Wielding Stormbringer cuts the failure rate of the drain life spell, and only that spell, in half.

Rather than the replacement for techniques being certain roles learning new spells from nowhere once you achieve a certain experience level, have the spells be known from the beginning, but uncastable unless you are above that level.

This also helps disincentivize drain-for-gain tactics, since keeping yourself at a lower level will cut off your access to certain spells.

Add a system of “hell curses”. When you enter a demon lord’s lair, you are afflicted with 2 random curses, which stick around forever until the lord is killed or bribed off.

You can receive at most six curses over the course of the game, requiring you to defeat the lords of the first three lairs you encounter. Further generation of lairs does not add any curses.

A non-comprehensive list of potential curses is:

• healing potions heal only half as much HP
• your speed is knocked down by 2
• your AC is deducted
• your spellcasting failure rates increase
• you are randomly inflicted with confusion every 50 turns or so

Wearing the Mitre of Holiness removes the spellcasting penalty from wearing a shield.

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

Alternative Necromancer role, because its implementation in SLASH’EM winds up being a rather halfhearted version of Wizard with some elements of Priest and Archeologist. Note: This was written for a hypothetical variant that does not have a Necromancer role, rather than as an update to SLASH’EM’s.

• When playing as a Necromancer, dying monsters may drop “soul” objects, which can then be collected by the player.
  • Souls only exist as an object for the purpose of occupying a space on the map before being picked up. They are weightless and do not actually occupy space in inventory, nor can they be stolen after being collected. A Necromancer can have an unlimited amount of them.
  • If a soul drops adjacent to the player, it is automatically collected.
  • Souls drop 100% of the time from monsters the player kills, less for monsters that die otherwise. Never for monsters that kill themselves.
  • Monsters ignore souls and cannot pick them up. (There is room for an extension where certain undead like a barrow wight or a lich can collect souls to become more powerful, but that is not required for this.)
  • Souls vanish after being on the floor for around 10 turns or being moved off level, preventing the player from sitting back while pets or conflict mop up a large crowd of monsters and then obtaining all their souls with no effort.
  • Souls can also be offered on an altar to gain alignment points.
• Souls are used to fuel the casting of necromancy spells, an entirely new spell school. Necromancy spells consume some Pw like normal spells, but also consume souls, and generally are more powerful than non-necromancy spells of the same level. Various spell ideas:
  • Reanimate creature: which consumes a soul of some creature and reanimates a corpse of that same creature, bringing it back as a pet. (It may be flagged as undead, if the variant supports this).
  • Soul blast: Consumes multiple souls and produces an attack whose power is proportionate to the total monster difficulty of the expended souls.
  • Empower undead: Temporarily buffs all nearby pets, scaling up with the more souls you expend. This is intended to be one of the primary ways a Necromancer takes care of enemies, so it should be a pretty good boost.
  • Spell which consumes 5-10 souls of one monster type and create a tame monster of that type without needing a corpse.
  • Spell which consumes souls to regain HP or Pw.
  • Spell which infuses your weapon, armor, or other gear with souls, making it more effective for a time.
  • Spell which consumes souls of one species and polymorphs you into that monster.
  • Charm undead: Tames undead. Low cost compared to general charm monster.
  • Create wight: Works like reanimate creature but the resulting creature gains level-drain abilities.
• A good guaranteed starting combination of spells for the Necromancer might be reanimate creature and empower undead, since this will enable them to kill monsters, bring them back as pets, and boost them with the souls from more kills.
• Most undead (at least the mindless undead) generate peaceful to Necromancers.
• If desired, there could also be an “amulet of necromancy” which, when worn by non-Necromancers, causes souls to drop (less frequently than they do for Necromancers) and enables the hero to cast necromancy spells. However, not many other roles would be non-Restricted in necromancy spells, and any Lawful hero would be harshly penalized for casting them.
  • In order to avoid this being a useless item for Necromancers, it could improve soul drop chances for them.
  • Non-Necromancers wearing the amulet might also be limited in the amount of souls they could have at one time.
• If desired, Valkyries could be able to collect souls natively, but the only thing they can do with them without penalty would be to offer them on altars for alignment points.

The system may want some simplification since it may be clunky to have the player navigate through menus to choose souls from all the different ones they have accumulated. Possibly, souls from a given species just combine, so you would be shown something like “souls of gnome kings (12 total monster levels)”. An extreme simplification would cut out the entire soul-storage system and just replenish Pw when you collect one.

