How much do you need to invest to get potions of descent?
Just one player's opinion: I think the "don't level" advice is generally overstated. Yes, it's counterproductive to farm dungeons for levels, but so long as you train your character's stats and skills and gear up, it should never be necessary to deliberately avoid leveling.
You will benefit, however, from keeping your fame low in the early game. Low fame will prevent the unkillable bandit spawns, and it's easy to do: just look up the quest tpes on the wiki, identify the quests that can be failed to lose fame with no loss of karma, and every time you visit a town pick up every single one of these quests, and fail enough of them to keep your fame at zero for a while.
In the early game the harvest quests should do quite nicely. You won't be able to complete them, and picking vegetables trains a bunch of stats and skills, in particular consitution which is very convenient to have lots of. Just go through Yowyn every time you travel between Palmia and Vernis, do all these quests and you should be covered for quite some time.
Performance quests are also a good way to keep fame low. There's no other penalty for failling them, and if you have to have (or buy) performance skill, completeing these quests will eventually become a good source of gold.
scrolls of oracle, and they are madly valuable, so i sell them. However I WANT to use them
I never found them to be useful. ID them and sell them, or stockpile and trade them to adventureers like kcwong is suggesting. Though personally I foudn potions of cure corruption to be better for that, though slightly less common at the early stages of the game.
are artifacts things that are named?
Yes.
http://elona.wikia.com/wiki/ArtifactScrolls of oracle are valuable? They're only 2000gp each for selling them right?
Which is a lot of gold for a first time player with a new character and no performance skill or store.
General advice to any aspiring elona player: don't worry about dungeons for a while. Do delivery and harvest quests for platinum and to learn new skills. There are lots of skills that will benefit you that you probably didn't start with, and you'll need hundreds of platinum to learn them. Start early. If you simply do this, trade for adventurers for gear, and level from questing rather than dungeons, you'll rapidly get ahead of the difficulty curve that most players like to warn about.