Once an item is unlocked, it's added to your shop pool and will randomly appear as a purchasable item in the dungeon. Most items don't need to put in the locker at all, and are best left as regular shop items once you've unlocked them.

The only ones you must locker if you wish to use them are the four legendary items earned by completing the four vicious-difficulty dungeons. The final boss drops a legendary item instead of a trophy in these four dungeons, and you can return to reclaim that item by winning the dungeon again if you don't locker it. I've got one piece of advice for a young kingdom's locker: the Fine Sword. Inexpensive but deceptively powerful, it nearly doubles your attack damage at 1st level and gives you a much-needed kick right at the start of the dungeon. That's not to say the other items aren't good or fun, this one just is the most utilitarian and doesn't cost much from the kingdom coffers to use.

Yeah, there are so many to choose from. The Platemail (2 damage reduction/level + permaslow) looks good, but not being able to one-shot low-level enemies with status effects can be horrible... I'm not sure what the best use case is.

Platemail was royally overpowered before it got that downside. Yes, it's hard to use, but most dungeons don't have nearly enough monsters with debuff effects to make it a deal-breaker. Remember you can always convert the item to remove its penalty when it outlives its usefulness. If you're not going for unstoppable, simply ignoring debuffing monsters is entirely viable. Of course, converting locker items can get very expensive, so it's not advisable unless you have a large bank account.

The trouble is that the plot descriptions don't always let you know that map X is overrun with something that invalidates your class, items, or religion... Either that, or the boss shows up at the last minute and does the job. Sure, Taurog+Platemail might wipe out the floor, but then the boss can still two-shot you and you converted all your spells and mana potions...

Oh well. Maybe I should leave that stuff on the ground, like Fireball + Mana Potion.

The game is hard enough the second or third attempt, but not knowing enough about the enemy composition can totally invalidate your approach on some maps. It's not as big a deal when it's a "mix of everything" map, but you bring your Dracul Sorcerer to the Labyrinth expecting minotaurs and maybe a stray naga, and then it's nothing but undead mana burn...

Taurog is one of those deities that's very risky to worship blindly. There's a lot of easy power to be had there, but it comes at the cost of versatility that can leave you crippled if you need a different approach other than "hit them until they die". Every dungeon has undead presence. The developers actually made a point of revisiting the monster distribution of all the dungeons to ensure a minimum (and maximum) amount of undead and magic-damage monsters so that Dracul and Mystera respectively played a little more consistently. So that's just the downside of Dracul, nothing specific to the labyrinth. Speaking of the labyrinth, bring Binlor. Your real enemy isn't the monsters, it's the dungeon itself. Bring those walls crashing down ;-)

Don't have him yet. Almost unlocked him, but I died. This was before I realized that you could retreat to keep your unlocks. (I think you can? I think I eventually did that with Philosopher's Stone.)

So much pain. :(

Gods don't care if you die in the dungeon run. If you completed the full process to unlock him, then he's now unlocked even if your adventurer bit the dust. A good 50% of the time I unlock Jehora Jeheyu, I die in the process (if you've encountered him, you'll understand why...)

Hmmm. I forget what the stone guy wanted, but I'm pretty sure I was on a Taurog run or something and just converted the glyph on the ground... X-P