'Leave me alone, stupid Great Wyrm of Power' Let's Play ToME!

Back during Stiv's LP of Angband there was a variant which we were shown a little of by VorpalEdge, named ToME. Now, ToME is easily my favorite rogue-like. I enjoy most of the races which play very differently due to their skill aptitudes, I enjoy many of the classes, but most of all I love the various little dungeons secreted around the world. I love them even though I have never seen most of them.

Let's get this clear right of the bat - I am no rogue-like champ. I will be dieing. A lot. I will also be using JTomeSpoiler so as to not be completely helpless, but believe me I don't know even close to everything about this game. I know very, very little.



So what I'm going to have everyone do is post two character types they would like me to play. I will go through the list according to who posted first, doing one character from each person and then cycling back through. When one of your characters makes it's inevitable demise, you may post a new character which will be added to the list under your name. "But Nodal", I hear you say through your computer, "What kind of options do we have?" Well, without further ado, here they are including some different options we can play with.

First up we have races.

These include your standard fantasy fare, along with Tolkien-specific races such as Thunderlords. They each have various minor special abilities which I will go into as they are selected, and they also contain skill modifiers. Skill modifiers make it cost either more or less skill points in order to raise specific skills upon level up. Skills will be covered in depth later on. Note: I will not be playing a Deathmold for at least a great while. Don't bother wasting your vote on it.


Next we have the various classes. Each class contains various sub-classes as well. Some classes provide various intrinsic bonuses. They also provide skill modifiers, change starting equipment, and for a few, require certain gods. The skill modifier system can lead to a few quirks. For example it is more skill efficient to create a Swordmaster and then put points into Unbelief than it is to create an unbeliever and put points into swords.



Warrior - Standard class. Jack of all trades when it comes to weapons, which is a good way to get yourself killed.

Swordmaster - Specializes in swords. Reasonable due to a great many weapons that drop being swords, and to fulfill your standard fantasy cliches. Also contains Darkswords, the weapon of the Unbeliever. These contain a field of antimagic which prevents monsters from casting around you a percentage of the time, but also prevents you from casting spells in any way other than a potion or scroll. Later on they can also detect and then destroy traps.

Axemaster - Specializes in Axes. I've never really used one of these.

Haftedmaster - Now were talking. Haftedmaster's bring down the hammertime. They tend to be hard-hitting, and they also contain a skill named Stunning Blows which can stun monsters when you score a critical strike using a heavy weapon.

Polearmmaster - Uses weapons like spears. I don't use these much either.

Unbeliever - Starts with a darksword, which is the only reason you would ever start with one of these instead of a Swordmaster. Even then, I wouldn't recommend it, but it's you guy's call.

Demonologist - A swordmaster with a demonblade. These guys tend to either run towards a swordmaster who hits hard and has a weak but long-lasting AoE, or a swordmaster who summons demons to fight with him.

Phew, that was a mouthful. The next group of sub-classes belongs to the Archer.


Archer - Uses ranged weapons to pew pew. Can create all kinds of specialized ammo out of various junk in order to cause different effects. Kind of like a mage who has to create their own spells and only has a limited amount(oh god FFVIII)

Ranger - Uses ranged weapons like an archer, however also has a couple of magic skills to rely on as well. Can train in Conveyance, Divination, and Nature.



The Rogue sub-classes rely on small swords and Sneakiness in order to kill monsters in the dungeon. They also have a few magic skills as well.

Rogue - Rogues have the Sneakiness tree, which consists of sneaking around sleeping monsters, back-stabbing them, dodging hits, stealing from monsters, and a little bit of added Speed. They also gain the Critical Hits Sword sub-skill which allows them to deal extra damage when using lightweight swords. Finally they have a reasonable modifier in the Conveyance, Divination, and Temporal spell trees.

Assassins - Assassins are Rogues with extra bonuses in Stealth, Backstab, and Dodging, at the cost of extremely weak modifiers in the three spell schools.



Here we have our spell-slinging classes.

Mage - Mages are middle-of-the-road. They have good modifiers in every basic spell school, and reasonable ones in Necromancy, Runecraft, and Thaumaturgy.

Geomancer - Geomancers have exactly what you would expect. More power in Geomancy and the sub-skills Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water at the cost of modifiers in Heart. Er...I mean the other spell schools.

