A cloak which, if worn by a light-emitting monster, blocks them from emitting light. Also applies to the player if they are carrying a light source or polymorphed into a light-emitting monster.

New role based on a “loup du noir” archetype, possibly called the Lycanthrope - you start with a pelt, a new sort of cloak-slot armor that polymorphs you into a specific type of monster when you wear it. You also are inflicted with some sort of delayed lycanthropy - you won’t randomly polymorph into a monster like with standard lycanthropy, but after not using a pelt for a while, you do start feeling the urge to put one on, and if you still refuse, you are eventually compelled to put one on. (It isn’t specified what happens if you get rid of your pelt(s) by the time you would be compelled to wear one; possibly you just die from insanity, or else the addiction is implemented in some other way like continuous worsening HP damage.)

The form you get from wearing a pelt has some boosted stats from the base form - in particular, your carrying capacity and damage would be better than the stat blocks for the monsters suggest.

You could start with either a “default” pelt which is not very good, but can be turned into an ideal one later, or start with a specific animal’s pelt, which you can control with the pettype option. This role never starts with a pet.

Pelts might also work as a standalone concept or one that works with a druid, ranger, or caveman role:

• You can obtain a pelt by using a knife to skin the corpse of some monster that would reasonably have a pelt. This will probably be an occupation, and either its time or success rate will vary based on your knife skill and if you have a role-specific bonus.
• By using some sort of magic (instead of it being inherent to a role), you can transform into the animal whose pelt you are wearing.
• Pelts confer some benefit when worn as a cloak besides the ability to polymorph, which varies depending on the monster species, such as a boost to damage.

A new object either inspired by, or literally, a Pokeball. It allows you to “pick up” pets by putting them into the ball (probably not along with any items), carry them around, and re-release them at a later point.

Amulet of protect inventory: negates any erosion, destruction, disintegration, or theft of your items, but every time it does, you take damage.

Pleather armor, an object that is mostly identical to leather armor, but is made out of plastic.

• If you somehow eat it, it counts as vegan.
• It’s much lighter than leather armor.
• If it gets exposed to extreme cold, it can become brittle and break.
• If it gets exposed to fire, it can melt, causing extra damage to the wearer.

A ring of monster attraction: Each individual ring is associated with a randomly selected specific, common monster species (or possibly monster class), and causes monsters of that species/class to generate disproportionately often while it’s worn. When the type is known, the ring appears as “ring of monster attraction”, but when an individual one is fully identified, it ring appears as e.g. a “ring of newt attraction”.

Depending on the potential for abuse, it should probably not be allowed to wish for specific monsters. E.g. it’s probably bad to allow the player to wish for a ring of wraith attraction.

Glass objects should be eligible for forging, since the temperatures involved in a forge are more than enough to melt and recast glass.

Also, it should be possible to forge pieces of worthless glass together to make decorative ornaments, which are worth either score or can be sold for spare money.

Amulet of full healing, which heals you completely (or as much as an uncursed potion of full healing) when your HP drops to 0, but does not stave off non-HP-based forms of death.

A special container that can hold the invocation items, and only the invocation items. Has bag-of-holding-like properties (or else is an artifact bag of holding). It appears in some hard to reach place in the dungeon.

A cursed amulet of reflection will behave as an “amulet of absorption”: instead of reflecting rays, nearby ones that weren’t going to hit you get redirected towards you instead. Also, rays that hit an amulet of absorption wearer don’t continue past them.

Alternatively, add the amulet of absorption as its own item, and make it usually generate cursed like other “bad” amulets.

New “scroll of limited wish”, which grants a wish that is restricted in the following ways:

• No artifacts.
• No magical items (thus no scrolls, rings, wands, etc.)
• No enchantment, must always be +0.
• No blessing or curse.

A potion of growth (or “embiggening”), which lets you temporarily lift boulders, and a potion of shrinkage, which lets you get through narrow diagonal gaps if you would normally be unable to.

Have Zeus’s lightning bolts as an item or artifact you can throw. If an artifact weapon, it should automatically return like Mjollnir; otherwise, it could be an item that vanishes after striking a target but deals immense shock damage to that target.

Alternative Necromancer role, because its implementation in SLASH’EM winds up being a rather halfhearted version of Wizard with some elements of Priest and Archeologist. Note: This was written for a hypothetical variant that does not have a Necromancer role, rather than as an update to SLASH’EM’s.

• When playing as a Necromancer, dying monsters may drop “soul” objects, which can then be collected by the player.
  • Souls only exist as an object for the purpose of occupying a space on the map before being picked up. They are weightless and do not actually occupy space in inventory, nor can they be stolen after being collected. A Necromancer can have an unlimited amount of them.
  • If a soul drops adjacent to the player, it is automatically collected.
  • Souls drop 100% of the time from monsters the player kills, less for monsters that die otherwise. Never for monsters that kill themselves.
  • Monsters ignore souls and cannot pick them up. (There is room for an extension where certain undead like a barrow wight or a lich can collect souls to become more powerful, but that is not required for this.)
  • Souls vanish after being on the floor for around 10 turns or being moved off level, preventing the player from sitting back while pets or conflict mop up a large crowd of monsters and then obtaining all their souls with no effort.
  • Souls can also be offered on an altar to gain alignment points.
• Souls are used to fuel the casting of necromancy spells, an entirely new spell school. Necromancy spells consume some Pw like normal spells, but also consume souls, and generally are more powerful than non-necromancy spells of the same level. Various spell ideas:
  • Reanimate creature: which consumes a soul of some creature and reanimates a corpse of that same creature, bringing it back as a pet. (It may be flagged as undead, if the variant supports this).
  • Soul blast: Consumes multiple souls and produces an attack whose power is proportionate to the total monster difficulty of the expended souls.
  • Empower undead: Temporarily buffs all nearby pets, scaling up with the more souls you expend. This is intended to be one of the primary ways a Necromancer takes care of enemies, so it should be a pretty good boost.
  • Spell which consumes 5-10 souls of one monster type and create a tame monster of that type without needing a corpse.
  • Spell which consumes souls to regain HP or Pw.
  • Spell which infuses your weapon, armor, or other gear with souls, making it more effective for a time.
  • Spell which consumes souls of one species and polymorphs you into that monster.
  • Charm undead: Tames undead. Low cost compared to general charm monster.
  • Create wight: Works like reanimate creature but the resulting creature gains level-drain abilities.
• A good guaranteed starting combination of spells for the Necromancer might be reanimate creature and empower undead, since this will enable them to kill monsters, bring them back as pets, and boost them with the souls from more kills.
• Most undead (at least the mindless undead) generate peaceful to Necromancers.
• If desired, there could also be an “amulet of necromancy” which, when worn by non-Necromancers, causes souls to drop (less frequently than they do for Necromancers) and enables the hero to cast necromancy spells. However, not many other roles would be non-Restricted in necromancy spells, and any Lawful hero would be harshly penalized for casting them.
  • In order to avoid this being a useless item for Necromancers, it could improve soul drop chances for them.
  • Non-Necromancers wearing the amulet might also be limited in the amount of souls they could have at one time.
• If desired, Valkyries could be able to collect souls natively, but the only thing they can do with them without penalty would be to offer them on altars for alignment points.

The system may want some simplification since it may be clunky to have the player navigate through menus to choose souls from all the different ones they have accumulated. Possibly, souls from a given species just combine, so you would be shown something like “souls of gnome kings (12 total monster levels)”. An extreme simplification would cut out the entire soul-storage system and just replenish Pw when you collect one.

Stun grenades, which work similarly to regular grenades except they explode for zero or a token amount of damage, and inflict stunning and other types of status effects on things in the blast radius. For instance, there could be a flashbang grenade which stuns and blinds its targets.

Gloves of skill (or “gauntlets of weapon mastery”): magical gloves which raise your effective skill level in your wielded weapon by 1.

• If you’re Restricted in your weapon, this only treats you as Unskilled, not Basic.
• If you’re Expert in your weapon, they do nothing.
• If the gloves are cursed, they instead reduce skill level by 1, and if they become cursed while wearing them and wielding a weapon, you get a message about how you find it more awkward to wield your weapon.
• Also, you get a message about holding your weapon more confidently when you put them on and your effective skill is raised. This automatically identifies them as well.

