Rather than the replacement for techniques being certain roles learning new spells from nowhere once you achieve a certain experience level, have the spells be known from the beginning, but uncastable unless you are above that level.

This also helps disincentivize drain-for-gain tactics, since keeping yourself at a lower level will cut off your access to certain spells.

When you are “due” for a sacrifice and of a certain experience level, you gain the ability to sense altars from afar.

When you perform a controlled polymorph, you are only able to turn into monsters which have HD equal to or lower than your level. If you are using a mask, or if you are polymorphing randomly, it treats you as being 10 levels higher than your actual one.

Lycanthropic and vampire shapeshifting polymorphs are exempt from this restriction.

Pets that are a higher level than you gradually untame over time, though they will always turn peaceful when they untame unless you have abused them.

Artifact bronze plate mail The Pact Eternal. Autocurses when worn. When invoked, it summons a tame copy of you, with copies of your armor and wielded weapon (which only works on a wielded weapon), drains 1 level from you, and reduces your maximum HP by half.

If you die while the summoned copy lives, you get lifesaved, the max HP penalty becomes permanent, the copy is unsummoned and you are relocated in its place (to produce an overall effect of it becoming the “real” you.)

If you take off the armor, the copy is unsummoned.

If the copy dies or gets unsummoned by any means, its gear vanishes along with it, and your missing max HP is restored (though your current HP does not get restored).

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.

• Generally you must be the same alignment as the artifact, unless the artifact is unaligned.
• The experience level will generally be higher than players reach in the normal course of a game. This could vary anywhere from 15 to 30 depending on how high of a barrier the designer wants to put on the artifact.
• It also might not become nameable until you have accomplished certain milestones such as completing the Quest or being crowned.
• The enchantment matters because the enchantment gets converted into whatever additional magic powers the artifact has, and will get reduced to zero. (It can be reenchanted afterwards.)
• If the conditions are not satisfied, you fail to create the artifact.

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.

In variants with percentage intrinsics, intrinsics granted by one’s role need not be binary. For instance, monks tend to gain a lot of elemental resistances by leveling up, so rather than having those be all-or-nothing cutoffs at fixed levels, spread it out so that they gain a decent percentage of the resistance with each level near the original cutoff.

This would complicate the enlightenment display, since now it would have to disclose something like “You have 76% fire resistance: 45% from corpses and 31% from your priest levels”.

Differentiate spellcasting greatly for the different types of spellcasters:

• Intelligence casters have a spellbook limited by their level, where higher level spells take up more space.
  • Specifically, they can store up to (10 + XL) levels of spells.
  • Higher skill in a spell’s school provides a discount: 1 level for Basic, 2 for Skilled, and 3 for Expert.
  • So for instance, a level 5 character has 15 spell levels available. If they know force bolt and are Unskilled in attack spells, that takes up 1 level. If they know cancellation and are Skilled in matter spells, that takes up 5 levels (7 - 2 because they are Skilled).
  • When they learn a new spell that cannot fit into their existing spell list, they are prompted to forget known spells until they have enough space, or decline to learn the new spell (which still uses up a read charge on the book).
• Wisdom casters always have all the spells they have learned available so long as they haven’t forgotten them, but are strictly limited in whether they can cast a spell of a given level by their skill in its spell school.
  • If Restricted in a spell school they can only cast spells of up to level 1. If Unskilled, up to 2. Basic, 3; Skilled, 5; and Expert, 7.
• Charisma casters (which only exist in a couple variants) always have all spells available to cast, but can never cast spells twice in a row; there is always a cooldown of (5 - skill) * 2 * spell level. (Skill ranges from 0 at Restricted to 4 at Expert.)

The hero gains levels twice as fast, for instance by putting a new level cutoff between each existing set of cutoffs (10 for level 1’s 0 to 20, 30 for level 2’s 20 to 40, etc). However, the player must choose with each level gained whether to take most of the effects of gaining an experience level - HP and Pw increases, etc, but NOT a skill slot - or a new skill slot.

A race which is very strong, with great abilities and intrinsics including drain resistance from XL1, but with the caveat that they instantly die of old age upon reaching XL30.

Intended for variants whose XP curve doesn’t make reaching experience level 30 through pure combat nearly impossible. Also, a safeguard might have to be put in place so that you cannot intentionally get smited by a god or gamble on polymorphing into your own race to lose levels intentionally.

Djinn role: the primary gimmick of it is that you are able to access three wishes, through #invoke or some other mechanism, one each at experience levels 10, 20, and 30. You are not able to get wishes from any other source; the wish fails (perhaps a friendly djinni from a lamp will make some comment about how you don’t need more wishes or they can’t grant wishes to fellow djinni).

Wraith corpses should function as a potion of gain level does, of the same beatitude as the corpse. I.e. a blessed wraith corpse will gain a level and then some fraction of experience points towards the next level.

Grant an experience level or two for completing Sokoban without penalties (or with an acceptably small number of penalties). Also maybe a permanent +1 luck that never decays, like with a full moon. Possibly remove the rings and wands or the prize to compensate, since they make the branch effectively non-optional and it should be optional.

Artifacts have a minimum XL associated with them. You can’t get a given artifact through sacrifice until you are at least its defined minimum XL.

Define a “power level” or a “tier” for each artifact, and when gifting an artifact, use the player’s experience level and other stats to calculate an appropriate tier to gift an artifact from. The only reason it feels bad to get Giantslayer is because you know you could have gotten something much more powerful but randomly didn’t; if the more powerful artifacts were simply not possible to get due to you not having the right stats yet, this might not happen as much.

Add a hard cap on the amount of levels you can gain via foocubus, but count each level gained this way - each ‘educational experience’ - as +1 on your chance of a good outcome of future interactions.

Monsters only give experience points when they are at least a few levels below your own level (i.e. you can’t level up from level 12 to 14 by killing only newts and grid bugs with any amount of grinding). To compensate, the cutoffs for experience level are brought closer together.

Stat shuffling through self-polymorph should be slightly biased towards reducing stats.

Gnomes get permanent detection of gold and gems within a radius 3. Or possibly the radius can scale with XL.

Make the sleep spell scale like it does in D&D: you can only put a total of (your level) HD of monsters to sleep.

Djinni released from bottles and water demons released from fountains don’t care about beatitude or depth for giving a wish; instead they will give the hero a wish if the hero is intimidating enough. “Intimidation” is based on stats like Charisma and XL, and the chance of successfully intimidating them increases as they do. Djinni from lamps are not affected by these rules.

The cost for buying protection is based on your maximum level reached, not your current level, to prevent draining for gain.

Entering the Valley and entering the second level of Gehennom (as well as possibly entering other branches) give the hero an automatic level up.

Determining whether you escape or dodge trap effects should be based on stats like Dexterity and maybe role and XL, rather than Luck.

Gentle relaxations for the quest XL requirement:

• It is waived if you have set the “descent into Gehennom” flag by going downstairs from the Valley.
• It checks maximum XL reached, not current; so if you have ever been XL14 it doesn’t matter if you have been drained since.
• It is waived if you have the demigod flag set from killing the Wizard of Yendor.

Getting lifesaved has permanent detrimental effects. Perhaps it reduces the stat maximum for an attribute as well as the attribute’s current value, like Wis or Con (Con is preferred, because it hits both carrying capacity and regeneration), and if the attribute it would reduce is 3 or below, life saving does not work at all. It could also possibly drain 1d3+1 levels.