Variant of Fort Ludios that contains Midas instead of Croesus. Midas has a petrification touch, but instead of turning you to stone slowly, it turns you to gold and creates a gold statue of you. Midas uses gold golems for his forces instead of dragons.

You can pay the Oracle to ask what level Fort Ludios can be reached from, if you have already visited the level containing its portal. (If not, there are technical issues with how the dungeon generates preventing her from telling you.)

New objects “scrolls of riches”, which serve as a means of storing large amounts of money without carrying around all the literal gold.

• Come in 3 types: “scroll of riches” worth $1000, “scroll of greater riches” worth $5000, “scroll of untold riches” worth $10000.
• Uncursed read effect: creates the scroll’s cost amount of gold on your square.
• Blessed read effect: as uncursed, but adds some extra gold.
• Cursed read effect: takes your money up to an amount between half the scroll’s cost and its full cost; if you lack enough gold it will start destroying your items in decreasing order of shop sale cost to cover the cost, excluding unique items.
• Confused read effect: either summon 1-3 gems (if blessed/uncursed) or glass (if cursed), or summon a gold golem as if from a figurine of the same beatitude of the scroll.
• Has an ink cost greater than 99, making it unwritable. Not specified whether it can be created from polymorph.
• Shopkeepers will always buy and sell noncursed scrolls of riches at face value, but will not buy cursed ones.
• If a guard sees you with a scroll of riches, they get angry.
• Several scrolls of untold riches appear in Fort Ludios.
• The thing that seems to be missing is a way to get these scrolls besides happening on them randomly; specifically a way to turn carried gold into them. Possibly shopkeepeers could generate with one or two and will trade them for the equivalent amount of gold.

The player is able to do some sort of ritual that involves sacrificing 25,000 gold pieces to open a portal to Fort Ludios if one has not already been generated. Possibly this would have to be done in a vault. If a naturally generated portal does already exist, the gold is still expended but the attempt to make another one fails.

Fort Ludios has a constant level difficulty, of perhaps 20, not varying based on where the game internally decided to place its floating branch.

There is some ritual you can do that allows you to manually create the portal to Fort Ludios. It requires the sacrifice of at least 10000 zorkmids, possibly some special item that is only generated somewhere below Medusa, and that you be in a vault. If the portal to Ludios already generated, this will always fail (it won’t make a second portal).

Gold that disappears by losing it in fountains, to thrones, or by failing to read spellbooks, appears in the Fort Ludios vault.

Change Fort Ludios’s door to a drawbridge, and add several more drawbridges leading into the throne room from all sides. When one drawbridge is opened or destroyed, all the others automatically open to let the monsters swarm out and attack.

Make Fort Ludios a multi-leveled branch leading upwards; the upper floors are smaller levels with the same footprint as the base of the building on the bottom level.

Ludios uses a smaller, elite team made up of mostly captains and lieutenants for defense, with maybe some recruited dangerous monsters, instead of a swarm of soldiers.

Make it impossible to portal-dance in Fort Ludios and beat it easily by putting a second exit portal in the fort and some sort of one-way gate in the starting room which has no other exits and the original exit portal.

Once you enter the large vault in Fort Ludios, several guards or Kops will appear from the portal and try to come hunt you down.

Shopkeepers gradually over time replenish their in-inventory gold, but only if Ludios is not yet generated. Any gold that is replenished to shopkeepers is removed from Ludios’ large vault when it generates.

Fort Ludios is a visit-once level: once you leave by the exit portal, the Dungeons of Doom portal disappears and the level becomes inaccessible forever. (Maybe if you leave any of the invocation items or the Amulet there, the portal refuses to let you out so the game doesn’t become unwinnable.)

Rebalance Fort Ludios so that it can realistically only be completed after finishing the Castle. One way to do this is to make soldier AI better, another way is to put the entry and exit portals on opposite sides of the level (or put the exit portal inside the fort), so the player can’t return to the Dungeons of Doom when things get hairy. The goal of doing this is to delay a large power spike due to collecting all of its gold until the player is truly ready for it.

Elaborations on the Fort Ludios minesweeper proposal by ais523:

• Should spaces with 0 neighboring mines get 0 gold? Good because it makes the game possibly more instantly recognizable as minesweeper, bad because it makes the overall amount of gold less predictable
• Need to guarantee somehow that the person stepping into the room doesn’t trigger a mine instantly, and set up the level accordingly.
  • The column nearest the entry door could be clear of mines and gold.
  • The whole border could be clear of mines. However, this means that the total amount of gold must end up being an even number - not ideal.
• What happens if a monster steps on a mine?
• Possibly this needs an Oracle consultation to explain it to unspoiled players. Or make an engraving when you enter - possibly “xyzzy” as a reference to the cheat code in Windows Minesweeper. Or start off with one mine uncovered and identified on sight.
• The number of adjacent mines could be expressed in the ones digit of the gold amount. Possibly with a large round number added, so every space is 3001 or 2002, which hopefully clues the player into the fact that it’s a significant number. But this might be too restrictive.
• How to reach the magic number 69105, and do so in a way that guarantees it can be generated? May need to bias the level generator so that this must happen.