Cloth golem, which can be created by polypiling too many cloth objects.

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.

New role, the Artificer:

• Artificers can innately see charges on things and use wands at a higher skill level than everyone else.
• Starts with an inventory of consumables comparable to vanilla wizards’, a scroll of charging, offensive wands, a magic marker, and random tools.
• Starts with all armors (magic and nonmagic) identified and all tools identified.
• Restricted in nearly all weapon skills like a monk, or can only reach Basic in a few ones like knife.
• Quest involves lots of golems.
• Quest artifact grants double damage with tools and gives blessed charging when invoked.
• Gnome is a playable race.
• Has a special tool, an artificer’s knife, which they can use for ring crafting. This works by removing the gem from the ring and replacing it with another gem. Not specified how this works for non-gem rings or rings containing things like black onyx or pearl which aren’t obtainable gems; possibly these are just uncraftable. Crafting a ring like this may destroy it depending on the beatitude of the knife, 75%/90%/99% for B/U/C for non-Artificers, 20%/50%/80% for Artificers.

Also see dtsund’s proposed Tinker role.

Special monster AIs/strategies for golems. Likely requiring a general AI overhaul. The strategy for an individual golem could be selected from a set of possible directives when the monster is created. They follow this directive completely and literally, which may result in some interesting behaviors. The player can #chat to the golem to have it mumble its directive.

• Kill all humans - golem attacks the nearest human(oid) it can find, not necessarily the player.
• Gather gold - golem pathfinds to the nearest gold on the level. If that happens to be carried by a monster, attack it.
• Build a castle - golem seeks out boulders and tries to pick them up and pile them into one small collection of spaces on the level. If you destroy or move them, it becomes hostile.
• Get corpses - golem tries to collect corpses, but will not hesitate to make more if there aren’t any more on the level.
• Build more of myself - golem tries to collect things made out of the material it’s made of. It attaches these to its body, increasing its HP and maximum HP; when its maxHP is high enough, it splits into two golems like a blue jelly.

Paper golems can grow up into “paperback golems”, which are at least twice as strong. When defeated they drop a couple blank spellbooks. Note however that some objection has been raised over nonliving golems being able to “grow up” in the first place.

Golems are particularly resistant to being tamed, because they have words in/on their head instructing them what to do; magical taming basically has to overpower that and make them do something else.

Snow golem, which is a ’ monster found in icy locales. Does not generate in Gehennom. It uses a spitting attack to launch snowballs (flavored as throwing them), which are an object which behaves like spat venom in that they disappear one way or another at the end of their flight. These deal damage and possibly knockback. The encyclopedia entry for snow golems uses “Frosty the Snowman” as reference material.

Bronze or brass golem. It would be either ’ or ’, depending on whether trying to avoid color conflicts with the gold golem.

Animate monster spell: if you cast it at a pile of objects with the correct material, it creates a tame golem of that material.

Golems will pick up (and add to their body?) any item made up of the same material as them.

Golems do not regenerate hit points, and healing spells do not work on them.

Rock piercers instakill stone golems, glass piercers instakill glass golems and iron piercers instakill iron golems.

Silver golem, which naturally causes silver damage to silver haters, and drops silver items on death. Should be pretty rare to avoid giving the player their pick of silver items.

Alchemic golem, which is basically made out of potions. Its melee attacks expose you to random potion or potion vapor effects. Killing it drops a few random potions and causes more random vapor effects. It can spontaneously explode when it hits something, with a greater chance when you hit it in melee. The explosion obviously also causes multiple random vapor effects to the area, and scatters potions around (by throwing them, so they tend to smash if they hit anything).

Golems hate existence so much that they attack all other creatures, but the other creatures don’t hate golems, so they just defend. This is a special case of implementing one-way grudges.

Chemistry golem, which spawns with some potions that it will either throw at you or quaff.