A spellbook will teaches you one of 4 ways to cast the spell, randomly chosen and deterministic per-spellbook:

• Verbal and somatic
• Verbal but not somatic
• Somatic but not verbal
• Neither verbal nor somatic (fully at will).

Various conditions prevent you from casting a spell if you are limited in how you can cast it: choking and being polymorphed into a form incapable of speech (etc) prevent you from casting a spell you only know how to cast verbally, and being held or stuck to a monster or having both hands welded to cursed gear (etc) prevents you from casting a spell you only know how to cast somatically.

You can read additional spellbooks to “upgrade” your casting ability in addition to refreshing your memory: e.g. if you can cast force bolt somatically but don’t need to speak, and you read a spellbook of force bolt that teaches how to cast it verbally but not somatically, you become able to cast it fully at will.

The motivation for this is to make large quantities of obtained spellbooks containing many duplicates of already known spells more interesting.

Not specified how the hero knows how to cast their starting spells; obvious options are:

• Always fully at-will
• Always requires verbal and somatic components
• Randomly chosen from among the four options

Magic bookshelf dungeon feature, which is heavily inspired by and is functionally similar to the TNNT swap chest, but only involves spellbooks instead of all items (and is not itself an object).

Looting while standing on it gives you a feeling you should put a book on the empty shelf, and if you do, you magically find other books on the shelf. You can see the identities of these books but do not permanently learn them if you didn’t previously know them. Once you take a book from the shelf, it vanishes.

Left up to the implementor whether the books would actually come from other players like the TNNT swap chest does (in which case it might end up filled with low-value or common books; if so, there are various ways this could be mitigated such as the shelf not accepting a book type it already has, or adding in randomly generated books) or whether the books would just be a pool of random ones selected at the start of the game.

An additional possible detail is that you can only see books on the shelf of equal or lower level than the total level of books you yourself have put in. So if you put in a level 1 book, you will only see other level 1 books, but if you then add a level 3 book, you will see books of up to level 4. Or, you always see all books, but only books below this threshold show you the spell and others appear as “a spellbook”. identities

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.

A new take on a Bard role, generally themed around leading a party of other adventurers through the dungeon, with some other additional ideas:

• The bard and healer cannot both be focused around petmongering, so one of them would have to change. Most likely the healer, as the bard’s traditional abilities are only good on pets.
• Instead of the standard little dog or kitten, the bard starts with a “party” of 3-4 player monsters, who are randomly chosen from other roles.
  • This would make the primary strategy focused on having the party do the fighting for you, letting them level up, providing them with weapons and equipment, and not letting them die.
  • Healers and archeologists, and possibly tourists, don’t make very good additions to the party, and so should perhaps be ineligible.
  • Party roles could be randomly chosen from distinct sets of “strong melee fighter” (Bar or Cav or Kni or Val), “ranged combat” (Ran or Rog or Sam or possibly Tou), and “spellcaster/cleric” (possibly Hea or Mon or Pri or Wiz). These could also just be hardcoded.
  • The party will not start with the full starting inventory of their respective roles. They will generally have the same weapons and armor, but will probably not have any of the scrolls, rings, wands they normally start with, and starting spellbooks should be either eliminated or unrandomized. In other words, you shouldn’t be incentivized to slaughter your allies for their stuff.
• Healer strategy should shift away from petmongering - the easiest way to do this is change the protection formula in such a way that the protection racket doesn’t exist; so that the player isn’t incentivized to keep XL as low as possible until they can buy protection.
• Difficult for Healers to find a new niche. (Avoidance of combat is an option, but dtsund’s Class Overhaul Proposal calls for Archeologists to fill that niche). Perhaps something that focuses on pacifying monsters by healing them, but this has issues: you shouldn’t be able to ‘‘tame’’ by healing since that turns Healers back in the direction of acquiring lots of pets, and most monsters start at full HP and don’t need any healing.
• Bards (and probably all players) should be able to equip their pets by #looting them, or a similar mechanism. (This would also apply to mounts.) Intelligent monsters will prefer player-given items above all others and will never willingly replace them for other gear. Possibly make this behavior dependent on options, because some players may want their pets to be pragmatic in their gear choices.
• Player monster pets should perhaps not be able to detect curses.
• Songbooks, + class items which contain a song that the bard can learn.
  • Balancing the songbook generation rate against spellbooks might be tricky, because although bards can still cast spells and other roles can play songs, each is not very likely to have that much use for the other set of books. Hardcoding different probabilities based on whether the character is a bard or not doesn’t seem very clean.
  • Possibly the bard should be able to discover songs by trial and error, although simple brute forcing is definitely not the way to do it. Maybe all spellbooks start identified.
  • The bard could need to practice the song by using the songbook in order to restore “song memory”. Song memory does not work quite like spell memory, it works essentially like direct success rate. There might be some mandatory delay between practices, meaning you can’t take an unlearned song and practice it up to 100% immediately. Or there could be a possible failure of practice, maybe a dexterity penalty (“Dumb move! You strain your fingers.”) to serve to prevent practice-spam. Playing a song would serve to
  • Songbooks do not eventually go blank, and can be used for practice indefinitely.
  • Or to keep it realistic with learning actual songs, you need to have the songbook on hand early on when you want to play it, but as you play it more and gain practice, you can eventually play the song without it anymore.
• The bard should possibly be able to sing some of their songs without requiring an instrument.