Celery, a comestible which uniquely has negative nutrition (because in real life, it takes a human body more calories to digest the celery than are in the celery.) The main use of this negative nutrition is to unsatiate yourself so you can continue eating other food.

It should be a large amount of negative nutrition in order to be worthwhile, but at the same time shouldn’t be instadeath for unsuspecting new players by immediately starving them. To that end, special case it so that it does not harm you if you are Hungry or worse, is worth -30 nutrition if “not hungry”, and is worth more negative nutrition if Satiated, possibly scaling up the more satiated you are.

Depending on implemenetation, it could either be safe or unsafe to eat when oversatiated - realism dictates it should be unsafe to eat, but gameplay dictates it would be useful in fewer situations unless it is always safe to eat. Or have it count as a small positive nutritional value assessed before maybe choking, followed by a large negative nutritional value assessed after you didn’t choke.

Knights still incur alignment penalties for eating celery while satiated.

The celery also crunches loudly whenever eating it, so it wakes up nearby sleeping monsters.

You can dip oil into booze or vice versa to create a new type of potion (“potion of firebomb” or “potion of molotov cocktail”) that is never randomly generated, which is primarily intended to be lit and thrown like oil, but results in a much more powerful fireball than oil alone would produce.

Effects when drinking this potion are unspecified. Since oil has minimal effect when you drink it, it likely just works like booze or diluted booze.

Two new objects, spiked gauntlets and spiked boots. Both are nonmagical and made of iron. Spiked gauntlets give a large damage bonus to unarmed combat and also give more AC than standard gloves. Spiked boots give a large damage bonus to kick attacks, and allow you to walk on ice without slipping, the same as snow boots do.

New object type “boots of burden”, magical boots which increase your carrying capacity by 50% when worn.

A realistic implementation would mean the boots cease to work when you begin levitating or flying even if you are still wearing them, but this may be too tricky to implement given that the carry cap change may need to prevent the hero from leaving the ground in some circumstances, and the game needs to concisely tell them why.

Stone shield, a magical shield made of stone that provides stoning resistance, but is quite heavy.

Portal stones: gray stones which are only useful in pairs (and which only 2 may generate in the whole game). They are used by putting one stone at a location you want to return to later, then later on activating the other one by rubbing it on your hand or something, which opens a temporary magic portal to (or levelports you to) the first stone.

Add two dice objects: a magic die and a plastic die. Both appear as “game die” when unidentified, are made of plastic, and weigh 2. Dice can be rolled by applying them or throwing them (upward or downward).

Magic dice are chargeable. They start out with 3-5 charges; uncursed charging adds 1 and blessed adds d3, up to a maximum of 7. The die can only be recharged twice.

Rolling either type of die produces a message “The die spins around and lands on [number].” Plastic dice and non-cursed magic dice use a d20 with even probability; cursed magic dice bias the result towards lower numbers such that the probability of each possible roll is proportional to 20 minus that roll (so there is a 19/170 chance of a 1, an 18/170 chance of a 2, etc.)

The effects are:

One possible alteration is to do away with both the instadeath and the wish, because it’s been pointed out that nearly all the negative effects are recoverable. The player has an incentive to hold off on rolling the die until they have the wherewithal to recover from most of the negative effects, and then roll it as much as possible in hopes of getting a wish, while suffering few permanent issues. Giving the die a chance to just unavoidably end the game to compensate for wishing abuse may be unsatisfying.

Everlasting gobstopper, a food item that you start sucking on when you eat it, providing a constant d2 nutrition per turn. It never gets used up, but once you spit it out (by choosing to eat something else or by using “-“ with the eat command) it is no good anymore and gets used up. If you get oversatiated by not spitting it out, you can indeed choke and die on it.

Boots of fleeing: they give bonus movement points based on how many turns ago your last offensive action was (offensive actions are things that would fade an Elbereth underneath you). For the first several turns after combat they grant no speed bonus, then gradually scale up to full speed. This means that remaining in combat grants you no speed advantage but lets you travel very fast if you avoid it.

Hookshot, a tool that shoots a retractable point on a chain and then pulls things together when the chain retracts. In practice, this should probably be implemented as an invisible beam that gets shot in the player-chosen direction, with a short range of only 3 or 4 squares. It has various effects depending on what it hits:

• Wall or furniture: Player is dragged towards that space.
• Boulder or solid stone: Goes “Clink!” and does nothing. (Except maybe if the player is a giant, they can drag the boulder to themselves with it.)
• Monster: Either deals small damage, or yanks the player and monster together. The relative weights of the player and monster determine who gets yanked more (could be either or both).

The game should not assume heroes all carry an unlimited invisible box of matches to light candles and lamps with. Doing that should require a fire source, whether that is Fire Brand, lava, a fire trap, the wand of fire, the fireball spell, or an already lit candle, lamp, or potion of oil. There could also be a new “lighter” tool which enables you to light things, but can get lost or run out of charges.

There should be silver crossbow bolts so people who want to use a crossbow can still get silver damage.

Add a potion of milk, working along the same lines as milk in Minecraft, which cancels potion effects (or since not many potions have lasting effects that you’d want to cancel, it cancels various temporary good and bad status effects in general, like confusion, stunning, and invisibility, but not nausea since drinking milk usually makes nausea worse in real life.

Stone of pacification, which when you carry it in open inventory prevents your pets from attacking peaceful monsters. (It does not affect hostile monsters, nor does it stop pets from attacking hostile monsters.)

Antimagic lamps, which cast an magic-denying field in their light radius. Your magic doesn’t work, but neither does anyone else’s, with everything behaving as if cancelled.

Bones of tortle players contain a tortle shell, which is useless except as an indicator the dead player was a tortle, or as polyfodder.

A statue-like object which should be fairly destroyable (should probably be breakable by force bolts and maybe even attacking it with a weapon enough times) which provides a level-wide buff to certain monsters.

• An example of such an effect is “phylum gating” - e.g. if the statue-thing is an ant, it will grant all ants on the level a power to gate in more ants like demons do.
• This is the only example given, but there are plenty of other buff possibilities.
• The buff could also be within a specific area rather than level-wide.
• Rather than a new object, this could simply be implemented as a special flag on a regular statue.

New type of terrain, “fire terrain”, a square that is on fire. It displays as an orange period. (If this will be too nasty to people who play with color off, the glyph should perhaps be changed.)

• Fire terrain has a certain amount of burning wood material on it.
• Standing next to or on fire terrain grants cold resistance, but standing on top of fire terrain has the same effect as a fire trap whenever you end your turn on it.
• The fire eventually burns out and reverts to normal floor, the duration determined by the total weight of the burning objects.
• Killing a wood golem with fire or burning more than a certain weight of objects on a square creates fire terrain on that space.
• Throwing burnables onto a fire trap may make them spontaneously combust and produce fire terrain.
• Fire terrain can be used to cook corpses.
• You can create fire terrain by applying a lit candle to a space with burnables on it
• You can also create it by applying a tinderbox to a space, which is a chargeable non-magical tool. Archeologists and Rangers start with one.
• Fires provide a light source of radius 3, but cannot be moved.
• Monster AI will not travel over fire if the monster is not resistant.

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.

An Alchemist role, revolving around potions and alchemy, and likely requiring overhauls of several systems.

