The potion of wonder gives both a positive and negative intrinsic when quaffed, and both a positive and negative object property when something is dipped into it.
Reduce the ability of holy water to bless large objects and stacks, by telling the player “Your [item(s)] is too large to dip into one bottle”. From there, it could either prompt “Use X bottles instead?”, tell you you don’t currently have enough potions, or suggest you apply multiple potions instead of dipping.
Small and single objects would still be blessable by using one potion.
Getting crowned as a lawful character should unlock the ability to dip for Excalibur if you are currently unable to, or raise the odds for successfully dipping to what Knights get.
Change dipping into existing water to a standard multiturn action. If you are on top of water that you can dip into, you are now asked immediately after typing #dip if you want to dip things into it. If you say no, you are prompted for items to dip into each other like normal. If you say yes, you are presented with an inventory selection menu that allows you to select multiple items. Then you dip each of those items once into the water, handled automatically as an occupation. If something interesting happens, like a fountain effect or a monster moves nearby, the occupation is interrupted like normal.
Unspecified how the player should communicate their intention to dip items multiple times. For instance, when diluting potions in a fountain which might dry up, it’s desirable to double-dip all potions one by one in case it dries up part way through, but it’s unclear how the interface should handle this.
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.
You can dip oil into booze or vice versa to create a new type of potion (“potion of firebomb” or “potion of molotov cocktail”) that is never randomly generated, which is primarily intended to be lit and thrown like oil, but results in a much more powerful fireball than oil alone would produce.
Effects when drinking this potion are unspecified. Since oil has minimal effect when you drink it, it likely just works like booze or diluted booze.
You can dip fruit into an uncursed potion of water to squeeze its juice out and turn it into a (maybe diluted) potion of fruit juice. However, this could be abused if fruit juice is smoky.
Dipping ammo in various potions can endow it with a permanent object property related to the potion.
Allow sinks to be catalysts for alchemizing things. (Or possibly add a “cauldron” as a new piece of dungeon furniture, but that’s iffier.)
A radically different system from how alchemy currently works, known as “1 + 1 = 2”: no matter how many potions are in the stacks being dipped, only one from each stack is consumed, and two alchemized potions are always produced (unless they explode).
Any item can be dipped into a potion of levitation to permanently reduce its weight by 20%. This uses up the potion, and it will only affect the item’s base weight, not the weight of any contents (i.e. a bag of holding thus dipped will weigh 12 + contents instead of 15 + contents). If the object is canceled at a later point, it loses this property and reverts to its normal weight.
The effect cannot be stacked; attempting to dip an already-levitated object into another levitation potion will have no effect and will not use up the potion.
A possible variation is to also confer this effect for potions of enlightenment, since “enlightening” the item could be interpreted as making it physically lighter.
Dipping Frost Brand into water potions (or possibly any freezing-eligible potion, which is most of them) should freeze and shatter the potion. Likewise for Fire Brand, which should boil potions and ignite (but not explode) oil it’s dipped into.
Shallow water shouldn’t be a free and easy method of diluting potions infinitely. Instead, it should have a chance of contaminating or polluting the potion (or turning it to a potion of sickness), where polluted potions can’t just be re-dipped to dilute them to water or cancelled back to water. Or instead of dealing with polluted potions, just have a chance of losing the potion entirely.
Dipping low boots into a potion of levitation turns them into levitation boots.
Deliberately dipping a bag into water wets all of its contents with no random chance of failing.
Dipping a unicorn horn in acid dissolves and destroys the horn, producing a potion of healing.
Dipping a spellbook in any healing potion will restore one of its read charges. Dipping it in a potion of restore ability will restore all of its read charges. In either case, the potion is used up.
Occasionally, when generating a level 6+ spellbook, set its opoisoned flag to true. You get “The book was coated in contact poison!” not as a random spellbook reading failure effect, but when you try to read a book whose opoisoned is set to true. Triggering the contact poison usually (but not always) clears the opoisoned flag, so it won’t be poisoned if you try to read it again.
Dipping a poisoned spellbook in any healing potion will neutralize the poison and use up the potion. Possibly, dipping it in a potion of sickness will poison the book, though this would be useless unless monsters read spellbooks.
Allow the player to dip into adjacent pools, as this is not actually hard to do in real life.
Dipping a unicorn horn into a potion of a type it normally “cures” will do nothing if the potion is cursed.
Dipping a spellbook in a potion of gain level turns it into a spellbook of some spell that is one level higher. You only get “Interesting…” if you try this on a level 7 book. Not determined whether this should count as polymorphing an object to break polypileless conduct.
Dipping a scroll of amnesia into some (or all?) non-polymorph, non-water potions will make the potion “forget itself” and turn to water. The scroll also blanks.
When dipping an oilskin sack in water, give a unique message “The water runs off the [bag/oilskin sack], leaving it dry.”, which unambiguously identifies the oilskin sack.
Darts can be dipped in several different potions besides sickness to get different effects. Blindness, hallucination, sleeping, confusion, etc. Implementation-wise, this can be done by overloading the corpsenm flag on ammunition to indicate which potion it’s been dipped in.
Potion of honey; nonmagical but provides a lot more nutrition than juice. Can be obtained from bees somehow, possibly by dipping royal jelly into a potion of fruit juice or potion of water.
You can dip a potion into a sink to pour water into it from the tap, diluting it and causing runoff which subjects you to vapor effects (hopefully identifying it). For simplicity, the 1/30 chance of a random potion coming out of the sink should probably be ignored here.
Dipping potions deliberately into a large water source (anything but the potion of water) turns them into water in one go, without a need to dip twice. You get a message about pouring out the old potion and filling the bottle with water. Being submerged underwater is not necessarily deliberate so it does not instadilute potions to water all at once.
Give potions more side dipping effects:
You can dip an item in a ochre, spotted jelly, or acid blob corpse to make it take acid damage (if applicable).
If you’re polymorphed into a unicorn, you can dip your horn into potions.
