Some mechanic (maybe involving forges?) that consumes valuable gems to add enchantment to weapons or rings, because gems tend to become useless at a fairly early point in the game.
Make enchantments on launchers relevant without making them overpowered by adding their enchantment to damage (because projectiles already add their enchantment to damage): the enchantment determines the likelihood of getting +1 to multishot, unaffected by role or skill. This chance is given as either enchantment/(enchantment + 1), or enchantment/8.
If the enchantment is negative, the same formula is used on the absolute value of the enchantment to determine if multishot should be decreased by 1. If it is decreased to 0, you fail to shoot anything and waste your action.
New artifact Staff of Agni, a quarterstaff with the following fire-based properties:
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.
Shop-owned items with positive enchantment (but not negative) have the enchantment identified, since the shopkeeper is, after all, trying to get you to buy them.
In variants with object properties, items with beneficial properties should also come identified in shops for the same reason.
Make more artifacts creatable by naming, with reasonable restrictions based on your role, experience level, alignment, and preexisting enchantment of the weapon, if it is a weapon.
Example: A lawful Priest who is XL 20 can create Demonbane by naming it, provided the mace being named is +5. The enchantment turns to +0 as the magic flows into its new anti-demon powers.
Track the highest-reached enchantment of enchantable weapons and armor. If it gets cancelled or disenchanted below this peak amount, you can dip it in a potion of restore ability to immediately raise it back to that peak.
Unenchanted pick-axes always miss when used as a weapon, so that you can be sure that you will not accidentally hit a monster with one and break weaponless conduct.
Fireable ammo (that which is only capable of being used by launchers) cannot be enchanted. It instead uses the enchantment of its launcher as the enchantment.
The enchantment on non-blessed weapons degrades by 1 point after a certain number of hits, roughly 100. Cursed weapons degrade in half the number of hits. Possibly, this auto-identifies the enchantment when it happens.
There could be some mechanism to prevent degradation by resetting the counter on a weapon, such as using a whetstone on it. (Not that this makes sense for non-slashing weapons.)
You can wish for armor with a greater than +5 enchantment and be guaranteed to receive that enchantment, but doing so causes the armor to do a possible vaporization roll immediately.
You can affix a ring to a suit of ring mail. This will make it part of the ring mail, and will raise its enchantment by 1 if it’s negative.
The arrows created by the Longbow of Diana are of your race/role’s affiliation (e.g. orcish arrows for orcs, ya for Samurai, etc), and bear the same enchantment as the bow itself.
A fairly accessible way to roughly determine the magnitude of the enchantment on an object, but not the sign of the enchantment, without resorting to magical identification. Possibly tiered in a system with levels of 0/1-3/4-5/6+.
An enchanted spell stave will boost your spellcasting in its school, with a greater boost the higher the enchantment is.
Gold dragon armor’s light radius is increased by 1 if its enchantment is above some amount such as +5.
You can’t safely wear more than N total points of enchantment on all your armor at once. More than that, and armor pieces may start randomly exploding.
Enchanted boomerangs can continue flying after hitting a monster, with an enchantment/7 chance. (Add 2 to the effective enchantment if the boomerang is blessed; subtract 2 for each successive monster it hits.) If the boomerang is cursed, enchantment doesn’t matter - it will always fall on the first hit.
The reason behind this is twofold: because it makes boomerangs a more attractive weapon, and for the slapstick comedy value.
Shuriken may degrade in enchantment when they hit monsters, but they no longer break.
Artifact unaligned touchstone called Grinder: rubbing it on or applying it to an object repairs one level of rust or corrosion but decreases enchantment by 1 (which can go negative). Invoking it cancels a single object.
Enchanted boomerangs (or magic boomerangs, if implemented) can gather items from the floor and return them to you.
Thirsty weapons sometimes gain a point of enchantment when they drain a level from something. Probably only up to a certain maximum.
Dragonbane behaves like in DCSS: it gains enchantment, safely and for free, upon killing dragons, maybe up to a higher maximum than usual.
Get rid of the enchant armor and enchant weapon scrolls. Artifacts have fixed enchantment values. Higher-enchanted gear spawns as depth increases.
Enchantments on armor and weapons time out (rather slowly). Also, any erosion damage to a positively enchanted item will be absorbed by that positive enchantment, which then vanishes in proportion to the amount of erosion. Perhaps the enchant scrolls should be made more common or cost less ink to balance this.
Disenchanters can eat magical items for food like incantifiers do (i.e. draining the magic out of the item, leaving it as uncharged/cancelled/+0 or turning it into a mundane counterpart). This works for disenchanter pets, and for players polymorphed into them. Not specified whether this should give the player intrinsics.
Possibly, add a ‘magivore’ monster flag to represent monsters that can do this, though if only disenchanters are capable of doing this then it may not be needed.
A number of ways for weapon enchantment to be learned without formal identification.
Roles which are good with melee weapons (Bar, Val, Kni?, Cav?) should be able to see the enchantment of their weapon after using it for a while, or perhaps right when wielding it. Alternatively, seeing the enchantment of a weapon should be based on skill: basic will reveal enchantment on 1% of hits, skilled on 10%, expert as soon as you wield the weapon.
Polymorphing a highly enchanted object will vaporize it if it turns into something that normally can’t be enchanted that high.
Luck’s effect on whether a projectile breaks is nerfed. Instead, the enchantment is the primary factor, and is more involved than just “+2 or above”.