Wizards can talk to the apprentices in their Quest home level to pay them for learning (possibly only low-level) spells. These are provisionally priced at 50 times the spell level times the player’s level, and is intended to serve as a dilemma for whether to buy spells or protection. (However, a single point of protection would cost the same as 8 total levels of spells, so the cost may need to be raised.)

Cornuthaums give a lesser reduced-hunger casting benefit to non-Wizards who wear them. They also improve reduced-hunger casting for Wizards.

Cavemen receive a spellbook of fireball as their crowning gift, which they can always cast with 100% success rate. Flavor-wise, this ties into “discovering fire”.

Allow wielding some types of traditional magical implements to reduce spell failure rates:

• Wielding a quarterstaff confers the same benefit as wearing a robe but does not stack with it.
• Wielding a wand of nothing confers the same benefit as wearing a robe but does not stack with it.
• Wielding an identified wand which matches a spell (wand of light -> spell of light, wand of death -> finger of death, etc) drastically reduces your failure rate when casting it. Perhaps casting the spell while wielding the matching unidentified wand should identify the wand.

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.

Advanced spell forms are slightly problematic. Certain spells (fireball and cone of cold) which have advanced versions automatically kick in when the player is Skilled or above, and can’t be cast using the lesser form even if the player wants to.

• Some variants give you the choice of casting the basic or advanced form, but this suffers from an interface annoyance (an extra y/n prompt) and the fact that the advanced form counts as the same spell level so it is not actually any more difficult or expensive to cast.
• Advanced forms are castable even at Basic skill, but have a higher failure rate.
• The advanced form appears in the Z menu once you are Skilled.
• The advanced forms are implemented as higher-level never-generated spellbooks, e.g. “fire storm” and “frost storm”. Reading the basic spellbook automatically teaches you the advanced spell as well. This is dNetHack’s approach.
  • This allows you to balance them separately; in the case of fireball and cone of cold, the lesser spells could be dropped to level 3 or so and the advanced forms elevated to level 6.
• The advanced forms are broken out into completely separate spellbooks that must be discovered and learned separately.
  • This makes the balance of spellbooks a concern, since it would add more books of a certain school.
  • Both of the ideas that involve higher level spellbooks may create a problem with the Z menu only allowing 52 different spells if more advanced forms come along, not that that can’t be worked around.
• Skilled+ casting does nothing to the actual spell effects, but allows you to cast the spell mentally: you do not need to be able to speak or move to cast it.

It’s a problem that utility spells with a high failure rate, such as identify at 95% fail, is a mere inconvenience to players, since they can sit in a closet with a stack of food and wait for their Pw to recharge until they succeed. This is not really a problem with combat spells, since the penalty for failing to cast the spell correctly is a disadvantage in combat, where time and Pw matter. Some possible ways to address it:

• Large penalties for failing to cast a spell, like a 1% memory loss and 50 hunger.
• Failing to cast a spell locks it for a certain period of time. It would be hard to make this not turn into an even slower grind for utility spells, since the lockout period could just be waited out.
• Make spells never actually failable, but Pw cost is increased proportional to the failure rate, specifically: real Pw = base Pw / success rate. Under this formula, a 15 Pw spell at 95% fail becomes a 300 Pw spell at 0% fail. This means the Pw cost should be exposed in the spellcasting menu rather than failure rate, even though failure rate still needs to be calculated. Maybe use different colors in the spellcasting menu to denote spells you can cast now, spells you can cast by waiting to recover more Pw, spells you can’t cast even at your current maximum Pw, and forgotten spells.

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.

Cantrips are level 0 spells that cost d2 or d3 power to cast. In order not to let them be unbalancing, they don’t train skill and are mostly useless, except in certain circumstances or for low-Pw spellcasters who can’t do much of the bigger stuff yet. ais523 suggests that good candidates for cantrips might be things that have little combat use, and whose effects could be duplicated by backtracking or other tedious things, but would be useful to avoid boredom. Given their cheapness, they should probably not train skills, and may not even need spell schools.

Most ideas for cantrips seem to be a little too powerful and would do better off as normal spells (and may be listed as independent YANIs for normal spells); however, those that seem like they would fit are listed here.

• Increase the odds of monsters dropping a corpse in the next few turns.
• Create an empty unlocked chest. (This would need some restriction so you can’t farm and sell them; perhaps you can only create up to 10 or 20 chests per game with this.)
• Mark a map square with a symbol, perhaps a comma, that is no different from normal floor but shows up on #overview and the normal map view.
• Deal some small damage, such as d5 or d6, to a nearby creature. (Acid Bubble from D&D is a nice corresponding cantrip.)
• Dig out a single square.
• Create a cancelled hostile yellow light. It cannot explode at you since it is cancelled, so it becomes an autonomous light source of radius 1, which can’t follow you down levels like a pet can. Killing it should not grant you any experience; otherwise this would be easily farmable.
• Light a radius 2 or 3 area permanently, like a weak form of the spell of light.
• Mage hand: you indicate a direction and the nearest item on the floor in that direction, assuming it’s under 100 weight or so, is brought to you and is placed in your inventory. This can be used > to get things out of pits.
• Create an illusion of yourself at your spot. The illusion never moves. Monsters that see it assume it is you and will attack whichever one is nearer (the illusion is instantly destroyed if attacked).

