New spell “seek item”, mid to high level divination. When cast, you are prompted to name an object type (or use the wish prompt to allow more details to be specified - i.e. a +5 broadsword as opposed to any broadsword). Then the entire dungeon is searched for matching items and tells you where they are found, probably just telling you the level for objects not on the current level and showing you the locations of objects a la object detection if they are on the current level.

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.

Angering peaceful monsters by casting an innocuous spell like light is very annoying, so split the spell up into a “light area” spell, which does not damage anything unless it’s a highly light-sensitive monster like a gremlin, and a “light blast” or “flash” attack spell, which may or may not light the area permanently and is designed to blind monsters.

Add a spell of insight, a level 2 divination spell which grants enlightenment.

Artificer role themed around turning items into different or differently powered items.

• They are intended to play similarly to a Healer, with alternate ways of surviving due to having personally low offense. However, their magic doesn’t focus on healing.
• Add a new spell school, “artifice spells”, with the following spells:
  • Transmute: Change the material of an object.
  • Imbue: Consume a wand and endow a different item with an object property related to that wand.
  • Enscribe: As above, but consume a scroll.
  • Reforge: As above, but consume a magical piece of wearable gear.
  • Elute: Consume a magical piece of wearable gear and produce a potion with a related effect.
• Can get up to Expert in artifice spells, Skilled in matter spells, Basic in enchantment spells. Other skill caps are unspecified.

Spell of collect arrows: it magically retrieves all objects on the current level that you’ve thrown or fired at some point in the past. (Possibly limited to weapon class objects).

Charm monster is generally considered too powerful and too low-level, and should probably be nerfed. Ideas:

• It only works if you’re not wearing any armor. (This is apparently how D&D does it.) Alternatively, its chance of successfully charming is reduced the more armor you’re wearing.
• Make it more reliable than it is now, but it always fails if you have other pets. (You can then only have one pet at a time without using scrolls of taming.)
• It only tames one monster at a time. (Make it a directional beam with a maximum range of 1.)
• It only pacifies monsters, and can’t be used to tame an always-hostile monster.
• Make it do what the temporary pet code in the Bard patch does: the monster remains tame for a fairly short amount of time and then reverts to whatever it was originally.
• Split into three spells: pacify monster (peaceful for charisma*2 turns), charm monster (tame for Charisma*2 turns), and dominate monster (tame permanently or for a long time).
• It only works on monsters, and doesn’t work on intelligent beings.
• It can’t directly tame a hostile monster; it can only pacify it. Peaceful monsters can then be tamed by subsequent casts, but attempting to tame a peaceful intelligent monster may anger it instead. The pacification step is dependent only on monster MR, but the taming depends on the player’s level relative to the target. The scroll of taming should remain comparatively powerful.
• Scale with skill: unskilled attempts to pacify one adjacent monster, basic to pacify all adjacent, skilled to tame one adjacent, and expert to tame all adjacent. All of these are subject to normal monster MR checks.
• Whatever nerfs do get applied, they should ensure that the scroll of taming is more powerful and reliable than the spell.

Add a spell of telekinesis as a high level matter spell, which replicates some of the monster-shoving functionality you can get with #wiztelekinesis.

A SpliceHack spell to make splatters of blood have a use case. It causes blood splatters in a area scaling from 3x3 to 7x7 around the caster (depending on skill) explode, dealing physical damage to things caught in the explosions. Blood splatters on the floor are cleared, and new blood being caused by something dying might be suppressed if it becomes too easy to repeatedly cast this for lots of explosions.

As proposed, this would be a level 5 attack or matter spell.

A spell that grants temporary magical breathing. This could be used in lieu of the magical breathing amulet to go underwater for short durations, but would also be very useful in variants that have suffocating engulfers.

There should be a spell (probably on the player’s side, possibly on the monster’s side) that dispels magical buffs such as protection and reflection. Or else, if adding a new spell is unwanted, this effect could be folded into cancellation instead.

A silence spell for either players or monsters or both. Not specified whether it would be area-of-effect or targeted at specific creatures. The main function of silence effects would be to prevent spellcasting. Not specified whether this would also affect reading scrolls (though probably not since you can “cogitate” the formula on scrolls if polymorphed into a speechless form).