• The main form of combat is to create phials of potion (where 1 potion splits into many phials), which can be tossed at enemies to cause potion effects on them. The main potions used are things like acid, paralysis, (lit) oil, and confusion.
  • Phials come in all the same types as normal potions but have somewhat weaker effects.
  • You can dip a stack of empty phials into a potion to fill them with that potion (up to some maximum).
  • Thrown phials have the same exact splash damage effect on things as throwing the potion would produce, but drinking it is a small enough dose to only cause the splash damage effects to the drinker. Requires some balance so that splash damage is useful against monsters but not useful for the player to drink for beneficial phials.
  • Phials can be dipped into potions, but nothing can be dipped into phials.
• The quest artifact is the Philosopher’s Stone.
  • The quest leader is Nicolas Flamel and the nemesis is an Avatar of Death (like Death, but weaker).
  • Fun possibilities for transmuting materials here if the object materials patch is in effect.
  • Its base item type could be a ruby (but perhaps not because dnethack makes the Heart of Ahriman a ruby) or a garnet, based on its color in Harry Potter, or an opal.
• Can also create alchemic gizmos: smoke bombs from potions of blindness, firebombs from potions of oil, all lighter and more numerous and useful than the base potions.
• Start with all potions identified.
• Could start with an alchemy kit, which is a rare tool find for other roles. NeroOneTrueKing proposed a set of mechanics for an alchemy kit:
  • Has 3 compartments. The first accepts only potions/phials of polymorph (or perhaps it just has charges and you can recharge it by using potions of polymorph).
  • The other compartments must each only contain items of the same material.
  • A success chance is displayed based on the amount of polymorph potion available, the weight ratio of the two compartments, and the materials themselves (metal can transform into metal relatively easily).
  • A successful use swaps all of the materials of the two compartments.
• Needs mechanics such that in an Alchemist’s hands, no potion is useless.

The invoke effect of the Philosopher’s Stone is heavily debated.

• It creates potions of the Elixir of Life. This potion cures disease and restores lost attributes, but most importantly it grants temporary intrinsic lifesaving. If you die with intrinsic lifesaving, you lose the remaining time for the intrinsic.
• Creating potions is way too powerful since the player will be able to bank them, so nerf this: perhaps you can only get Elixir of Life by dipping the Stone into a potion of full healing, or something. Or Elixir goes bad after a while and reverts to water, making it usable for before a fight but not for stashing.
• The Elixir should not be more powerful than a potion of full healing, or the invoke effect of the Staff of Aesculapius - healers should be the best at actual healing. Probably, getting lifesaved from intrinsic lifesaving will only restore enough HP to stay alive a little longer.
• The Elixir gives a large temporary boost to HP regeneration.
• No Elixir of Life; it instead turns potions of sickness into (extra? full?) healing.
• The Stone can turn metal objects into gold or can turn rocks into gold pieces when rubbed on them.
• When dipped into gain level or gain energy, transforms the potion into polymorph.

A really great Alchemist implementation would probably involve a full alchemy overhaul which adds herbs and fungi, harvesting ingredients from corpses, cooking, and interesting ways to combine everything. The challenge with making this is how to make it useful for other roles and not just the alchemist, and at the same time not overcomplicating the game with the new additions.

With respect to other proposals about crafting (involving a craftsmen’s guild or even scattered craftsmen), the process of traveling back and forth to and from it might become busywork. So if players could craft things on their own, that might be better.

• Would probably need properly flavored terrain for workstations, like a furnace or smelter, for certain crafts, otherwise flavor is too weird. (But this creates the problem of having to travel back and forth to it again.)
• Fixed, non-simple recipes (e.g. existing scroll crafting is a simple recipe) are a heavy spoiler tax and should be avoided.
• This could be simple for certain types of items, as in requiring some silver or gold and a diamond to craft a diamond ring, but doesn’t explain where any magical effects come from, and also might weirdly tie crafting recipes to randomized appearances which have previously been meaningless.
• Probably requires a few more “base” crafting materials, some source of leather, some source of wood, etc.
  • Corpses could decay into bones, which disappear themselves with a longer timeout, but in the meantime can be used to craft bone stuff.
• One of the craftable items should be saddles, because they’re very hard to find for non-Knight characters who want to ride.
• Tallow candles should be relatively easy to make, because they can be made out of fat from slain animals.

Several new objects for aiding in alchemy:

• Flask, holds multiple quaffs of a single potion type (so that holy water can’t be mass-created but other potions can).
• Mortar and pestle, can grind gems / other things into dust which can be used to make potions.
• Alembic, can distill potions from things in the dungeon such as corpses.
• Recipe books/scrolls, which tell the reader how to create a certain potion through alchemy, and identifies the result potion or even all potions involved.

Potion of coffee, a nonmagical potion which confers temporary sleep resistance and, while the sleep resistance is still active, a small bonus towards the odds of learning a spell from a book successfully.

In variants that have withering, add a ring of withering: causes extrinsic withering when worn, and is one of the rings which is usually generated cursed.

A nonmagical ring called a “regimental ring”, which when worn makes soldiers peaceful (unspecified whether higher ranking officers should respect it or not). It possibly appears as rare loot in barracks or rarely generated in the inventory of high-ranking officers.

Ring of quick change, which decreases the amount of time needed to put on and take off gear.

This could be a chargeable ring, which makes the decrease proportional to its enchantment (and a negatively charged ring making gear changes take more time). If implemented as non-chargeable, gear changes would most likely take a constant 1 or 0 turns.

One side effect of wearing this is that nymphs that charm you into taking off armor get fewer or no turns to make additional thefts while you are disrobing.

A ring which gives you effective Basic skill in all weapons when you wear it. (Not specified exactly how the #enhance interface would display your skills when using the ring.)

Ring of clarity, which makes you immune to confusion when wearing it. If you happen to eat it, it will cure any temporary confusion you have.

Remove the scroll and spellbook of identify, and in place of them add in items that work like a touchstone: each such item is useful at identifying the type of items of a particular object class, like touchstones are for gems. Also like touchstones, certain roles and races have affinities or advantages with various of these identifier items.

Gray philosopher’s stone; a randomized gray stone that turns objects (possibly only of a certain material) rubbed on it into gold if non-cursed, and turns gold objects rubbed on it back into that same material if cursed.

Scroll of census: when read, you are prompted to name a monster species. It then tells you how many have been generated and how many are left to extinct the species. When blessed, you are instead prompted to name a monster class, and you get this report for every species in that class.

Canceling magical armor not only sets it to +0 but turns it into a nonmagical counterpart, which consists of new items such as “faded cloak”, “faded boots” etc. This would probably also rename “faded pall” to avoid confusion.

A magic leash, which gives your pets enough speed to always stay by your side so that can move at your regular rate across a floor without constantly getting ahead of it and having to stop to wait for it.

Add a quiver item, which is a lightweight container which can only store projectiles. The first projectile item placed inside determines what projectile is valid to put in after it (i.e. you cannot put arrows into a quiver followed by rocks for a sling). However, you can either empty the quiver, or put different types of projectiles into other ones. They can also hold stackable throwing weapons like darts or spears.

You can put a quiver in your quiver slot, and then using the #fire command will shoot ammo from the quiver in first-in-last-out order.

A new magical gray stone provisionally called a “curse-eater”. If you are carrying one in your main inventory, every time you are hit with a curse items effect, the gray stone absorbs the curse instead and loses one level of beatitude. If it absorbs a curse while already cursed, it crumbles.

Carrying multiple stones will make a curse items effect hit only one of the stones, chosen randomly.

Armor of life saving (unspecified whether it would be magical body armor or some other sort of armor like a helm, or even an object property on existing armor). When it saves your life, it crumbles to dust like the amulet does, as well as any other source of life saving you happened to have, to prevent double-life-saving exploits.

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.

A new object or, more likely, an artifact which is a ring of enlightenment. Wearing it increases Intelligence and Wisdom by 1. Additionally, when you perform the #attributes command, you are shown your fire, cold, shock, poison, and sleep resistance statuses. Possibly it can be invoked for full enlightenment.

Dowsing rod, an item that you can engrave the name of an item on. Assuming the engraved name is a real object, it glows when one of those objects is on the same level as you, getting brighter the closer you are to it. (It doesn’t actually emit light on the map.)

Add a “purple crayon” tool, which is used by engraving on the floor with it. If you engrave the name of a monster species, a single monster of that species is created, possibly ignoring reverse-genocide restrictions. This is a reference to the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Displacer beasts could drop their hide, which can be enchanted or otherwise crafted into a cloak of displacement.

Leprechauns very rarely drop a four-leaf clover on death. This is a vegan comestible that provides 1d3 luck (or just acts as a luckstone) when carried and can be eaten to gain 1 Luck. (The four-leaf clover appearing from sacrifices is not this item and cannot be picked up, though that could become confusing.)

Add a quiver item. Ostensibly in the tool class, could either take up a new equipment slot, or take up the shield slot to prevent you from wearing a shield at the same time the quiver is equipped. It’s not actually a container, and just “holds” whatever is in your existing in-game quiver. While equipped, it adds +1 to your multishot, possibly +2 if it is blessed but this may make it too powerul.

