The Oracle becomes angry at you if you dry up all of her fountains.

Throwing gold into a fountain (by standing on it and throwing it downwards) makes the gold vanish, and has a (gold/1,000,000) chance of giving you a wish.

Water elementals’ HP (and Pw, if applicable) regeneration is boosted when they are on a water-containing space such as a moat or a fountain. Possibly, they can also suck up the water to regain a large quantity of hit points at once, which removes the water terrain if it is expendable (a fountain or pool or puddle of shallow water will dry up).

In order to make them more interesting in combat, their AI may favor hanging around sources of water and trying to find a path to the nearest water when they are injured.

If you talk to King Arthur after receiving the Quest from him, he will tell you to seek the blessing of the Lady of the Lake. (Or just have him tell you this as part of giving you the quest.) After this, your next fountain dip is guaranteed to produce Excalibur, if it does not already exist.

Add a system for casting ritual spells: more powerful and more expensive spells which have some esoteric effects you can’t get otherwise. The main differences between ritual and normal spellcasting are that they consume valuable, hopefully non-renewable components, take a number of turns to cast instead of taking effect instantly, and may require you to be in or set up certain circumstances.

Various ritual spells that have been proposed:

• Ball spells which consume a gem as focus and create a ball of elemental power that hits surrounding squares but not you. (Long casting times would probably make rituals infeasible for combat though.)
• Temporarily increase your carry cap by a great amount. (Other new intrinsics as required.)
• Resurrect a corpse as a tame monster (necromancy).
• Grant temporary intrinsic life saving.
• Single controlled polymorph with a greatly increased duration.
• Summon a demon, demon lord, or demon prince. Requires 5 cursed candles and a marker (to draw the classic pentagram). If summoning a named demon lord, it’s either random or there’s some expensive way to control who shows up. The demon lord could be peaceful, but with current behavior this is useless. Possibly summoning them allows you to make a pact with them.
• Remove the graveyard status from a level (would need to be expensive, and perhaps involve the Book of the Dead, and multiple different headstones).
• Grow a tree. This consumes at least a piece of fruit. For anti-farming the tree should probably not produce fruit or bees when kicked.
• Create a portal between two levels of your choice (doesn’t work with the Amulet obviously, but otherwise works)
• Create an artifact (that is, you somehow imbue an item with properties it can’t normally get).
• Bless items. Consumes a blessed scroll of remove curse.
• Genocide a genocidable monster. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other costly things.
• Reverse genocide a monster. The monster may or may not have to be normally reverse-genocidable. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other moderately expensive things.
• Charge something. Requires a rare ingredient - perhaps a dilithium crystal.
• Summon tame elemental(s). Among other things, ingredients include: a potion of water, any beatitude (water); a rock (earth); lit candles, a lit oil lamp, or a lit potion of oil (fire); an amulet of magical breathing (air).
• Create a magic lamp. Needs an oil lamp (of course) and a figurine or mask of a djinni (or possibly a nearby live djinni).
• Make the current level non-teleport. Requires a scroll of teleportation and that the caster be standing on an anti-magic field at (?) either the start or the end of the ritual.
• Create a fountain. Requires a statue of a medium-sized or larger monster, which gets destroyed (by turning it into the centerpiece of the fountain). There may be potential for wishing abuse; perhaps the fountain should be flagged so that it can’t produce a wish-granting water demon.
• Turn a regular knife into an athame. Components include other bladed weapons with positive enchantments adding up to 20 or something; all of these charges will be drained to +0 in the creation of the athame. The resulting athame is +0, regardless of the charges on the component weapons or original knife.
• Create a tame golem or golems. Requires a large amount of total weight of objects made out of the golem’s material.
• Summon a coaligned angel or other minion of your deity as a pet.
• Create a tame wood nymph from a tree (only once per tree).

Ritual spells come in spellbooks like usual, but aren’t stored in your spell list. Instead, reading the spellbook prompts you if you want to begin its ritual and tells you the necessary ingredients and circumstances you need to satisfy as preconditions. If you meet all the conditions and answer yes, you initiate the ritual. (For simplicity, this should probably burn up / expend all the components instantly.) You cannot begin a ritual while in the process of casting another ritual; this should probably be implemented as a precondition.