See also: Bard implementations.

Add a system for casting ritual spells: more powerful and more expensive spells which have some esoteric effects you can’t get otherwise. The main differences between ritual and normal spellcasting are that they consume valuable, hopefully non-renewable components, take a number of turns to cast instead of taking effect instantly, and may require you to be in or set up certain circumstances.

Various ritual spells that have been proposed:

• Ball spells which consume a gem as focus and create a ball of elemental power that hits surrounding squares but not you. (Long casting times would probably make rituals infeasible for combat though.)
• Temporarily increase your carry cap by a great amount. (Other new intrinsics as required.)
• Resurrect a corpse as a tame monster (necromancy).
• Grant temporary intrinsic life saving.
• Single controlled polymorph with a greatly increased duration.
• Summon a demon, demon lord, or demon prince. Requires 5 cursed candles and a marker (to draw the classic pentagram). If summoning a named demon lord, it’s either random or there’s some expensive way to control who shows up. The demon lord could be peaceful, but with current behavior this is useless. Possibly summoning them allows you to make a pact with them.
• Remove the graveyard status from a level (would need to be expensive, and perhaps involve the Book of the Dead, and multiple different headstones).
• Grow a tree. This consumes at least a piece of fruit. For anti-farming the tree should probably not produce fruit or bees when kicked.
• Create a portal between two levels of your choice (doesn’t work with the Amulet obviously, but otherwise works)
• Create an artifact (that is, you somehow imbue an item with properties it can’t normally get).
• Bless items. Consumes a blessed scroll of remove curse.
• Genocide a genocidable monster. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other costly things.
• Reverse genocide a monster. The monster may or may not have to be normally reverse-genocidable. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other moderately expensive things.
• Charge something. Requires a rare ingredient - perhaps a dilithium crystal.
• Summon tame elemental(s). Among other things, ingredients include: a potion of water, any beatitude (water); a rock (earth); lit candles, a lit oil lamp, or a lit potion of oil (fire); an amulet of magical breathing (air).
• Create a magic lamp. Needs an oil lamp (of course) and a figurine or mask of a djinni (or possibly a nearby live djinni).
• Make the current level non-teleport. Requires a scroll of teleportation and that the caster be standing on an anti-magic field at (?) either the start or the end of the ritual.
• Create a fountain. Requires a statue of a medium-sized or larger monster, which gets destroyed (by turning it into the centerpiece of the fountain). There may be potential for wishing abuse; perhaps the fountain should be flagged so that it can’t produce a wish-granting water demon.
• Turn a regular knife into an athame. Components include other bladed weapons with positive enchantments adding up to 20 or something; all of these charges will be drained to +0 in the creation of the athame. The resulting athame is +0, regardless of the charges on the component weapons or original knife.
• Create a tame golem or golems. Requires a large amount of total weight of objects made out of the golem’s material.
• Summon a coaligned angel or other minion of your deity as a pet.
• Create a tame wood nymph from a tree (only once per tree).

Ritual spells come in spellbooks like usual, but aren’t stored in your spell list. Instead, reading the spellbook prompts you if you want to begin its ritual and tells you the necessary ingredients and circumstances you need to satisfy as preconditions. If you meet all the conditions and answer yes, you initiate the ritual. (For simplicity, this should probably burn up / expend all the components instantly.) You cannot begin a ritual while in the process of casting another ritual; this should probably be implemented as a precondition.

