Valkyries should be able to guarantee Mjollnir auto-returns safely (with no chance of hitting you) either by being piously aligned or having maximum Luck.

Add an artifact spear of Odin that grants flying when wielded, and replaces Mjollnir as the first sacrifice gift for Valkyries. This is intended to give them a reason to use their starting spear and reduce the inevitability of Excalibur, while being flavorful towards both Odin with the spear, and towards Valkyries with their mythological power of flight.

A few extra roles, such as valkyrie and barbarian, should start with Basic riding skill, even though they don’t start with a steed.

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.

Ravens are always generated peaceful for Valkyries (or maybe only neutral Valkyries, since they follow Odin).

The potion of booze should appear as “potion of mead” to Valkyries, using the same system that makes it appear as “sake” to Samurai.

In variants that have multiple Norse-based non-quest-artifacts, valkyries recieve a randomly chosen one of them as their first sacrifice gift.

Some mechanic for Valkyries that involves escorting the spirits/ghosts of those who die in battle.

One take on this idea: you can chat to ghosts to tame them, and then they will follow you around as pets do. Then you can release their spirits by praying on an aligned altar. Doing this successfully gives you some sort of reward. However, hostile monsters will attack the ghosts you are escorting without provocation, making this not trivially easy.

Valkyries always get the snow boot bonus while walking on ice (i.e. they never stumble), even if they aren’t wearing snow boots.

Being a male Valkyrie is a minor trouble when praying and will be divinely fixed by reverting you to female.

Valkyries only gain wings (and therefore flying) after they are crowned.

Valkyries can fly at will with the #fly command, but it costs Pw per turn/flying action to maintain.

Valkyries offering fire giant or frost giant corpses get double the sacrifice value. Possibly this could be generalized to other roles sacrificing “enemy” monsters.

Valkyries have some drain life power, as they are “choosers of the slain” in Norse mythology.

The Norn and Valkyrie quest friendlies should have different messages if you talk to them after having been changed into a man.