Spell staves should have active or passive effects that scale up with your skill in the stave’s spell school. For instance:

• The staff of enchantment may apply confusion or sleep to monsters you hit with it.
• The staff of holiness reduces the chance that your items will get cursed.
• The staff of healing gives increased HP regeneration.
• The staff of evocation increases your damage output while standing on grass, or grants you the phase-through-trees ability.

When a shimmering dragon’s stun breath is reflected, you become confused.

Chatting to a quantum mechanic can result in them talking to you about physics, causing you to become confused.

Add a system of “hell curses”. When you enter a demon lord’s lair, you are afflicted with 2 random curses, which stick around forever until the lord is killed or bribed off.

You can receive at most six curses over the course of the game, requiring you to defeat the lords of the first three lairs you encounter. Further generation of lairs does not add any curses.

A non-comprehensive list of potential curses is:

• healing potions heal only half as much HP
• your speed is knocked down by 2
• your AC is deducted
• your spellcasting failure rates increase
• you are randomly inflicted with confusion every 50 turns or so

Add a potion of milk, working along the same lines as milk in Minecraft, which cancels potion effects (or since not many potions have lasting effects that you’d want to cancel, it cancels various temporary good and bad status effects in general, like confusion, stunning, and invisibility, but not nausea since drinking milk usually makes nausea worse in real life.

Ring of clarity, which makes you immune to confusion when wearing it. If you happen to eat it, it will cure any temporary confusion you have.

Using a spell staff allows you to cast spells of the associated school while not necessarily being able to speak (due to polyform or some other reason); it could also potentially suppress other impediments to spellcasting, such as confusion.

There should be a way to remove confusion from pets. One simple way to accomplish this would be giving you a way to directly feed a lizard corpse to your pet, by making pets prioritize eating a lizard corpse when confused. Though this would not work for herbivorous or inediate pets.

Confused sea monsters should sometimes randomly move out of the water and flop onto land. (E.g. it suppresses the behavior of treating non-water spaces as invalid.)

Reading a noncursed scroll of amnesia while confused “clears your mind”, which cures the confusion and sometimes gives you enlightenment, but the regular amnesia effects still happen too.

When zapping a wand when confused, one of the potential random directions to zap is at yourself. This could potentially apply to any directional prompt, not just wands.

Artifact whistle Nightingale, based on the Nightingale Robber from Russian folklore. When blown, it causes various effects to monsters in a sizeable radius: stunning, confusion, scaring, possibly even instadeath if they are weak monsters or have low HP (or just HP damage). Any of those effects can also happen to the player. The player is guaranteed to become deaf for several dozen turns from blowing the whistle.

As a limiting factor, it will only cause these effects if blown when its invoke timer is ready, and blowing it will internally set its invoke timer as if you invoked it. If blown when its invoke timer is not ready, it will just behave like a regular whistle (and no “ignoring you” message will be shown).

If you attempt to write enchant weapon or enchant armor (that you already know the appearance of) while confused, you will instead write the other one, even if you don’t yet have it identified.

Dart traps can make you fall asleep, go blind, hallucinate, get confused, etc. This would mesh well with #1922.

Reading a scroll of confuse monster while confused confuses nearby monsters in a large radius akin to confused taming.

Monsters can drink potions of booze as a defensive item, but only when fleeing. It cancels their fleeing and confuses them.

Undead caught in a flash of light (from cameras or just from casting an area light spell) get awakened if they were asleep or confused (with a chance that decreases at higher levels) if already awake. Possibly, just illuminating their space by carrying some light source near them should be enough to wake them up.

Sustain ability also gives stun and confusion resistance, and prevents you from studying books.

If a mind flayer eats your brains while you are confused, it becomes confused.

Reading a spellbook while confused may teach you a random spell but only set your memory of it to 1000 turns. It can also reduce memory of all other spells by 1000. Alternatively, it has no real effect, and just prints a message “You were holding the spellbook upside down… You learn the spell of ‘kcol draziw’.” (a random spell name printed backwards).

Vortices confuse you after you spend a few turns engulfed in them, because you’re dizzy from spinning around so much. (Limit this to actual vortices: fog clouds, for instance, are in the v class but don’t spin you around.)

Additional temporary effects accompany drinking a potion of booze. The effects wear off when the confusion does (so if you extend it by, say, drinking a potion of confusion, the effects are prolonged). There is consensus that there should be both positive and negative effects; all of the following have been proposed:

• A damage bonus, or even double damage
• Temporary HP
• An accuracy penalty (or a Dexterity penalty)
• Slight reduction of speed
• Temporary cold resistance (debatable; if possible it should probably make you not feel cold attacks but still take regular damage from them)
• Attacking an enemy makes you automatically keep fighting it until one of you is dead
• Monsters are treated as having higher charisma (currently no monsters are treated as having charisma at all, but this could also hurt or nullify your ability to refuse a foocubus removing your clothes)
• You may pass out when the confusion ends, and end up with a hangover when you wake up. (Not described what the effects of a hangover would be). You may also find yourself suddenly on a different level when you wake up.
• You are protected from gaze attacks due to not being able to focus enough to meet someone’s gaze.
• If you’re a dwarf, the effects get magnified
• If there is any such thing as a player-is-scared effect, it is canceled when you drink the booze and blocked while you’re under the influence. This goes for however long the confusion persists, so you can extend it by drinking potions of confusion if you want.
• Any AC from your armor is nullified (this would also contribute to monk “drunken boxing” proposals, since monks don’t usually have as much armor AC)

Change the confused effects of the scroll of punishment: blessed mollifies your god if angry, uncursed increases anger by 1, cursed increases anger by 1 and your god smites you.

When trying to descend stairs while stunned, and possibly confused with some probability, you should fall down the stairs.

Add some effect to Snickersnee so that it’s not just a slightly better katana. Ideas include confusion resistance, stunning resistance, and displacement.