I've been playing POWDER off and on for about 5 years now. I first learned about it in high school and loved in at first sight. I finally got my first successful game run today while playing a full H'RUTH build.

Starting off the game, I knew that a pure barbarian build was going to come with some major consequences. You know, like never casting spells ever. The first few floors were fairly easy, running around smashing things with a random mace I picked up in my
studded leather armor. No shoes, no helmet, no shield.

After several floors, I found a nice +1 round shield and a feathered helmet. Put on some cursed riding boots which quickly got un-cursed (Thanks Klaskov), and a couple of random rings. Eventually learned endure hunger through a level up and made the
hardest of decisions with my small barbarian brain.
1. Kill and eat everything I see.
2. Starve, but have Pax hate me less.
Choosing eternal starvation, I began to fix my reputation with Pax (which was about -60 at the time) I can't cast healing spells to make Pax like me, so I just ran around murdering undead. A LOT of undead.

Got my inventory full of random junk and read a scroll of identify, learning just how much stupid cursed things I was holding onto. Then grabbed my rings and set them to swap between regeneration, cold resistance, and shock resistance. Polymorphed my
books to get more physical skills and learned them, fully decking myself out with the greatest armor techniques mana potions can buy.

About floor 10, I found a nice artifact feathered helm of telepathy that made me also invisible. Klaskov had liked my random mace I started with, so it was a +5 by this point. Turns out it doesn't really matter what weapon you use if you just enhance it
enough...

Finally found some more artifacts and started equipping them. A shield with light radius 2, +1 chainmail of see invisible, a buckler of armor 3 and fast. Then I found it. A warhammer with acid resistance and extra fire damage. Putting on the speed
buckler and warhammer, I was able to run through practically everything, immune to almost all forms of damage by eating the corpses of fire dragons and ice or lightning dragons.

Many floors later, I started to run into end-game issues.Never having gotten past floor 13 before, the lower floors were scary. Having a health pool of over 300hp was great, but getting that health back took forever, even with a ring of regeneration.
Solution: take long naps.

I forged down the dungeon finding safe locations every floor to claim as my own. The problem of cockatrices was solved by repeatedly throwing spears at the problem with my superior speed and jump boots (which I had found). My greatest foe was the water
elemental. It was only after some trial and error that I found I had enough hp with my ring of regeneration to kill them. Jumping around and through them to avoid taking as much damage as I could while bashing them to oblivion. After they were dead, I
would run to a safe location and heal up to full before exploring more.

By this point, I had learned every single melee skill in the skill tree and still had points left over. Through the repeated eating of kobold mages, liches, and soul suckers, I had over 130 mp; not that I could use it. My max hp almost breaking 400, I
realized my largest problem was actually a lack of useful artifacts.

Unable to solve my problem at my current floor, I broke through the final 5 floors hoping to find some artifacts on the last floors. Quizar's floor pulled me through. I got an artifact ring granting poison and cold resistance. Forging my way down to
floor 25, I put some clogs of water walking on my feet and ran through the passages immune to practically all the damage.

Finally I reached floor 25. Exploring around, I killed and ate a few dragons, then ran across the lava to fight Baezl'bub. With 411hp, the fight was actually kinda anti-climactic. I just ran up to his face and smashed it in with the equivalent of a
regular +4 warhammer (Scrolls of enchant weapon are great). All his fiery doom got resisted and I bashed him to death slowly. Finally grabbing his black heart and feasting on his corpse, I rose back to the surface where I poured holy water upon his heart
to restore it to it's proper glory before finishing the game.

Final results, only Belweir and Tlosh hated me. I managed to get every other deity to like me and bless me, (which was really nice). The most annoying part of the entire game was trying to get infinite holy water, since XOM and Pax kept blessing my
regular water. I got around this by leaving a bottle of regular water at each of my safe stations on the lower floors.
I must say, I've really enjoyed playing POWDER, and now I get to do it again, this time with magic...

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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