If they are outside of Gehennom, Infidels’ prayers to Moloch are more likely to succeed the deeper they are in the dungeon.

When you pray and get deadly sickness cured by your god, they also grant you a little temporary sickness resistance as a grace period against immediately needing it again.

If you pray while there are hostile monsters near you, your god may decide to answer the prayer by frying all the monsters around you with lightning (sparing pets and peacefuls). This would work best when there are a bunch of hostiles right near you but none a medium distance away. Possibly it should be suppressed when your HP is low, but then again restoring your health while leaving you surrounded by monsters often doesn’t give you high odds of surviving.

The hero is not credited with killing the monsters, and gains no experience or penalties.

If you get a stack of 10 (or 5) identical scrolls that correspond to an existing spellbook, there is some ritual available which will let you convert them into the spellbook, possibly dropping them on an altar and praying.

If you pray to your non-starting god while wearing opposite alignment, your original god may try to blast the helm off your head. This can have several possible outcomes:

• Your original god doesn’t interfere. The prayer proceeds normally.
• Your original god attempts to remove the helm but fails, possibly causing some HP damage, or uncursing the helm. The prayer then proceeds normally.
• Your original god attempts to remove the helm, fails in one of the ways above, but succeeds at interfering with your prayer, which then fails.
• Your original god succeeds at removing the helm (there are a number of fun ways to do this: they disintegrate it off your head, send it flying in a random direction, teleport it, drop it on the floor, etc.) Your alignment reverts back to its original and the prayer fails.

In variants where you can gamble away, sell, or otherwise lose your soul: a character who has lost their soul will get no more help from their god (until they manage to recover it). Sacrifices will be accepted but will never get rewarded with a gift; otherwise successful prayers will fail to give you shimmering-light invincibility, will go unanswered, and will give you no message as to the pleasedness of your god, and possibly you lose your divine protection as well.

Praying while standing on a throne, assuming you’re in good standing with your god, causes the god to have an increased chance of crowning you. Possibly, they always crown you if they decide to grant a boon and you are in good enough standing to be eligible for crowning.

Your god considers both your luck and your alignment record when deciding whether to grant a prayer, and weighs alignment record more heavily. That is, if you have negative luck but good alignment, your god will often still grant the prayer, and positive luck might save you from bad alignment, but not often.

Aligned altars can generate in Gehennom, and standing on a coaligned altar in Gehennom is the only way to contact your god (via prayer or sacrifice). If the altar is crossaligned, you can try to convert it, but Moloch may seize control during the process and turn it into an altar to Moloch. Molochian altars in Gehennom are very difficult or outright impossible to convert.

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

You can pray at a gravestone, or possibly ring a bell at one, to cause any of a number of good and bad effects:

• Summon a ghost, which might be hostile or peaceful.
• Summon a hostile undead, flavored as it forcing its way up out of the grave. Usually a zombie.
• Polymorph you into a zombie or mummy of your own race.
• Put you to sleep, ignoring resistance.
• Create a swarm of hostile manes or lemures.
• The headstone falls on your foot, dealing some damage, less if wearing boots (“killed by a falling tombstone” if fatal).
• If the grave is a bones pile grave, the ghost of the player always appears. It will be peaceful if their alignment matched your own and hostile otherwise.
• Various cosmetic messages that do nothing. “The air suddenly turns cold.” “The engraving on the headstone shimmers for a moment.” “A shiver runs down your spine.”
• The dirt cracks open and spits out any items buried under it.
• A voice from nowhere whispers a random rumor, true or false.
• The epitaph on the grave changes. This does not flag the grave.
• Get an alignment bonus for honoring the dead (this is only if triggered by praying). “You feel that the one buried here is content.” Bonus might be larger if you’re lawful or a Priest, probably 1 otherwise. This should possibly happen before and independently of any other effects.
• Limited identify of 1 item.
• Type-identify of multiple un-type-identified items in the inventory, but the player doesn’t get to pick which. Might pick 0 items (flavored as the spirit not knowing anything new about what the hero is carrying).
• Enlightenment.
• Temporary telepathy / sleep resistance / infravision / other intrinsic.
• The gravestone rumbles and moves aside, revealing a branch staircase to a just-created-now one-level branch, a small one-off “crypt” floating branch that contains some undead, some boxes containing corpses, and some treasure.
• You “feel that the dead are restless”, aggravating monsters level-wide. All gravestones on the level become flagged against further attempts. This effect could be added to and independent of other ones, and if so, it’s a chance dependent on the number of already flagged gravestones on the level, which provides a nice way to balance it on levels that have massive amounts of gravestones.

After you get one effect, the gravestone is flagged so that it doesn’t happen again (or, more evilly, that any further attempts will only result in bad effects). Possibly shouldn’t work at all on graveyard levels, because they have too many graves to balance these effects.

Track, and report at the end of the game in the dumplog or xlogfile, how many times the player prayed and sacrificed.

If you pray at low HP with a single hostile monster in the vicinity, your deity might decide to “fix” the problem by smiting them to death.

Replace the passtune boon with something more useful, since it is only marginally useful to spoiled players. Then, let the Oracle provide the passtune as either a major consultation or as a service. The Oracle can also be used to tell you which prize is at the end of Sokoban.

Gods’ “Prove thyself worthy or perish” message is flavored as “Prove thyself worthy, because I can do no more for you”. On the Planes, the gods’ balance of power prevents your deity from granting you any extra help (apart from sending angels when you arrive in Astral). If this were not the case, one would expect to be able to breeze through the Planes, with your god smiting down any enemy that might threaten you getting them their Amulet. Prayer will not work, though it will still break atheist conduct.