Hello lads...
I just spent a couple of hours figuring out how avernum save files work and now I'm able to add any item to my inventory.
It's rather crude and needs some minor (read major) tweaking but it works, as far as I could test it. I might be able to wrap up a cool hack to help you guys out. Also, it is easy to edit other stats, like gold, but I think the ingame cheat suffices.
Anyone interested? I can share either the executable or the source code.
And by the way. I have 20,000 spare eyestalks