Differentiate spellcasting greatly for the different types of spellcasters:

• Intelligence casters have a spellbook limited by their level, where higher level spells take up more space.
  • Specifically, they can store up to (10 + XL) levels of spells.
  • Higher skill in a spell’s school provides a discount: 1 level for Basic, 2 for Skilled, and 3 for Expert.
  • So for instance, a level 5 character has 15 spell levels available. If they know force bolt and are Unskilled in attack spells, that takes up 1 level. If they know cancellation and are Skilled in matter spells, that takes up 5 levels (7 - 2 because they are Skilled).
  • When they learn a new spell that cannot fit into their existing spell list, they are prompted to forget known spells until they have enough space, or decline to learn the new spell (which still uses up a read charge on the book).
• Wisdom casters always have all the spells they have learned available so long as they haven’t forgotten them, but are strictly limited in whether they can cast a spell of a given level by their skill in its spell school.
  • If Restricted in a spell school they can only cast spells of up to level 1. If Unskilled, up to 2. Basic, 3; Skilled, 5; and Expert, 7.
• Charisma casters (which only exist in a couple variants) always have all spells available to cast, but can never cast spells twice in a row; there is always a cooldown of (5 - skill) * 2 * spell level. (Skill ranges from 0 at Restricted to 4 at Expert.)

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.

The dunce cap inhibits spellcasting (on top of the low intelligence it provides; not specified if it should entirely block spellcasting or just make it very difficult) but also provides magic resistance when worn. This is to add diversity of non-artifact magic resistance builds for non-spellcasters, and also to allow people to give magic resistance to pets that are incapable of wearing cloaks.

Peaceful monsters casting spells do not interrupt multi-turn occupations.

Worn shields of mobility do not apply a shield-based penalty to spellcasting, since they are by design supposed to aid your mobility.

Using a spell staff allows you to cast spells of the associated school while not necessarily being able to speak (due to polyform or some other reason); it could also potentially suppress other impediments to spellcasting, such as confusion.

A silence spell for either players or monsters or both. Not specified whether it would be area-of-effect or targeted at specific creatures. The main function of silence effects would be to prevent spellcasting. Not specified whether this would also affect reading scrolls (though probably not since you can “cogitate” the formula on scrolls if polymorphed into a speechless form).

However, this may require defining certain existing spells as not requiring speech, because it does not seem entirely fair to take away all of someone’s escape or healing spells with fairly low level magic.

Object properties, one per spell school, which each give you a casting boost in their spell school when the item is equipped (it only generates on equippable items). Should be rare compared to other object properties, and unwishable.

Eating the brains of a spellcasting monster should restore some magic energy, and perhaps even have a chance of learning a spell from its brain. (This latter part would work better in variants such as FIQHack where monsters have a list of player spells).

Certain high level spells require some minimum amount of skill in their school in order to be able to cast them at all. For instance, create familiar should be impossible to cast if you are not at least Basic in clerical spells, perhaps even Skilled, no matter what you do to improve your spellcasting odds.

Evil librarian monster: it is peaceful at first, but considers every spell you know to be an overdue library book, and charges you a $100 late fee per book when it encounters you. If you don’t pay, it attacks. Possibly they carry some books, and if you manage to keep it peaceful, you can loan books from it. May generate with a magic marker.

Casting spells decreases your spell memory by a small amount but one that would be significant if you cast the spell heavily.

Ring that provides magic resistance, but hinders your own spellcasting while you wear it by increasing your spell failure rates. Additionally, it gradually drains your magic energy while being worn. If you have no energy, the ring stops providing magic resistance.

The Amulet drains your power when you cast spells, even if you’re not carrying it, if it’s on the ground nearby. The amount of power drained is proportional to your closeness to it.

A dungeon feature that massively improves your spellcasting success rates while you are standing on it.

Remove Wizards’ exclusive access to reduced-hunger and hungerless casting. Instead, tie spell hunger to how experienced you are with the spell; this could either track how many times you’ve cast that specific spell, or use your skill in the spell’s school as a proxy for that, or both. Intelligence could remain a factor, but the important thing is that non-wizard casters can also enjoy the benefits. (Note that Wizards, what with casting spells a lot more than other roles and having high spell skill caps, will still reap a larger benefit from this.)