Also change the Ranger quest artifact to the Quiver of Diana, a quiver which gives telepathy and reflection when equipped and possibly also prevents ammo from breaking, though it can still erode. When invoked, all projectiles on the level that you threw or fired are magically returned to your inventory, even if they’re being carried by monsters or buried or whatever.

Scroll of training, which allows you to readjust your skill slots. Blessed it allows more readjustments than uncursed, whereas a cursed scroll could do something bad like make you choose 2 categories to lose skill in and choose only 1 to regain skill in.

A horseshoe item that can be equipped on any equine creature (including player centaurs), in the boots slot. Horseshoes could deal a small amount of additional damage in kick attacks, and also deal damage based on their material, e.g. silver damage to silver-haters if the shoes are silver.

A new magical candle object. Zombie corpses within its light radius will not revive.

Ring of opening, which unlocks locked doors and boxes instantly while you are wearing it and try to unlock them. If blessed, it additionally untraps doors and boxes when you try to interact with them, but there is a fixed chance it unblesses in the process every time it untraps something.

Bag of homogenization, a magical bag that will convert the material of items placed into it to match the material of a stack of the same object type in the bag, if one exists, so that they can stack together. If this is unbalanced, or it’s desired to make it facilitate stacking even more, it can also remove enchantment and fooproofing from the items placed into it.

Amulet versus magic, which gives magic resistance when worn but also makes it difficult for the wearer to use magic, translating to a sharp penalty in spellcasting rates and, depending on the implementation, reducing or nullifying the effects of magic items.

Saddle bags, a container that can be equipped on a saddled pet. Looting the pet from an adjacent square will ask if you want to open the saddlebag, and if you confirm it will give you the normal container prompts to put in and take out items.

A spell or other magic item or ability that can be used to apply an effect to a monster that prevents them from teleporting, levelporting, or warping.

Easter egg: a comestible that has very low weight and very high nutrition, thus a very good food to have. They generate very rarely, perhaps only 1-3 per game on average, and generate exclusively in hidden spots: in chests, closets, and vaults, the dead ends of mazes, beneath sinks (revealed when you step onto the sink), in trees (revealed either when you step next to the tree or kick it), etc. The glyph is brightly colored, perhaps purple.

Bottle of enchanted hot sauce, which you can dip corpses into. If the corpse is unsafe to eat, it will be refreshed for 10 turns.

A potion or spell of free action, which gives it as a temporary intrinsic, and exists solely for the rare case where you are in a demonic or vampiric form and the ring of free action is silver.

Potion of acid resistance, which true to its name confers temporary intrinsic acid resistance.

Chlorate candles, which appear rarely. They provide immunity to gas clouds when carried, and stay lit when the hero is engulfed.

5% of the time when Medusa is decapitated, she drops a “head of Medusa” item which can be wielded and used to petrify monsters, but only if the hero is blind (attempted use of it when not blind will petrify the hero).

A pokeball item that can be thrown at injured or status-inflicted monsters to capture them, after which they turn into pets.

A flask item that you can dip into a potion to fill it with that potion, protecting it from fire and cold damage while still allowing you to drink it at a moment’s notice. When you drink from it, it becomes empty and can be reused with more potions. It could be either in the tool object class or the potion object class.

Ring of increase range, which makes all beams, rays, and projectiles you fire travel farther than normal. Possibly chargeable.

Ring of criticality, a charged ring that has an (enchantment)% chance per hit of changing the result of the die roll for that hit into a critical hit that deals double damage (and will trigger effects such as Vorpal Blade decapitation). If negatively enchanted, it has the same chance of changing the die roll into a critical failure that deals zero or 1 damage.

Assuming the Wounds Patch (which allows Healers only to see the injury status of monsters from a distance) is implemented: Add a head mirror tool, which is worn in the eye slot, or possibly the helm slot. When equipped, non-Healers can see wounds on monsters like Healers can.

Zombie arm, which is occasionally dropped by zombies. It can be wielded directly as a club, or you can equip it with a weapon which gives you the ability to melee targets from a little farther away. Eventually rots away with the same timer as a corpse.

Potion of astral vision, which confers temporary astral vision. To give this some use, also add some sort of being that appears on the Astral Plane and is only visible with astral vision.

Scroll of recall: a scroll that works like a magic whistle but with more varied effects.

• Uncursed: works identically to a magic whistle, summoning pets on the level to your side.
• Blessed: summons pets from anywhere in the dungeon to your side.
• Cursed: summons hostiles to your side (unclear if this is from anywhere in the dungeon or just the current level).
• Confused: summons objects to your side.

Potion of marksmanship: grants a temporary +10 increase in accuracy, but only for ranged combat.

Magic collar, an amulet without a randomized appearance, which you can apply to a pet to make it wear it, assuming it has a neck. The pet then becomes visible to you at all times while it’s on your level (similar to seeing it with telepathy) and possibly tracked in #overview if it’s not on your level. Farlooking a pet wearing a magic collar shows HP and other additional information as if you had used a stethoscope on it.

Not specified what effects there would be, if any, if the player wears the magic collar.

Ring that provides magic resistance, but hinders your own spellcasting while you wear it by increasing your spell failure rates. Additionally, it gradually drains your magic energy while being worn. If you have no energy, the ring stops providing magic resistance.

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.

Invoking the Longbow of Diana gives you light arrows. These are a special object, weightless, created with the same enchantment as the Longbow, but attempting to enchant them further will fail (maybe making the enchanted arrows evaporate). If they leave your inventory for any reason, they will vanish. As a weapon, they are very powerful (to the point of probably instakilling most weaker monsters they hit). To prevent the player stockpiling them, the invoke effect will only top up the amount of them in your inventory to 5.

When a light arrow strikes a target or falls to the ground (and vanishes in the process), it permanently lights up the surrounding area.

Potion of regeneration. Grants some medium duration (maybe fifty to a hundred turns) of temporary intrinsic hungerless regeneration. Can be brewed using healing potions, perhaps, but should be fairly rare in terms of random generation.

Potion of bug repellent; is poisonous or otherwise harmful to drink, but if you smash it over yourself, all insects (classes a, s, and x) will flee from you.

Shovel, a tool that can be used to dig walls, but only deals 1d2 damage in combat (because it’s a pure tool, not a weapon-tool) and doesn’t count as hitting with a weapon if used in combat.

Love potion, an item that can tame monsters it is thrown at. Not specified what the effects of the player or monsters drinking it would be, or whether hostile monsters would throw it at you.

Squirt gun: a weapon which can be loaded with a potion (using up the potion), giving it ammo for 5-10 shots. When you fire it, a liquid projectile flies through the air, and causes potion effects (identical to those of throwing a whole potion) to whatever monster it hits.

It would be silly to define a separate liquid projectile object for each type of potion; probably the best implementation would be to have a single “splash of potion” object and use some field on the object, like corpsenm, to track what sort of potion it is.

Loading water into the squirt gun can be used to discipline pets.

Add several new never-randomly-generated cards, all of which are designed to give strong but short buffs, to you and more often allies. Though their frequencies are 0, they are sometimes dropped from monsters you and your pets kill, at the same frequency the keyed create monster cards do.

Other roles can write these scrolls if they want to or find them in bones, but they are generally intended to be less powerful than many existing scrolls so they shouldn’t steal generation probability from them.

Giants can rip doors off their hinges, by picking them up, to use them as weapons. They do a lot of damage, and can only actually be wielded by giants. Possibly, kicking a door with excessive strength (and/or being a giant) not only breaks it off the hinges, but sends it flying to hit anything unlucky enough to be in its path.

There isn’t really an obvious object class for a ‘door’ object to be in, though WEAPON_CLASS is probably the most straightforward.

Possibly also allow this with sinks or trees. All of these heavy improvised weapons should probably use club skill.

New object, a metal collar you wear on your neck. Makes you immune to being decapitated by Vorpal Blade. It would probably be worn in the amulet slot.

Fog horn, a magical tool that when played surrounds the user with clouds and possibly fog clouds (the monster). It would be best if some type of non-poison-gas cloud were implemented first; it is probably a bad idea to actually change the terrain around the user into cloud.

