Dipping a corpse into a potion of polymorph “keys” the potion to that specific monster type: if it is used to polymorph the player or a monster, they will be turned into the same monster type as the corpse used. The corpse and potion are not consumed by being dipped.

If the monster is no-polymorph, nothing happens.

If the potion is used to polymorph an object, it does not do anything unusual, unless the object is a type for which species matters, in which case the potion changes its species to the keyed type, which can be useful for changing a figurine to something specific.

If in a variant that has potions of specific monsters’ blood, this can also be created by dipping polymorph into monster blood or vice versa.

Human (and possibly humanoid) monsters killed by a vampire’s drain attack (not its weapon or physical bite damage) should have a long timeout set on their corpses to revive them as a vampire. If the player or a pet was the one that killed them, they should revive tame.

Eating a mimic corpse typically makes you mimic some object besides a pile of gold, giving you an opportunity to identify it if you don’t already know it. You get the message “You can’t resist the temptation to mimic a [object]” with that object’s randomized description being appended if it was previously unknown.

The odds of getting an object you haven’t discovered are controlled by your Luck.

• If Luck is 0, you mimic the first random object type the game picks.
• If Luck is positive, the game rerolls up to Luck times to try and find an unidentified object type.
• If Luck is negative, the game rerolls up to Luck times to try and find an identified object type.

Special (or themed) rooms in Gehennom containing priest and monk corpses, to correspond to the themed room that contains a bunch of dead bodies with no priests and monks because a comment notes “Moloch has a special fate reserved for members of those classes.”

Eating a mummy corpse that gives deadly illness uses a different message than other too-old corpses, about it being contaminated with toxic embalming fluids.

Healers can use a stethoscope on a corpse to usually find out what its cause of death was.

If a dwarf sees you eating a dwarf corpse, he grows enraged and gains to-hit and damage bonuses. This may also extend to other races seeing you eat their fellow kin, though orcs might just laugh instead.

Shopkeepers in delicatessens who are sold corpses should magically turn the corpses into tins of that monster with a random beatitude. As well, delicatessen shopkeepers rarely generate carrying a tinning kit.

Polymorphing a dragon corpse creates a random object made of dragonhide.

With respect to other proposals about crafting (involving a craftsmen’s guild or even scattered craftsmen), the process of traveling back and forth to and from it might become busywork. So if players could craft things on their own, that might be better.

• Would probably need properly flavored terrain for workstations, like a furnace or smelter, for certain crafts, otherwise flavor is too weird. (But this creates the problem of having to travel back and forth to it again.)
• Fixed, non-simple recipes (e.g. existing scroll crafting is a simple recipe) are a heavy spoiler tax and should be avoided.
• This could be simple for certain types of items, as in requiring some silver or gold and a diamond to craft a diamond ring, but doesn’t explain where any magical effects come from, and also might weirdly tie crafting recipes to randomized appearances which have previously been meaningless.
• Probably requires a few more “base” crafting materials, some source of leather, some source of wood, etc.
  • Corpses could decay into bones, which disappear themselves with a longer timeout, but in the meantime can be used to craft bone stuff.
• One of the craftable items should be saddles, because they’re very hard to find for non-Knight characters who want to ride.
• Tallow candles should be relatively easy to make, because they can be made out of fat from slain animals.

Cantrips are level 0 spells that cost d2 or d3 power to cast. In order not to let them be unbalancing, they don’t train skill and are mostly useless, except in certain circumstances or for low-Pw spellcasters who can’t do much of the bigger stuff yet. ais523 suggests that good candidates for cantrips might be things that have little combat use, and whose effects could be duplicated by backtracking or other tedious things, but would be useful to avoid boredom. Given their cheapness, they should probably not train skills, and may not even need spell schools.

Most ideas for cantrips seem to be a little too powerful and would do better off as normal spells (and may be listed as independent YANIs for normal spells); however, those that seem like they would fit are listed here.