Apart from the component cost, rituals act as a constant drain on your Pw until the ritual is complete. If something distracts you in the middle of the ritual, you can go take care of it and then resume the ritual as long as you have the Pw left to finish it. (You could also drink gain energy during the ritual.) The only way for a ritual to fail, possibly backfiring with bad effects, is for you to run out of Pw while it is incomplete.

In addition to its preconditions, each ritual also has some postconditions: common to all rituals is that you have been casting the ritual for at least some length of time, but there may be others, such as standing on the square where you began the ritual, or have another item, or kill a monster, or something. There may also be other conditions such as “moving off the space where the ritual started breaks and halts the ritual”.

Every time you stop casting a ritual (whether it succeeded or failed), it increments the spellbook’s spestudied field; the book will eventually disintegrate after casting it a certain number of times.

Instead of books having spestudied charges which leads to a lot of issues with polypiling, you read them once and they disappear, but you get 3 times the spell memory. This is intended to remove tedious spellbook micromanagement.

• Spellbooks would need to be considerably more common than they are in vanilla. In FIQhack, where this was originally discussed (and later implemented), spellcasters generate with books, and the level of dropped spellbooks scales well as the game progresses since more dangerous monsters carry higher-level books.
• This addresses polypiling by allowing the player to polypile the book as much as they want, but they can only read it once. (Does not fix the problem of polypiling a book multiple times and identifying but not reading the results – perhaps an increased chance of going blank is in order.)
• Slightly makes things tougher for people who finish their games in under 60,000 turns, since they can’t use a spell for free confusion. Which may actually be a good thing.
• Also a problem for people who play very long games, because they will need to find or write replacement spellbooks; however, this was sort of already the case.
• May make polypiling unknown spellbooks too popular, since an unknown spellbook is likely not to be the one you want, or you have price-IDed it and know it’s something you will never use, and you can now poly without consequence. Perhaps address this by giving polymorphed spellbooks an elevated chance to become blank, and blank spellbooks do not poly into anything else.

The wield slot is fairly underused among object classes, and there are a number of interesting bonuses we can add to spells if the corresponding spellbook is wielded.

• Decreases failure rate of the wielded spell (utility spells might need to be made higher-level/harder to cast to maintain balance).
• Or decreases Pw cost of the wielded spell.
• Allows you to cast the wielded spell even if completely forgotten.
• Allows you to cast the spell without knowing it already - the Z menu gets an additional “-“ option to cast from the spellbook in hand if you don’t know what that book is.
  • Casting from an unknown spellbook will immediately check for reading success as if you had read the book: if you succeed, it then moves on to other checks like whether you have enough power, etc and you may cast the spell. If you fail, you get a random failure effect appropriate to that spellbook.

In an effort to make use-testing spellbooks less of a terrible idea, all characters should get a warning when reading a spellbook that’s way out of their comfort zone and they have very little chance of successfully studying it.

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:

• Higher level spellbooks could be heavier. D&D does this. However, unless the game shows the weights of items to the player, it will be tedious for the player to figure out the exact weight of a book by picking up and dropping items of known weights.
• Make spellbook appearances more complex based on level. A simple color indicates a 1-2 level book, an unusual color or appearance indicates a 3-4 level book, a very odd or ridiculous appearance or material indicates a 5-6 level book, and a completely over-the-top appearance indicates a level 7+ book. (Example: “red”, “steel”, “bone”, “jewel-encrusted”). Shuffling of the random appearances would need to be changed so that the books retain an appearance in their original bracket.
• Make scroll label length (or, more complicated, its number of syllables) roughly correlate to its cost. The correlation could be fuzzed a bit, so MAPIRO MAHAMA DIROMAT is probably a 300 zorkmid scroll, but is certainly no less than 200, and NR 9 is probably something really cheap, but might be 100 zorkmid.
• When you read a spellbook, you are given a menu with three options:
  • Give the book a cursory glance-over. This can fail with low Int/XL but is fairly unlikely and has very minor failure effects. If successful, it identifies the spell level of the book. Takes 1/10 the usual spell study time.
  • Briefly study the book but don’t try to learn its spell. This can fail with mediocre Int/XL but will be reliable at high ones. Moderate failure effects. If successful, it identifies the spell contained in the book. Takes 1/3 the regular spell study time.
  • Study the book normally with normal failure effects and normal spell study time. Learns the spell if successful.

Scale spellbook generation rates by level and dungeon depth, making lower-level books much more frequent higher in the dungeon, and higher-level books more frequent lower in it.

