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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Deaths in Goblin Town should produce a bones file, but one that just consists of a partial bones pile (not a full pile; the implication is that the Goblin King removes some of the best items from it) that is supposed to load somewhere in the early regular dungeon as a warning to other adventurers. These piles should contain a corpse, but since the former hero did not die on that space, there is no ghost. The corpse could possibly also uniquely render as “mutilated”.

Bones are only loaded when the experience level (or highest experience level reached) of the dead player is less than or equal to the current player’s experience level.

When a unique monster is removed from a bones file and the bones file is subsequently loaded, a special message is produced that hints at what the monster would have been.

Support blood splatters with no particular associated monster type (NON_PM). Such splatters will render as nondescript blood.

When saving a bones file, go through all the blood splatters on the level and set them to this nonspecific type. This avoids a bit of weirdness where a new adventurer enters the bones file, sees the splatters, and can immediately identify what type of monster each one came from.

If you die to a bag of tricks (“carnivorous bag”) and produce a bones file, neither your ghost nor any of your possessions will appear in the file… just the bag on the floor. Someone who subsequently finds and applies the bag will cause a hostile player monster with all the “dead” player’s gear to pop out of it.

Certain deaths (i.e. most HP deaths, but not things like disintegration or sliming) should let you scrawl a bit of player-chosen text in the dirt with your finger which persists in the bones file. This engraving is of blood if your current form has blood, and dust otherwise.

This is slightly technically complicated because the bones file gravestone also stores an engraving and there cannot be two engravings on one space; one solution is to engrave the message on an adjacent square.

It is possible to leave bones on Astral. If this happens, instead of a ghost, there will be a fourth resurrecting Rider, War, with all the equipment of the dead player, 100% of it cursed.

Ghosts (and technically other player remnant monsters such as wraiths, ghouls, etc) found in bones levels are empowered with additional abilities that normal monsters don’t have.

If you die to overwhelming cold damage (on the order of 3-4 times your current HP, for instance from Asmodeus’s cold attack), you leave behind a frozen statue (made of ice?) instead of a corpse.

Ghosts left behind by coaligned players are peaceful and grudge against hostile-to-the-player monsters. Ghosts killed by brainlessness do not behave like this, nor do ghosts not generated with bones.

Track how often bones files from a player are loaded. Because multibones levels exist, this should probably be accomplished by exposing in the discoverer’s dumplog or xlogfile every instance of a struct cemetery existing in the game, specifically the name of the player associated with it.

Alternate ending where you can settle down in an abandoned temple or possibly just a random altar room and become the priest of the temple permanently. (Creating a bones file where you are now an aligned priest).

Bones files created from filler levels should treat themselves as being on the deepest level the player reached in that branch in their game, so that there aren’t situations where a character carrying good gear who died in a silly manner on a higher-up level will leave a bunch of accessible loot.

Occasionally, when a bones file would create a ghost (e.g. most times), and the level difficulty is high enough, create a wraith of the player instead. If in Gehennom, occasionally create a shade of the player.

When the player is killed by a carnivorous (or, more rarely, an omnivorous) monster, the bones file may not contain a corpse because it was eaten by the monster. Never happens if it would be cannibalism for the monster to eat you.

Make bones a composite option that enables you to load only your own bones files, and never other people’s.

Bones levels have a special level sound. Possibly the same “eerie feeling” you get in abandoned temples.

When a monster triggers a magic (or maybe polymorph) trap, one possible effect is that they turn into a figurine of themselves with appropriate beatitude. However, the trap exploding on them is more likely, so that it can’t be used to farm figurines. A possibly evil addendum is that if the player would have otherwise died from damage from a magic trap, the bones file may contain a figurine of them instead of a corpse.

Restrict bones files from being loaded (possibly just discarding the bones file) if they contain monsters that are far out of difficulty for the player encountering them.

Make it possible to leave bones on certain levels that have a branch entrance in them (mainly mine entrance, sokoban entrance, quest), by virtue of removing the branch entrance before saving it as bones. If branch upstairs are removed in this manner, replace it with a pile of rocks; if downstairs are removed in this manner, replace them with a pit.

Alter the player’s corpse weight based on how hungry they were when they died.

The player’s own ghosts generate peaceful (possibly only in bones files).

Various ideas to prevent powerful bones generated on a level’s upstairs from instakilling a player:

• Don’t generate bones if the player died on the upstairs.
• Going downstairs doesn’t use a turn, but going up does.
• When saving the bones, set all monsters’ movement points to 0.
• If the player died on the upstairs, swap the upstairs and downstairs locations.
• A way to “peek” up or down the stairs without going there.

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