Apart from the component cost, rituals act as a constant drain on your Pw until the ritual is complete. If something distracts you in the middle of the ritual, you can go take care of it and then resume the ritual as long as you have the Pw left to finish it. (You could also drink gain energy during the ritual.) The only way for a ritual to fail, possibly backfiring with bad effects, is for you to run out of Pw while it is incomplete.

In addition to its preconditions, each ritual also has some postconditions: common to all rituals is that you have been casting the ritual for at least some length of time, but there may be others, such as standing on the square where you began the ritual, or have another item, or kill a monster, or something. There may also be other conditions such as “moving off the space where the ritual started breaks and halts the ritual”.

Every time you stop casting a ritual (whether it succeeded or failed), it increments the spellbook’s spestudied field; the book will eventually disintegrate after casting it a certain number of times.

Dipping an item into any fountain may erodeproof it with low probability. (Or else have this only apply to magic fountains with somewhat higher probability.)

Artifact whose main purpose is to soak up water and apply it to other things. It removes a pool or moat square or dries up a fountain when applied to one (moats may refill), gaining a charge each time. You can apply it to spend a charge blanking a scroll, erasing an engraving (any type, not just dust), cleaning your face or hands, and extinguish fiery monsters such as a flaming sphere (possibly instakilling them).

The initial idea was to create a “sponge” object as the base item type, but since it’s undesirable to make a new object just to be the base of an artifact, it could instead either be a “spongestone” gem, or just an artifact towel, since towels can already soak up water. (If implemented as a towel, the towel would only gain one charge of wetness when immersed in water, and could attempt to dry up that square immediately.)

Add a random fountain effect that heals you for a small amount. Magic fountains may heal you for a larger amount (if you are below full HP) and become nonmagic in the process with the standard “wisp of vapor” message.

If you displace a tame or peaceful cat onto watery terrain such as a sink or fountain (or shallow water, if implemented) it automatically attacks you, though it doesn’t actually go hostile; it’s a one-off reaction to getting wet.

Fountains can be frozen, creating a silver or cyan “frozen fountain”. These can’t be dipped into or quaffed. They appear in ice-themed levels.

Freezing a fountain does something. All the following have been suggested:

• Destroys it and turns it into an ice square.
• Breaks it and creates pools before turning into an ice square.
• Sets a flag on it which indicates that it’s frozen; it’ll thaw eventually but it can’t be dipped into or quaffed from until then.
• Creates an ice devil (a water demon that got frozen) with the same odds as getting a water demon.

Dipping a weapon into a fountain can as a random effect raise its enchantment by one, to a maximum of +1.

Add as rare possible fountain effects erodeproofing and blessing a dipped object. (Possibly only in magic fountains.)

One of the Oracle’s fountains is guaranteed to be magical, but it’s randomly placed among the four fountains.

Dropping a scroll onto a fountain usually or always blanks it.

Excalibur starts out much weaker than it currently does, but you can perform further feats to enhance its power and give it more abilities as the game progresses. Such feats include: slaying a dragon, returning to King Arthur having finished the Knight quest, getting crowned as a lawful, re-dipping it into a fountain at a high experience level.

Fountains can be contaminated by letting corpses rot on top of them. This makes them more dangerous to use.

Hitting a fountain with a ray of cold or cold blast freezes and breaks it, creating frozen pools in the area.

When you are polymorphed into a sea monster, you can sit on fountains and drink potions of water to regenerate HP.

Dipping or dropping gold pieces in a fountain very rarely increases your Luck.

When Fire and Frost Brand come into contact with water due to rust traps or dipping them in fountains, print a message about the water instantly evaporating or freezing. If either is dipped into a fountain, it dries it up.

Add un-eroding a dipped item as an additional fountain dip effect.

When fountains dry out, they become empty fountains instead of disappearing (possibly turning its { to white or gray?). There is something you can do to restore the water to a dry fountain.

Players can polymorph dungeon features by zapping a polymorph beam down at it, with some special cases:

• Gravestones can be created by polymorph and are more likely than other outcomes, but cannot be polymorphed into anything else. Trying to do so only polymorphs its epitaph.
• Polymorphing an altar angers that altar’s god and any attendant priest since you effectively destroyed their altar
• Fountains either cannot polymorph into anything besides headstones or have a very limited chance of becoming something else; this is to prevent the player from being able to generate a bunch of thrones from fountains.