Glowstick: a tool that can be applied to make it emit light in a radius of 2. It lasts a few thousand turns before dying (reducing to radius 1 light when near the end of its life), but cannot be turned off like a candle or lamp can.

A potion or spell of searching: it doesn’t give you the regular searching intrinsic, but rather it detects any traps you move adjacent to with a 100% chance (regular searching isn’t guaranteed to find these, and this effect won’t find other things that searching is able to find).

Alternatively, just make it give you temporary intrinsic searching as currently implemented, but make it so that timing-out intrinsic searching (available only from this) is guaranteed to find everything.

Ballistae, a very large and heavy weapon that takes time to set up and prime, but can be used to launch javelins to deal a large amount of damage. Giants can wield them like crossbows. May appear as defenses in special levels like Fort Ludios and the Castle.

A magical horn whose effect depends on what material it’s made out of. One effect could be pacification; another possibility is to make it a horn of summoning, with the monster type summoned controlled by the material.

The spell of protection, rather than giving you a golden haze, gives you a “spectral shield”. It weighs nothing, and automatically equips into your shield slot if your offhand is free. It provides around 3 or 4 AC, and this does not degrade over time. However, the shield is temporary and will dissipate in a hundred or so turns.

If the shield is unequipped but kept in your inventory, it hovers around you and tries to block things on its own, but it only provides about 1 or 2 AC in this form. If it leaves your inventory for any reason, it dissipates. Casting protection again while you are already carrying a spectral shield resets its dissipation timer; it doesn’t give you a second one.

The shield has a price of 0, so you can’t sell it.

Grab bag: a magical bag that contains up to four small random items. You may take out any one item, and are allowed to view the contents first; after taking out one item the bag and its other contents vanish. Items cannot be put into a grab bag. If you tip it, one random item comes out and then it vanishes.

Add a new sort of body armor that makes a compromise between studded leather and crystal plate mail - less AC than crystal plate mail, but more than studded leather (so around 5 AC), weighs more than studded leather but less than crystal plate mail (so around 300-350 aum), and doesn’t hinder spellcasting at all. Possibly, “crystal scale mail”.

Possibly crystal plate mail’s base AC will have to be boosted, or its weight lowered, in order to avoid this new armor being just better (as it stands, a gain of about 2 AC in exchange for about 100 extra weight is something most players won’t take).

A magical bag which only holds gold and gems, but any gold and gems inside it don’t weigh anything.

Add a potion of resistance, which provides a cocktail of basic resistances (things like fire, cold, shock, sleep, and poison) for a limited time. In order to make this more useful and not just yet another candidate for stashing away, possibly all roles start with it identified.

New Biologist role, which revolves around polymorphing monsters, brewing potions (probably non-alchemically), and possibly collecting samples from monsters.

Possibly, they start with a number of potions of booze, but are penalized for drinking booze; it’s intended to use for brewing with samples. They also possibly have a guidebook describing recipes (other roles can do this too, but lacking a guidebook they won’t be able to do it very well).

Starting equipment may contain:

• Alchemy smock
• Gloves, probably leather but maybe padded
• Goggles, a new eye-slot tool made of plastic that protects your eyes from splashes and spits just like the visored helmet
• Knife
• Walking shoes
• Wand of polymorph (questionable)
• Tripe and vegetables to tame monsters

One take on the quest: it sees you fighting the Black Mold (a mold that constantly multiplies itself and attacks with random elemental damage, including possibly disintegration, when touched). The quest artifact is the Elixir of Immortality, but this is not possessed by the nemesis; instead you have to brew it yourself using an ingredient found on the goal level and which will be destroyed by the Black Mold if you don’t get there first. The Elixir isn’t needed; the quest is counted complete if you destroy all the Black Mold.

They can get Expert in only a few skills, including knife.

They are penalized for “animal testing”, which is polymorphing or otherwise abusing living peaceful or tame monsters. Or possibly it’s okay as long as the subject isn’t killed. However, they are rewarded for other forms of experimentation.

Assuming empty potion bottles are somehow implemented so as not to be game-breaking: they should weigh 1 or 2 aum, and can be dipped in sinks to fill them from the faucet. This usually fills them with water, but can have other sink effects such as getting a random potion from the faucet instead.

One-and-a-half-handed weapons that are capable of being used either one-handed or two-handed. They default to two-handed if the player is not wearing a shield or twoweaponing. They have better damage stats than pure one-handed weapons, but the damage is reduced if it is used one-handed.

Some object that you can dip in lava to enhance its properties.

Assuming a new Gehennom generation algorithm which generates doors, some of which must be passed in order to get through the level: have a special type of “demon key” to open doors in Gehennom. Lots of them generate in Gehennom (though not as many as there are doors; possibly a certain type of monster there generates with them so you can obtain more if you get stuck), but each key is single-use and breaks when used to open a door.

Spell of blindness (possibly also available as a wand), which blinds monsters.

Convert the potions of monster and object detection into scrolls, since they are a bit of an oddity among potions in that all the other potions have a direct effect on the drinker. These one-time divination effects seem more suited to scrolls.

Chargeable ring (or amulet, if it’s feasible to make chargeable amulets) of energy regeneration.

New non-magical gauntlet which is metal and has no special effects but has 2 or 3 base AC. Knights start with it instead of leather gloves.

Gold nuggets as a replacement for loadstones. They are expensive, but heavy, and generate cursed. Like loadstones, cannot be dropped when cursed.

Skeletons for vertebrate monsters. Corpses turn into these when they rot away. They cannot be undead turned into their monster; trying to do this will create a skeleton monster instead. Lawfuls might get an alignment boost for burying a skeleton in a pit and filling it.

A magical whistle that instead of warping pets summons a temporary ally who disappears after a while.

Gloves of fortune, which unlike SporkHack cause killed monsters to drop d10 gold pieces that didn’t previously exist, and rarely a gem.

Boots of earthquake: when you stomp the ground with them (by kicking downward), an earthquake happens. However, this spends 1 point of enchantment on the boots (not going below 0; if they are 0 or less then no earthquake happens.)

Potion of elixir, which heals more HP than healing, but less than extra healing. It also recovers the same amount of Pw and restores 1 ability point in all attributes. HP and Pw maximums do not get raised.

Another type of magical horn, a “horn of heroes”, that when improvised on creates powerful allied monsters (dead heroes?). Ideally the summons would be temporary.

Ring of gold detection, which provides persistent passive gold detection in a radius. Lets you see how much gold a monster is carrying when you chat to them or use a stethoscope. Vault guards are guaranteed to carry one; leprechauns very rarely generate with one.

Potion of honey; nonmagical but provides a lot more nutrition than juice. Can be obtained from bees somehow, possibly by dipping royal jelly into a potion of fruit juice or potion of water.

Dowsing rod: chargeable magical tool that when applied tells you the total value of all gold and gems on the level that isn’t being carried by the player (but not their locations), and whether there are any artifacts on the level that are not carried by the player.

Stealing gloves (also possibly named “rogues gloves” or “gauntlets of thievery”). 0 base AC, and Rogues begin the game wearing a pair. When you hit a monster barehanded while wearing them, you deal no damage (and don’t train bare handed combat skill) but you get a Dex-versus-monster-AC chance of stealing a random non-equipped item or some gold out of their inventory. You can also attack a peaceful monster with them to attempt to steal something; in addition to the Dex-vs-AC roll, this requires passing both another Dex check and a Cha check for them not to notice. If the Dex check fails, you don’t steal anything successfully; if the Cha check fails, they notice (waking up if asleep) and get mad. If the stolen item is currently equipped, there’s no Cha check; the monster just gets alerted and angry.

Nuggets of various metals (copper, gold, iron, silver, mithril, maybe generic metal). These are all * class and are basically rocks but worth more.

Wand of detect magic. Non-directional; if you are carrying any items in your inventory which are magical, “You feel a magical aura inside your knapsack.”, and any object classes in open inventory which are magical but not type-identified are identified as being magical.

Ring of item protection (ported from Rogue’s ring of maintain armor): protects all inventory items from damage of any sort, which includes outright destruction such as monsters casting destroy armor and ring/wand explosions. Also includes protection from disenchanter disenchantment.

