Ideas

There's been something of a spike of interest in hedgehogs and their spiny status lately but at this point it's worth noting that the status as is isn't worthwhile at all because it will only do 1 damage to unarmed attackers.

So why not have a bigger, nastier hedgehog monster with the Super Spiny status that will return a portion of the damage done to it.

Like a mutant porcupine?

Or even just a normal giant porcupine?

While I support the idea of bigger, nastier hedgehogs for GC or the Deep Forest, I think there's no need for a new Super Spiny status; Simply have the spiny status deal damage to an unarnmed attacker based on strength (or endurance, maybe that makes more sense ?) Since a base hedgehog's strength is quite low, this would keep it reasonable for the ones in UT, while allowing bigger ones to deal more damage.

Now I don't know whether it was mentioned here before, but akin to lycanthropy and vampirism, it would be interesting to have a zombie status effect (zombie plague? zombification?).

Basically, it would work as a (bit worse?) leprosy, optionally also making your character greener (just lke normal monsters are made greener while zombified). Unlike normal leprosy, the leprosy-like rotting from zombifcation could be stalled by eating raw flesh. You would also have no upper food limit while in zombie state - any food that would bring you to Satiated would be wasted and you could still eat more, because of your ravenous hunger for raw flesh.

You would also be immune to decapitation and de-groin-tion, making torso you only vital body part, and whenever you would pick up a body part you are missing (not necessarily yours), the game would ask you if you want to attach it.

This state should be exclusive with the other two, just like the other two (lycanthropy and vampirism) are. You would also not become zombified after being bitten by a zombie (too strong), maybe by drinking a special elixir.

Your stats would suffer badly, but you would be very hard to kill. This state would be very bad whenever you are not fighting, because without raw flesh, you would become weaker and weaker. If a fight, it might be very beneficial.

I would like to see a variation of the hallucination status common in Rougelikes. Instead of just walking around tripping I would like it to be more of a psychosis state, where you see the same thing wrong until the effect wears off. so floating eyes would look like kobolds, or villagers or non hostile NPC's would look like monsters and not give you a warning for attacking them. Maybe make the condition notification subtle so you dont know you have it right away.

It would be awsome if werewolves (and anything else with lycanthropy) had an aversion to silver (and maybe mithril, because mithril is "true silver" after all). Being struck by silver (mithril) weapon (or any item, really) could deal +50% damage to lycanthropes, while if they were wearing any silver equipment, it could occasionally sear them for small damage.

Similarly, vampires should have an aversion to sunlight. Either they could stop regenerating HP as long as they are above ground and outside during day, or they could take intermittent small damage to any uncovered body part (thus fully armored vampire would be immune to sunlight).

Hum. Problem with that is that the skill factor completely overshadows any special properties of materials. Silver not being an idea material for a weapon, your choices would pretty much be limited to silver daggers.

That's why I suggest for mithril to also be considered a type of silver. Mithril comes from Tolkienian mythology and is called "true silver" there as one of its alternative names. We could even make silver harden into mithril.

Alternately, we could introduce better types of silver, eg. "moon silver".

Do blocked attacks cost stamina, like attacking does? If not, it should, because blocking enemy strikes would definitely be taxing.

Which gets me to my point - we could make heavy shields more worth the hassle. Light shields are better because of their accuracy, thus blocking more blows. Heavy shields, on the other hand, could drain less stamina per attack blocked, because of their increased bulk and stability. Thus you could pick to wear a heavy shield and loose only very little stamina from all the blocked attacks.

If you wear a shield at all, that is.

None of the runs I get very far in, nor of many runs I've seen people do that get very far, actually use shields, but maybe that's just me.

That's a good observation. The inherent disadvantages of sword-and-board - reduced damage output - do not at present outweigh the advantages, in a similar way that light armor is generally superior to heavy armor. As such most successful runs dual-wield and wear soft armor. There could be an entire discussion thread about the subject of shields, if there isn't one already.

There must be a discussion buried around here somewhere. I've found that lightweight wooden material shields are amazing at the start of the game, but later they just get smashed by big orcs.

Anybody used a GEF shield or fabric shield?

There was this thread on blocking and this discussion on shields.

