Guarantee a pick-axe or dwarvish mattock to be either generated on one of the Mines levels above Minetown, or in a shop in Minetown (though part of the motivation for this idea was guaranteeing a way to get into Orcish Town, and a pick spawning inside that town doesn’t really help much, so maybe it can spawn near the upstairs.)

Enhance Minetown with a bunch of new NPC denizens:

• Dwarven trainer: found in a largish room.
  • Chatting to him makes him ask if you want to train, for a fee. If you say yes and pay it, he shouts “Defend yourself!” and begins to fight with you. This lasts until you chat with him again. While you are in this training fight, neither of you deal damage to the other one, though you can still deal damage normally to other things.
  • If you don’t want to train, he offers to teach you how to disarm for a large sum of money. Disarming is a technique you can use with the #disarm command after you have learned it from him. Possibly, it unlocks a “disarming” skill that you can’t get elsewhere. When you use the disarm command, you are prompted for a direction to pick an adjacent monster. The monster must be wielding a weapon, and you must have some minimum amount of skill in your weapon (which can be martial arts). The chance of success is 20% base, +1% per point of Luck (or -1% per negative Luck), +5% for every skill level above Unskilled you are in either your weapon skill, or the disarm skill, +2% per level you have over the monster, and -2% per level the monster has over you.
• Elven enchantress: Mutually exclusive with the trainer. Chatting with her prompts you for an item to enchant.
  • Items that are not naturally enchantable with enchant scrolls get refused.
  • Artifacts or items at their maximum enchantment get refused; she gives a line about how it is already surrounded by powerful magic and she dares not attempt it.
  • If the item is damaged, it gets repaired, for a modest amount of money per level of damage.
  • If the item is undamaged but not blessed, it gets blessed, charging a slightly higher amount of money.
  • If the item is blessed and undamaged, its enchantment is increased by 1, charging a larger amount of money that scales in direct proportion to the preexisting enchantment on that item.
  • She possibly fooproofs the item if it’s at maximum enchantment.
• Dwarven innkeeper: also found in a large room.
  • Chatting to him has him offer you an ale, for either 5 zorkmids or the appropriate buy cost of a potion of booze, and accepting produces the effects of an uncursed potion of booze, as well as identifying the potion of booze. 50% of the time, he also gives you a random rumor as if from an uncursed fortune cookie. (Criticism of this is that on-demand confusion makes several early-game challenges involving confused effects of scrolls trivial.)
  • He will also offer you a room to stay the night if the Watch is not angry at you, for either $50 or the cost of a potion of full healing. Accepting fully heals you (or produces the effects of an uncursed potion of full healing, without identifying the potion since one wasn’t involved). Not specified how it should deal with the time you are sleeping, whether that means literally putting you to sleep or something else.
• Old gladiator: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn; chatting to him produces some old battle stories and a request for an ale (same price as if you were buying it yourself). The first time you buy him an ale, he will teach you a random weapon skill. Subsequent times he only thanks you drunkenly for the drink.
• Aged traveler: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn, mutually exclusive with the gladiator; chatting to him has him offer to tell you the depth of the Oracle level for 50 zorkmids, or offer to “teach you some things he’s learned in his travels” for 1000 zorkmids, which acts like a blessed potion of gain level, but is not available after you get it once. Alternatively, he could teach you several random item identities.
• Dirty drunk: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn, mutually exclusive with the gladiator and traveler.
• Bar brawler: found in the inn, interacting with him in any way will make him angry and start a fight. You’re allowed to fight but not kill him (which would anger the Watch), and you can pacify him by putting him to sleep, paying him off, beating him close enough to death to make him give up, or whatever. If the fight breaks out in the inn you owe the innkeeper money for broken furniture.
• Criminal or mugger: chatting to them makes them aware of you and they will try to steal from you later.
• Merchant: Wanders around Minetown, slightly weaker than a shopkeeper. Will sell you food rations at the standard price. Criticism of this is that an unlimited source of food rations is unbalancing and makes a delicatessen obsolete. To add balance, he might have a limited quantity of them to sell, but then he is still kind of pointless.
• Beggar: Has one randomly generated item, which he will sell at either its standard price or a discount. Most of the time this won’t be useful, but occasionally it could be something good.
• Bureaucrat: sits alone in a small room. Chatting with him makes him sneer at you, “I’m busy”. However, if the Watch is angry, he will offer to take a large amount of gold from you to pacify them.

A secondary proposal is to make some of the denizens who teach you things actually useless a random amount of the time. For instance, the gladiator is a liar who’s good at spinning stories and not much else, or the aged traveler is a charlatan who gives misinformation, abusing Wisdom or sapping your experience points.

Add a minetown variant called “Wine Town”. It would largely follow the regular Minetown precedents of having the Watch, a temple, a (high probability of a) general store, but would also have at least 2 potion stores, a couple random potions of booze lying around, and a large “drinking hall” room.

5000 turns after you kill or get rid of the last guard in Minetown, orcs invade and transform it to Orcish Town.

A Minetown variant where Frontier Town is in the process of being invaded by orcs. Most denizens are still alive, but swarms of orcs are trying to destroy the town, and if you are an orc the leader will try to press you into service to join them in trashing it. If you decide to join them, all the normal Minetown inhabitants become hostile to you but murder penalties are removed.

Minetown shopkeepers should be gnomes, and the priest and Watch should be dwarves, either by creating new racial variants of those monsters or via a monster race implementation. It doesn’t make any sense that everything in the town is run by humans.

Allow tourists to play as gnomes, and they start the game in Minetown instead of dungeon level 1.

Orcish Town, but it’s a relatively normal Minetown, just with all the gnomes and dwarves replaced by peaceful orcs.

A Minetown containing a jewelry store, or add a jewelry store to Bazaar Town or one of the less plentiful Minetowns.

Add small jails to most if not all Minetown maps.

Dwarves don’t tunnel within Minetown limits (they can dig up the outer areas of the level just fine).

Weight the probability of Orcish Town down lower than 1/7. Possibly as a starting point, reintroduce Frontier Town as minetn-8 so that the probability will become 1/8.

Guarantee a random sack somewhere in all Minetown variants.

A Minetown (or some other town) minigame based around classic survival/area defense games:

• Takes place in a smaller-than-Minetown square walled area in a large open part of the mines.
• Orcs, with a very high spawn rate and an increasing difficulty modifier, appear around the edges of the map.
• The walls will block the weakest and the unequipped from entering the town proper, but it won’t be good once orcs start showing up with pickaxes and ladders.
• To prevent the orcs from building up a horde, there are some weaker points in the walls, maybe a gate they can try to bash down or an unrepaired breach. These must be defended with manpower and all the traps you can think to lay.
• Orcs grudge everything inside the town, and vice versa; meanwhile, nothing in the town is hostile to you.
• Shopkeepers sell you items from their limited inventory at very cheap prices.
• There are watchmen who can hold back an incursion, but they’ll eventually fail if the player isn’t able to get there in time.