There are three main ways to get a wish in ADOM. You can drink from a pool, but there is only a small chance of getting a wish this way, and drinking from pools has possible bad effects, such as unnatural aging. Rubbing a blessed ring of djinni summoning will release a djinni who will grant you a wish. Zapping a wand of wishing also grants a wish; wands of wishing cannot be recharged, but they can have the last charge wrested from them. Rings of djinni summoning often look like ordinary rings, and wands of wishing often (maybe always) look like glowing wands. There is also the spell of Wish (Divine Intervention for clerics), but it is so difficult to cast that practically no-one manages it.

You cannot wish for artifacts, but you can wish for any non-artifact item you like. You have to be reasonably generic when wishing for items. For example, you cannot wish for "20 blessed long swords (+8, 1d8+15)". You would have to wish for "long swords", or better yet, "eternium long swords" or "swords of sharpness". Similarly, you can wish for ordinary monsters, but attempting to wish for a unique monster will either fail or give an amusing result. All attempts to wish for more wishes will also fail.

It's always a good idea to wish for items in the plural. However, there are a few items (including the popular wishes amulet of life saving, girdle of giant strength and potion of gain attributes) where you will only get one even if you wish for more. Also, you can only get two stat-increasing potions from one wish.

All skills can be wished for except for Alertness, which increases Perception, and Healing, which fully heals you. You can also acquire random skills by wishing for scrolls or potions of education.

You can wish for any stat to increase it, although Appearance must be wished for as "beauty" and Perception as "alertness". Wishing for "learning" gives two potions of learning, while wishing for "knowledge" increases learning directly. If you want to increase your Learning, it's usually best to wish for crystals of knowledge. You get three from one wish, and each blessed crystal gives you 1-2 points of Learning (up to a maximum of about 27). So the crystals will give you an average of 5 points, and the potions only 4.

Here are some good things to wish for:

  • Amulet of life saving - Don't wear this yourself! It is for Khelavaster, the dying sage. He'll give you an excellent reward for it, including six blessed scrolls of chaos resistance.
  • Scrolls of chaos resistance - You'll get more by saving Khelavaster's life than by wishing for them, but if you didn't get the wish until after you'd allowed him to die, you may need them.
  • Pairs of seven league boots - Blessed ones speed up movement tremendously, especially in the wilderness.
  • Girdle of giant strength - Increases your strength by 12 while wearing it, which helps with both combat and carrying capacity.

If your weapons and armour aren't good enough, you can improve them through wishing. Good weapons to wish for are swords of sharpness, maces of destruction, phase daggers, and pretty much any eternium weapon. Good pieces of armour are eternium tower shields, eternium plate mails, and dragon scale mails (which render you immune to one elemental attack). Rings of elemental mastery will protect you from fire and cold, and rings of ice protect your equipment in the Tower of Eternal Flames. Rings or cloaks of invisibility can also come in handy. A potion of gain attributes will increase all your stats by one if blessed. Wishing for gold gives you about 43000 gold pieces (depending on your level). You can wish for any spellbook you like - wishing for "spellbooks" gives several random spellbooks.

When facing Andor Drakon or anyone else that you don't want to get hit by, speed is an excellent wish. It gives you a boost of about 200 which wears off at one point per turn.

If you need to gain experience levels in a hurry, one dangerous way to do it is to wish for the Emperor Moloch. This will summon about 20 hostile greater molochs.

Some unusual wishes give amusing but totally useless results. For example, wishing for immortality gives the message "Funny, very funny" and wishing for Thomas Biskup gives "Thou shalt not mock the Creator!".

Some of the information in this writeup was derived from the Wishing section of Andy Williams' ADOM Guidebook, at http://www.andywlms.com/adom/adomgb-app-M.html .