Artifact amethyst that when dipped into fruit juice turns it into booze, the reverse of what usually happens.

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.

Enhance Minetown with a bunch of new NPC denizens:

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

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

Carrying an amethyst makes you immune to all effects of quaffing booze.

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

You can tame (or at least pacify) hostile dwarves by throwing potions of booze at them, which they catch.

When you pass out after drinking booze and “awake with a headache”, you lose 1 HP. If this kills you, your death is “killed by a hangover”.

The potion of booze should appear as “potion of mead” to Valkyries, using the same system that makes it appear as “sake” to Samurai.

Detect food sources additionally detect potions of fruit juice, and possibly potions of booze.

Eating too much food can give you a ‘hiccuping’ intrinsic, where you sporadically hiccup and wake up monsters. Drinking more than two potions of booze in quick succession can also do this. You can cure the intrinsic by drinking a fizzy potion.

A minor artifact that turns water into booze. Potentially has an affinity to Priests and they receive it as a sacrifice gift somewhat more often.

After you drink booze, you are afflicted with hiccups for some time, which on some small fraction of turns makes you throw a quivered item in a random direction or drop your weapon.

If a system is implemented that tracks the amount of booze you have drunk throughout the game, lawful gods start to penalize the player for drinking too much after a while.

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.

Merge the potions of booze and confusion together, because booze is basically just a weaker form of confusion that also has a minimal amount of nutrition. It’s not certain which way they should be merged: deleting booze and favoring confusion has the advantage that monsters can still flavorfully throw it at you in order to cause confusion (you don’t get instantly drunk from being splashed with booze), but deleting confusion and favoring booze is attractive because it’s a more flavorful item in general, what with having a dual confusion/nutrition effect, being nonmagical, contributing to levels like the Wine Cellar, etc.

Addendum to the brewing patch: you can ferment/dissolve newt corpses to produce potions of gain energy, and can combine various fruits with water to produce fruit juice. Also, since booze tastes like liquid fire, fermenting a red mold corpse produces a potion of booze.

Monsters can drink potions of booze as a defensive item, but only when fleeing. It cancels their fleeing and confuses them.

Satyr, a h monster that is either chaotic or lawful (either could fit), are always male, generate with booze frequently, and chase after any nymphs nearby (who flee or teleport from them). Appear in the Ranger quest frequently.

Drinking booze reduces your memory retention of spells.

Fruit juice turns into booze all on its own if you leave it alone for long enough.

Booze is a customizeable name in the options like fruit/slime mold.

Ice boxes occasionally contain potions of booze or fruit juice in addition to corpses. A proposed frequency is 1% of ice boxes, and they contain d3 of either type of potion (possibly both).

Leprechauns steal potions of booze as well as gold.

Drinking multiple potions of booze in a short time span has progressive effects: first confusion as normal, then vomiting, then sending the drinker to sleep or losing some (resistable) HP via alcohol poisoning. Also add in monster (dwarf, orc, leprechaun) booze-drinking behavior, complete with drinking songs as level sounds when a monster is intoxicated.

Drinking booze while already under its effects, or occasionally when its confusion effect wears off, causes hallucination.

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)