The Tavern

How come gargoyles can go berserk while ghouls cannot? Both races are nonliving, nonbreathing and bloodless. Yet gargoyles can whip their nonexistant blood into a frenzy. Clearly gargoyles should be blocked from going berserk.

I'd support it. A slight nerf to gargoyles, but they can probably afford it. Maybe move this to GDD?

Yeah, but Gargoyles are more sentient and capable of thinking, whereas ghouls, at first thought, really don't seem to be like that. I would agree with you otherwise.

Crawl's undead explicitly have human or near-human intelligence.

I always had the impression that the "blood" stuff in berserk flavor text was metaphoric, and that undead couldn't berserk because reasons. Literal blood, that makes more sense as for undead, esp. vampires.

I'm also pretty positive that berserk should work like other god powers and bypass race limitation. Why is one if not the last god power which doesn't work with some races (undead, Fo)?

If having two item work differently from a god power is bad, they could be differentiate more (such as Lucy's blink is different from blink spell), or just remove - although !rage is a most interesting item for me.

Gargoyles could stand a nerf, I remember bringing this up in a series of inconsistencies between Goyles and other races (and monster goyles, but monster to PC conversion is so inconsistent it has to be chalked up to balancing).

Gargoyles are a mess, just like all the other new species. In trunk, originally they had a different name (but what? I don't remember), then they were renamed and redesigned, then they were redesigned again. I played a gargoyle who had no bonus AC but had some self-petrification gimmick or what.

Gargoyles seem to me a very noob friendly race. I am not sure this change would make them more fun.

alternatively, you could let ghouls berserk

There were originally called grotesks, although I may be off on the spelling somewhat. Also they started with +2 unarmed aptitudes, which is basically my white whale of crawl races and will probably never ever happen. It got nerfed to +1 pretty quick, before finally going down to 0 where it is now.

Can we get rid of the Transmutations limits for Gr, Gh, & Mu while we're at it?

The game needs more options, clearly.

Gargoyles are obscenely strong in so many respects - taking away their ability to rage wouldn't even come close to balance all their great perks. I would not be opposed.