Warper - These screw with space and time, and have high modifiers in Conveyance, Divination, and Temporal.

Sorcerer - My favorite glass cannon. Sorcerers have a high modifier in the Sorcery skill, which is interesting. Sorcery skill acts as 1 in all 11 of the primary magic skills. However, it removes 1% of your health for each point. At level 50 Sorcery you will be a spell-casting powerhouse, but a single sneeze will send you reeling.

Necromancer - Necromancers earn all of the horrifying spells, and also learn to create undead minions from corpses left by enemies. This is helped by a high skill modifier in the corpse-preservation skill, which makes more monsters drop corpses when they die.

Runecrafter - Runecraft is another interesting skill. You gain various Runes, and by using them in various combinations and assigning a mana amount to them, you basically create your own spells. A neat trick.

Thaumaturgist - Basically, thaumaturgists are luck mages. When you level Thaumaturgy you gain spells that can be cast without the need for spell books. However these spells unlike others do not level up and gain damage and additional effects based on your thaumaturgy skill and spell-power.

Alchemist - Widely considered the most broken class, this class makes it's own potions, and later on, it's own artifacts. I've never played one.



For all you theists out there, here are the deity classes.

Priest(Eru or Manwe) - These are basic spell-priests. They will mostly use their divinely-granted spells and abilities in order to vanquish their foes. The difference between these two is choice of god.

Druid - A priest of Yavanna, basically. However they also gain great bonuses in Monster Lore, and a good one in Summoning.

Dark-Priest - A Priest of Melkor...also known as Morgoth and the final boss of the frigging game. Proficient in Necromancy as well as prayer. Worshiping Melkor also unlocks the Udun magic school, full of powerful evil effects.

Paladin - This is really closer to a Monk, actually. They get a great Barehand combat modifier, and combining that with the mindcrafting that is a part of Spirituality and your prayers makes this a powerful build. They worship Tulkas, god of smack-down.

Mindcrafter - Not really much of a priest, actually. Uses Mindcrafting which is a bookless skill that uses Mana. They also have a good Prayer skill which they can apply to any god they wish.



Last but not least (well maybe least) are the Loremaster sub-classes. These are all of the classes that make full use of some of the weird monster lore skills that are mostly only used as a side-note in other classes.

Loremaster - These are the jack of all trades of these classes. Mediocre modifiers in Summoning, Possession, Symbiosis, and Mimicry with a slightly better corpse-preservation skill and a good Monster-lore skill.

Possessor - These ditch the other three skills in order to have a good modifier in Possession. Possessing is taking on the form of a monster after they leave their corpse. You generally get a large hp boost, and you also gain access to all the monsters skills.

Mimic - Using special cloaks made from monster's corpses a mimic can change into the monster and gain its intrinsics. They also get a nice barehanded skill in order to fight as a monster.

Symbiant - Symbiants are able to transform non-moving monsters such as eyes and mushrooms into a wearable item. The item grants abilities such as attacks or extra damage reduction depending on the monster transformed. Nice for a sub skill, but I can't imagine winning with a class based on it.

Summoner - Summoners create totems from the dead bodies of enemies in order to summon them to the dungeon to attack. This can result in either a partial summon, which constantly uses a summoner's mana, or a true summon, which could destroy the totem and are also sometimes disloyal, but do not constantly require mana.

Monk - Monks again remind me a lot of Paladins. Prayer is pretty much essential in order to have some survivability due to not being able to wear armor.

Bard - Bard's play songs which continuously drain mana. They also make fairly good barehanded fighters, and have minor skill in Summoning, Symbiosis, and Mimicry.

Thank god that's over. There are a lot of classes in this game, as you can see. Now you can also choose a god, except for the classes where a god is chosen for you.



No God - I have no idea why you would ever pick this. Tulkas in particular has absolutely zero detriments after being chosen.

Eru Illuvatar - The creator of the world and father of the Valar. He boosts your wisdom and mana based on your piety, and while praying will sometimes cause evil creatures to miss, and will sometimes resurrect you when you die (worthless since you can't rely on it). He gives you access to his Eru spells, and also when your prayer is high enough, Divination spells. He is also easy to gain piety for since it increases any time you're not praying and are not resting. However you can only wield blunt or blessed weapons without them being weakened, and he doesn't like when you kill good monsters.