Scroll of create magic item, which attempts to generate a magical item. If the scroll is blessed, you can choose the object class; if cursed, the object will be cursed.

Assuming the game supports creating temporary regions of non-poisonous gas clouds: New “smoke bomb” potion. It makes you choke/vomit when quaffed. Intended to be thrown; where it shatters, most of the surrounding terrain will be transformed into cloud.

Vanilla has since added non-poisonous gas clouds (for things such as mist from zapping fire over water), and this effect could work just as well by breaking a smoky potion, instead of adding a new object.

Woolen shirt, shirt-slot armor which gives zero AC but cold resistance.

Jars, which are like tins except made of glass (or possibly, tins made of glass material, in object materials implementing variants). Generate quite often as chest contents. Possibly, what is in the jar is apparent just by looking at it.

Bodkin arrows that have heavyshot (from DynaHack): instead of multishooting, they deal double or triple damage depending on how many you would have multishot otherwise.

Assuming that some limit has been implemented on the number of pets you can have at one time: New amulet that allows you to have more pets than you normally can.

Some consumable object that lets you freshen a corpse (for eating or sacrifice) that doesn’t require resurrecting it with undead turning.

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

Scroll of repair: uncursed repairs all levels of erosion on an item of the player’s choice; a blessed scroll repairs all erosion in the player’s inventory; cursed scroll attempts to erode one random item in inventory 1d3 times. If confused and non-cursed, will erosionproof an item of the player’s choice; if confused and cursed, will remove erosionproofing from a random item and then erode it 1d3 times.

The scroll of enchant weapon retains its confused effect of erosionproofing a weapon, but it no longer erosionproofs non-weapons or repairs the weapon. Enchant weapon scrolls are also made much less common, with the probability dumped into the scroll of repair instead.

Wand of charging: non-directional wand that uncursed-charges an item in inventory. Will explode if an attempt is made to recharge it.

Wand of identify: a non-directional wand that will always identify one item when zapped.

Tomatoes, a type of comestible that you can throw at monsters to decrease their charisma (if they had charisma).

Whetstones, imported from SLASH’EM, but with some additional effects.

• The behavior from SLASH’EM is that whetstones can be used at a water source to remove rust and negative enchantment from edged weapons and pick-axes.
• Cursed whetstones either weld themselves to your hand or have a chance of breaking a weapon rubbed on them.
• Blessed whetstones can uncurse a cursed weapon rubbed on them, but at the cost of removing the whetstone’s blessing.
• If slingshot is implemented, rubbing rocks on a whetstone will break them into slingshot.

Party hat, a conical hat which increases Cha by 1 if uncursed, 2 if blessed, and decreases it by 1 if cursed.

Lemons, a comestible that deals 1 point of damage when eaten unless acid resistant and exercises Constitution. If you are killed by eating a lemon, the death reason is “killed by citric acid”.

A cloak of flying.

Chain whips and silver chain whips, which use whip skill.

Blowguns, a weapon which can be used as a launcher for darts. (Cavemen can thematically use these.)

Characters with at least Basic in sling can do something (use a touchstone? flint stone? any gray stone?) to break rocks into slingshot, which weigh 1 and have comparable to-hit and damage to flint stones. Slingshot may be weapon-class instead of rock-class. The higher the sling skill, the more shot that one can get out of a single rock. There should also be rare silver rocks, which can be broken into silver shot.

Armor of training: has no AC, but gives you a small multiplier to your experience point gains (and possibly skill point gains) whenever you are wearing it.

This could also exist as an object property rather than a new object.

Potion of training: gives you a temporary multiplier to your experience point gains (lasts for the next N monsters, not the next N turns). Might also give you a temporary multiplier to skill training point gains.

Add “candelabrum” as a new randomly generated tool. It can hold 3 candles and gives a light radius of 2 with one candle, 3 with two candles, and 4 with three candles. Its material is brass. The Candelabrum of Invocation’s unidentified description is now “ornate candelabrum”.

Add several types of tape, which can be applied to mute yourself. While mute, you cannot cast spells, but you have a chance of not speaking the incantation when you read a scroll (resulting in the scroll becoming identified but not used up; none of its effects happen). There are four types of tape which randomly generate: Scotch tape (generating blessed 75% of the time and cursed 25%), packing tape (always uncursed), duct tape (50% blessed, 50% cursed), and Flex Tape (25% cursed, 75% uncursed).

Tape may fail to prevent you from reading a scroll, with a message “The magic of the scroll forces your mouth to move against the tape.” followed by the normal scroll reading messages. The chance of this happening is 2% if the tape is blessed, 12% if uncursed, and 50% if cursed. When taking off blessed tape, there is a 75% chance you take it off normally, but a 25% chance that you rip it off instead, dealing 2 damage. When uncursed, there is an equal chance of taking it off, ripping it off, and having it be stuck on your face. When cursed, there’s a 99% chance that it’s stuck on your face, but a 1% chance that you tear it off, dealing 15 damage. Every ten turns you spend wearing tape, it might fall off on its own (5% chance), falling on the floor. Finally, every time you put on or take off tape, there is a 15% chance that it lose its stickiness, fall off if you put it on, and turn into an “odd strip of material”, which can be used as a blindfold. Odd strips of material cannot be generated randomly.

In an effort to make unicorn horns not infinitely usable but also preserve their other good qualities: Split the unicorn horn into two items, the horn, a simple tool which now has a number of charges, and a “unicorn spear” / “hardened unicorn horn” which is a weapon.

Both items have the same base damage, are two-handed, and use the unicorn horn skill, but reading a scroll of enchant weapon while wielding a unicorn horn will transform it into the weapon version like how crysknives work. The weapon cannot be used to cure ailments.

A “blank ring”, which has no powers. A gemstone can be inserted into it, which will turn it into that type of gemstone ring, whatever it happens to be. Possibly can be obtained by canceling other rings.

Frisbees, a plastic weapon using boomerang skill. Deals only 1d2 damage, but can fly in a straight line at extremely long range. Frisbees thrown at dogs might tame them.

Some limited way to charge rings that isn’t the general-purpose magical charging that also charges wands and tools. Maybe add a “scroll of enchant ring” that, like armor and weapon scrolls, only works on rings.

See also L’s Scroll of Enchantment patch, which merges ring, weapon and armor enchanting into a single scroll.

Stomping boots. While wearing these, you may instakill and move into the square of all small monsters in the a, s, and x classes.

Scroll of religious text, which can be read for a prayer (or opportunity to pray) that ignores your prayer timeout.

Karma stone: a type of gray stone that, if it is blessed or cursed, can be rubbed on another item to transfer the blessing or curse to that item, making the stone uncursed in the process. Cursed karma stones in inventory eventually transfer their curse to a random item on their own; the stone might remain cursed after doing this. The loadstone in the Mimic of the Mines is replaced with one of these.

Chargeable ring that reduces incoming damage (perhaps by half, not triggering if half physical or half spell damage applies from some other source) but may lose a charge every time you take damage.

An early-game body armor piece that increases Pw regeneration.

A compass item, which when applied points up or down depending on where the stairs to Vlad’s Tower are. It spins around if you’re on the level itself or inside the tower.

Various forms of AoE monster-debuff candles. Charm them, anti-undead, etcetera.

Special candle found generated in Gehennom. While one is lit on a level, it suppresses spawn rates and makes the difficulty about what it is now (without the candle lit monsters will generate at a much higher difficulty). They should be fairly nonrenewable, perhaps wishable but not polymorphable. This limits your duration of time in “easy Gehennom” before it gets harder. The candles work the same outside Gehennom, but are less useful (maybe they specifically suppress demon spawns).

Thick woolen socks, worn in the boot slot. Give no AC, but provide cold resistance.

Gillyweed: comestible that grants temporary intrinsic magical breathing when eaten.

Amulet of reincarnation: when you die, it prevents your game from ending, but it permanently polymorphs you into a different form.

Armor of lifesaving. Works as expected, saves your life but disintegrates in the process; more interesting than an amulet because it leaves you more vulnerable after disintegrating. This could possibly be an (extremely rare) object property.

