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

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 enhance club skill to Grand Master.

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

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

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.

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

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.

New role based on a “loup du noir” archetype, possibly called the Lycanthrope - you start with a pelt, a new sort of cloak-slot armor that polymorphs you into a specific type of monster when you wear it. You also are inflicted with some sort of delayed lycanthropy - you won’t randomly polymorph into a monster like with standard lycanthropy, but after not using a pelt for a while, you do start feeling the urge to put one on, and if you still refuse, you are eventually compelled to put one on. (It isn’t specified what happens if you get rid of your pelt(s) by the time you would be compelled to wear one; possibly you just die from insanity, or else the addiction is implemented in some other way like continuous worsening HP damage.)

The form you get from wearing a pelt has some boosted stats from the base form - in particular, your carrying capacity and damage would be better than the stat blocks for the monsters suggest.

You could start with either a “default” pelt which is not very good, but can be turned into an ideal one later, or start with a specific animal’s pelt, which you can control with the pettype option. This role never starts with a pet.

Pelts might also work as a standalone concept or one that works with a druid, ranger, or caveman role, or a hypothetical new shaman role:

• You can obtain a pelt by using a knife to skin the corpse of some monster that would reasonably have a pelt. This will probably be an occupation, and either its time or success rate will vary based on your knife skill and if you have a role-specific bonus.
• By using some sort of magic (instead of it being inherent to a role), you can transform into the animal whose pelt you are wearing.
• While polymorphed with a pet, you are a perfect imitation of the monster, to the point where monsters might behave differently because they see you as one of them.
• Pelts confer some benefit when worn as a cloak besides the ability to polymorph, which varies depending on the monster species, such as a boost to damage.

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

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

Cavemen receive a spellbook of fireball as their crowning gift, which they can always cast with 100% success rate. Flavor-wise, this ties into “discovering fire”.

Livelog when a Caveperson player creates fire for the first time.

Cavepeople can safely sacrifice same-race monsters to “give them to the ancestors”, but only if the monster wasn’t killed by the player.

Buff Cavepeople by giving them a direct boost to carrying capacity beyond what they get from their Str and Con, to the point that they can carry more weight than any other role.

Cavemen wielding clubs get damage bonuses that increase with their skill in club, to make up for clubs’ awful damage.

Replace Cavemen’s quest artifact with scales from the Chromatic Dragon (their quest then becomes “kill the dragon that is terrorizing our people” instead of “fetch the artifact from the dragon who stole it”). The scales only drop when she is killed, rather than her being generated with them (thus, they can’t be stolen). The scales could either be implemented simply as a base item akin to chromatic scales in UnNetHack which provide a cocktail of resistances, or as an artifact. If implemented as a non-artifact, the Caveman role will have no associated quest artifact.

The scales should NOT be enchantable into scale mail. The pile of resistances is good enough.

Don’t gift a character a spellbook as a prayer boon if the character is illiterate or certain roles (like cavemen or barbarians), and if a spellbook is given limit its level somehow so that a character doesn’t get a spellbook of much too high level.

Blowguns, a weapon which can be used as a launcher for darts. (Cavemen can thematically use these.)

Barbarians and cavemen get weapons/ammo instead of spellbooks as a prayer boon, or enhancements to their current weapons.

Cavemen (maybe only lawfuls) get a small alignment bonus for cannibalism, because it is honoring the ancestors.

Cavemen get a small alignment penalty for writing or using complex tools.

If you are a Caveman, you get telepathy or clairvoyance while you are hallucinating.

Cavemen get a large damage/to-hit bonus when throwing spears at large mammals, or an alignment bonus for killing large mammals with spears.

The Caveman pantheon should be changed to monosyllabic god names like the rest of the Caveman-specific text.

Cavemen should get a berserking bonus if their pet gets killed.

Some roles should get food appraisal as a permanent intrinsic. Caveman at level 6 (though level 1 is also a very popular suggestion), Tourist at level 10, maybe Healers at level 1 but they already get poison resistance so maybe not.