On a related note, here's my idea for a new artifact:
The Sci-Fi Shield (of Sophos), while not item-wise a shield, an arcanite belt(reference to Rimworld?) or amulet that would create a force-field around the player, that could have one or more of the following effects:causing damage to unarmed attackers ("Your right/left arm is zapped/crisped by the shield!"); deflecting ranged/magic attacks("The flying banana peel bounces off the shield and falls to the ground." "The elder dark mage's spell is deflected by your shield!"); and maybe even stopping melee weapon attacks ("Rondol the kobold patriarch's mithril spear bounces off your shield harmlessly."). But this would all come at a cost to the durability of the shield (not the worn item), eventually wearing out ("Your Sci-Fi Shield (of Sophos) powers down before it overloads (whatever that means)."), with passive "regeneration" of the force field over time if not shut down; if shut down, it would be required to return to full strength to turn back on. Higher tiers of magical metal (octiron, mithril/adamantine (I forget which is a magic metal, unless neither, or maybe both), valpurium, and the like) could increase the shield's capacity and/or rengeration rate.

Regardless of whether you would include "of Sophos" to the name, this could be given as a deity reward by Sophos (maybe and/or Loricatus if you decide to not include the "of Sophos), in similar manner to the Valpurium Sword/Shield and blU-eS creeN.

Yes, I know this is a ridiculously long post for a single artifact recommendation, but the idea popped in my head and it begged to be written.

Paintings of Dulcis (idea thanks to Izzy's Saal'thul story)

Extremely rare spawn? Through prayer only?

Various artworks created by the divine, these are shrouded from mortal eyes. Upon revealing, they can bestow various revelations upon the seer.

The idea is that there are several different types, and you won't know what you've got until you "open" it, so to speak. Upon doing so, one of several different things can happen, or even nothing at all.

Chance of disappearing after effect or 100% chance? Either way, they're pretty to look at and they sell for a pretty penny (especially the ones that do nothing).

There should be a special reaction if you bring a tame Lobh-Se to Elpuri's level. Probably a fullscreen message about the two of them first setting an eye on each other and then an instant spark - they fall in love on the first sight, two horrible and horribly lonely monsters. Then the player is presented with a [Y/n] prompt whether he will allow them to remain together. If the player agrees, both Elpuri and Lobh-Se are moved to a neutral team.

This would be a pretty cool and heart-warming story, IMHO. And not really game-breaking or overpowered by making the GC boss neutral, because you a) need to get tame Lobh-Se and bring her all the way to Dark Level and b) won't kill Elpuri, thus not getting his head and preventing you from Freedom ending unless you afterwards fight both Lobh-Se and Elpuri to get the head. However, you could use it to cicrumvent Elpuri and go directly down to Oree, but then you need to fear the lower GC more than Elpuri, really.

Hybrid mutant spider frog babies?

Yay!

Hybrid mutant spider DARK frog babies.

It would be nice to have a character log be created after you finish a game (by dying or winning). This would be a .txt file with you end-game message (same as in high scores), but also the name of your character (including alignment and possible polymorph form), your attributes, skills, equipment and inventory, plus massacre history (abbreviated, you only get how many of which monster you killed, how many your allies killed and how much died from different reasons, possibly with the cause of death for uniques, but not for everyone). If possible, could also include similar info for the pets that were on the same floor as you when you died/won.

Basically, this would ba a similar info you get when the game is finished, but in a form you can later share and brang about without the need to make many screenshots. Right not, it's not cool you get to look at this info once, but if you don't remeber to screenshot it, it's gone.

Agreed. Even better if you could view the logs through the game (and that way see the graphics of the monsters & equipment, etc.)

That would be nice, but we should also have plain text logs, becase those are easy to post somewhere without the need to, once again, screenshotting your logs.

What about a rare fountain/lamp effect whereby you are transported to a bones file in its entirety. IE you move into the complete game the bones file was in. so all the levels and layout you have done in your current game are replaced by the layout in the bones file. Like a dimensional teleport or trip to a past life?

Maybe a secret wish for "time travel"?
Or possibly said time travel being a max relationship prayer thing you could get from Sophos and/or Infuscor.