The Mitre of Holiness should, when worn, passively provide a damage bonus against undead and demons you attack.

Artifact chaotic helm Helm of the Underworld, modeled after Hades’ helm. Grants drain resistance, invisibility, magic resistance, and passive detection of buried objects (or phasing, if this is too difficult to implement) when worn. When invoked, it does a stronger version of the chaotic turn undead effect (rebuke or tame undead).

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.

Gold is a metal associated with the sun, so weapons made of it should deal extra damage against undead. Additionally, blunt gold weapons get a d2 damage bonus versus everything due to being heavier.

Knights should not receive caitiff penalties against undead.

Archons’ light radius should be a passive aura area-of-effect attack that causes strong light effects: potentially blinding normal monsters, hurting gremlins and undead, petrifying trolls, and so on.

Remove the ability of non-blessed stethoscopes to tell you information about undead, so that only a blessed one will work on them. The message for trying to apply it to them is “Foo doesn’t seem to have any vital signs.”

Angels (or other “blessed” monsters) that make bodily contact with undead monsters deal d4 bonus damage to them, just the same as if a blessed weapon hit them.

Remove the graveyard flag from the Castle level, but make it so that undead cannot follow you upstairs past the Valley of the Dead, preventing wraith luring. (Could also apply this restriction to levelport and branchport).

Merge Sunsword and Trollsbane like NetHack Fourk does (a single artifact that emits light, instakills gremlins and instapetrifies trolls, with bonuses to undead), except keep it a morning star and name it Sunflash (because a lot of these consolidated effects have nothing to do with trolls). Having it stay a morning star makes it an attractive choice for Priests, and raises the appeal of training morning star.

If you die next to a pet that can make you arise from the grave, it infects you and makes you arise from the grave as that, without ending the game.

Before you first enter the Valley, demons and undead (chosen from the graveyard monster algorithm, though perhaps excluding wraiths) continually spawn in the maze on the right of the Castle and try to path towards the upstairs. Also before it is set, in the Valley, awake demons and undead will try to path to the upstairs if they have nothing better to do.

Ghosts do not count as undead; they’re just dead.

Remove the odd feeling messages from magic traps. Instead move them to a new trap, a “foresight trap”, which gives you a vision of something to come. Once triggered, the trap vanishes. Effects can be:

• “You hear a far-off song: .A.EF” - give part or all of the passtune
• “You have a vision of [something]” - reveal something about the dungeon structure, like “stronghold far below”
• “A shiver runs down your spine!” - create a level-appropriate “scary” monster somewhere on the level, like a ghost or other undead
• “You smell charred flesh.” - create a level-appropriate monster with a fire attack somewhere on the level
• “You hear distant howling.” - create a level-appropriate werefoo on a level above or below

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.

Spell of necromancy that turns a corpse you’re standing on (or possibly adjacent to you) into a tame undead. Probably in the clerical school, though a case could be made for matter (and certain variants have a school of necromancy which this would much more directly fit into). It will work on corpses of undead that you have killed. Casting this spell would have some sort of penalty for lawfuls; there would be some sort of warning before trying to cast it.

You can normally only create zombies or mummies when an undead monster exists for the kind of corpse you are animating (i.e. a jackal can’t be turned into undead but a gnome can turn into a gnome zombie/mummy). For intelligent monsters that have no counterpart, the spell can create ghosts.

At a high enough skill or caster level, you can create skeletons from the corpse of any vertebrate, and maybe even vampires from humanoids. You can also create wraiths and shades from monsters that have no undead counterparts.

When you zap a wand of undead turning at a corpse that has an undead form, unless there is a ghost above it, it will resurrect the corpse as that undead. Also do this for living monsters that have undead forms, subject to monster magic resistance.

The cursed Book of the Dead will occasionally raise the dead around its location on its own without warning.

Mindless undead are immune to every form of fear effect, including scare monster.

Note: EvilHack takes this a step further and makes every mindless monster immune to fear, not just undead. This may be more apt, depending on your point of view.

Demon and undead pets move reluctantly over blessed items.

Undead in Sunsword’s light radius will flee.

Undead caught in a flash of light (from cameras or just from casting an area light spell) get awakened if they were asleep or confused (with a chance that decreases at higher levels) if already awake. Possibly, just illuminating their space by carrying some light source near them should be enough to wake them up.

Hitting vampires or all undead with light should hurt them. Not to the extent of gremlins though.

If an undead monster tries to put on an amulet of life saving, it will be either undead turned or destroyed, or brought back to life.

Buff late-game undead, because undead’s significance in Gehennom tends to be pointless since they aren’t scary by the time the adventurer gets there.

• Zombies resurrect in Gehennom akin to GruntHack zombies.
• Spectres, which are like wraiths but much faster and with more attacks.
• Vampire mages.
• Skeletal dragons.
• Minotaur zombies.
• Z might need to be made ungenocideable.
• GruntHack-like zombies, which inflict zombification sickness and eat your brain to drain Int.
• Shades can generate in graveyards in Gehennom.

A Necromancer role which includes: creating skeleton armies, binding the undead via rituals similar to the Binder, launching rocks that contain small petrified animals that transform into undead animals, bone chains, and encrusting undead minions with different jewels to grant them different powers.