Allow the player to cut down the trees in the Ranger quest home level to traverse the level more easily, but give an alignment penalty for doing so.

Hitting a tree with sufficient cold damage makes it explode. The explosion type could be either physical, like a gas spore, or cold itself (which could possibly set off a chain reaction causing other trees to explode).

Add two new elemental planes, those of Positive Energy and Negative Energy.

The Plane of Positive Energy:

• The full level is lit.
• Has lots of yellow lights, trees, and whatever plant-based monsters exist in the game.
• Everything is treated as if it has regeneration. The player can regenerate current HP past its maximum, but if this gets too far past the maximum, they instantly die from being unable to contain the energy (there are warning messages to this effect as you approach this point).
• Items in the player’s and monsters’ inventories can randomly get blessed, enchanted, or charged - even if this runs the risk of overenchanting and destroying them.
• Eating any food restores HP as well as nutrition.
• All exercisable attributes are exercised at regular intervals.
• All sleep effects are negated.

The Plane of Negative Energy:

• The full level is dark.
• Contains lots of undead.
• Everything constantly loses hit points. If you have regeneration, it either nullifies or only partly nullifies this effect.
• Items in the player’s and monsters’ inventories can randomly get cursed or lose enchantment or charges (going negative on things which are capable of being negative).
• You lose several times as much nutrition per turn as normal.
• All abusable attributes are abused at regular intervals.

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.

Add a Druid role: intended to be a more balanced form of SLASH’EM’s doppelganger race, druids are highly attuned to nature and possess innate shapeshifting abilities.

• You begin the game with polymorph control and get polymorphitis at XL 5 or so.
• Possibly you start with a wand of polymorph, or potions of it.
• Inventory could be severely restricted, so you have to figure out how to do most things through polymorph.
• You have the power to change into a tree, which will make most monsters ignore you. While in tree form, you are immobile but regenerate HP and Pw faster. Orcs might attack you with axes, a la Tolkien.
• Without extrinsic polymorph control, your polymorph control limits you to changing into forms with the M1_ANIMAL flag.
• Possibly have limited access to #polyself outside of wizard mode, so they can change intentionally and not randomly. Would work best as an ability with a timeout, or cost Pw outside of wizard mode.
• Possibly, the monsters you can polymorph into must have a certain base level or difficulty that’s tied to your XL somehow (maybe XL/2). If their base level is too high, you can’t polymorph into them.
• Your controlled polymorphs always succeed - you will never accidentally fail and “feel like a new woman” with the 20% chance that all other roles have.
• You are seriously bad at combat in your regular form, having very little weapon skill (nothing can be advanced to Expert, possibly not even to Skilled), and physically weak in your normal form. Combat in a polyform should be incentivized enough so that it isn’t really worth it to wear any armor. Maybe you should get to-hit and damage bonuses while in a wild form?
• Diminishing returns on polymorph time limit that prevent you from reusing the same form(s) over and over and over again. (This may actually be applicable as a general YANI for polymorph control).
• The critical balance needed is to make polyselfing powerful and awesome to play with and use for typical combat, but simultaneously polyselfing needs enough restrictions that it doesn’t just turn into Master Mind Flayer: The Game.
  • One proposed restriction: you can only turn into monsters you have already encountered, or if that is too lax, into peaceful or tame monsters adjacent to you at the time. The druid should be able to pacify most animalistic monsters to take advantage of this (temporarily?)
• The starting pet is a woodchuck (or wolf). Pantheon is probably drawn from Celtic mythology, though hopefully not overlapping with Knights.
• Some heavy polymorph / monster / player as monster tweaking is probably required, in the sense that there should, ideally, be valid reasons to exist in any given polymorphable form.

Grass terrain, rendered as a green period or comma. It could have the following properties:

• Dies and turns to normal floor if hit by fire or have a death ray zapped over it.
• Turns into fire terrain if hit by fire and can spread to nearby grass.
• You can plant trees on them, whereas you cannot do this on normal floor.
• Small monsters that are capable of hiding under objects can hide in grass.

Brown puddings (or the player polymorphed into one) can cause trees to instantly rot and die by attacking them. If there are other monsters with a decay attack, this behavior should logically extend to them as well.

