A system in which dwarf heroes gain experience by carrying a lot of gold, or lose experience by carrying little gold. More specifically, if your total number of experience points is less than the amount of gold pieces you are currently carrying, you gain 1 experience point per turn, and if greater, you lose 1 experience point per turn. You gain or lose an experience level as normal whenever this brings you across a threshold for one.

Dramborleg and Ashmar should have an invoke effect that only dwarves can use, or alternatively should synergize and give a buff when both wielded by a dwarf.

Certain races should be able to forge using materials other races can’t:

• Dwarves can forge with crystal items, and possibly stone.
• Orcs can forge with stone items. Bone would be more flavorful for orcs, but less flavorful in being something that can actually be forged with.

If you are playing a dwarf, monsters pick a random gender pronoun when referring to you in their dialogue (random but consistent for each separate monster) because they can’t tell which one you are.

The “Construction Patch”:

• When digging out stone (not necessarily walls) with a pick, rocks may fall on your head with a lowish chance, about 10% per dug square. These deal the least damage if you are wearing a dwarven helm, and a little less than normal if you are wearing some other hard helm. Dwarvish characters have a high chance of dodging the falling debris entirely. Possibly also allow a boulder falling on your head from digging similar to when monsters tunnel.
• You can apply rocks at an adjacent floor square to build a wall. It takes 50 rocks, or 25 if there is a boulder in that square. (If the space is marked as being wall-nondiggable, this either doesn’t work, or flips the space to being diggable.) It takes 1 turn per rock to build it. In the process it creates an immovable object or dungeon feature called “partially-built wall” on that space, which tracks how many rocks are part of it. If you move onto the space, you can dismantle the wall and retrieve the rocks.
• You can apply rocks at an adjacent pool or moat to attempt to fill it. The more rocks, the higher the chance of filling it. This takes only 1 turn.
• Stone to fleshing diggable wall turns it into huge chunks of meat.
• Force bolts from striking wands or the spell scatter rocks off diggable walls they hit, and in roughly 5 shots the wall is destroyed.
• Digging a pit or hole puts a pile of rocks on a random adjacent square.
• When you dig a hole and fall down to the next level, you are usually accompanied by a shower of rocks falling on and around you. Dwarves are more adept at dodging and getting hit by fewer rocks.
• When using a pick to dig a square of natural stone where the four orthogonally adjacent squares are all dug out already, you are asked if you want to carve out a boulder. If you say yes, a boulder is deposited on the new space.

Note that the two boulder-creation methods above run the risk of being exploited for abusable quantities of food if you have stone to flesh available, and the stone-to-flesh-walls method explicitly invokes this.

Dwarvish shopkeepers never ask you to leave your pick-axe outside if you are also a dwarf, because they understand the deep cultural offensiveness of asking a dwarf to set aside their pick.

Dwarven characters should always passively see all gold on a level, with the possible exception of gold carried by a monster.