• Increase the odds of monsters dropping a corpse in the next few turns.
• Create an empty unlocked chest. (This would need some restriction so you can’t farm and sell them; perhaps you can only create up to 10 or 20 chests per game with this.)
• Mark a map square with a symbol, perhaps a comma, that is no different from normal floor but shows up on #overview and the normal map view.
• Deal some small damage, such as d5 or d6, to a nearby creature. (Acid Bubble from D&D is a nice corresponding cantrip.)
• Dig out a single square.
• Create a cancelled hostile yellow light. It cannot explode at you since it is cancelled, so it becomes an autonomous light source of radius 1, which can’t follow you down levels like a pet can. Killing it should not grant you any experience; otherwise this would be easily farmable.
• Light a radius 2 or 3 area permanently, like a weak form of the spell of light.
• Mage hand: you indicate a direction and the nearest item on the floor in that direction, assuming it’s under 100 weight or so, is brought to you and is placed in your inventory. This can be used > to get things out of pits.
• Create an illusion of yourself at your spot. The illusion never moves. Monsters that see it assume it is you and will attack whichever one is nearer (the illusion is instantly destroyed if attacked).

Several new objects for aiding in alchemy:

• Flask, holds multiple quaffs of a single potion type (so that holy water can’t be mass-created but other potions can).
• Mortar and pestle, can grind gems / other things into dust which can be used to make potions.
• Alembic, can distill potions from things in the dungeon such as corpses.
• Recipe books/scrolls, which tell the reader how to create a certain potion through alchemy, and identifies the result potion or even all potions involved.

A carrion-eater conduct in which your only source of nutrition is allowed to be corpses. No permafood, juice, prayer or anything else.

Any corpse which has touched sewage is automatically tainted if you try to eat it.

A dead Keystone Kop should be referred to by the game as “Keystone Kop korpse” rather than “corpse”.

When a monster dies and leaves a corpse, they may make some noise that wakes up other monsters. The odds and radius of the sound increase with the size of the monster.

Corpses dropped by zombies are always or often cursed. Removing the curse from them makes them less likely to revive. This could even be made as strict as every time a zombie drops a corpse and a revival timer is actually set on it (as opposed to a rotting-away timer), it is made cursed.

There is some interaction you can do at an altar when you bring a zombie corpse there (not sacrificing it, since it will be too old) that sets the soul of the creature free, which will stop it from reviving.

Give a YAFM for attempting to apply a bullwhip towards an adjacent space containing a horse corpse: “Stop beating that dead horse!”

By wielding a floating eye corpse and either applying it at monsters or hitting monsters with it, you can paralyze the monsters, provided they can see you. As a potential downside, you might paralyze yourself if you stumble or fall into a pit while wielding it while non-blind.

Displacer beasts may drop a hide, which can be enchanted or otherwise crafted into a cloak of displacement. (Or else this could just work with a displacer beast corpse which could be enchanted/polymorphed/crafted, without requiring a new object for the hide).

Bottle of enchanted hot sauce, which you can dip corpses into. If the corpse is unsafe to eat, it will be refreshed for 10 turns.

Wraith corpses should function as a potion of gain level does, of the same beatitude as the corpse. I.e. a blessed wraith corpse will gain a level and then some fraction of experience points towards the next level.

When you are hit by a digestion attack, any corpses you are carrying in open inventory may be instantly digested by the monster and disappear, or else become partially eaten. (If the corpse is a cockatrice corpse, it might stone itself, or maybe that wouldn’t happen because of all the stomach acid?)

Eating the corpses of mummies may cure terminal illness (though they may also still give terminal illness, being old corpses), because powdered mummy has been used as a healing agent.

Mimics can mimic corpses.

If you eat a corpse of a monster that drank a potion just before dying, you have a chance of getting some effect from the potion too.

When a corpse (possibly only a fleshy, blood-bearing corpse?) falls into water, any nearby sharks and/or piranhas become “frenzied”, gaining bonuses, for some time. Possibly they could also try to converge on the space containing the corpse and maybe eat it.

5% of killing hits with Fire Brand, on a monster that can leave a corpse, never do leave a corpse. This is accompanied by the message “The [monster] freezes solid and shatters!” or “The [monster] burns to ash!”

Note that this idea is NOT for the Brands to instakill monsters 5% of the time. It just blocks a corpse drop 5% of the time.

Corpse traps, which act like statue traps but instead revive a corpse that is on that square when the player steps onto it or otherwise interacts with the corpse.

