YAAP: Tara-Mon-Hum-Fem-Neu, vegetarian, weaponless

[funcrunch]

I've been trying to ascend a Monk ever since that class was introduced
to the game, and finally succeeded tonight. I have now ascended with
every class. As a bonus I managed to keep both vegetarian and
weaponless conduct.

I studied hard for this game. That's right, I read all the spoilers I
could get my hands on, including specific details about nurses and
foocubi which enabled me to get up to over 500 HP (although I ended
with 452 max; I think Death drained some off) and level 30 without the
benefit of wraith corpses. For the uninitiated: nurses will heal you
and add max HP if you are naked and weaponless (easier done for a Monk
than other classes). And foocubi will occasionally add a level. You can
keep dancing with nurses until they vanish, and playing with foocubi
until they develop a "severe headache". I spent quite a lot of time
with these creatures (hence the 91000+ moves).

Nothing extraordinary happened in this game that I can recall. Having
several altars including a coaligned temple helped a great deal. I
donated to get my naked AC down to 1 and enchanted armor (helm of
brilliance, cloak of magic resistance, gauntlets of dexterity, speed
boots, t-shirt) to +4/+5 to reach an AC of -25. Not nearly as good as
games where I've worn dragon scale, plus I couldn't use a shield so had
to wear an amulet of reflection. Thus making the game tougher as
without an amulet of life saving I couldn't afford to die even once!

Spells ended up being very useful. I was surprised how much damage I
could do with magic missile at only Basic skill level. I took out the
high priestess of Moloch with it without even having to engage in
hand-to-hand combat. Her minions dropped like flies too. But the most
handy spell was Identify; once I got the helm of brilliance enchanted
(having started with quite crappy Int), I loved being able to identify
anything and everything I picked up at will. My god gave me lots of
spellbooks and I was happy to use them (remove curse and extra healing
also provded useful).

Keeping vegetarian conduct was easy since I found a ring of slow
digestion. Unfortunately I didn't get much royal jelly so my strength
maxed out at a disappointing 18/36. Weaponless was not too hard either,
thanks to the aforementioned spell; I was just super-super-careful
about checking to make sure I was "empty-handed" after every time I
used a pick-axe to dig through Gehennom.

I do admit to going quite genocide-happy (34 species: hL;NnRP) and
using six wishes, the last for a blessed spellbook of cure sickness in
case my unicorn horn was cursed when I met Pestilence. Luckily, the 2nd
altar on the Astral Plane was the right one and after taking out Death
and Famine, I was done.

Final stats:

Tara the Master
St:18/36 Dx:23 Co:18 In:16 Wi:22 Ch:15 Neutral
Astral Plane $:0 HP:422(452) Pw:123(215) AC:-25 Xp:30/100083490
T:91622

3730 creatures vanquished. (Wizard 7x; used wand of death every time
after first)

5353736 points. My highest to date was a Barbarian with about 5.8
million, in an earlier 3.x version. I wasn't going for high score and
didn't want to be burdened in the Endgame, so I only took the most
valuable gems and the bell/book/candelabrum with me. (And Magicbane,
though I never used it.)

Next, I suppose I should try some of the other races; I've only really
played humans so far (except when Elf was a character class). But
first, a break for Real Life. :-)

[funcrunch]

Edit: I just searched this newsgroup for previous wins and found that I
had a score of 6,305,544 for a Priestess in version 3.3.1. Surprise!