I've recently decided to try a challenge that I'm dubbing the frugal wizard: essentially, I'm playing a wizard who will only use his starting gear, plus guaranteed items (eg. quest rewards, fixed drops/items such as the black torc, large rations of Munxip and food from ratling trades), and herbs. I don't plan on taking any books from the library, except possibly the weird tome depending on my corruption situation.

The current incarnation is a Raven-born dwarven wizard. Starting stats were not as good as I would have liked, but workable: 15 St, 17 Le, 14 To, 15 Ma. Starting gear was similarly mediocre, and my spells are pretty terrible: quarterstaff, [2,1] robe, Magic Missile, Summon Monsters, Wand of cold and wand of ball lightning, some useless scrolls, a pot of water and an uncursed PoGA.

My starting strategy was to grab some food, get the waterproof blanket, then kill the raider lord. Using the money from that, I bought some keys, more food, then trekked over to bugcave. Levelled to 9 (didn't want to go higher because I can't risk bookcasting there), then dived into the CoC to the arena where I bought some more food. Found stable herbs for spenseweed, pepper, stoma, curaria on D6, and found morgia/pepper in Big Room (there may be more there; haven't explored the whole level yet). Scummed herbs for a bit, then got the Si and visited Dwarftown. Asked to kill a large kobold. At some point around this time my quarterstaff was destroyed, so I've been fighting unarmed. This, surprisingly, hasn't been as much of a problem as I expected it to be, most mobs I can safely kill on berserk, and my PV is respectable thanks to morgia buffed To and Mithril Skin. Tragedy struck when my book of magic missile was destroyed by a random trap, but I was able to kill the black druid to get a book of frost bolt, and the black torc.

My problem now is that I'm not sure what to do next. I'm level 12 right now, so the pyramid will be open to me soon, but I'm not sure if I can clear it without the wand of fireballs (although I'm looking forward to getting a pickaxe to fight with), but the prospect of doing the animated forest/DH without invis or darkness and with only 21/13 on coward is pretty daunting. I haven't used my big ID from Thundarr yet, so I'm considering getting a few hundred pots of booze from beggars and trading them with Yggaz for hopefully some pots of invis, but I feel using Yggaz is pretty scummy for this challenge and I'd rather avoid it. Prospects for the griffyard look a little better. I can hopefully make pots of blindness from alchemy with booze and one of the herbs I have available, which should deal with the necromancer (a large heap of spenseweed probably won't hurt here either). I may want to risk wearing the black torc for the extra speed and cold resistance, although I'm not sure if being cursed is worth that, especially since I need to use piety to uncurse items. I'm also not sure if I want to use one of the only two holy waters I'll ever get on Griff's grave.