibly equipped with top-tier gear such as dragon scale mail or artifact weapons, unless they decide they have some advantage with which to beat you.
Archeologists can give artifacts to Lord Carnarvon. At the end of the game, any artifacts in his inventory count towards the game score, without having to drag them up to the Astral Plane.
Extend the graphical tile system to support special tiles for artifacts.
Artifactless conduct: is broken whenever an artifact enters the player’s inventory (since the player never has to pick up an artifact).
Intelligent non-quest artifacts will evade your grasp if you are directly cross-aligned (lawful when it is chaotic or vice versa). That is, a lawful can never pick up Stormbringer and a chaotic can never pick up Excalibur, though neutrals can still can and will still get blasted.
When an artifact is destroyed, unset it as existing so that it can be gifted or wished for again.
Artifacts whose base item type isn’t chargeable can be charged; this will clear or reduce any invoke timeout remaining.
If an artifact has been generated and is on some existing level, wishing for it will remove it from that level and teleport it right into the player’s hands. However, the beatitude, enchantment, and other fields of the wish will fail.
When you wish for an artifact and it arrives with an angry person, that person gets an appearance message, or at least a single line of dialogue.
At the start of the game, three artifacts are selected as potential divine gifts, and you will never get any other artifact than these three by regular sacrificing. These three artifacts must not hate the player’s race and ideally will provide a good balance in terms of power and utility. Gods can also grant non-artifacts as gifts, which no longer count against your odds of receiving an artifact. Also, the chance of getting an artifact is biased against low-level characters who have not made many sacrifices and towards high-level characters who have.
Invoking artifacts for invisibility makes you visible again if you are already permanently invisible. Also, move the Orb of Detection’s invoke invisibility ability to some lesser artifact because it’s a lame power for a quest artifact.
General artifact-stealing attack; like the Wizard’s quest-artifact-steal attack but applicable to all artifacts and without Amulet of Yendor theft baked in. Archeologist player monsters might use this (“That belongs in a museum!”).
Whether an artifact has or hasn’t yet cooled down is visible to the player.
Artifacts occasionally resist being vaporized from overenchantment (however, if they do, they don’t get the extra points of enchantment.)
The various Banes scare their target type of monster on top of the extra damage they deal them.
Attacking with a crossaligned artifact weapon halves all damage you deal.
You can wield artifacts in your offhand, but they must be non-intelligent, non-gifted, and non-crossaligned. (Non-wished-for is an option, but may be too exclusive.)
All Banes artifacts are bloodthirsty (disabling the attack prompt for peacefuls, like Stormbringer) versus their respective monster type.
Intentionally destroying an artifact reduces the artifacts generated counter, so you can wish up new ones.
As part of artifact rebalance: guaranteed sacrifice gifts should probably not be ascension kit quality gear, since otherwise sacrificing for such gear becomes a dominant strategy. (Most important for weapons; you don’t want to be able to obtain a weapon early that will obsolete all other weapons in the game.)
The Heart of Ahriman grants half physical damage, and Thoth Amon is nearly guaranteed to pick it up.
The Archeologist quest has either a lot of fairly weak artifacts or a lot of mundane items (golden staffs, death masks, sacrificial daggers etc) that are worth a lot of money in the locate and goal levels of their quest.
If you try to eat an artifact and it blasts you to death, put YAFM in the death message: “killed by trying to eat the [artifact]”.
Most artifacts should have a negative to-hit bonus, so you’re encouraged to train the weapon’s skill with some weapon that isn’t the artifact.