On occasion, a small mimic poses as a spellbook so persuasively that it actually is a spellbook item, and you can pick it up and carry it around. Attempting to identify, read, throw or kick the book reveals it as a mimic. (If mimics have been genocided, this silently doesn’t happen.)

Internally this is stored using the book’s otrapped flag.

Potion of coffee, a nonmagical potion which confers temporary sleep resistance and, while the sleep resistance is still active, a small bonus towards the odds of learning a spell from a book successfully.

Cartomancers don’t spellcast using Pw. Instead, they read the book (which is instantaneous for them, and possibly subject to a failure chance like normal if the spell is not known) and the spell immediately takes effect. This increments the read counter for the book, so each book can be used to cast a spell 4 times before it blanks.

Instead of spellbooks having 4 read charges, they store “400% memory” - enough magical power to give a reader full knowledge of the spell 4 times over, which is functionally identical to how many times they can be reread now but more granular. Reading a book to restore memory of a partially forgotten spell only consumes the missing fraction of memory required to bring you back up to 100% retention.

Example: The hero reads a spellbook of knock, bringing themselves to 100% memory and the spellbook down to 300% memory. 10000 turns later, the hero, now with 50% memory, rereads the book. This restores their memory to 100% but the spellbook is only decreased to 250%.

This would allow events that degrade spellbooks (reading it and polymorphing it) to degrade it by a randomized degree instead of a flat, predictable 1/4 of its use every time.

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 branch named “The Ancient Library”. It is likely accessed by portal from the main dungeon rather than stairs. It contains some spellbooks and a smaller number of scrolls, which serve as the main loot of this branch, but there aren’t too many of them in order not to be unbalancing. The level design makes it still visibly a structure, but fairly ruined with collapsed walls and such.

The branch is populated by monsters of a new species that either serve as the guardians of the library, or have moved in to inhabit it after its decline. They make for a difficult fight, and compounding the problem, taking a book will awaken and anger all of them on the current level. (Or the books spawn embedded in the walls – bookshelves, and you need to kick the walls to get them out, which triggers this.) There is no singular boss monster in the branch, nor is there any singular reward item.

If bookworms (#1793) are implemented, they also appear in this branch.

If you chat to a peaceful spellcaster creature who is carrying a spellbook while carrying or wielding a spellbook yourself, it may offer to trade.

This might be of limited utility since only aligned priests in vanilla normally carry spellbooks, or it might be well suited to a variant like FIQHack where spellcasters usually have a book or two.

Paper golems can grow up into “paperback golems”, which are at least twice as strong. When defeated they drop a couple blank spellbooks. Note however that some objection has been raised over nonliving golems being able to “grow up” in the first place.

Spellbooks that you have identified but haven’t actually learned display a “(level n)” on them to indicate the spell level.

When you are gifted a spellbook by your god as a prayer boon, the book will always be your role’s special spell if you don’t already know it. (Possibly, they won’t give it to you if you have it identified, or they will give it to you if you know but have forgotten the spell.)

One possible failure effect for reading a spellbook (or writing it, if it’s possible to fail at writing a book) is for the spell to force itself into your head. Your spell retention is internally -1, a special value that means you can cast the spell, but only once, and then you immediately forget it.

If you get paralyzed by reading a spellbook, there’s some message indicating that you got paralyzed. Currently just getting “You can move again” is weird.

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.

When you fail to read a spellbook, increment its read counter. The chance of a book crumbling to dust is no longer a flat 1/3; a never-read book will never crumble, and the chance increases the more times the book is read.

Dipping a spellbook in any healing potion will restore one of its read charges. Dipping it in a potion of restore ability will restore all of its read charges. In either case, the potion is used up.

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.

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).

The usage fee for reading a book in a shop is reduced to 45%, to make it so that unless you have very high Cha, it’s better to pay the usage fee than to buy and resell.

Don’t gift a character a spellbook as a prayer boon if the character is illiterate or certain roles (like cavemen or barbarians), and if a spellbook is given limit its level somehow so that a character doesn’t get a spellbook of much too high level.

New special room “lich hall”. Contains one difficulty-appropriate or somewhat-out-of-difficulty lich, generated asleep with difficulty-appropriate undead. One or two statues generate along the walls, and there are several spellbooks on the floor or in chests. Within the hall, the lich can summon more undead.

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.