Manwe Sulimo - He grants a speed boost based on piety, and eventually levitation. When praying he grants eventually extra speed, free action, and flight. He gives his own Manwe spells, as well as access to Air, Conveyance, and Meta. His detriments are loss of piety at all times regardless of praying, although you lose more if you are praying and less if you're a type of Elf. You also lose piety from killing good creatures and gain it from killing evil creatures while praying.

Tulkas - Based on piety you gain constitution and strength boosts, and while praying sometimes grants extra melee damage. You earn piety when killing evil creatures, more piety when killing evil creatures while praying, and even more when killing demons while praying. With prayer skill you gain his Tulkas skills as well as Earth Magic usage, and his piety only decreased slowly when praying.

Melkor Bauglir - With piety grants boosts to strength, constitution and charisma at the cost of intelligence and wisdom. He also grants resistance to fire and access to the Udun school of magic. While praying, you sometimes invisible, immune to fire, and your foes may be Cursed. Piety is gained by killing while praying, and especially by killing good monsters while praying, sacrificing books and corpses at his altars, and by sacrificing your own max hp at his altars. You lose piety at all times, and especially while praying, and you lose even more if you are a type of elf. He grants his own spells as well as some Mind spells.

Yavanna Kementari - With piety gain grants intrinsic treewalking, and while praying allows you to heal faster on grass. Piety is gained by killing nonliving creatures, undead, and demons and by charming nonevil animals. Piety is lost constantly, although less if you are an Ent, and also by killing monsters while praying, killing animals while praying, hurting your own pets, and when trees are destroyed. She gives her own spells as well as access to Earth, Nature, Water, and Temporal.





The remaining choices are options and number of quests. I usually leave options on those seen there, although I will modify them if wished. For quests, I put it to 99 so that there is a quest every main dungeon level. This makes for a more interesting early game and a more exciting end game. Quests will be discussed when encountered.

So that's it! Post your choices, and I'll roll up some characters. Let's get ready to rumble survive perish die horribly.

You should totally make a Female Archer Yeek named Eek.

I don't really care about the god. The one who grants speed perhaps?

Hm... half-elf rogue of Manwe, maybe?

Are those screenshots being resized somehow? Looks like it, with some of the characters being blurry.

Dwarven Runecrafter, since I think that sounds tough! I'm really interested in this game.

human warrior, any religion

It's Photobucket being lame. For some reason they're showing at 94% size.

A Barbaric Hobbit Haftedmaster of Tulkas.

Ent Bard of Eru Illuvatar
Petty-Dwarf Geomancer of Yavanna Kementari

Have fun with this! I found ToME to be pretty miserable, but I also have a strong dislike of roguelikes which aren't quite as streamlined as they could be (see: my opinions on almost any Angband variant, Nethack).

Oh yeah. Human monk. Maybe one that's a vampire, if you can do that.

Vampire Hobbit Bard!

And with a build like that, you'll need all the (apparently) non-drawbacky Tulkas power you can get.

For those who are not in the know, ToME used to be PernBand, a Dragonriders of Pern -based variant of ZAngband (which is another variant of "vanilla" Angband). At some point, the game it got C&D:d by Anne McCaffey's lawyers and it had to be rebranded. It's always been more or less a "hey this would be a cool feature, let's add it" kind of a game (as you can probably tell already from the race and class selection options), which means there are lots of quite unbalanced things.

ToME? Oooh, ooh, play a deathmo-
oh.

Let's go for something hilariously mis-matched.
A Rohanknight Assassin. Worshiping Eru.
I have never tried that setup, but I think it could actually work really well. Maybe even too well.

::edit:: Forgot about Eru's weapon restriction. Eheh. Well, that will make it interesting trying to find a good blessed sword, and Rohanknights are tough enough to rough out the early game without a decent weapon.

Human Paladin who uses ranged weapons. His name is Stealth Armor Lenny Brisco.

- Eddie

So you're ready to create a character. There are a couple more things you need to go through. First, you need to choose your stats for the auto-roller.



