Artifact dart Safety Pin. It has no special benefits if used as a dart, but instead has a passive carry effect of protecting all your scrolls in open inventory from burning or wetting.
New “scroll of limited wish”, which grants a wish that is restricted in the following ways:
Assign every scroll and spellbook a random “writing difficulty” value at the start of the game. Say it’s stored as a percentage chance (in reality, this is an implementation detail and could differ). Every time you attempt to write a scroll or book, it computes your own percentage chance to correctly write something unknown, which is deterministic and only depends on stats like Luck and Intelligence and your role. Whether you write the scroll successfully or not depends on whether your computed percentage beats the randomized percentage of that scroll.
For each scroll and spellbook you try to write in the game, resolve the random writing chance exactly once, the first time you try to write it when unknown. If that initial attempt fails, mark the scroll or spellbook as not knowing how to write it, so that subsequent attempts will fail with a message like “You don’t know how to write that, so you don’t even try to.” which means they won’t eat up ink either. If you subsequently learn the identity of the scroll or book, you become able to always write it successfully as normal.
You can clean slippery fingers by rubbing a scroll on them, but this makes the scroll useless and destroys it.
Paper golems occasionally drop non-blank scrolls.
If you give your pet a scroll, and it is a scroll that monsters can normally read, it reads it on its next turn.
Make scrolls and spellbooks in particular partially identifiable outside of a shop without having to formally identify them or guess based on frequency (which are currently the ‘‘only’’ ways to identify them outside of a shop). Ideas:
Several new objects for aiding in alchemy:
Scroll of census: when read, you are prompted to name a monster species. It then tells you how many have been generated and how many are left to extinct the species. When blessed, you are instead prompted to name a monster class, and you get this report for every species in that class.
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.
New objects “scrolls of riches”, which serve as a means of storing large amounts of money without carrying around all the literal gold.
Scrolls can be “corrupted” or “misspelled”. This basically acts as a toggle on whether the confused behavior of the scroll activates: reading a corrupted scroll while not confused will produce the confused effect and reading it while confused will produce the regular effect. There is no way to restore a corrupted scroll to normal.
Possibly, an unidentified corrupted scroll will have its label deterministically garbled similar to engravings, e.g. “scroll labeled FO0B|E BLe7Ch”. If identified it would simply show as “corrupted scroll of X”.
Writing a scroll while confused will make the result corrupted. Also, scrolls hit by water damage or produced from polymorphing other scrolls may be corrupted.
Scroll of training, which allows you to readjust your skill slots. Blessed it allows more readjustments than uncursed, whereas a cursed scroll could do something bad like make you choose 2 categories to lose skill in and choose only 1 to regain skill in.
A moist towel in your inventory prevents scrolls from being burnt up.
Scroll of recall: a scroll that works like a magic whistle but with more varied effects.
Add several new never-randomly-generated cards, all of which are designed to give strong but short buffs, to you and more often allies. Though their frequencies are 0, they are sometimes dropped from monsters you and your pets kill, at the same frequency the keyed create monster cards do.
Other roles can write these scrolls if they want to or find them in bones, but they are generally intended to be less powerful than many existing scrolls so they shouldn’t steal generation probability from them.
Option to configure your character to be nearsighted, which prevents you from seeing things more than a few spaces away from you unless you’re wearing lenses. You can also be farsighted, which means you can’t read scrolls or spellbook unless you’re wearing lenses.
For all “matched pairs” of scrolls and spellbooks (remove curse, fire and fireball, identify, etc), identifying the scroll automatically identifies the spellbook. Possibly vice versa instead, where learning the spellbook automatically identifies the scroll, or both.
Add “magical writing” as a nonweapon skill, which is trained at a fast rate by writing scrolls and spellbooks, and increases your odds of writing unknown scrolls and spellbooks successfully.
Cursed or unlucky wishes for scrolls, potions, or spellbooks may give you the blank counterpart instead of what you wanted.
Every turn on the Plane of Fire, all scrolls and spellbooks in inventory or on the level are destroyed (except for naturally fireproof ones).
Greased scrolls and spellbooks, if they catch on fire, burn up and deal additional damage.
The chance for writing an unknown scroll or spellbook is based not on luck but on how many scrolls and spellbooks you already have identified (and thus, how familiar you are with their sort of magic).
This was later written up as a more complete proposal.
Failing to write an unknown scroll or spellbook just consumes an average amount of ink; otherwise it implies that the character knew how much ink the job would have taken.
Convert the potions of monster and object detection into scrolls, since they are a bit of an oddity among potions in that all the other potions have a direct effect on the drinker. These one-time divination effects seem more suited to scrolls.
If your Intelligence is 6 or lower, reading a scroll may give its confused effect even when you are not confused.
Dropping a scroll onto a fountain usually or always blanks it.
Scroll of create magic item, which attempts to generate a magical item. If the scroll is blessed, you can choose the object class; if cursed, the object will be cursed.
Scroll of repair: uncursed repairs all levels of erosion on an item of the player’s choice; a blessed scroll repairs all erosion in the player’s inventory; cursed scroll attempts to erode one random item in inventory 1d3 times. If confused and non-cursed, will erosionproof an item of the player’s choice; if confused and cursed, will remove erosionproofing from a random item and then erode it 1d3 times.
The scroll of enchant weapon retains its confused effect of erosionproofing a weapon, but it no longer erosionproofs non-weapons or repairs the weapon. Enchant weapon scrolls are also made much less common, with the probability dumped into the scroll of repair instead.