Dipping a spellbook in a potion of gain level turns it into a spellbook of some spell that is one level higher. You only get “Interesting…” if you try this on a level 7 book. Not determined whether this should count as polymorphing an object to break polypileless conduct.

Blessings or cursings on spellbooks does not translate to automatic success or failure. Instead, it acts as a fairly large bonus or penalty to your effective Intelligence when reading it.

Spellbooks can generate pre-read. They will always have at least 1 use remaining in them (and that will be uncommon), but they are not always new spellbooks. If monsters cast player spells and generate with spellbooks to cast them (as in FIQHack), those spellbooks should be pre-read as well.

Spellbooks cannot be written by appearance. If you don’t know the spell, you can’t unknown-ID write it based on appearance (though you can still try to make an attempt to write it based on the spell).

Writing an unknown spellbook is not as likely to fail outright as it is now. Instead, there is a chance that it will “warp strangely” as normal, and become some ‘‘other’’ spellbook you don’t know yet.

If you try to buy a high level spellbook in a shop while outwardly looking unqualified (low XL, low Int, Barbarian), the shopkeeper raises an eyebrow and condescendingly asks you if you’re sure you can read it. This can help you informally identify high level spellbooks.

Bookworm, a w monster that eats books (they end up in its stomach/inventory and aren’t destroyed, though they may lose a read charge). Levels up, gaining power and speed, for each book it eats (higher level books give it more power), eventually gaining more attacks. Possibly can also eat scrolls. Initializes as having already eaten a few books.

Sustain ability also gives stun and confusion resistance, and prevents you from studying books.

Implement directional looting for objects embedded in a wall where the object is a spellbook and the room type is LIBRARY, so the player doesn’t have to kick the wall to retrieve the books.

When a spellbook’s ward is studied, it is possible to get a non-failure, non-success result of “you’re not skilled enough to tell if there is a useful ward here”. This is done by throwing the player’s Int, XL, and possibly other stats into some deterministic function along with the book’s object id and the ward it actually contains.

Monks, and possibly other roles, can learn martial arts techniques out of spellbooks similar to dnethack wards and SLASH’EM bard spells.

Reading a spellbook while confused may teach you a random spell but only set your memory of it to 1000 turns. It can also reduce memory of all other spells by 1000. Alternatively, it has no real effect, and just prints a message “You were holding the spellbook upside down… You learn the spell of ‘kcol draziw’.” (a random spell name printed backwards).

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.

Gnomish characters read spellbooks faster than other races.

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.

See also this proposal which expands on the idea.

In variants with felt markers, allow them to write spellbooks and scrolls of mail - the other scrolls are the only thing they can’t write.

Change up and add new failure effects of spellbook reading:

• Any failure confuses you instead of paralyzing.
• The level 5+ confusion effect seems quite tame in comparison to the other effects, so replace it with paralysis.
• New effect: book tries to eat you
• New effect: level drain
• Spell enters your head automatically, but erases your knowledge of one/all of your other spells. (This could be quite annoying and may be better off as an Evil Patch Idea.)
• New effect (possible in combination with other effects, and for any book): book curses

Books no longer have a 1/3 chance of disintegrating when failing to read them; instead, a cursed book will always disintegrate.

Give all roles a warning when they might fail to read a spellbook, but make the numbers involved much less useful than the Wizard’s warning. (Possibly, just give players “difficult to comprehend” when success chance is less than 100% and nothing else, and buff Wizard warning to add more levels: “somewhat difficult”, “difficult”, “very difficult”, “extremely difficult”).

The game should allow you to reread a spellbook and relearn the spell whenever you want. The prompt should be “You know [spell] quite well already. Read the book anyway? (yn)”

Special room “ruined church” that contains ghosts, pieces of glass scattered around the floor, maybe an altar, maybe a spellbook, and blank paper/scrolls of junk mail scattered around the floor.

Several small spellbook additions:

• The thick spellbook weighs more than other kinds. The thin spellbook weighs less.
• Reading a dusty spellbook has a chance of making you sneeze (if you are in a breathing form with a nose), which wakes up monsters.
• Reading a silvery spellbook as a silver-hater makes you “not able to handle” the book and drop it

Monster status “discord”, which causes a monster to be seen as a target and be attacked by other enemies. On the player, discord is the same as wielding Stormbringer. Discord is available through the spellbook of discord.

Blank spellbooks in flooded libraries generate with the “number of times read” counter full, so they can’t be polypiled into readable books.