If you get crowned while having held to pacifist conduct, and you would ordinarily get a weapon gift, your god should instead give you a figurine of a strong monster based on your alignment. Sample monsters might be an archon if you’re lawful or a master mind flayer if you’re chaotic.
If a hostile monster applies a figurine and hits the random chance of getting a tame monster (for the hero), it should not actually create a tame monster, but instead it should create a peaceful monster which specifically grudges the monster that used the figurine.
Rework figurines to behave sort of like dNetHack crystal skulls. Applying them summons a tame monster of the figurine’s type, but produces a message “You call forth the spirit in the figurine”. The figurine does not get used up, and remains linked to the monster; reapplying it while the monster exists will recall it; it can then be resummoned again right away. If it dies while summoned, the figurine cracks and becomes unusable. Possibly there is some way to restore it, such as dipping it in a potion of restore ability.
In order to avoid tricky cases such as the summoned monster dying when the figurine is not on the current level, it might automatically unsummon the monster when the figurine and the monster stop being on the same level.
Tourists encounter a new shop, a gift shop, on dungeon level 1, possibly built around the entrance stairs. The gift shop stocks mostly useless items like fake Amulets of Yendor, juice and candy bars at high markups, plastic figurines of low-level monsters, and T-shirts (which are much less of a big deal to the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourist).
Randomly generated statues and figurines (and masks in variants that have them) should use a higher effective difficulty when choosing the associated monster species, because using low-level monsters is boring and typically useless to the hero.
This should probably also apply to statue traps, since they are not very threatening at the moment.
You should be able to wish for figurines of unique monsters. If they activate, they will have no effect , so they would just exist to be something you can wish for as bragging rights.
Artifact figurine, the gimmick of which is that it will always turn into a pet if not cursed, and the monster it turns into will fight anything without fear and maybe also has some extra buffs. When it dies, it reverts to the figurine, which immediately has its artifact cooldown set and can’t be applied again before the cooldown ends.
The inspiration for this idea was the Guenhwyvar panther figurine from the Legend of Drizzt, so possibly this artifact could just be named Guenhwyvar and be a figurine of a panther, which already exists in NetHack.
Some mechanic that allows you to capture a defeated monster as a figurine (inspired by SpliceHack’s cartomancer but not tied to a specific role, and also not as easy to come by, probably requiring special magic or a special tool to perform it).
When a monster triggers a magic (or maybe polymorph) trap, one possible effect is that they turn into a figurine of themselves with appropriate beatitude. However, the trap exploding on them is more likely, so that it can’t be used to farm figurines. A possibly evil addendum is that if the player would have otherwise died from damage from a magic trap, the bones file may contain a figurine of them instead of a corpse.
Statues of a monster occasionally contain a figurine of that monster inside.
Artifact figurine Doppeldoll: when applied turns into a tame clone of yourself with copies of all your weapons and armor.
Figurines cost 50 times their monster’s base level (or some other constant).
Figurine monsters generate with an inflated monster generation difficulty (because a figurine of most at-difficulty monsters is likely to be underwhelming as a potential pet).
Blessed figurines always make the monster turn out tame. Uncursed ones make a tame monster 80% of the time and peaceful 20% of the time. Cursed ones make a tame monster 20% of the time and a hostile monster 80% of the time.
