Fountain

Fountains,, are a dungeon feature represented primarily by a {{blue| { }} (left curly bracket), but possibly by a (pilcrow) or a  (top half integral), depending on your operating system and options (see the note about symbol below). They are found randomly scattered through out the dungeon, usually in rooms that do not have any other dungeon feature (ie: chests, sinks) in them. You use a fountain by dipping items into it, and by quaffing its water.

Randomly generated fountains have a 1/7 (14%) chance of being magic, an attribute that cannot be determined prior to use.

Quaffing
You can drink from a fountain by quaffing its water while standing over it. Upon doing so you get a message indicating the results.

If the fountain is magic, and your Luck is non-negative:

Quaffing from a non-magic fountain, or magic with negative Luck:

Finally, the fountain has a 1/3 chance of drying up (except in Minetown, where you'll always get one warning)

Dipping
If you #dip a single ordinary long sword in a fountain, are at least experience level 5, and Excalibur doesn't already exist in your game, then there is a 1/6 chance of something special happening to your   long sword. If you are lawful, the long sword is converted into the blessed, rustless, uncorroded, damageproof Excalibur and you exercise your wisdom. If you are neutral or chaotic, your long sword is cursed, loses its rustproofing, may lose an enchantment, and you abuse your wisdom. The fountain then disappears; this will anger the Minetown Watch whether you've been warned or not, if that's where you happen to be.

In any other case, the dipping is handled normally. First, the object gets wet and does the appropriate things (scrolls and spellbooks blank, potions dilute, iron objects rust, lit objects go out, grease washes off). Then special effects can happen (only 50% chance if wetting object already caused an effect):

Finally, the fountain has a 1/3 chance of drying up (except in Minetown, where you'll always get one warning); 1/6 if wetting the object caused an effect.

Other fountain effects
Digging down in a fountain square may create a number of pools in your vicinity. (Never two orthogonally adjacent, never on your square, the more likely the closer to you.) The fountain may then dry up:
 * "Water gushes forth from the overflowing fountain!" (pool created)
 * "Water sprays all over you." (no pools created)

Gremlins may multiply in a fountain (you can use the #monster command to do so if you are polyselfed into one).

Fountain quaffing
Fountain quaffing is the specific practice of immediately quaffing from every fountain you find, in the hope of releasing a water demon and getting an early wish. In a lesser form, most inexperienced players will unintentionally engage in this behavior; this is unfortunate as most fountain quaffers die after a few hundred turns, but those with experience don't mind because they can just start again. This is a form of metagaming considered fairly low. It is the reason why water moccasins rank so highly on the list of top deaths on nethack.alt.org, and perhaps the explanation why quaffing from fountains in general is a leading cause of death there (along with deaths to Team Ant).

Symbol
The representation of a fountain as a pilcrow, "&para;", is probably not intentional. The top-half integral, "&#x2320;" (some fonts may not have this character), looks vaguely like a fountain and is probably what the DevTeam had in mind.

The problem is that PC character sets vary from one country to another. The symbol "&#x2320;" occurs at code point 0xF4 in the PC code page 437, which is used in the United States. Most of Europe, however, uses either code page 850 (Western Europe) or 852 (Eastern Europe using the Latin alphabet). Code page 850 has "&para;" at position 0xF4, and code page 852 has "&#x02D8;".

This script may provide a workaround for some Windows users. Call it, say, RUN-NH.BAT, drop it in the same directory as the NetHack.exe binary, and link the desktop icon to it:

chcp 437 NetHack