As you can see, you choose minimum values that you want the auto-roller to hit for all of your stats. I tend to try to max out about 2, and then work from there. As you can also see, Kobolds are terrible and they suck. Their one redeeming feature is how fast they level, which quickly becomes irrelevent.



Here is the final result. You could edit your background if you like, although I generally don't bother. You can see that I foolishly tried for too much with the auto-roller and ended up with fairly poor stats. I didn't bother to remake the character because let's be honest, it's a yeek archer.



Here we are, Bree. Home sweet home. Different towns will be the hub of your adventures during ToME. They're where you go to obtain most quests, and pick up supplies for you dungeon crawling foolishness. Bree contains some general stores that will be in most if not all towns, and a couple special areas.



1 - This is the general store. You can pick up a few things here that I always buy first every game. These are a brass lantern for one extra radius of light, a couple flasks of oil to fuel the lantern, a cloak, a shovel for digging, and later on a fur cloak and rations. I also sell off my starter torches here.

Next to the 1, there is a +. This is The Prancing Pony. Here you can buy rations, but you can also listen to rumours, which are useless, buy food and drink, which tops off your fullness, and rest for the night which turns night into day.

Above the 1 is a >, which we will inspect in a bit, and also another +. This is the Pet Shop, where you can buy eggs which I believe hatch into pets, Scrolls of Summon Never-Moving Pet which are of use to Symbiotes, and hard biscuits.

2 - This is the Armoury. These are mostly of use only at the beginning of the game for purchasing, as you will find far better in the dungeon. However I pick up a Soft Studded Leather, a Metal Cap, and a Pair of Soft Leather Boots. Armourys will only be of use for selling later on.

3- This is the Weaponsmith. Like the Armoury, these are of use for selling various weapons you find in the dungeon. You can also compare weapons here in order to view which is more powerful, without doing to math yourself.



4- This is the temple. Here you can buy spellbooks for the gods, in order to use their granted abilities. You can also buy potions and scrolls here which are useful for healing, and maces which come in handy for Eru. I'm reasonably sure you can sell blessed weapons here as well, if they have a large amount of money, which is that number in the upper right. This number is the most you can get for an item in that shop. Shops will change shopkeeper which will change that number, but it doesn't happen very often at all. The other thing shopkeepers effect, is that if the shopkeeper matches your race, you will recieve a discount.

Next to the temple is a +, which is the Soothsayer. Here you can learn what your fates are. I will go into fates when we recieve our first one.

5 - This is the Alchemy Shop. Here we can buy potions and scrolls which will be used in order to stay alive. Of particular note are the restore stats potions that are sold here, Phase Door and Teleport Scrolls which are a quick way to stay alive by wraping elsewhere, Word of Recall scrolls which warp you back to the town or back to the bottom of a dungeon, Identify scrolls which tell you the basic properties on an item, *Identify* which tells you the special properties of an Ego item or above, Enchant Weapon and armour scrolls which improve bonuses, and Scrolls of Recharging for gaining additional charges in a staff or wand.

6 - This is the Magic Shop. Here you'll find spellbooks for using spells, and also wands and staffs which are like scrolls with multiple charges. However using these requires Magic Device skill, so scrolls are more reliable if you do not have this. You can use this store for selling rings and amulets as well.

7 - The Black Market. Here you can find any number of powerful items, with a catch. The prices here are much inflated compared to other shops. However Black Markets are the only place to find truly powerful items, besides the dungeons.

Next to the Black Market is the Merchants Guild. This is not currently implemented in the game, so it is safe to ignore it.

The next number in Bree is 9. This is because not every single town will have every type of shop. However the shops a town does have are hardcoded into the game, and are not randomly determined.

9 - This is the Book Store. This is the most reliable place to find any type of spellbook be it for Magic or Prayer. Most Spellbooks will only have a single spell, increasing a mages load, however there are also Tomes which contain many spells.

To the bottom right of the bookstore are two +s. The first is the Mayor's Office where you can view the race legends which is a scoreboard of your characters, and you can also obtain quests.



Apparantly there are thieves loose troubling the town! This sounds like a job for Eek, master Rock Thrower! I'm sure the town will be very grateful and reward us with all kinds of treasures. The thieves are located in the > which was seen previously. >s and <s are staircases to dungeons going down and up respectively. Before we go there however let's talk about the last shop in town.

