More than places visited and quests done, the important stuff is equipment and attributes, including PV/DV and HP/PP.
Graveyard is comfortable with 20 PV and around the same amount of DV on normal-aggressive tactical setting.
This gives you enough resistance to drain attacks by the undead.
Nonnak shouldn't be approached without double cold resistance or immunity (which is guaranteed) and this usually means Pyramid first, Griffyard second.
Pyramid with 15+ PV, decent melee weapon, ~80-100 HP and some undead slayers is relatively comfortable, especially with means of trap detection but the top room can be occasionally nasty.
Here's where the wand of fireballs is your friend.
This brings us to another conclusion - do the dwarven quests first and get the rewards.
It's better to wait with arena championship until Thrundarr actually asks you to become a champion.
Kill two birds with one stone.
Using gold for precrown is a poor choice. You're better off digging 2-3 tunnels on a level with an altar and use live-sac exclusively to get a precrown.
Gold at this stage of the game is more difficult to get in large quantities and it's more quickly spent on stuff in shops that might still be better than whatever you've found so far.
Later on, when you slay your first batch of ancient dragons, there will be more gold than is necessary.
Stay away from bug temple, it's a deadly place even for late game characters.
Use herbs and get those stats to their potentials asap. The benefits are immediately tangible.
At the early stage of the game, PV matters most. Later on DV becomes more important as more monsters tend to ignore pv or hit really hard.
Good melee attack is important early too, but is usually harder to get than armor.
So make sure you know how missiles work, they are great life savers early on.
Source of light is unnecessary but is *very* useful in DD and recommended especially for chars with small damage output - once critically or severely wounded, the druid will most likely panic and run.
Good luck finding him in the dark and not bumping into any cats.
"Hell is empty and all the devils are here."