The only thing that might disturb the balance of the game if the shops were to restock, as far as I can imagine, would be infinite enchant scrolls from the library. However, I say let that be, as it would require truckload of grinding and patience to buy enough of them to encahnt all your gear beyond reason.

I always thought it's much better to squash all easy to exploit bugs than to try to stop hevay grind player - they will always find a way and many of these changes are just killing some fun for the majority, who will never grind or farm too much simply because it's boring.

If anyone was determined to follow Mellis by becoming the world's greatest trader, I say let them mine whole dungeon levels and sell the rocks and stuff to burn through hundreds of enchant scrolls chasing utter overpoweredness - they earn it if they can keep doing this for as long as it may take. It's already possible to enchant your gear to very high levels with a wand of cloning/mirroring, so adding more scrolls will not change this much, as they tend to work extremely rarely when you reach higher enchantments.

But if enchanting is still concern, items could be made to explode from overenchanting - until +9 you're safe, but then every successful enchanting may break or outright destroy the item. No, it does not prevent eternal grinding, because I hate preventing options. But it makes it much less worthwile.

It would be interesting if shopkeepers restocked their shops. Let's say that every day when you're not on the map/floor, all items in the shop are restocked (as when first generated) and the shopkeepers' gold restored.

Several prayers in quick succession could heavily drain your piety instead of being unsuccessful. So praying twice will help you, praying too often will result in you being smitten.

If we want worhshipping gods to be more dangerous/Fun, I think POWDER has an interesting system. In POWDER, all of the gods are watching you all the time and your piety is based on all your actions - but no two gods like the same thing. Thus, you will mostly have some gods to like you, some to hate you, and all can act on a whim to help or hinder you. It is even possible to get most gods to hate you, but that results in quick demise...

This could be adopted into IVAN by making your piety for all gods you know (so forgoing books of gods you don't want to worship may be beneficial) fluid based on your actions and their likeings and dislikeings. Then you could have both active effects (prayers) the player can try, but that may not work if you have angered the god by some forbidden action; and passive effects that the gods throw at you sometimes, whenever highly pleased or angered. Gifts, for example, could be moved to passive-only effects, so you won't be guaranteed to get any item or creature on a prayer, but rather have to sustain high piety for some time to increase your chances of getting one.

I was thinking SoGC-like effect, as this scroll is rather rare (in my experiences) yet with interesting effect. However, hardening existing golems sounds very nice!

I see two possible ways of making golem smithing special - either it's rather cheap prayer* that gives you temporary golem from selected item, giving you boost in the form of an ally for a short time at the cost of loosing the item; or its a more expensive prayer that let's you pick only items of Loricatus' materials and creates a permanent golem for you that can be hardened by subsequent Smith Golem prayers. New golem can only be created if the old one is destroyed and must be hardened again.

* Assuming prayers will have different piety/cooldown costs.

I think the gods should not get immediately angry should you pray very often. Rather, based on your Wis, relative alignment to that of the god and the time between prayers, you could lose some piety. Let’s say you pray several hours apart, have high Wis and matching alignment – you get the prayer effect and raise your piety. If you, however, spam several explosions of Legifer in a row to kill some badass monster, or if you’re only L while praying to him, you lose piety instead, but he will not become angry until you are in negative piety. That would allow you to use some of the tactical prayer effects more freely, making them more powerful/reliable, but still costly if you overuse them.

BTW, I'll add several prayer ideas I had:
* for Atavus, I was thinking:
** Greater Gift – gifts random powerful item, but only for a limited time (mirrored items); eg. may grant flaming valpurium sword, armor of great health +7, amulet of life saving etc.; never grants any item that may be used for permanent boost (no enchanting scrolls, ommel fluids or wands of cloning, but healing liquid, scrolls of teleport and attack wands are okay, because if you don’t use them quickly, they disappear)
** Lesser Gift – gifts random item, similarly as a result of polypile; mostly gets you junk, but this prayer could be cheap even when spammed and may give you bananas/carrots/wands etc.
* Dulcis is rather musical, so she could sing a lullaby to put nearby creatures to sleep, or maybe scream for sonic damage?
* entombing for Silva, as she already deals with earth - it could create solid rock walls on all free adjacent squares, basically giving the player a rest from any monsters (except those already next to him or ghosts), the downside being you have to dig yourself out (maybe earthquake yourself out if without pickaxe?)
* golem smithing (I'd say Loricatus, but might be Sophos as the god of knowledge, including the writing of shems)
* brown gas would be interesting as a prayer effect - Scabies could surround you in farts, so no monster will get to you
* life draining would be appropriate as Infuscor's prayer, plus it's interesting effect, leeching health from your enemies.

So...

Will there be new player ghosts with equipment and attributes matching the deceased character?



Would be great!

Would it be possible to add either a leather strap over the female character's breasts, or her nipples? Right now, it looks a bit wierd with her wearing panties but with nothing in the chest area.

Thanks for the config file workaround anyway. It was slightly annoying to play with the little window.

Kobold hunters! Give those cuddly little things some love!

But really, I like this idea.