The Tavern

Greetings, my fellow crawlers!
Since long ago I had an idea of playing gnoll for all runes run while trying to achieve 27 in all skills. After googling around, I found that it is indeed possible, yet I saw no guide tackling this kind of game. I always play from specialization, not generalisation, so I am at total loss. What background should I pick? How should I level my stats? What god should I follow? Thanks in advance, any bit of advice will help!

I'm actually in the middle of a challenge just like this. The tavern thread is here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26590&p=341092&hilit=+gnoll#p341092
I haven't played this character in quite a while, but I intend to pick it up again when I feel like it.

As for the background, I would go for pure-strength or pure-int. Pure-strength GnFi^Gozag is very good as far as I can tell, though I don't know whether it'd fall of in extended (I would switch to Zin), and it might be that I was lucky with shops. (I got a vamp Broad axe and the shield of the gong and the scales of the dragon king on my GnFi^Gozag.)

Pure-int, I'm taking a Gnoll Reaver^Vehm into extended. Reaver is a bcrawl-exclusive background, but any mage background should work fine. If you're ok with dying in Lair if you're unlucky with spellbooks, wizard is a good pick. Vehm is more reliable than Ash but a bit weaker imo.

I think I'll go Wizard and focus Int, spells are a must in the late game, one way or another. Now what about gods? Vehm is kind of good for your typical caster, but he lags behind in the extended. What are other options? I see that some people in your thread have suggested Makhleb - is hp for kills really that strong for everyone?

*shrug* If you can bring a Gnoll to 15 runes, you can surely keep it alive a while longer for the full skills. To me it seems mostly like an exercise in patience.

That being said, Wizard is the most popular background for.a good reason, the early Spellcasting boost goes a long way towards easing the middlegame. In terms of gods, I would recommend Zin because you will spend a lot of time in Pan and weariness might get you into some sticky situations where you will be grateful for Zin bailouts. Gozag, Vehumet, TSO, Sif, Chei, etc. would also work.

Wizard is the most popular background? Is this a joke?


What?

Anyway, my point is that background does not matter. This gnoll will be very different in the middle game and in the late game.

For reference, here is one of my tries where I started as a berserker and in the end I used all the level 9 spells:
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Magip ... 114246.txt