Wondering if anyone else experienced the same difficulty I'm experiencing right now.

Been playing on and off for many years now. I just got my first win a couple months ago (much thanks for the helpful advice from forum posters). My win came with a trollish monk, the first such combination I had ever played, infact the first monk I'd ever played past the very beginning stages of the game.

As I continue to play, I find that the difficulty of the game has increased exponentially... since my win I don't think I've had a single character make it to dwarftown! Part of this was general carelessness right after my victory (I've finally won now, I'm less motivated to play conservatively, so what if my character dies).
Part of it has been what seems to be consistently bad luck. Since my victory I've had more characters killed by ghuls than in my entire history of playing ADOM. I've always known to be careful around ghuls, I don't let myself get surrounded when there's one in a room, and I try to kill them with ranged attacks whenever possible, but since getting my first victory, every single ghul I've encountered in melee has been an instadeath. Just this morning I had an extremely promising dwarven wizard (started with Acid Bolt, Strength of Atlas, and Teleport, 23 learning, potion of wonder that yielded Petrification, got the waterproof blanket, stairs to UD right next to up stairs in the small cave, killed kranach, etc.) I cleared the keethrax dungeon down to level 6, just to get some extra exp before tackling the UD, only to be slaughtered from full health (about 70 hitpoints) by a single ghul who I'd run away from and was waiting by the stairs on level four of the Druid Dungeon.

I typically play my early game sort of aggressively, I aim to get the waterproof blanket, kill kranach and descend through the UD every time, but if any of those aren't in the cards I don't force the issue.
I played this same style before and up to my victory, and sure I lost a lot of characters in the early game, but I got to the point where at least half my characters made it to the pyramid...

Now I'm 50 characters down without even seeing Dwarftown... come to think of it, I think only one character has even made it to the CoC...

Wondering if anyone has experienced this same kind of post-victory suck-fest, or if its just me.