Alternative Necromancer role, because its implementation in SLASH’EM winds up being a rather halfhearted version of Wizard with some elements of Priest and Archeologist. Note: This was written for a hypothetical variant that does not have a Necromancer role, rather than as an update to SLASH’EM’s.

• When playing as a Necromancer, dying monsters may drop “soul” objects, which can then be collected by the player.
  • Souls only exist as an object for the purpose of occupying a space on the map before being picked up. They are weightless and do not actually occupy space in inventory, nor can they be stolen after being collected. A Necromancer can have an unlimited amount of them.
  • If a soul drops adjacent to the player, it is automatically collected.
  • Souls drop 100% of the time from monsters the player kills, less for monsters that die otherwise. Never for monsters that kill themselves.
  • Monsters ignore souls and cannot pick them up. (There is room for an extension where certain undead like a barrow wight or a lich can collect souls to become more powerful, but that is not required for this.)
  • Souls vanish after being on the floor for around 10 turns or being moved off level, preventing the player from sitting back while pets or conflict mop up a large crowd of monsters and then obtaining all their souls with no effort.
  • Souls can also be offered on an altar to gain alignment points.
• Souls are used to fuel the casting of necromancy spells, an entirely new spell school. Necromancy spells consume some Pw like normal spells, but also consume souls, and generally are more powerful than non-necromancy spells of the same level. Various spell ideas:
  • Reanimate creature: which consumes a soul of some creature and reanimates a corpse of that same creature, bringing it back as a pet. (It may be flagged as undead, if the variant supports this).
  • Soul blast: Consumes multiple souls and produces an attack whose power is proportionate to the total monster difficulty of the expended souls.
  • Empower undead: Temporarily buffs all nearby pets, scaling up with the more souls you expend. This is intended to be one of the primary ways a Necromancer takes care of enemies, so it should be a pretty good boost.
  • Spell which consumes 5-10 souls of one monster type and create a tame monster of that type without needing a corpse.
  • Spell which consumes souls to regain HP or Pw.
  • Spell which infuses your weapon, armor, or other gear with souls, making it more effective for a time.
  • Spell which consumes souls of one species and polymorphs you into that monster.
  • Charm undead: Tames undead. Low cost compared to general charm monster.
  • Create wight: Works like reanimate creature but the resulting creature gains level-drain abilities.
• A good guaranteed starting combination of spells for the Necromancer might be reanimate creature and empower undead, since this will enable them to kill monsters, bring them back as pets, and boost them with the souls from more kills.
• Most undead (at least the mindless undead) generate peaceful to Necromancers.
• If desired, there could also be an “amulet of necromancy” which, when worn by non-Necromancers, causes souls to drop (less frequently than they do for Necromancers) and enables the hero to cast necromancy spells. However, not many other roles would be non-Restricted in necromancy spells, and any Lawful hero would be harshly penalized for casting them.
  • In order to avoid this being a useless item for Necromancers, it could improve soul drop chances for them.
  • Non-Necromancers wearing the amulet might also be limited in the amount of souls they could have at one time.
• If desired, Valkyries could be able to collect souls natively, but the only thing they can do with them without penalty would be to offer them on altars for alignment points.

The system may want some simplification since it may be clunky to have the player navigate through menus to choose souls from all the different ones they have accumulated. Possibly, souls from a given species just combine, so you would be shown something like “souls of gnome kings (12 total monster levels)”. An extreme simplification would cut out the entire soul-storage system and just replenish Pw when you collect one.

Monsters that hatch from eggs should be specially flagged as being ineligible to death-drop items, since the only explanation would be that the item was with them in the egg, which makes no sense.

Paper golems occasionally drop non-blank scrolls.

Snow golems occasionally drop one or more of the following when killed:

• carrot
• fedora or elven helm
• random cloak, possibly slightly eroded, rarely of frost
• random pair of gloves, possibly slightly eroded, rarely of frost
• a few rocks, or possibly jet stones

Displacer beasts could drop their hide, which can be enchanted or otherwise crafted into a cloak of displacement.

Leprechauns very rarely drop a four-leaf clover on death. This is a vegan comestible that provides 1d3 luck (or just acts as a luckstone) when carried and can be eaten to gain 1 Luck. (The four-leaf clover appearing from sacrifices is not this item and cannot be picked up, though that could become confusing.)