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.

An enchanted spell stave will boost your spellcasting in its school, with a greater boost the higher the enchantment is.

Spell staves are made into poor melee weapons (comparable or worse than the club, being basically a stick that’s just sturdy enough not to break), but are made lighter than the quarterstaff, weighing only 10. Its bonus to a single spellcasting school is countered by it applying a slight spellcasting penalty to spells of some or all other schools.

Implement a player fear system that unlike many other proposals, does not take away agency from the player by paralyzing them or forcing them to flee using a predefined algorithm. Instead, it incentivizes the player to flee by making continued combat unattractive.

Create a new intrinsic called “Panic”/”Panicking”. Sources of fear (including existing sources of paralysis-fear, e.g. ghosts) give you temporary amounts of this intrinsic. While you are panicking:

• You have a large to-hit penalty, possibly making it so that you can only land a hit when rolling a natural 20. (Directly subtracting a large number from to-hit could still be overcome by wearing rings of increase accuracy and would be hard to balance the exact number.)
• You deal half damage for any attack you can make land.
• Ranged attacks have a high chance of misfiring in the wrong direction.
• Spells not in the escape school or designated as emergency spells (or healing spells, for variants that remove emergency spells) have a higher failure rate or are uncastable.
• Your skills may be treated as if they are the levels you started the game with.
• Your speed is slightly boosted (if possible, only your movement speed, not your general attack/item use speed).
• If you die, your death reason will have a “while panicking” appended to it.

If you have confusion charges from the scroll or spell (meaning your hands are glowing red), the Z menu will gain a “confuse” spell option that always has a 0% failure rate, with the associated key being “-“. Casting this allows you to “zap” a confusion charge in any direction, confusing the first monster it touches.

The player can’t cast spells or use magic items while standing on top of an anti-magic field. (Rather than straight up not being able to use the magic items, they would behave either like their non-magic counterparts, or as if they had no charges, as much as possible. Magic instruments would play normally, wands would fail to produce an effect, scrolls would have no effect, and so on.)

For role differentiation: each role can only learn up to a certain number of spells. Wizards can learn them all, while roles like Healers can learn about a dozen; valkyries might be able to learn 3 and barbarians 1 (or 0). Possibly combine this with #2084.

The player can never learn, or can learn but never cast, spells that they are restricted in.

Trying to cast a forgotten spell and getting nightmarish images in your mind drains a few points of Pw.

The base Pw cost for a spell is specified per-spell, and only correlates with spell level rather than being tied to it, which allows for interesting things like low-level spells that are easy to cast but expensive.

Spells now take different numbers of turns to cast (interruptable by normal means). Combat spells and some of the emergency spells still take only 1 or 2 turns, but utility spells can take up to five or so.

Deafness multiplies your spell failure rate by a constant amount, due to maybe not getting the pronunciation right because you can’t hear yourself.

Factor your role’s skill cap in spells’ schools into the success rates for those spells.

Spells can be “bound” together so that they can be cast simultaneously.

Armor made of bone increases your spellcasting ability somehow (many ways to do this; decrease failure rate? Decrease Pw cost?)

Higher skill in a spell school allows you to subtract some points off its Pw cost.

Ring or amulet that causes your spellcasting to draw on HP instead of Pw, possibly only when your Pw is zero, or possibly not requiring a ring. Each point of HP is worth 2 Pw points. If cursed, doubles spell Pw costs. If blessed, energy regeneration will regenerate HP until full before regenerating Pw. Casting from HP too much may decrease your HP maximum. If implemented as an artifact, possibly flavor it as an evil counterpart of the Eye of the Aethiopica.

Note that a couple variants have implemented this as a “ring of blood magic” or similar items.

Casting a forgotten spell consumes some Pw, perhaps one point per spell level, or just a random amount, in addition to its confusion and stunning effects.

Hands holding a quarterstaff or wands don’t count as being occupied for the purposes of calculating spellcasting penalty. (Perhaps generalize wands to any other non-weapon.)

To avoid the annoyance of disrobing in a closet to cast utility spells, mark certain types of spells as being non-combat, utility spells. Such spells have a much reduced armor penalty, but take several turns to cast.

Reorganize which roles get which special spells, based on the change that every role should always have a 0% failure rate at casting its special spell.

If the metal spellcasting penalty were to be removed entirely for one armor slot, it should be the boots slot, because your feet are very distant from the magical casting part of your body.