Getting the gear you need, and the money to succeed?!

[Viscerate]

Yeah, the easiest is to just pick up tailoring and make yourself some leather armor, you just need to find the pelt ingredients, then later on try and buy some player created banded or see if you can buy some bronze armor off someone.

When I first started playing this game back in 2000 and were new I actually bought banded from the shops and it was super expensive, but people bought DF belts for 10p or so back then so was easy to get money :P