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.

There should be a “black glow” message for when items get cursed by a fountain (either by quaffing or dipping).

Alternate god smitings (to go alongside striking with lightning): chaotic gods or Moloch try to create lava around and underneath you, and neutral gods blast you in a magical explosion that instakills you if not magic resistant, curses all your items, strips any charges from charged items and disenchants gear to something highly negative.

A new magical gray stone provisionally called a “curse-eater”. If you are carrying one in your main inventory, every time you are hit with a curse items effect, the gray stone absorbs the curse instead and loses one level of beatitude. If it absorbs a curse while already cursed, it crumbles.

Carrying multiple stones will make a curse items effect hit only one of the stones, chosen randomly.

Dropping items onto a Moloch-aligned altar (or only his high altar?) can curse them.

A monster spell ‘curse weapon’ or ‘curse equipment’, a clerical spell that is a weaker version of curse items: it only curses one item, but selects from among worn and wielded objects. If the target isn’t wearing or wielding anything, it will target one piece of equippable gear from their inventory, or failing that a random item.

If you have a scroll of remove curse in your open inventory and you get hit with a curse items effect, the scroll occasionally intercepts the curse like Magicbane does, but it gets destroyed in the process.

The spell of remove curse may be cast offensively at monsters to bestow a curse.

Spellcasters who curse items also have a separate way to remove your knowledge of items’ beatitude, so you don’t know what might have just been cursed.

Scrolls of remove curse never generate cursed, and resist becoming cursed.

Magicbane should block random item cursing from a fountain.

Mummies have a curse item attack that would probably make them not fun to have in their current quantities. So mummies are not randomly generated; they appear in graveyards and some special levels like the Catacombs and the Archeologist quest, but otherwise do not appear.