A tree hit by a fire ray or explosion should instantly incinerate, provided it’s not marked non-diggable (petrified). Likewise, a tree hit by a disintegration blast should disintegrate.

A “druid staff” artifact, which can be invoked to create a patch of grass similar in size to a stinking cloud, radius 4-5. Enemies within the grass radius become rooted to the ground, making them unable to move (but still able to fight, shoot, etc) for some time. While wielding it, you can chat with trees, which causes them to give you some food, mana, or rarely a pet (possibly an ent).

You can bury fruit to make a tree grow where the fruit was buried.

Assuming the fruit type of a tree has been made deterministic rather than random when kicked: farlooking a tree will describe what kind of tree it is, e.g. “apple tree”, “banana tree”. Fruit trees you have already kicked are described as “bare”, e.g. “bare apple tree”. Trees that never had any fruit, if implemented, are “maple tree” or “oak tree” or something.

Giants can rip doors off their hinges, by picking them up, to use them as weapons. They do a lot of damage, and can only actually be wielded by giants. Possibly, kicking a door with excessive strength (and/or being a giant) not only breaks it off the hinges, but sends it flying to hit anything unlucky enough to be in its path.

There isn’t really an obvious object class for a ‘door’ object to be in, though WEAPON_CLASS is probably the most straightforward.

Possibly also allow this with sinks or trees. All of these heavy improvised weapons should probably use club skill.

Kicking a tree may summon a couple angry ravens (replacing the bee effect).

Kicking a tree may cause you to get hit by a falling branch and take some damage. (Possibly, the branch has a smallish chance of appearing on the ground as a quarterstaff, but only once per tree).

If trees’ fruit is ever made deterministic to the tree, occasionally scatter some of that fruit around the base of the tree.

Trees can rarely drop slime mold “fruit” when kicked.

When you hit a tree with fire from any source, it can turn into a burning tree (#). This burns for a few hundred turns before burning out and turning into normal floor. While on fire it acts as a light source of radius 9, and deals fire damage to anything adjacent each turn and occasionally to anything within a radius of 3. Come to think of it, there could also be a “bonfire” terrain using the same glyph.

Trees’ fruit is generated along with the tree (possibly buried for code purposes so that it shows up on object detection but not when you just look at the tree, or perhaps just “embedded in the tree” is good enough). When you kick or chop down the tree, this fruit is released rather than generating some fruit on the spot.

New artifact Green Thumb, neutral/unaligned gauntlets of dexterity, or gauntlets of defense if implemented. (Ideally made of wood, if possible). Invoke to create a tree. While you have them equipped and you are near a tree, you get some extra damage reduction.

Dwarves don’t go within two spaces of a tree if they can help it. (This is an Order of the Stick reference.)

If ents exist, chopping down a tree angers any ents on the level.

Water nymphs may create a pool on their spot when killed. Items they stole from the player fall into it, of course.

Wood nymphs may create a tree on their spot when killed, and mountain nymphs may leave a boulder.

Applying a pruning hook (or possibly any polearm) to a space containing a tree, assuming there’s no monster occupying that space, it triggers the regular bees/fruit from the tree without needing to kick it.

Forest rooms, which contain a scattering of trees.

Occasionally, sitting next to a tree will cause an apple to fall on your head.

Wood nymphs, or players polymorphed into wood nymphs, can walk through trees as if they weren’t there.

Kicking a tree may generate one or more angry wood nymphs.

Elves and possibly Rangers get an alignment penalty for cutting down trees. Dwarves get an alignment bonus.

Add a field to struct rm (or possibly reuse the flags field which is 5 bits) that determines the type of tree that is on that space, if typ == TREE. This enables you to control what kind of tree it is, and what kind of fruits you will get by kicking it, and whether you can get bees from it. Also add a level flag that allows a level designer to specify that all trees on the level should be barren.

Elves should be able to squeeze between two trees diagonally.

You can loot trees to get less fruit than you might by kicking it, but the chance of getting bees is much reduced. This might fail, in which case you might fall out of the tree and abuse Dexterity or something similar. If you are polymorphed into a Y, it has a 100% chance of success; if a human or elf, probably 80%; if an orc, 40-50%; if a gnome or a dwarf, 1-5%.