ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I was just thinking - all the challenge runs I've seen mentioned on this forum are about trying to win the game on Madness - which usually seems to involve building the strongest possible character and maximising damage output (while also playing with godlike levels of skill and patience).

But are there any other types of challenge/conduct runs that the really good players attempt?

For example: trying to win the game with the weakest possible character (avoid gaining XP, skip as many side-quests and optional zones as possible, dodge monsters rather than killing them, and yet still be powerful enough to handle High Peak at, say, level 30 instead of level 50)? Is this even possible?

I came to ToME from Nethack... I was a terrible Nethack player, but I always enjoyed reading about people who had managed to win the game while being vegetarian pacifists with one hand tied behind their back, etc.

You don't hear as much about this, but it seems like it could be fun.

Some ideas:
1. Finish the game with as low character level as possible. There's an achievement for killing Bill the Troll at level 1; not sure about other low-level achievements.
2. Use an unlikely race+class combo. Or Yeek, which is the de facto challenge race.
3. Play an Adventurer or standard class using an unlikely combination of talents. For instance, a melee Archmage.
4. Finish the game while wearing the bikini. There's an achievement for this. You unlock the bikini option at character creation after finishing the Melinda quest line.
5. Finish the game using only the default inscriptions. This would be really tough I think.

EDIT: I made a suggestion thread for adding conducts to the game.

I think various iterations of random adventurers could be challenging and interesting. I would expect playing roguelike random advnenturers would challenge knowledge of the game and tactical creativity/smartness.

Also there are some addons that have some diffeerence in how the difficulties work, such as having NM like modifiers but adding in the extra rares that spawn on Insane. So that you do not need the uber strength builds but do see a lot of extra class combinations.