shadow-of-the-wyrm VS RL_M

Another vote for Shadow of the Wyrm. Classic style but a modern developer.

Shadow of the Wyrm is a much more recent game, but worth playing. I think it defaults to graphical tiles now, but you can play it in ASCII too.

Shadow of the Wyrm (open world)

Shadow of the Wyrm. It does have graphical tiles these days but I usually play it in text.

If you're still interested try theses games - https://www.shadowofthewyrm.org/ - https://www.thegroundgivesway.com/ - Angband - ToME4

Other than that I suppose Shadow of the Wyrm and Caves of Qud have interesting and fantastical worlds that you can be immersed in.

Caves of Qud, Elona, Unreal World and Shadow of the Wyrm are main ones that come to mind as not being entirely about dungeon crawling(though only Unreal World isn't at all about it).

Shadow of the Wyrm totally has this feeling, of a big open lore-filled world and you're just this adventurer wandering around talking to NPCs, crossing whatever bodies of water you like (once you get the means), visiting whatever towns you're interested in, and interestingly doing so is purely for exploration/because you want to, and not because some NPC told you to :P

Shadow of the Wyrm, maybe?

Larn is pretty good. It's unusual too, I can't think of another roguelike that's tried to mimic Larn. There are a few versions of it floating around, but the one I play is this revived version from about 2016 onwards.

Since you seem to be mainly checking out the early ones, you could try Larn. The most up to date version I'm aware of is here.

Release page: https://github.com/atsb/RL_M/releases/tag/14.1.4