Puffer fish, a monster with a non-poisonous bite but a passive poison attack. Its corpse conveys poison resistance pretty reliably but is always poisonous to eat, even if it’s been tinned.

Replace poison instadeath with a system where poison sticks around in your system for a fairly long time, allowing multiple doses to build up and eventually kill you if you’re careless. This means when faced with a swarm of poisoning monsters or orcs with poisoned arrows, you still have incentive to flee, but won’t cheaply die to the first one or two.

Noxious sphere, a sphere similar to its siblings in that it has an active explosion attack, but the explosion is of poison and creates a 3x3 (or larger) stinking cloud centered on the sphere.

Artifact The Poisoner’s Chalice, a chalice that can be dipped into types of potions that form poisonous coatings on weapons. When this happens, it gains charges and additionally gains the ability to coat weapons in that type of poison indefinitely. When a weapon is dipped into the chalice, it expends a charge and coats the weapon in the current type of poison. Invoking it switches the poison type to any of the ones it already has.

You can use booze potions to clean off your wounds, helping you recover faster. Poison wounds, specifically, though this is debatable because 1) the game doesn’t track wounds you got from poison and 2) alcohol can help treat infections, whereas poison isn’t an infection.

Healers should probably be able to do this more successfully than other roles.

The game should support poisoned bear traps (that deal extra poison damage much like a poisoned spiked pit does), and it should be possible for the player to manually poison a beartrap item.

Occasionally, when generating a level 6+ spellbook, set its opoisoned flag to true. You get “The book was coated in contact poison!” not as a random spellbook reading failure effect, but when you try to read a book whose opoisoned is set to true. Triggering the contact poison usually (but not always) clears the opoisoned flag, so it won’t be poisoned if you try to read it again.

Dipping a poisoned spellbook in any healing potion will neutralize the poison and use up the potion. Possibly, dipping it in a potion of sickness will poison the book, though this would be useless unless monsters read spellbooks.

Generalize cockatrice-egg mechanics to all eggs: eggs of acidic monsters will be acidic, eggs of poisonous monsters will be poisonous. Possibly even have a (reduced) chance of getting intrinsics from a monster egg.

Healers receive an alignment penalty from using poisoned weapons.

Inflicting poison damage on a monster, or killing it by poison, makes the corpse poisonous to eat.

Overhaul poison so that its effects are less random: some might still cause instadeath, but it would only be found in the late game or via bosses like Demogorgon and Scorpius; early game poison shouldn’t drain multiple stat points at once.

Debilitating wound system that expands on wounded legs. Includes wounded arms and various types of disease and poison, all of which provide various debuffs. Quaffing any healing potion cures all of these at once on top of its usual HP healing.

Condensing all of NetHack’s poison mechanics into one unified mechanic:

• Dexterity and Constitution poisons are removed. Quasits (the only AD_DRDX attack) might still directly harm Dex, but it’s no longer flavored as poison. Rabid rats (the only AD_DRCO attack) don’t cause poison, they cause disease, which hits Constitution. Poison will now only affect Strength.
• Poison is now implemented as a timing-out trinsic. The amount of Str loss is a direct function of how much timeout is left, so Str will gradually recover as the poison goes away.
• Passing Con saving throws could give small bonuses to decreasing the timeout faster than normal.
• While poisoned, HP regeneration is either impeded or stopped entirely, or else the player’s HP is damaged every turn, or every several turns.
• It could also heavily abuse Str while it lasted instead of being directly tied to Str.

Differentiate between poison, which comes solely from ingesting it, and venom, which comes from getting toxins in your bloodstream from a bite, claw, or sting. Monsters like spiders can be both poisonous to eat and venomous when attacking.

Killer bees should hurt even more than they do currently, and their sting should poison 100% of the time, but they instantly die when they sting.

Poison is either changed or extended so that it is a lasting status condition that gives you negative HP regeneration, or some other source of this property is added.

Ideas around a system in which you can cook corpses:

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

Remove instances of “bad RNG” contributing to forms of instadeath or a disproportionate bad effect for a RNG decision made mostly or completely independently of the player’s decisions, because they just add randomness or variance to the outcome of the game:

• Poison instadeath
• GWTWOD
• Chameleons turning into out-of-difficulty monsters the player can’t handle