However, this may require defining certain existing spells as not requiring speech, because it does not seem entirely fair to take away all of someone’s escape or healing spells with fairly low level magic.

A level 5 or 6 “mass healing” spell, which basically casts extra healing on yourself and all tame creatures within a certain radius.

New clerical monster spell (possibly also a player spell) that creates a region of black storm clouds between the caster and target and moves across the map towards the target. The clouds block vision, can strike anything in or near them with lightning (though not intelligently), wet items on the floor beneath them and in the inventories of monsters beneath them, hit things with gusts of wind if those are implemented, and can spawn temporary lightning monsters that vanish when the cloud does.

Another variant of this idea is as a static cloud that can be targeted like a stinking cloud, probably as a level 7 spell (depending on how bad the lightning is).

A magic arrow spell, modeled off a similar spell in GnollHack. It is a level 1 spell that shoots a magic arrow at a single enemy for 1d6 damage and never misses. Possible variations include boosting the damage to 2d6 but allowing it to miss, or allowing it to be smite-targeted at any enemy in a radius with a direct unobstructed path.

A new spell that is primarily a healing spell, but is in the clerical school instead of healing and works by divine influence, which would make priests and knights good at casting it, but not healers and wizards.

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.

Spell of disarming, a level 2 attack (possibly matter) directional spell, which disarms the first monster it hits, causing the weapon to drop. At Skilled and above, it makes the weapon go flying in the direction the spell was directed.

Spell of foresight, a high-level divination spell that gives you a short amount of a temporary buff which gives monsters a massive to-hit penalty against you, possibly giving yourself to-hit bonuses as well. It also gives you automatic searching; searching while you have the foresight buff active is guaranteed to find traps.

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.

Spell that lets you do a random uncontrolled short-range teleportation, in order to escape from a tricky situation. Actually, it might not be a bad idea to turn the spell of teleport away into this, with a reduced level (3 or 4), and make it unable to shoot a teleportation beam.

The player can cast destroy armor at other monsters at melee range.

Cure blindness is a pretty useless spell, and should probably be removed or its effects folded into some other spell like extra healing or clairvoyance. Alternatively, if see invisible is nerfed so that it cannot be granted permanently, this could be folded into a “spell of true sight”, which grants temporary see invisible as well as curing blindness, perhaps temporary blindness resistance, and blocking (but not curing) hallucinations like Grayswandir’s wield effect.

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

Spells whose main purpose is to buff allies within an area of effect. (They will give the player the buff too, but the buffs won’t be a huge improvement for a single creature. So you get more out of the effect the more allies you can affect with it, and it’s best used when you have allies around).

Spell of necromancy that turns a corpse you’re standing on (or possibly adjacent to you) into a tame undead. Probably in the clerical school, though a case could be made for matter (and certain variants have a school of necromancy which this would much more directly fit into). It will work on corpses of undead that you have killed. Casting this spell would have some sort of penalty for lawfuls; there would be some sort of warning before trying to cast it.

You can normally only create zombies or mummies when an undead monster exists for the kind of corpse you are animating (i.e. a jackal can’t be turned into undead but a gnome can turn into a gnome zombie/mummy). For intelligent monsters that have no counterpart, the spell can create ghosts.

At a high enough skill or caster level, you can create skeletons from the corpse of any vertebrate, and maybe even vampires from humanoids. You can also create wraiths and shades from monsters that have no undead counterparts.

Spell of summon single nasty: summons only one monster, but the game looks at the target’s current gear and defenses and analyzes exactly what sort of monster would be the best for facing it.

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

Spells that give temporary to-hit or damage buffs. Must be carefully balanced; this is intended for fighter roles more than wizards. It also shouldn’t last long enough or be cheap enough to be perpetually castable.

A spell that provides see invisible (but the potion should be objectively better than it by at least an order of magnitude).

Spell of earthquake, mid-level matter spell. Causes an earthquake centered on you; range and power varies based on your skill level.

Add a spell of paralysis, which basically copies the same monster spell. Melee range, better than sleep.