Gloves that give a boost to multishot somehow: either increase the maximum by 1, or reroll the roll if it happened to be 1, or something. There’s debate on how not to overpower multishot with an item like this.

Customizable, player-named “hat” armor that uses a similar system to slime molds, except it is 0 AC helm-slot armor. Archeologist fedoras are set to this by default, and the fedora item is removed and replaced with the more generic “hat”, which is hard-set to fedora for Arc’s starting hat.

Caltrops: a nonmagic stackable tool that when applied creates a “caltrop trap” on your space, which damages / immobilizes / slows the first monster to enter it. Rangers and rogues excel at using them and possibly get some bonuses from them. Not difficult to untrap, though it would be nice if some caltrops could gradually be lost in the process. Maybe spreading caltrops consumes five or so of them, and you won’t always get five back during an untrap.

Add nets, on the basis that NetHack needs to have nets in it. You can throw them in pools to fish with, and throw them at small monsters to trap them in place. There could also be a trap that catches you in a net. You can also mess up throwing them and tangle yourself instead. Possibly, nets would be their own skill too.

For simplicity of implementation, they should create a temporary web on the player’s space (with a flag set so that it uses “net” in its messages instead of “web” and is probably harder/impossible to tear through at high Strength). Either nets would generate in stacks of 11-20 and get destroyed when the monster escaped the net, or they would drop themselves (most of the time) when the monster escaped the net and destroyed the trap. Either way, they should be fairly light.

Scroll of material change, which converts the material of an object into a different one.

Muzzles that can be put on pets so they stop eating food off the floor. Uncursed ones block their eating 90% of the time; blessed 100%; and cursed ones weld to the pet’s face and prevent it from eating anything until it starves or the curse is removed. May also decrease tameness when put on the pet.

Shepherds’ crooks: a wooden multi-purpose weapon-tool.

• Damage is a little less than a quarterstaff. Should probably not weigh as much as a quarterstaff; it would be hard to justify 40 weight any way you slice it.
• Can be applied to give a menu offering to do one of three things (and unlike grappling hooks it never does the wrong thing):
  1. Hit a monster at polearm range (skill-dependent).
  2. Attempt to hook a monster at polearm range. Tame monsters are always hooked. Peacefuls are always hooked, but may be angered. Hostiles might be hit instead of hooked. If the monster is hooked, it will be pulled towards you, or you will be pulled towards it if it’s much larger than you.
  3. Grab the top item from a square, even if the square is a trap or water square.
• Wielding one passively gives a boost to the radius in which pets will follow when you change levels.
• Wielding one also makes pets follow you as if you had a treat.
• Can be applied to a monster two squares away to yank it towards you, which may stun the monster.
• Binders in dNetHack could start with one. Peasants in dNetHack could generate with them.
• Two-weaponing a crook and a flail should do ‘‘something’’ (from Egyptian pharaoh iconography).

Lesser and greater scrolls of enchant weapon. The lesser enchant by 1 point up to a maximum of +2 (uncursed) or +3 (blessed); the greater enchant by 1-3 points to a maximum of +5 (uncursed) or +7 (blessed).

Padded sack: bag that protects its fragile items from breaking.

Decorative objects/furniture for atmosphere: sarcophagi, (inanimate) skeletons, rubble in corners, mist, shafts of light that illuminate small areas.

Fish scale mail; awful AC but grants magical breathing.

A diving helmet item which confers magical breathing when worn.

Hitting a tin of long worm or purple worm meat with an undead turning beam turns it into a can of worms, which when you apply or eat it creates a bunch of random w around you. Cans of worms can also be found randomly generated.

Brass knuckles, an item that increases damage done with bare hands and martial arts if you are unarmed. There are multiple takes on it:

1. They are a ring-slot item, possibly occupying both ring slots at once, or just one. In this case, you must also not be wearing gloves in order to get the bonus damage, or else you can’t even put on gloves while wearing the knuckles. Can be charged like other rings to increase the damage dealt by them; however, the damage boost even when they are +0 is significant.
2. They are glove-slot armor. This is nice because it means they can be enchanted with enchant armor rather than charging. While the enchantment increases damage, it does NOT provide any AC bonus.

Item called “message in a bottle” that sometimes generates near water sources. You can read it to get a random rumor.

Am amulet versus thievery, which protects you from all theft attacks including nymphs, leprechauns, foocubi, and possibly even Amulet-stealing attacks.

Scroll which makes an evil clone of a target monster which will attempt to kill it.

Potion that keeps your HP from dropping below 1 for a limited time.

Potion of antivenom/antidote which cancels out any Str loss from poison. (Not really that useful if poison is simple Str loss; blessed restore ability is superior, but if poison is an actual status effect, it would be more useful.)

Float stone, a gray stone which has negative weight. Non-stacking, and rare. If you get enough float stones to more than cancel out your own weight and the weight of any possessions you’re carrying, you levitate. Possibly doesn’t work when put into containers, or at least doesn’t get multiplied by the effect of a cursed bag of holding. May gain positive weight when cursed, or greater negative weight when blessed (or vice versa).

Scroll of knowledge: rare scroll that directly increases Intelligence when read.

Non-magical tools that can be used to heal wounds.

Deployable barricade on a tile. Blocks movement; must be attacked or kicked several times to be destroyed. Presumably lightweight to actually carry around.

A wand that, when it hits a creature, saves that creature’s position and forces it to teleport back to that position after a few turns.

Scroll that restores you to full health but decreases your maximum health.

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.

Scroll that tells you the dungeon overview for the next 5 levels of the dungeon. If blessed, shows more levels; if cursed, shows fewer levels or omits details.

Lure, which attracts monsters to you. Could be a magical non-consumable item, or a charged item that amounts to spraying yourself with scents. The Amulet of Yendor should also have this effect, at its maximum level at all times.

Dipping eucalyptus leaves in water gives you a potion of tea.

Type of arrow that is made out of enchanted worm teeth. Gives the racial arrow bonus to anyone using it.

Merge the rings of slow digestion and hunger into a single chargeable ring of digestion. Negative values increase hunger faster, positive values slow it down. Duplicating the effect of a vanilla ring of slow digestion would require getting a +10 ring or stacking up to 10 with two rings. (Possibly the negative/positive values should be switched, but that would complicate the generation code.)

Frost lamp, a tool which gives out a radius 3 cold aura. Water and lava within the radius freeze and then revert once out of the radius. Fiery monsters take damage from being in the radius. Eventually runs out and has to be recharged.

Ring of fast living: gives an experience multiplier and increases hunger rate drastically, multiplies your damage but also multiplies damage you take.

Ring of carrying: new chargeable ring that multiplies the weight of the player’s inventory by (1 - (0.05 * enchantment)) when worn. Stacks with a second ring. Initial charge and beatitude is set the same as any other charged ring.

Torches, which can be created by dipping a club into a potion of oil. Torches are their own item, not just a “lit club” (though possibly the lamplit flag could be used for this), and have a light radius of 3. Deals additional fire damage to monsters it hits, but may go out. May light the hero on fire if they fall down the stairs with a lit torch in inventory.

Merge the rings of sustain ability and slow digestion into a “ring of stasis”. Double-edged effects: slows down digestion like normal, but also slows down healing, energy regeneration, timer effects like confusion and sickness, any timing-out intrinsics, prevents exercise from happening, blocks or reduces to 1 effects that directly change attributes.

Scroll of healeportation: performs both a heal and a teleport at once.

Reach gloves: let you pick up items from adjacent squares and grapple monsters.

Saltwater or murky water, intended as a nerf for “just dilute most potions”:

• Potions of saltwater behave exactly like potions of water, except that they cannot be used to bless or curse things. Holy (and unholy) water must be pure.
• All in-game sources of water except for magic fountains (possibly regular fountains as well, but they might be too plentiful) are saltwater. Diluting potions in them will yield only potions of saltwater.
• Can also get pure water if a unicorn horn dip would already result in water.
• Not specified what cancelling potions should do. Possibly most potions just cancel to saltwater, juice or sickness. It’s weird because flavor-wise it shouldn’t produce anything but pure water, but it obviously won’t fix the current problem if you merely have to cancel potions instead of diluting them.
• If called murky water instead of saltwater, the “murky” randomized potion appearance should change.