Some monsters, a subset of item-using monsters, can’t read scrolls even though they can use all other items. Trolls and some orcs would be in this set (possibly even allow some members of a species to read and some not to, based on their internal monster ID.)
Add several types of tape, which can be applied to mute yourself. While mute, you cannot cast spells, but you have a chance of not speaking the incantation when you read a scroll (resulting in the scroll becoming identified but not used up; none of its effects happen). There are four types of tape which randomly generate: Scotch tape (generating blessed 75% of the time and cursed 25%), packing tape (always uncursed), duct tape (50% blessed, 50% cursed), and Flex Tape (25% cursed, 75% uncursed).
Tape may fail to prevent you from reading a scroll, with a message “The magic of the scroll forces your mouth to move against the tape.” followed by the normal scroll reading messages. The chance of this happening is 2% if the tape is blessed, 12% if uncursed, and 50% if cursed. When taking off blessed tape, there is a 75% chance you take it off normally, but a 25% chance that you rip it off instead, dealing 2 damage. When uncursed, there is an equal chance of taking it off, ripping it off, and having it be stuck on your face. When cursed, there’s a 99% chance that it’s stuck on your face, but a 1% chance that you tear it off, dealing 15 damage. Every ten turns you spend wearing tape, it might fall off on its own (5% chance), falling on the floor. Finally, every time you put on or take off tape, there is a 15% chance that it lose its stickiness, fall off if you put it on, and turn into an “odd strip of material”, which can be used as a blindfold. Odd strips of material cannot be generated randomly.
Some limited way to charge rings that isn’t the general-purpose magical charging that also charges wands and tools. Maybe add a “scroll of enchant ring” that, like armor and weapon scrolls, only works on rings.
See also L’s Scroll of Enchantment patch, which merges ring, weapon and armor enchanting into a single scroll.
Scroll of religious text, which can be read for a prayer (or opportunity to pray) that ignores your prayer timeout.
Scroll of material change, which converts the material of an object into a different one.
Lesser and greater scrolls of enchant weapon. The lesser enchant by 1 point up to a maximum of +2 (uncursed) or +3 (blessed); the greater enchant by 1-3 points to a maximum of +5 (uncursed) or +7 (blessed).
Whacking monsters with certain types of wielded scrolls may have certain effects on it (and may consume/shred the scroll in the process): fire burns them, confuse monster confuses them, scare monster scares them.
Allow scrolls to generate as metal, flavoring metal scrolls as engraved plates. These cannot have their labels wiped and cannot have new labels written on them, but they are immune to fire and water damage.
You can write a scroll onto a piece of paper armor (with a magic marker, incurring the regular ink cost), then instantly read it.
Scroll which makes an evil clone of a target monster which will attempt to kill it.
You can convert spellbooks into scrolls. You may get scrolls related to the spellbook topic if possible, otherwise random. Possibly beatitude affects the number of scrolls produced.
Scroll of knowledge: rare scroll that directly increases Intelligence when read.
Scroll that restores you to full health but decreases your maximum health.
Scroll that tells you the dungeon overview for the next 5 levels of the dungeon. If blessed, shows more levels; if cursed, shows fewer levels or omits details.
The hero can either not write unknown scrolls and spellbooks at all (writing by appearance is still fine as long as the appearance is known), or else the chance of writing one increases with every scroll and spellbook the hero identifies.
Scroll of healeportation: performs both a heal and a teleport at once.
Add hallucination effects to (many, perhaps all) scrolls:
New unaligned artifact dagger Almagest: uses the powers of scrolls to augment itself, and bears a scroll label signifying which scroll ability it is imbued with. Opinions vary on whether this label should be randomly generated by the dagger (and the player may choose to read it, upon which it gives the uncursed scroll effect and disappears for 1000 turns, eventually returning with another label) or whether the label should be deliberately imbued by the player by rubbing it on a scroll. It gains +d4 to damage and +d4 to hit when it has an inscription.
There are additional special effects if the player has formally IDed the scroll whose label is on the dagger:
When you fail to write a scroll because you ran out of ink, it will become a “garbled scroll” instead of disappearing. Garbled scrolls can’t be read (or possibly they could be read, for a number of generally negative weak magical effects), but they can be re-blanked so the scroll can be written again. This could also happen when you fail to write a scroll by not knowing it. There is a slim chance, probably less than 10%, that you end up writing some random scroll instead of a garbled scroll.
Add a scroll of polymorph. Blessed polymorphs you with polymorph control over this one occasion; uncursed polymorphs normally; cursed polymorphs you and everything adjacent to you.
Add a scroll of air (as well as the scroll of flood, which is renamed to the scroll of water) so that there is one scroll for each element. When read normally, it could give a message “You feel a fresh breeze” and either reset your strangulation counter or give you temporary breathlessness. (Breathlessness seems like a potion effect more than a scroll effect, but then again, during those times when you need emergency breathlessness, you’re probably not capable of quaffing a potion.) If you read any of the water, earth, fire, and air scrolls while confused, it summons elementals, whose tame/peaceful/hostile state depends on the beatitude of the scroll. If you read it while on the Plane of Water, it either creates a new air bubble if you’re not in one, or expands your bubble permanently if you are in one. If cursed and in a bubble, the bubble shrinks to one space.
SpliceHack has since implemented the scroll of air as an burst of wind that shoves adjacent monsters away in all directions.