Level 1 divination spell “waypoint”, which reveals the location of all stairs/ladders (but no other spaces) on the level. Does not work if the level is unmappable.

Spell of baleful polymorph: a beefed-up version of polymorph (or an advanced form) that, when it polymorphs a monster, allows you to determine what to change it into. Perhaps this does not work on pets, so you can’t give yourself a army of titans.

Ring spells, level 7 (or even 8) attack spells, which cast a ring of some elemental power emanating from your square that does not hit your square itself. The radius is 1 if Unskilled or Basic and 2 if Skilled or Expert.

Spell of shove: level 4 or 5 escape spell. At Unskilled and Basic, it fires a beam that pushes the first monster it hits back one space (as if receiving a staggering blow, but doing no damage); at Skilled and Expert, it fires a shorter-range beam in all eight directions. What with shoving monsters into moats to drown them and things like that, this could be a pretty fun spell.

Spell of repair: level 3 matter spell. If wielded weapon is eroded, fixes its erosion. Otherwise, target a random piece of worn armor and fix any erosion it has. At Unskilled, the erosion will only be repaired 1 level at a time; at Basic, 2 levels; at Skilled, 3 levels; and at Expert (maybe) the item will be erodeproofed.

Spell of probing, in the divination school, that probes monsters based on skill:

• Unskilled limits it to touch range and gives minimal information on the monster’s status, possibly only showing HP like a stethoscope.
• Basic is still touch range but gives the usual amount of information.
• Skilled shoots a probing beam and gives some additional information.
• Expert allows you to select any space or monster in your line of sight within a radius, and gives the same information as Skilled.

The wand of probing is raised to be on par with the Skilled effects.

A level 5 or 6 divination spell that creates a tame speed 0 monster. This new sort of monster gives you permanent vision in a radius around it if it is tame.

Lightning spells:

• The most common suggestion is for a level 5 attack spell that creates a lightning bolt, implemented as a simple ray. Possibly, it causes an electrical explosion on the first target it hits if cast at Skilled and Expert.
• Alternatively, a spell of lightning bolt could be a melee range spell that deals heavy shock damage.
• Chain lightning is a spell that forks off and hits adjacent targets in a breadth-first search (see here for how it might work). Possibly, the lightning bolts can only chain off at 135 or 180 degree angles (maybe 90, too). Chain lightning can still be reflected, but becomes a straight ray.
• Lightning storm, which causes an electrical explosion centered on every monster in your line of sight (possibly with a decreasing chance of doing so as it gets further from you). Or if this is too overpowered, just strike these monsters with an individual lightning bolt that does not cause an explosion.

A spell that lets you mark a tile within some radius. A few turns later, any monster on that tile is dealt significant damage.

Reduce the level of create familiar significantly, and make it only able to create replacement pets and possibly similar low-difficulty monsters, and not work if you already have any pets. Add a 7th-level clerical spell, “create minion”, that summons tame/allied minions of your god.

Spell that creates temporary weapons and armor made of energy: good base stats, but no magical properties, and vanish after some amount of time. Not defined whether they should be enchantable; probably they should but the enchantment will vanish along with the rest of it.

Silence auras that prevent both you and monsters spellcasting. Maybe also a directed silence spell, which silences an individual monster. While silenced, monsters can’t be chatted to, and nothing they do will make noise (possibly only if in a silence aura).

While under the effect of silence, the player’s stealth is elevated.

Spell that grants temporary hit points.

Clerical spell that gives you a certain duration of a property that steals enemies’ maxHP and heals you when you hit things in melee.

Revamp Astral so that the challenges to player mobility, options, and time don’t all depend on being crammed in by monsters. One idea is to have spellcasters that summon force fields / temporary walls to block your progress.

Monster spell that creates a wall, or possibly just a boulder, to block the hero’s progress.

A Word of Recall spell, which after a sizeable delay (3d5 or 5d6 turns) levelports you to one of several possible locations: Minetown, dungeon level 1, the Oracle, the Castle, the Quest. You will not travel anywhere you have not already visited. Does not work if you have the Amulet.

Add spell of summon pets, a level 2 or 3 matter spell that duplicates the effects of a magic whistle. The name needs work.