Alternatively, don’t actually make saltwater a separate potion; just use saltwater as a flavor reason for why the player can’t intentionally dilute potions to water. (Can use a separate flavor argument, that potions are generally corked while not used, to explain away the lack of dilution for water damage.) Also, make most potions cancel into non-water base potions (such as confusion and hallucination to booze), with the notable exception of polymorph. It’s also harder or impossible to get water from random alchemy or polymorph.

A third option is naming blessing-capable potions “purified water” and leaving the mundane potion of water as it is. Things such as unicorn horns can neutralize toxins but can’t actually remove them, so the resulting water isn’t purified.

Paper bags that are a container but disintegrate when wet. They can generate with a potion of booze inside.

Make death magic resistable by an amulet or ring. Possible names and corresponding exact effects vary:

• “life protection” (bad name, life saving is very similar)
• “unliving” (makes you not count as living and life saving won’t work)
• “undeath” (actively makes you count as undead, you are vulnerable to turn undead effects and lawful gods may be annoyed at you)
• “versus death magic”

A type of boots, perhaps high iron boots, that protects fully against xans.

New slot for belts:

• Belts themselves could be armor or tools, but probably armor. They mainly serve to hold items for quick access. It’s not defined whether they are intended to hold an indefinite number of items like any container, or a limited amount. The only problem with making them armor is that they would by default be enchantable for more AC, but belts should probably not be enchantable. If it makes more sense that several magical belts would hold charges, tools would be the appropriate class.
• Items carried in a belt weigh nothing and are mostly or totally protected from destruction, and using them doesn’t take the action it usually takes to get an item out of a bag.
• Types of belts could be scroll-holding, potion-holding, wand-holding, ammo-holding (with a possible “endless quiver” item or artifact), gem-holding (to get partial resistances from certain gems), chastity (providing immunity to foocubi seduction) or no special powers but some moderate AC.
• One randomized belt description could also provide protection against leprechaun theft.
• Randomized descriptions could include: cloth, leather, worn, studded, buckled, braided
• Tourists and Convicts also start off with garish swim trunks/striped slacks, which do the same things as Hawaiian shirts/striped shirts. The swim trunks also allow swimming. Both of these protect from instadeath when you sit on a cockatrice corpse.
• Belts of giant strength, elven grace, and troll toughness. These increase your Str/Dex/Con either to 25 or by +enchantment (if belts can even be enchanted, which isn’t currently defined.)
• Swordbelts/sheathes. These allow you to ready an additional weapon or give you an additional weapon slot.

More belt ideas here.

New type of book “encyclopedia”:

• Appears as a “hardback book” when unidentified, base price 300.
• Nonmagical and always polypiles into a blank spellbook.
• When read, it adds the appearance of some unknown magical items (1d4 if blessed, 1d3 if uncursed, 1 if cursed, plus 1 if you are an Archeologist) to your discovery list.
• It doesn’t disappear when read, but will set a flag that prevents its effects from happening again. This flag will be cleared when creating a bones file.
• Archeologists start with a special blessed encyclopedia (using a different flag), which is their research (the starting one comes pre-read and isn’t useful to this character). Reading an unread archeologist encyclopedia gives the message “These seem to be an archeologist’s notes. You pore over them intently.”, and type-IDs two unknown scrolls, rings, amulets, and wands, and puts two blessed scrolls of magic mapping into your inventory.
• The Archeologist home level contains another encyclopedia.
• There has to be an incentive for archeologists carrying around their encyclopedia so it doesn’t just get discarded as dead weight. A flavorful way to do this would be to award them extra experience points (say, double or triple) when they learn new object types while carrying an encyclopedia.

Sunglasses, an eye-slot tool that protects versus being blinded by flashes of light from things like lightning bolts, cameras, and yellow lights, either completely or with an 80% chance. (They probably shouldn’t block blinding from spat venom.) May also block certain gaze attacks. They should have some downside when worn, such as limiting your maximum vision radius or impeding searching.

Tourists start with a pair of sunglasses.

When you fail to write a scroll because you ran out of ink, it will become a “garbled scroll” instead of disappearing. Garbled scrolls can’t be read (or possibly they could be read, for a number of generally negative weak magical effects), but they can be re-blanked so the scroll can be written again. This could also happen when you fail to write a scroll by not knowing it. There is a slim chance, probably less than 10%, that you end up writing some random scroll instead of a garbled scroll.

Elven gloves, which grant stealth and can be enchanted to +7.

Add a scroll of polymorph. Blessed polymorphs you with polymorph control over this one occasion; uncursed polymorphs normally; cursed polymorphs you and everything adjacent to you.

Jetpacks, a chargeable source of levitation/flying. They are worn in the cloak (or body armor?) slot and grant 0 AC.

Lizard scales, available as a drop from killing a lizard, are wearable as AC 1 body armor. They can be upgraded into lizard scale mail, which has AC 3. This armor protects you from petrification.

A lamp with the same unidentified appearance and base cost as a magic lamp. It is a charged magical tool (has a lifetime, comparable to an oil lamp) that sheds no light, but instead detects unseen in its range whenever it is turned on. This includes invisible monsters, secret doors, and all traps. It also allows vision to penetrate through clouds.

Store type “sushi restaurant”, which sells sea monster corpses, kelp fronds, various sushi rolls, and sushi mats, tools which allow you to combine kelp and sea monster corpses into higher-nutrition sushi rolls. Sushi rolls include kraken sushi, eel wrap, and shark tempura.

Add a scroll of air (as well as the scroll of flood, which is 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.

Potion equivalent of extra healing for magic power, or else some consumable way to recover 20-40 power in one go; the normal potion of gain energy is currently more useful for raising maximum power than it is for restoring it. This new thing need not be more effective than gain energy is at raising maximum energy. (Perhaps “potion of restore energy”, which does not raise maximum at all.)

Saddlebags, a rarely generated container that can be applied to a saddled mount and then have gear put into it, allowing the player to offload some of their weight onto the mount. While they are as nonmagical as a sack, they have a higher base cost and weight. You can loot it on an adjacent mount by using the directional #loot command. Knights may start with one.

Soldiers occasionally drop piccolos, which act similarly to wooden flutes (but made of metal).

This could also be done in the object materials patch without adding a new item for piccolos, by simply having them drop metal flutes.

Implement “spoiler novels”, cheap books like 3.6 novels that contain spoilers. (Not described in what form the spoilers would be. Several true rumors?)

Nonwishable unique items or artifacts that would be “nice finds” in the dungeon.

Add a silvery potion, either as a random appearance or a dedicated potion like dNetHack’s potion of silver starlight, which will silver ammunition dipped into it, perhaps temporarily. It might also silver other weapons (spears, daggers) or other items. Random appearances have the possible problems of the potion potentially having a defined dip effect already (polymorph, for example), and it potentially not appearing in the game if there are extra random appearances. Dipping fragile silver items, like silver arrows, into a potion of acid could create a silvery potion.

Some version of key breaking, perhaps when trying to use a cursed key. However, this should not go the SLASH’EM route of allowing any unlocking device to break, since that just makes the player carry around extra keys. Skeleton keys should be made of bone and can break. Perhaps add a new key that is not breakable but is rarer than skeleton keys (stealing some of skeleton keys’ probability).

Lock picks and credit cards should possibly be able to break too.

Wind dragons, a cyan D whose breath is a wind beam: it doesn’t damage you, but blows you backward, and can’t be reflected. Their scales grant flight, which now confers resistance against knockback and Newton’s Third Law.

Gauntlets and boots of reflection.

More acid resistance sources in FIQHack, to balance yellow dragons’ exploding acid breath. Possibly a ring or amulet of acid resistance.

Easter eggs as an actual item, in addition to monster and chicken eggs. Possibly they have a chance of containing a candy bar, or a figurine.

Monster status “discord”, which causes a monster to be seen as a target and be attacked by other enemies. On the player, discord is the same as wielding Stormbringer. Discord is available through the spellbook of discord.

Boots of shock resistance, which have a thick rubber sole to prevent you from being grounded.

Note: several other people have commented that since such boots would prevent you from being grounded, you would actually take extra shock damage from other things, like touching grounded metal objects.