ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

One of the thing I like in roguelikes is that one has to adapt to events and change character build... Escorts is the only truly random way to get random, not item related nice stuff. Other than that the player knows for sure

a) He'll get 2 generics from the arena
b) He'll get locked harmony and stats\skill points after eating the Heart
c) He'll get fungus for killing Urkis while being antimagic
d) He'll get confusion res and mind save from halfling ruins... And so on

I find it rather boring. Roguelikes are about surprises!

What if rewards were randomized? Still thematically fitting but several different variants? Weighted as many other random things in TOME and possibly influenced by race\class of the character when applicable.

Problems:
1) Startscumming, for later quests it's not a large issue but for the arena it rather troubling. On other hand I am sure that many people restart if no luck with required escorts in first zones....
2) Balancing. It's hard to make rewards equally good, but is this needed? After all those are optional and game can be beaten without those

I think those quest rewards are ok as they are, but there's a point. I wouldn't mind seeing one extra escort option that could be totally random. Maybe give such option if you manage to save the escort totally unharmed.

I may be going to an extreme, but this seems a good place to provide input.

How much talk has there been of a class built around randomness? I know there've been Draconian (addons) and talk of "Demonspawn", from Crawl. That sort of concept (unconrtollable mutation/development) would make for an interesting class. I think balance was always the biggest concern, but I doubt it'd be impossible.

Unrelated: Having several sidequests give random rewards would be interesting, too.
Some ideas include an artifact from Talerion for a suitable gift, or perhaps a special reward from Protector Myssil for vanquishing a certain Necromancer from a racial starting dungeon?

A bit offtopicness too, but indeed I too have toyed with the idea of some mutation based class that could even alter their equipment slots by adding/removing random body parts among other random stuff.

I feel like ToME is more about taking a player-controlled character through a random adventure, and the player controlled stuff is not random while the environment and enemies are random.

A class which was specifically based on getting random stuff would be an interesting addition, and for that class getting random rewards might be a thing, but I wouldn't really want random rewards for normal characters... not by default anyway.