If you throw a corpse at a pet that would normally eat it, they immediately eat it as if it were a treat food thrown to them. It does not increase apport, though. (This is particularly relevant in variants where pets can gain intrinsics from corpses and it’s desirable to make them eat something.)

Corpses dropped by mummies take much longer than other corpses to rot away, since they are all dried out. (They are still unsafe to eat and unable to be sacrificed from the moment they drop, though.)

Aligned priests in a coaligned temple attempt to pick up corpses lying around and sacrifice them.

While you are hallucinating, any parrot corpses you come across are rendered as “ex-parrot” instead of “parrot corpse”.

Add more sources of nausea, particularly in the late game, because it’s an underutilized debuff that only really is relevant early. Proposed sources:

• Certain types of demons or the presence of certain demon lords such as Baalzebub or Juiblex.
• When you are hit with a disease attack but for some reason don’t get deathly sick, or are already deathly sick.
• Stepping over a rotting corpse.
• Some smallish chance every turn you are in a cockatrice nest.

Most of these increased sources of nausea should be subjected to some sort of (low-chance) Constitution saving throw so that characters with better Constitution have an advantage.

The corpses of monsters killed by cold effects take longer to rot. (Maybe they should also be fresh for sacrifice longer than usual.)

When an undead turning beam is zapped over the corpse of an undead monster that’s set to revive, the corpse is either destroyed outright or the revive timer is canceled so it won’t revive. (In this second scenario, zapping the corpse again with no revive timer set on it could resurrect it like normal.)

You can bash things with a wielded acid blob corpse. This inflicts acid damage to both you and the target and has a fixed, lowish chance of destroying the corpse.

If you try to sell a zombie corpse to a shopkeeper, they get angry. Or maybe they merely won’t let you into the shop if you’re carrying a zombie corpse, the same way it works with digging tools.

Sharply cut the frequency of lizards spawning (possibly even lower than 1/7), and possibly remove the special case that makes them always leave a corpse. This is because a player will usually accumulate enough of their corpses to be easily safe from any delayed stoning effect for the whole game. This won’t much affect reverse genociding them, if the player really wants a lizard corpse.

Also, possibly elevate their monster difficulty to something higher than 6; not because they are that difficult, but to make them appear only later on in the dungeon.

Alternatively, simply make lizard corpses rot, so that a player who wants to carry around a stoning defense must use other items, such as tins of lizard or acidic monsters, or potions of acid.

Eating corpses gives you a temporary “queasy” intrinsic, which is a debuff on par with being burdened. This is aimed at fixing the irrelevance of the game’s hunger clock.

Barbarians get extra nutrition from eating corpses, since they have practice in how to eat them properly. Possibly up to 1.5x the nutrition.

Spell of necromancy that turns a corpse you’re standing on (or possibly adjacent to you) into a tame undead. Probably in the clerical school, though a case could be made for matter (and certain variants have a school of necromancy which this would much more directly fit into). It will work on corpses of undead that you have killed. Casting this spell would have some sort of penalty for lawfuls; there would be some sort of warning before trying to cast it.

You can normally only create zombies or mummies when an undead monster exists for the kind of corpse you are animating (i.e. a jackal can’t be turned into undead but a gnome can turn into a gnome zombie/mummy). For intelligent monsters that have no counterpart, the spell can create ghosts.

At a high enough skill or caster level, you can create skeletons from the corpse of any vertebrate, and maybe even vampires from humanoids. You can also create wraiths and shades from monsters that have no undead counterparts.

When generating a corpse during level creation, pre-age the corpse a la zombie and mummy corpses so that it’s not weirdly fresh.

Polymorphing a corpse does not turn it into random food, but instead turns it into the corpse of a random level-appropriate monster. Discards any oextra information about the previously existing monster.

Almost-rotten corpses, those that give the “You feel sick” message, may cause you to vomit.

Wielding and hitting enemies with a pyrolisk corpse deals fire damage.

When you zap a wand of undead turning at a corpse that has an undead form, unless there is a ghost above it, it will resurrect the corpse as that undead. Also do this for living monsters that have undead forms, subject to monster magic resistance.

Skeletons for vertebrate monsters. Corpses turn into these when they rot away. They cannot be undead turned into their monster; trying to do this will create a skeleton monster instead. Lawfuls might get an alignment boost for burying a skeleton in a pit and filling it.