The + next to the Mayor's Office is The Mathom-house. This is for when you get that really cool cursed item that is super cool but you will never use. Here you can store items but can never get that back. However you can examine them like a little museum.

Now let's get back to the Thieves and clear them out...huh?



It looks like Farmer Maggot has words for us. By pressing the Y key, we can speak with him about his issues.

"My mushrooms, my mushrooms! The rain, a dark horrible rain, began so I had to return to my home. But when I came back my dogs were all mad and didn't let me near the field. Could you please bring me back all the mushrooms that have grown in my field to the west of Bree? Please try to not harm my dogs. They are so lovely..."

So now we have a second quest. Let's press Ctrl+q and find out what they look like.



What? We have three quests? That's right you start the game with the Dol Guldur quest. I've never actually gotten this far into the game, due to my overarching terribleness. However hopefully with the necessarily slowed-down play of a Let's Play we'll get there at some point.

Enough foolishness! Eek is ready to kick some ass and fail miserably, and we're all out of ass! Into the Thieve's De-





Well that was sub-optimal. I'm sure that's fine though, let me just walk into the door to open it, and we'll be on our way.



Or Eek will slam into the door futilely. Some things like opening locked doors have a success chance. There are times when this is so low or would take so long that you can't be expected to do anything other than hold the button down. However since this is a phenominally bad idea due to how there could be monsters behind the door who will kill you dead if you walk into them, many commands will happen over and over until success automatically. So let's press o and get that door open.



Now were in a hallway. Since Eek's gear must be around here somewhere he runs through, check all the rooms until...



Aha! Another locked door! Eek bursts with excitement.



Our equipment, casually strewn on the ground without a single guard standing over it! You can tell that Bree gets the better class of thieves.

Eek gears back up and is now ready for anything the thieves try to throw at him. With her lantern in use, she braves a dark room and finds himself in a hallway. There is a door at the end of this hallway. Well Eek knows what to do with locked doors now! Let no man say that Eek does not lear-



That seems a little excessive. Knowing that stealth has no purpose here any longer Eek prepares for combat!





This is the character screen, accessed by pressing C. Here you can see all of Eek's current capabilities. Or lack thereof as the case may be. However there is a way to make these slightly less abysmal. By changing tactics, we can take points from perception, searching, stealth, and disarming, and AC and add them to general fighting capability. This will allow us to hit harder with our arrows, and hopefull we will not be hit. With an exploration change, we can take another hit to our sneaky abilities, in order to get a Speed increase. This will make it a little easier to avoid our foes.

Blinking to get the huge shards of wood out of her eyes, Eek heads through the door to meet her foes.

Now Eek is not even close to the most powerful of heros. So her plan is to draw out the enemies one by one, and bring them to the lit hallway at the top of the floor. This way she can fire at them with her bow and hopefully bring them down before she is reached.



And it works like a charm. Although Eek was a little nervous when a second thief came, the first goes down fairly easily and Eek prepares to do what Kobods are best at - earn levels. Killing the thief gains Eek her skill to create ammo, which archers gain at level two. Eek also hears a deep voice begin to speak to her.



"Centuries ago an ancient relic of mine was broken apart. The pieces of it have been lost in fallen temples. Thou art to find my lost temple and retrive a piece of the relic. When thy task is done, thou art to lift it in the air and call upon my name. I shall then come to reclaim what is mine! The temple lies a very long way to the south-east of Bree, and quite some way to the north-east of Minas Anor, I can feel it."

So here is our first God Quest. Every game you can recieve up to five of them. They all involve finding a temple whose location is randomly generated, and then going into it to get a relic. The relic can show up on any of the five floors. However since the floors are not constant, if you miss the relic, you fail the quest. Thus you must go though each floor fully before going on to another. Due to a quirk in the design, you can simply exit to the world map again and then go back into the temple to recieve the next floor. If the relic does not spawn on the first 4 floors, it is guaranteed to be on the fifth. When you do find the relic, you gain a small free boost to your prayer skill, and if you collect all five relics over the course of the game, you get a larger one. Each time you level you have a chance to get a god quest if you don't already have one. For this reason I head there as soon as I get one so that I do not miss out on a quest and miss the fifth and largest prayer bonus.