A new branch with infinite levels, whose level difficulty continues steadily increasing the deeper you go. Monsters killed do not drop anything, except that there is a very small chance, increasing with greater difficulty, of dropping a single wand of wishing. Unlike the rest of the dungeon, monster generation cares only about the level difficulty, ignoring the player’s experience level.

Levels in this branch are non-persistent. To prevent destroying any unique items, you either can’t bring them into the branch at all, or you are prevented from leaving a level in any way while they are on the level somewhere other than your person. Not determined what drinking a cursed potion of gain level would do.

One way to increase the challenge and prevent the hero from resting on the downstairs every level and starting each new level fresh is to suppress or remove natural HP regeneration in this branch.

Using an upstairs will take you back to the branch entrance, which may then close off forever. Possibly, 9/10 of upstairs will just crumble to nothing upon arrival in the level (whether this 9/10 is random or happens regularly every 10 levels isn’t determined). This makes it less easy to decide to bail out, though levelport or branchport would probably still work as escape items.

Not determined is to what degree the branch should enforce the player to spend time on each level. The three proposed options are:

1. No enforcement. The player can go as deep as they want by digging a hole right away with the increased risk it entails.
2. Enforced finding the downstairs. The floor is nondiggable, so the player has to at least reach the downstairs in order to travel further.
3. Enforced battling a certain amount (or all) of the monsters. The downstairs will not let you travel down them unless you have killed a certain amount of monsters on the level.

Add several new never-randomly-generated cards, all of which are designed to give strong but short buffs, to you and more often allies. Though their frequencies are 0, they are sometimes dropped from monsters you and your pets kill, at the same frequency the keyed create monster cards do.

Other roles can write these scrolls if they want to or find them in bones, but they are generally intended to be less powerful than many existing scrolls so they shouldn’t steal generation probability from them.

Kills by cartomancers’ pets should also have the occasional chance to drop a card of summon monster. It should not just be limited to player kills, since this disincentivizes the whole strategy of using temporary summoned monsters to do most of the fighting.

Queen bees drop a few killer bee eggs.

Straw golems have a smallish chance of dropping a T-shirt.

Air elementals drop some rocks (and “sticks” - the occasional wand of nothing?) which is the debris you have been pummeled with. (Also makes the Plane of Air a little less difficult to cross if you haven’t got a levitation source.)

Rock moles and other item-eating monsters drop any gold or gems they have eaten (digesting them can’t be a fast process), or they destroy 10% of all gold they eat and have a 10% chance of destroying any other items they eat; otherwise those items will be placed in the mole’s inventory.

Skeletons may drop skeleton keys when killed.

Killer bees occasionally drop lumps of royal jelly when killed.

Adult female dragons drop eggs (more so than the usual oviparous drop odds).

Any comestibles death-dropped by an F monster are rotten when eaten.

Tame dragons never drop scales.

Rope golems sometimes drop leashes, bullwhips, or grappling hooks upon death.

Tigers occasionally drop tiger eye rings.

Water moccasins occasionally drop water walking boots.

Dragons have a smaller chance of leaving scales if they are killed with a sharp weapon.

In order for a random item to drop as a death drop, it must be able to have been carried by the monster. This means that newts and such won’t get many death drops and the ones they do will be small.

Specifically, this approach doesn’t involve trying extra hard to pick an appropriately sized item, because then lightweight items such as scrolls and magic markers would become too common. It merely rolls up a random item, checks whether it would be the right weight for this monster, then decides not to drop it if it’s unrealistically heavy.

Add a “summoned” bitfield to struct monst, which is used to identify monsters that have been created through magical means. Should be a bitfield rather than a flag so that it can track different details of how it was summoned (from trap/wand/etc, by player or by something else; it probably doesn’t warrant a mextra struct). Summoned monsters can have various anti-farming nerfs applied to them: no training skills, no corpses, no deathdrops, no starting inventory, no experience, etc. Possibly, summoned monsters also disappear after a few hundred turns.

Female oviparous monsters sometimes drop eggs of their species when killed. The chance is reduced if the monster was dead and revived.

Remove deathdrops entirely, and instead give monsters items in their starting inventory with the same rules as a deathdrop.

Add rare drops to some monsters, with a very low probability (around 0.1%). These could be artifacts or otherwise unattainable items.