My first Ghoul, and my first Hunter.
Having never played a character with ranged weapon damage as the primary source of damage, I opted to play this as an unarmed melee fighter. The throwing skill and the starting javelins were immensely handy in the first few leves to take out baddies at range. I was also very lucky in finding the Okawaru altar on D:1.
Similarly, having never played a ghoul before, I was terrified of what the food micromanagement would be like (seriously, I was reaaaaaaly bummed this combo was picked). Well, it turned out it wasn't bad at all. If you just chop and eat what you kill, you will be just fine with ghouls. Waiting until chunks rot apparently increases their utility, which was the only thing that made the food micromanagement somewhat annoying. Basically I would often chop up a corpse, and need to sit around waiting for the chunks to rot to eat them.
Once Okawaru's heroism was online, this game became a breeze. Though the unarmed damage was relatively impotent all game, it was enough to do the job. The lair runes fell easily, but I was also very reluctant to try Vault:$ due to the recent changes I've been hearing about. I ended up braving it, and got exteremely lucky in that there was no Warden in the entry party, so I was able to stairdance my way to the silver rune.
Slimy and Abyss runes were pretty easy to come by, I had nowhere near the fun MrPlanck did in his quest for the Abyssal rune.
With all these runes flowing, I thought I'd take on the Tomb, and that was also quite easy. This is the first character I've played seriously that had torment immunity, and it sure makes the Tomb a different place. Now, with six runes, I figured I'd take a stab at the post-endgame game (or whatever it's called). I tried Antaeus first, and he had a great mace of distortion. With my measly UC damage, I was not able to scratch him, and with his distortion weapon, he kept teleporting me away, or abyssing me before I could do enough damage, so I ended up taking the rune without killing him.
Next was Dispater, and I burned nearly all my goodies getting him dead, which let me know that I was not going to be able to do enough damage to the demon lords, and would need to ninja everything. This seemed like too much work for me, so I decided to cash in my 8 runes and go home. Zot:5 was the easiest it's ever been for me. I got lucky on spawns, and pretty much waltzed in and took my orb. Being able to heal between fights by eating those 8 chunks of storm dragon flesh really puts a dent in your downtime.
Ghoul was fun, this CDSC challenge is a breath of fresh air.
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/moose/morgu ... 061546.txt