Hey Narf, does your roguelike have magic yet? I've become rather enamored of the runecraft system in the Nintendo DS RPG/RTS hybrid "Lost Magic"... it's quite original in that you draw runes on the screen to cast spells, and after a certain point in the game you can combine multiple runes to cast more powerful spells. Obviously you can't draw on the screen in a PC roguelike, but I thought the combining runes system would be really cool... ToME (Tales/Troubles of Middle Earth;
http://www.t-o-m-e.net) uses a similar system for one of its mage classes, and if you're interested you could use it in your roguelike too!
In fact the idea got me so excited I was thinking of starting work on yet another roguelike project that will probably fail - why I never pick up work on the existing ones I've started I don't know, but it might be fun
The idea so far is that you could have a variety of runes which your character can learn, and spells are cast not from a list but by typing the rune keys - keys on the numpad, or letter keys, or whatever - I kinda like the numpad because you can have "opposed" runes (fire and water for instance) located opposite each other and some sort of "neutral" Balance or Cosmos rune in the middle. Anyway, so you type the "cast a spell" command (say "m", like in Angband), then you type 2 runes, and after you type the second rune you can target the spell. If you combine fire and fire you might get a big fireball, for instance; air and water for maybe a freeze spell; light and air for a haste spell. The more runes your character learns, the more spells he can cast - a starting character choosing the fire-mage template might only be able to cast a fireball, but once he learns a second rune (say, earth) he could now cast four spells: fireball (fire/fire), stoneskin (earth/earth), magma bolt (fire/earth), and earthquake (earth/fire)!
So if you had nine runes (say fire, water, earth, air, cosmos, chaos, light, dark, and balance) you could have 81 spells in your game. That might sound like a lot of spells to come up with, but Lost Magic has something like 400 spells and 18 runes, and to come up with those spells they used patterns - all the fire+X spells are beam attacks, all the water+X spells are rapid-fire attacks, all the dark+X spells are monster traps, etc.
Of course if you don't like this idea, don't use it, but I thought I'd just bring it to your attention!