After blowing through the remaining rogues, Eek comes up against the boss of this quest, the Bandit. Eek runs back to the original hallway, firing at the Bandit as she goes.



Eek gets back into the corner of the first room, and switches to Coward tactic in order to try to escape back tot he hallway and gain some more room to fire. However as she does so...



The Bandit delivers the special skill of the thief type, and steals some money and teleports away. This is actually a pretty good outcome as it gives Eek time to heal up, and grab back some of her arrows. She also notices that the last thief pushed her to level 4. She proceeds to work on her skills.



Every level you get five points to put in your skills. As you can see, I pumped the Bow-mastery skill so that perhaps Eek could hit something with the arrows she is firing. When you put points in a sub-skill, you also receive a few points in the skill that that sub-skill is in. This makes it so that I have some Archery skill as well, and also a little Combat skill. You are not allowed to put points in a skill that would push it to 5 points over your characters current level, so I put my remaining point into Archery and move on.

As Eek comes back into the main southern room, she spies the bandit. After moving her tactic back to berserker, she is ready to try this again. She baits him back to the northern hallway. However every single shot is missing the bandit. She manages to turn around in the room and go back down the hallway after resting.



This time she has more luck! The Bandit perishes, leaving an unidentified dagger, a Copper Ring, and Eek's stolen gold from earlier. It also propels her to the heights of level 7! Kobolds are good at leveling. Eek places the points in Bow-mastery, Archery, and Combat.

Eek mops up the rest of the thieves, including a Novice Warrior and Novice Mage who cannot stand up to her level 7 prowess. As she finishes off the mage, she starts to have a good feeling about that dagger the Bandit dropped.



That (good) next to the Dagger? That's called a pseudo-id. The Combat skill causes those to happen more frequently with weapons and armor, the Archery skill with ranged weapons and ammo, and the Magic skill with magical items. However there is some bleed-over so that eventually a melee weapon user will be able to tell if that bow he just picked up has an enchantment. Good weapons and armor contain a positive enchantment on them, which makes them worth IDing. IDed enchanted items sell for far more than the unIDed kind, however when sold all items are automatically IDed.

That Copper Ring is also unidentified. Each game the type of ring Copper refers to will change, so one game it might give a to-hit bonus, another acid resistance, and a third curse you! Once IDed, all scrolls, potions, and other magical items of the same type will be automatically identified for the rest of the game.

Bracing herself, Eek opens the final locked door to find herself faced with two Novice Warriors. However Eek has killed the Bandit! She has nothing to fear from these two. She strafes away and brings them both down.



The magic preventing the staircase from being seen is gone! Let's go talk to the Mayor and get showered with jewels for our heroics!



That's...that's kind of like jewels. At least Eek will be able to use all those seperate rooms to store things in. Let's head back to the house and check out the new digs.



Oh lord. Basically your house is just a storage. You can drop items off here that you might need later, and then pick them up when you do. Oh and remember my explanation about why there was no 8? I lied! Turns out your house is 8, I forgot. That is true though about each town having different buildings.
Eek is tired after a long day of killing thieves, so she just heads over to pick up a couple of ID scrolls to check her gear.



Not bad, a dagger +2,+2 and a Ring of Levitation. Eek'll wear both for now. The Dagger has a +2 to hit, and a +2 to damage which should come in useful if Eek needs to fight in melee. The ring, well, levitates you! No falling in pit traps for one.

Preparing for bed, Eek takes one last look at her stats as they currently are.



As you can see, Eek is still terrible at everything except shooting her bow. Oh well, what can you do with a Yeek.

And that's all for this edition of Let's Play ToME. What do you folks think Eek should do next? Go straight to the Temple so she doesn't risk not getting all of the god quests? Head into the Barrow-Downs for a good time? Something else? Let's hear it!

Also had everyone been enjoying the LP so far? Any suggestions?

Eek is still alive? Yay!

I don't mind what she does next, really. As long as she doesn't die ^_^

That is... rather unexpected.

I didn't play ToME much (not a big fan of its almost silly "include everything" formula), so I'd say do whatever's likeliest to keep a character like this one alive.

