Mummies have a constitution-draining touch attack, which possibly also inflicts a ‘withering’ intrinsic that deals damage over time and abuses Constitution every turn.

Mummies could also “cast” a curse on you, not to curse your items, but to make you sink through the floor, sending you down 1-3 levels.

The Astral Plane should be brightly lit, what with having all the halls of the gods and being suffused with holy power.

Amulet of drain resistance, which also gives immunity to death magic. Useful if monsters casting drain life are implemented.

A pet will only eat a corpse that will make it polymorph if its tameness is very low. Otherwise it will avoid it.

Add a knockback attack and a monster that can use it. Getting knocked back into a wall deals some extra damage, and getting knocked back into water or lava has predictable effects.

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.

Cartomancers start with the create monster card identified and they have a whole bunch of them containing various early to mid game monsters in starting inventory.

Message for when a pet (that you can see) gains a level.

Ring or amulet that causes your spellcasting to draw on HP instead of Pw, possibly only when your Pw is zero, or possibly not requiring a ring. Each point of HP is worth 2 Pw points. If cursed, doubles spell Pw costs. If blessed, energy regeneration will regenerate HP until full before regenerating Pw. Casting from HP too much may decrease your HP maximum. If implemented as an artifact, possibly flavor it as an evil counterpart of the Eye of the Aethiopica.

Note that a couple variants have implemented this as a “ring of blood magic” or similar items.

Make death messages more diverse and flavorful. Base it on the attack type of the monster and possibly the weapon used, so that “killed by a jackal” becomes “clawed/mauled/shredded by a jackal”, “killed by a gnome” becomes “bludgeoned to death by a gnome” if it was wielding an aklys, “stabbed to death by a gnome” if it was wielding a dagger, etc.

Note that this creates a headache for tournaments that track unique deaths.

New msgtype intended to be even stronger than msgtype:stop, perhaps called msgtype:paranoid. Requires the user to type “yes” before continuing.

Note: A patch has since been created for msgtype:alert, which forces you to hit tab before continuing.

The demon lords should take no interest in you until you are on the ascension run with the Amulet. At which point they attack.

Add a scroll of air (as well as the scroll of flood, which should be renamed to the scroll of water) so that there is one scroll for each element. When read normally, it could give a message “You feel a fresh breeze” and either reset your strangulation counter or give you temporary breathlessness. (Breathlessness seems like a potion effect more than a scroll effect, but then again, during those times when you need emergency breathlessness, you’re probably not capable of quaffing a potion.) If you read any of the water, earth, fire, and air scrolls while confused, it summons elementals, whose tame/peaceful/hostile state depends on the beatitude of the scroll. If you read it while on the Plane of Water, it either creates a new air bubble if you’re not in one, or expands your bubble permanently if you are in one. If cursed and in a bubble, the bubble shrinks to one space.

SpliceHack has since implemented the scroll of air as an burst of wind that shoves adjacent monsters away in all directions.

Player monsters, crossaligned priests, and hostile angels on the Astral Plane should be able to steal the Amulet from you. If they get it, they will try to make a beeline to their high altar to sacrifice it.

The player is also able to steal the Amulet back, though, and wearing the Amulet acts as one turn of protection against it being stolen: an attempt to steal it will just remove it from your neck.

If something else ascends, your game ends in an escape. However, the crowd of Astral monsters are hostile towards the Amulet-bearer, not you; so if it gets stolen from you, the pressure will let up a bit.

Ideas around a system in which you can cook corpses:

• The general idea is to unbreak the hunger system by making regular corpses unsafe to eat, so the shortage in resources isn’t in food itself but is in safe methods of cooking it.
• Cooking sets a corpse’s rot timer to 0, lets them go longer without spoiling, or unspoils them.
• May also remove poison from some kinds of poisonous corpses.
• Cooked corpses are unsuitable for sacrifice and less likely to give intrinsics, or don’t at all (because the vitamins are destroyed).
• You can apply wands of fire to cook corpses.
• Or maybe eating raw non-vegetarian corpses is just plain dangerous, causing vomiting or sickness or other bad effects.
• Corpses can be cooked by killing monsters with fire or hitting monsters with fire attacks while they are carrying corpses.
• The problem is that nobody has yet proposed a mechanism for cooking corpses that would work well. Having firewood or some similar thing would massively affect the early game between characters that can and cannot manage to find it, and roles that start with or without it. Wands of fire have been proposed as a resource but those are valuable. Introducing a new item like firewood means that a whole lot of mechanics have to be reviewed for whether they should interact with or create that item.