Some consumable object that lets you freshen a corpse (for eating or sacrifice) that doesn’t require resurrecting it with undead turning.

Corpses dropped by aligned priests or priest player monsters are always blessed.

Corpses dropped by mummies are always cursed.

Ghouls eat rotten corpses they find on the ground.

Purple worms eat corpses in 1 turn, because they can eat the monster in 1 turn so why not the corpse?

Zombies destroyed by turning never leave corpses, or the corpses they do leave are incapable of reviving.

Add a TDTTOE message about swinging your dead cat if you start hitting things with a wielded cat corpse. Also have a separate message “There isn’t enough room to swing your dead cat” if there are 4 or more walls adjacent to you.

Pets eat corpses incrementally, not all at once, and you can interrupt their eating by moving them off the corpse (e.g. swapping places). The corpse becomes progressively partly eaten as they eat it. Interrupting their eating deducts tameness points from them equal to how many they would have gained if they had been allowed to finish eating normally.

Tinning huge corpses produces the tin as usual, but just makes the corpse partially eaten instead of destroying it.

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

Fountains can be contaminated by letting corpses rot on top of them. This makes them more dangerous to use.

Inflicting poison damage on a monster, or killing it by poison, makes the corpse poisonous to eat.

F corpses can be dipped into potions to make different potions: juice + violet fungus = booze, juice + yellow mold = sickness, water + green mold = acid. (Note the existence of the Brewing Patch, which dissolves most F in juice to produce confusion, hallucination, booze, sleeping, and healing.)

Later suggested recipes which involve dipping a corpse in acid to dissolve it:

• Wraith corpse → potion of gain level. (Does not always succeed, to compensate for the fact that a wraith corpse doesn’t always grant a level. Maybe it even has a lower success rate than getting a level from a corpse.)
• Newt corpse → potion of gain energy.
• Floating eye corpse → potion of levitation or possibly monster detection.

All acidic corpses, not just acid blobs, never get tainted (but do eventually rot away).

You get a small Pw boost (similar to newts, or perhaps not boosting max Pw)? by eating the corpse of a spellcasting monster.

Mummy corpses never rot away.

Most corpses have sharply decreased amounts of nutrition (from the current values). They may also be too mangled to be good for a sacrifice, randomly based on their object ID. Their intrinsic-conveying chances are unchanged, though.

Wraith corpses cannot give food poisoning, though they can still rot away.

There is some sort of way to store a soul (ghost, or monster’s or pet’s soul from its corpse before it rots) in an item, and later release it into a freshly killed corpse to make the soul inhabit that body. Possibly this could be a ritual spell.

Unicorn corpses are never tainted from age, though they do eventually rot away.

Zapping a corpse with a cold ray will increase its decomposition timer (making it take longer to rot). If already rotten, only scales it back to rotting age.

If you eat the corpse of something and a monster of that same class sees you eating it, it becomes angry. (This is from ADOM).

Ideas around a system in which you can cook corpses:

• The general idea is to unbreak the hunger system by making regular corpses unsafe to eat, so the shortage in resources isn’t in food itself but is in safe methods of cooking it.
• Cooking sets a corpse’s rot timer to 0, lets them go longer without spoiling, or unspoils them.
• May also remove poison from some kinds of poisonous corpses.
• Cooked corpses are unsuitable for sacrifice and less likely to give intrinsics, or don’t at all (because the vitamins are destroyed).
• Can apply wands of fire to cook corpses.
• Or maybe eating raw non-vegetarian corpses is just plain dangerous, causing vomiting or sickness or other bad effects.
• Corpses can be cooked by killing monsters with fire or hitting monsters with fire attacks while they are carrying corpses.
• The problem is that nobody has yet proposed a mechanism for cooking corpses that would work well. Having firewood or some similar thing would massively affect the early game between characters that can and cannot manage to find it, and roles that start with or without it. Wands of fire have been proposed as a resource but those are valuable. Introducing a new item like firewood means that a whole lot of mechanics have to be reviewed for whether they should interact with or create that item.

Blessing a corpse prevents it from being tainted or rotten (the “Blecch! Rotten food!” effect).