A “fearless” object property for weapons or equipment which makes the wielder or wearer immune to fear effects. (This is more useful in variants which implement a fear system.)

A player fear system should track the sources of fear and slow down the timeout for the fear the closer you remain to them, particularly if you remain in line of sight; and/or accelerate the timeout so it goes away faster if you are far away and not in line of sight.

Assuming a player fear system is implemented, Nazgul should passively cause fear in the player as an area of effect (or a gaze if this is too hard to implement).

New object property “of fear” or “of terror”, which is only valid on melee weapons. When a weapon of fear or terror hits a monster, it may scare that monster. If a player fear system is implemented, it also scares the player when they are hit with it.

If a player fear system is implemented: if the player is adjacent to a creature standing on a scroll of scare monster, they will become scared of that creature. Intelligent creatures will deploy a scroll of scare monster to take advantage of this.

Implement a player fear system that unlike many other proposals, does not take away agency from the player by paralyzing them or forcing them to flee using a predefined algorithm. Instead, it incentivizes the player to flee by making continued combat unattractive.

Create a new intrinsic called “Panic”/”Panicking”. Sources of fear (including existing sources of paralysis-fear, e.g. ghosts) give you temporary amounts of this intrinsic. While you are panicking:

• You have a large to-hit penalty, possibly making it so that you can only land a hit when rolling a natural 20. (Directly subtracting a large number from to-hit could still be overcome by wearing rings of increase accuracy and would be hard to balance the exact number.)
• You deal half damage for any attack you can make land.
• Ranged attacks have a high chance of misfiring in the wrong direction.
• Spells not in the escape school or designated as emergency spells (or healing spells, for variants that remove emergency spells) have a higher failure rate or are uncastable.
• Your skills may be treated as if they are the levels you started the game with.
• Your speed is slightly boosted (if possible, only your movement speed, not your general attack/item use speed).
• If you die, your death reason will have a “while panicking” appended to it.

Scare system that works on the player: the game tracks a list of monsters (or monster IDs) you are currently scared of and for how much longer you are afraid of that monster. You cannot attack a monster you are scared of in melee, nor can you use a ranged attack towards it when you can detect it in the line of fire, nor can you move directly towards it. (Trying to do any of these things won’t cost a turn.)

Player status called Terrified: it acts like confusion and stunning in that it makes you move in uncontrolled ways, except that it pathfinds away from whatever is scaring you.

When the player is afraid of a monster, to-hit is reduced and they may not be able to attack that specific monster at all.

Elves can engrave Elbereth and use it on the player, scaring them.

Additional temporary effects accompany drinking a potion of booze. The effects wear off when the confusion does (so if you extend it by, say, drinking a potion of confusion, the effects are prolonged). There is consensus that there should be both positive and negative effects; all of the following have been proposed:

• A damage bonus, or even double damage
• Temporary HP
• An accuracy penalty (or a Dexterity penalty)
• Slight reduction of speed
• Temporary cold resistance (debatable; if possible it should probably make you not feel cold attacks but still take regular damage from them)
• Attacking an enemy makes you automatically keep fighting it until one of you is dead
• Monsters are treated as having higher charisma (currently no monsters are treated as having charisma at all, but this could also hurt or nullify your ability to refuse a foocubus removing your clothes)
• You may pass out when the confusion ends, and end up with a hangover when you wake up. (Not described what the effects of a hangover would be). You may also find yourself suddenly on a different level when you wake up.
• You are protected from gaze attacks due to not being able to focus enough to meet someone’s gaze.
• If you’re a dwarf, the effects get magnified
• If there is any such thing as a player-is-scared effect, it is canceled when you drink the booze and blocked while you’re under the influence. This goes for however long the confusion persists, so you can extend it by drinking potions of confusion if you want.
• Any AC from your armor is nullified (this would also contribute to monk “drunken boxing” proposals, since monks don’t usually have as much armor AC)