Artifact Ideas?

Back Room Game Design Discussion
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I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with crawl code a while ago, but didn’t feel like I understood the game itself well enough to make a good contribution. Since then I’ve played a lot, and have been thinking about artifacts recently, so here are some ideas I came up with. Let me know if there are any that would be worth my time to implement and make a pull request for.

scarf of visibility
contam
stealth -inf
+1 los
full los halo
evoke to mark self
thoughts: mark is risky but potentially extremely powerful in a good location. Other properties are a relatively minor mixed bag. Currently there are no scarf unrands in game so I feel like something should be done

lead ball
orb
+6 str
offhand punches do 2x damage
thoughts: basically a 2h weapon for unarmed; decent but probably worse than shield or 2h for other melee. Potentially good for VS/Ds that want a fast 1h and str for their innate auxs

100 pound ring
drain
non artifact weapons that do not have the heavy brand are treated as if they also have the heavy brand
thoughts: the restriction to non artifacts feels awkward, but it would probably break things without it. Needs drain to prevent swapping too often

+0 wind up arbalest
modified arbalest base type
base delay is 1.0 and not reduced by ranged weapons skill, but is affected normally by other factors
base damage is multiplied by delay
thoughts: good early game weapon for a lot of characters, good 0 skill ranged option for melee dex chars, potentially powerful build with heavy armor+tower shield. Might be too strong and tedious with melee dex because you want to swap when things get into melee, but being 2h may mitigate this. Hard to say how good it would be with heavy armor and tower shield, enchantment and base type may need tweaking

-1 slippers of reckless speed
speed
+blink
*tele
*shaft (duplicates explore shaft chance without the restriction to once per branch)
thoughts: sounds funny but probably not a good idea. If it were implemented it might need contam to prevent it being used only when you want *tele and *shaft.

+10 staff of fury
staff (5 dam, +5 acc, .6 min delay at skill 12)
contam
wiz
archmagi
int+10
str+10
casting spells has a 33% chance to berserk you (or heavily contaminates you if you’re immune)
thoughts: gives melee chars on demand berserk and occasional access to useful spells, at the cost of a bad base type and no swapping. A questionable option for casters wanting to transition to melee. Numbers probably need tweaking

Xom’s Dice
infinite charge misc evocable (to replace chesspiece)
every use guarantees 1d3 extremely good random effects
2-10% (based on evo) chance for 1d3 extremely bad random effects per use
(e.g. with 0 evo the second use has a 10% chance of bad effects, the third 20%, fourth 30%, etc.)
thoughts: seems more interesting than xom’s chesspiece to me. based on risky dice from hxh

2 Thanks
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Probably better on an orb (since light already exists). Mark is probably too abusive though

No point restricting it for already heavy weapons. +160% dmg / +100% delay seems fine enough. Bigger problem, IMO is that it doesn’t feel different from heavy, because it is just heavy.

First off there are species that can’t go berserk.
Second off there already exists orb of wrath, as well as many *Rage unrands. So there isn’t a ton of design space that isn’t already covered by those items. E.g. bear spirit can also be good for casters wanting to melee sometimes.

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staff of summoning should be reincarnated as an unrand

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hmm. those feel really unbalanced to me. huge buffs combined with huge drawbacks may lead into something that can be broken or tedious. maybe try to think something that doesn’t change that much the gameplay, something that’s not so overpowered that needs to be insta-nerfed with *corrode, *drain, ecc
Thinking of new unrands is fun, but balancing is the hardest part by far :woozy_face:

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An evokable self shaft could be really funny. There are times where I’d rather take my chances with some monsters a floor down instead of nearby

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How about an artifact potion that let’s you (temporarily) mutate into another species? So you could mutate into a Formicid and shaft yourself :slight_smile:
(A single-use artifact would probably be bad, so maybe something else than a potion.)

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That is a neat idea! But I agree, if its a single use unique effect it should probably be bigger impact, like the amulet of dreams. Transmutation potions themed around different species could be a novel concept worth exploring though!

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We already have one for tree form, of course. I’d love to see potions added for fungus form and/or wisp form, though.

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I was thinking like djinni form, maybe giving you expected resists and traits as well as a random spell at a suitable level as an ability (spellpower determined by fighting or level, whatever works best). Stuff like that

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The only one of these I find exciting is the reckless slippers, and those only if you remove the *contam.

*shaft is bad enough of a downside that it’s entirely fair not to want to wear the item all the time, and footwear already can’t be swapped mid-combat. I’d never wear them if they had *contam, but I’d probably wear them for lols if they didn’t.

I like the idea of a scarf of visibility, and also the idea of self-marking, but I don’t think the combination works very well. Self-marking is very powerful, and should perhaps be the core of an artifact’s identity.

Another scarf artefact idea:
Scarf of Wucard Mu
spirit shield, archmagi, -?AC
The idea is that it’s good for mages who are confident they won’t get hit, or already have spiritshield, or characters who want spiritshield and also occasionally cast spells.

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+12 Dragonbone Bow {cumbersome}
A longbow with 30 base damage and .6 mindelay, which encumbers you as if you were wearing ER 20 body Armour.

The goal is to make a ranged weapon which is particularly appealing to high strength characters. At mindelay, it is roughly equal damage/aut to a +9 Heavy Longbow at 15 Armour, 22 Strength, with the Dragonbone Bow winning out at higher strength or Armour skill.

The numbers may be a little stupid right now.

3 Thanks
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+7 Golubria’s Slingshot {portal, cascade}
A sling with automatic portal projectile (uses 1 MP per shot and becomes inert if the wielder runs out of MP)

Unique mechanic: Cascade
On a successful hit there’s a percentage chance the sling bullet jumps to and hits another random enemy in LOS. I’m not sure what the percentage would need to be or whether it needs to go down with each successful hit, but the idea would be you often get 2-3 hits on a shot and sometimes 5+, including multiple hits on the same enemy though never consecutively.

It would be an early spawning unrand since a sling won’t stay useful for very long, flavored as an invention of the young Golubria that they used to break all the windows in their neighbor’s house with one shot. It would be really satisfying to decimate Robin’s pack of goblins with…

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+1 Hat of Revolution {Contam, Mutate, will+}
A play on words on Evolution, this hat would give essentially both evolve and devolve at the same time. After a set amount of exp, give the player both a random positive and negative transient mutation.

The mutations could last either to or 1.5 length of the *Mutate timer to create the feeling of constantly wildly evolving and would scratch a bit of that mutation roulette itch while remaining pretty mild.

(I was also considering this idea instead as a rework on Piece from Xom’s chessboard where it would be a (3/3) evocable that gave this effect with maybe other benefits.)

1 Thank