Update:
Celebestel II died as my second-best character so far. She had a whole bunch of elemental spells, meaning she could burn, zap, dissolve, or freeze her enemies (along with random items on the floor) at will - but most of the time she used pure magic in combat, Magic Missile or its successor Mana Bolt.
Her Robe of Permanence was a lovely find - it protects all her stats and gives her all the basic elemental resistances. With a bit more time/luck, she could have built on that and been safe from almost anything.
... but then she pushed open a door without using Detect to check for monsters behind it, and I saw:
> You hear an eerie roar.
> You are hit by something cold!
> You die.
It was a Death Drake, but I only know that from her tombstone: I never saw it. One breath of Nether, which Celebestel had never even seen anything that resisted it, and she was down from nearly full health to a pile of bones on the floor.
Oh well! That's Angband.
Her current successor is:
Lupa I - Kobold Ranger
I'm a bit torn on how to picture Lupa: she's a kobold, which are dog-like reptilian humanoids from D&D and its associates. They're the one player race which doesn't fit all that well into Middle-earth (well, other than Half-Trolls). Should I draw her as just a small goblin? As a canine creature? As a mini dragon? Still considering.
Lupa is a Ranger, which means she gets a boost to using her bow, plus some Nature spells. She's got a decent selection of arrows in her pack, and can shoot most things dead in one hit. She also has, between spells and rods, the ability to know everything that's going on around her.
What she
doesn't have is... almost everything else. She's on Level 20 of the dungeon and hasn't seen a single artefact. She doesn't have electricity resistance (though she is innately resistant to poison). She can't see invisible monsters. She has no resistance to fear, blindness, confusion... she's only found a single item which prevents paralysis! She's only met 9 unique monsters, and none of them are anything to write home about. (She has continued my trend of killing Wormtongue, though - he went down in 3 arrows.)
Right now she's at a level where she keeps running into ghosts, and can only fight back by using a potion or staff to see them. If she doesn't pick up some decent equipment soon, I don't think she'll make it down to level 30...
hS