The Tavern

You can consume a amnesia scroll or a spellbook to "forget how to forget" a currently memorized spell, binding it forever to yourself, thus increasing the spellpower of that spell.

This is a non-choice for the vast majority of spells a given character is going to use. Its just a guaranteed buff with absolutely no drawback.

Could it also increases the spell slots that the spell consumes? Or even the spell level?

Granted, I usually don't have amnesia scrolls coming out of my ears, but I usually have two or three that I'm not going to use at the end of the game and boosting the top spells would always be an easy choice as the OP lays it out.

I could consume the whole book, but a lot of books only have one good spell or one spell worth binding.

Simpler idea- Just have it give a piety boost ala having a weapon cursed. You can remove it by forgetting and then re-memorizing it, which is the same trade of consumable for resumed convenience as with a weapon.

And it's a caster buff, which is nice given that, IMO, Ash is worse for casters than primarily fighters early game, particularly pure casters.

That's really an odd position to me. If you're primarily a fighter, why not go okawaru? You're going to want to be upgrading your weapon through the early game unless you luck out a lot, so you won't have weapon boost. You'll gain armour boost as you find pieces, but okawaru just hands a bigger one within a floor of worshipping him. You don't really care about spell skills in the early game anyhow.

If you're looking for a primarily non-magic character, I can't imagine how you could justify Ash. Maybe if you're a mummy for clarity. Ash excels on hybrids and blasters. You get your sticky flame/summon ice beast/battlesphere online sooner. You get a decent weapon for when you need to kill things with a stick for bargain xp. You get defenses for free. And then when you find a good 1-h weapon around the 1-2 rune, you can switch to training it up with a boost that keeps you from having a big power downtime.

1. Some people don't powergame and also suck at using actives D: #BadPlayer

2. I like ash on really crappy spellcasters like Trolls that benefit from the skill boost. #TerriblePlayer

Ahhh... Well I certainly agree that a TrMo^Ash is easier than a TrCj^Ash.

So far as the powergaming goes, I think very few people always pick the optimal choice when it comes to god; sometimes I just want to run my OpTm^Gozag gosh darn it, and the fact it's suboptimal doesn't get in my way...

Also Ash users are not as dependent on finding their weapon type. As soon as you have skill boost online you get +4 or more in the weapon skill, and later on (typically on first lair levels) you can transfer knowledge out of an abandoned skil.

byrel: I also like Ashenzari on stabbing builds. Sure, you will pick up some spells. But knowing where monsters are is priceless. (This is probably also #BadPlayer but I never cared much about that.)