ToME WikiElvishPillager: Hello, I'm a generally crazy guy who plays roguelikes occasionally.
I'm happy because I just won my first roguelike game ever yesterday. (I would have put this in the DitL archive, but he is not alive anymore, so... hmm...) Unfortunately it was not without a bit of cheating - motivated by my last character having been killed by Hill Trolls (which he could have easily defeated) when his 4 key stuck down, I backed up all my savefiles, which tempted me to cheat death a few times. Oh well.
Yup, it looks like I'm just going to go on and on about this character. I was planning to talk a *little* more about anything else, but...
He was a Human Hermit Necromancer, but really a cross between a Necromancer and a Thaumaturgist; he put all his skill points into Necromancy, Thaumaturgy, Magic, Monster-lore, and Corpse Preservation, so he had no utility spells like trap detection. What's more, in Undead Form, although you seem to take less than usual damage from enemy monsters, traps can kill in one hit. Ouch. (That was one of my death cheats...)
At level 2, he (I'll use "he"; he started masculine (random pick) and ended masculine (trap of masculinity) even if he went through all the genders several times in the middle) got a Thaumaturgy shards view spell (1d8, 4 mana) that was extremely useful through the whole early game. Up until the late game, I had a macro for a view spell instead of the usual mage's magic missile. The cool thing is that it also kills any invisible monsters.
Around level 15, I got an awesome Wall Destruction spell, and ever since then, I had no respect for the walls of Mordor or Angband. It will take quite some getting used to, playing a normal character after this. :P Speaking of not being a normal character, he was seven feet, five inches tall at the end of the game, and around level 45, he started using demon hordes as his main offensive tactic.
You see, he worshipped Melkor, and he intentionally took damage while praying to make Melkor summon demons. He took all the Horned Reapers he could get as companions, and let the Horned Reapers summon more demons to deal with any problems. Before long, he had a regular demon army, although he was at great risk if he ever tried any view spells after that. 
This collapsed when he got to around dlvl 75, where his minions started summoning Pit Fiends. The Pit Fiends cast chaos balls and polymorphed the Horned Reapers. (this seems like a bug - btw, I was playing under 2.3.1) So he couldn't use Horned Reapers any more; he switched over to all Pit Fiends, but the Pit Fiends summon Ancient Dragons as much as demons. What's more, the Ancient Dragons' powerful breath weapons quickly killed the Pit Fiends due to splash damage. So I was forced to switch to Ancient Dragons.
Mind you, seven Great Wyrms of Power is a pretty good set of companions. They can summon other Ancient Dragons almost as effectivly as Demons summon each other. After that, I never had trouble with anything except enemy demon armies on deep dlvls. (Morgoth was easy, but he summoned a couple Major Demons, which I almost lost against...) The most difficult encounter in the game was the Corridor of Death in Mount Doom. I was forced to use a thaumaturgy Destruction spell to remove the enemies from well down the corridor, removing a bunch of pets in the process.
After destroying the One Ring, I began to worship Tulkas for the +3 CON. I got my initial 20000 piety by killing my own demons with a pure light beam. It didn't anger them! After that, I always used the light beam to pick off enemies... It hurt pets, but they never got angry.
I renamed my Mana Area spell "Sort Treasure". It's good for picking out artifacts, even if you do have auto-id. I had auto-id for much of the game from the Gothmog set; On one especially small arena level, I found all three Gothmog demonbooks. I got a couple points of symbiosis from FF quests, and took on a Master Quylthulg symbiote (Some dragons are good at summoning things...)
The battle with Sauron was laughable. My dragons simply breathed all kinds of elements at him until he bled to death due to shards damage. (I had previously gotten the One Ring off of Feagwath.) Morgoth was a lot more interesting. It took me a lon g time to find him and... my pets breathed all kinds of elements at him and he didn't die, because he had loads more HP and resistances. So I walked up to him and cast Vampirism over and over again... he died. But there were a couple of Greater Balrogs left, so I dismissed my remaining pets (not including companions) and invoked my most powerful area spell over and over until they all died. Uh, in hindsight, the battle was not very interesting at all.
At end-game I had all my stats maxed (all but DEX were maxed even without the Massive Iron Crown, which I was stuck with due to a Trap of Silent Switching - those things are crazy!) and all the resistances, three immunities, and almost every other flag I could possibly want (no auto-id or precog though.) It was actually rather disappointing. I also didn't have the Golden Horn of the Thunderlords because it was wasted by a Trap of Wasting Wands.
Uh, yeah. I also didn't go into the Void because it's completely ridiculous, and also none of the Ultimate items would have been much good for my character.
ReenenLaurie: I can imagine that there'll be a lot of people who'd really frown on your character's tactics (read Spoilers/Lord Dimwit's Advanced Strategy Guide, especially 10.3 Player Ethics) but I believe if you had fun, then it's great. So as long as you had fun, which apparently you did, great stuff!
(Did you get all your pets to drop their items? You can get some pretty cool drops that way.)
ElvishPillager: Yeah, this character did not exactly scorn to use abusive tactics; he even used area spells through walls. (but ONLY on permanent walls, because they annoyed him so much.) My new character is much less abusive - and I'm DitL'ing him too.
I certainly had fun, but I didn't do the drop trick. There's enough random junk around the dungeon without it, haha. On the other hand, I did scum Dark Elf Warlock corpses for stat potions and other corpses for good egos (i.e. Lich).