Very nice Nodal I just stumbled across this LP. ToME is one of my favorite RL as well though recently I've been playing the Furyband version of it. Which adds way more classes and races including a couple that make the alchemist look like a wimp.

Having said that Alchemist is still one of my favorite classes in ToME. However it really takes a serious investment in time to get up and running. Though you can do some crazy stuff with it. Want 20 levels in 1 attack? Yep you have the means. Want a wand of noxious gas with 10,000 charges on it? yep you can do that. Want to drive yourself mad trying to *Identify* every item so that you can craft them, and then try to manage 20 different types of essences of which you have thousands off? Then alchemist may be right for you.

As far as character suggestions go though.....
Lost Soul Thunderlord Warrior named Thor

Should be a quick character

The temple was at level 3, so it shouldn't be too bad.
...
You haven't mentioned leveled monsters yet.

Manwe gives quests of invisible monsters, right? I haven't played ToME in a while, but I think I remember his quests being fairly annoying because of that.
The position is kinda lousy too. You may need to cross a river or two to get there. I remember I always used a trick to skip over the mountains to Lothlorian instead of ever going around.

Now that I think about it a little more though, you've done nothing but the Bree quest. There will be invisible leveled monsters vs. your post-thieves kobold archer. This is a sure way to get killed, I think.
Wait until you're level 10-12 and have some useful potions and scrolls before going to the temple quest.

Just a small question here. What does your sanity stat do?

It's basically a health stat only refillable by potions or other magical means. It's derived from Wisdom, instead of Con. When it goes empty, you're dead.

Symbiote for my first choice, and Alchemist for the second on the list. Religion and race are your call, I'm not a hater

This is highly unfortunate too, as the game is much more fun when your sanity stat is low.
Fun fact: Last I checked, there is a way to get a negative sanity stat without dieing. If there is ever an opportune time, I request that you do this just for the sake of doing so.

There's no reason to worry about it till much later though. I think the earliest monsters that are a threat to sanity are mindcrafters? Or vampires. I forget which type becomes able to affect your sanity first. There is a unique (Simon the blubbering idiot, I think) that can damage sanity but he's a total pushover.

In theory I really love the idea of these massive roguelikes with giant worlds and endless quests, but the issue is it's still a roguelike. If I fuck up quest 55, I am never going to see it again. Shiren the Wanderer (my vote for the most perfect of the genre) balanced it out the best, but I am really looking forward to you exploring these endless options so I don't have too.

P.S. That is my disdain towards epic roguelikes, not you. This is already absolutely fantastic

P.S.S. Unbeliever please. I have a soft spot for atheists in worlds where there are multiple gods that have absolutely no issue chatting away with just any old person:

Actually, that reminds me of a discussion I had with my gaming group, who all insisted on playing atheist characters despite the leader of our group being able to smite people with holy power. It was an interesting bit about how atheism is generally unfeasible in a setting where the gods outright give ordinary mortals a fraction of their powers to help themselves.

One of our characters remained atheist though, because it was more or less accepted that he was homicidally insane, and a raging racist to boot.

Also, this LP should be interesting following Stiv's LP.

I thought it was pretty cool how R.A. Salvatore handled an agnostic D&D priest. He had copied spell books before, so he was basically saying, how do I know that my holy book isn't just another type of spell book.

Unbelivers are great! Not only do the Dark Swords make them crazy melee machines, but their unbelief extends into an antimagic field around them, which also disrupts monster teleportation. Of course, it also makes them unable to use any activate-able magic items, which is basically a death sentence at high levels...

Fun!

I've always enjoyed Mindcrafters as well; as I recall, their standard attack spell will daze enemies, making it easy to close to melee range, and they have a super-cheap Detect spell. I had a great deal of fun playing a Monk/Mindcrafter hybrid when that was still possible.

Yeah, plus additionally their antimagic field also nullifies summons, which is REALLY nice. They're actually a pretty balanced class (given a decent race), because I assume the premise was something like "let's make a class that doesn't use magic, but is still winnable" and not like "what if you got random spells?" for thaumaturgists "what if you could wear slimes / mushrooms?" for symbiants.

By the way, you can see some winning ToME race/class combinations from the Angband Ladder: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-browse.php?v=ToME