I was playing last night (found the ctrl-v thing that let me increase the screen size) and whipped up a crap-load of characters. Played with several character, because I suck at this and wanted to try the new Vampires.
I like them flavor-wise, and the mechanics are fun. That said, I am nowhere near experience enough with this game to actually get them anywhere. (don't think I made it further than DL:4).
In other news, playing the Hill Orc Priest was awesome. And it reminded me of something.
Shortly before I stopped playing, I learned of an interesting little trick and thought it would be interesting to use. Basically, a lot of people use the Ecumenical Temple as a storage space, because you don't need to worry about a wandering monster moving your stuff, and it's fairly large. But you can also do this: After finding the temple, drop whatever you want to store in it. Then leave the temple by returning to the previous level. Save and quit. Open up you save files, inside you should find a list of maps. The one you are looking for is after the dungeon level you just saved on. Copy that file, and place it in another folder. Start up a new character. When they get to the temple, have them enter, then leave. Save and exit again. Delete the current player's temple map, and replace it with your archived one. Rename the map to the same name as your current character. Start the game, load up the new characters save, and enter the Temple. Voila! You just learned how to make a universal stash for all of your crawlers. The level of scumminess of the stash depends on what you use it for. Food storage is never a bad idea, and is only a little scummy, but you could always store a bunch of excellent items there, and take your crawler to the orb everytime. Hell, it's even possible to duplicate items using this method! (Which I'm sure you can figure out yourself.) Just make sure you keep your character out of the temple when saving, and keep the archived map updated so you don't lose anything.
Last time I did this I had a Kobold named The Librarian keep everything neat and tidy, and ID'd. He also was rather well-read. I wanted to use a Mummy or Ghoul, but I couldn't get one down there. Consequently, there are a lot of dead librarians in that version.
Think I'm going to try again.
As for ghost issues, when a character dies there is a chance the game will create something called a bones file. This is what makes the ghosts appear. You can safely delete these until you're ready to deal with them. Otherwise the ridiculous number of dead characters you have is going to keep you from really learning anything. In 4.3, bones files are located in the saves folder. I hope they give you an init option in future versions to just turn the things off. But I have a feeling I'm going to get blammed for this post enough as it is.
HAPPY CRAWLING!