A good trick with banana peels is to make a pile of 50 or so in New Attnam, right in the path of the slaves, and every time one dies, they drop 10 free bananas, which help to add to your evil pile of doom.
There's a bones level I've died on 5-6 times, it had tons of kamakaze dwarfs. It finally ran out of dwarfs once, though, so now it's just has a lot of stones lying around.
Something I've noticed about kicking, this one time in the UT, I was having trouble breaking the lock on a large chest. I'd kicked it 20 times or so, then gave up. I took off my troll hide boots and tried kicking again, and after only 2-3 kicks the lock breaks. Were the boots making my kicks weaker?