> My guess is knivetsil simply sent other characters to explore the deepest levels, gain items, and bring them back to Perinn for the new characters. This is confirmed by the fact that the hall of fame indicates that he won the game with a one-character party the day after making the later of those two posts; that character was probably the one recovering those items, and once his job was done, he went on to win the game.

I tried that once. It was at the end of my second game, and the last six-character party I played. Jaunting around on level 10, I thought, "hey, I could carry a bunch of cool stuff from down here back up to Perinn and equip a new party with r0xx0r gear for my next game!" So I did it.

Then I started the new game, and it was so boring that I quit and deleted the entire party after only gaining a few levels.

I discovered that, for me, part of the fun is the challenge of getting your party over the initial hurdles of level one. Having all that extra-special stuff on level one gave them an unfair advantage over the monsters there and took all the fun right out of it.