shadow-of-the-wyrm VS frogcomposband

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?

Frogcomposband has a huge amount of races and classes to play as. 80 various races and monsters by my count. And many classes for the more normal races that I couldn't be bothered to count. Some 51 classes, unless special races also have special classes. Sometimes with extras like picking a certain god, spell school or bias towards good/evil etc. Anything normal you might want such as a human fighter, elf mage, hobbit rogue. To pure monsters or animals of various flavours. Hydras, spiders, dragons, jellies. To very weird ones. Such as a magical ring, possessing others who find it. But can't do much more than cast spells on its own.

There aren't a lot of recent variants. FrogComposband is one of the newest ones and it's reasonably popular. It pretty much just throws loads and loads of extra stuff in. It's a lot.

Relatedly, PosCheng's spiritual successor FrogComposband (you'll need to select the Monster -> Mimic race options).

https://github.com/sulkasormi/frogcomposband/releases/download/v7.1.salmiak/frogcomposband-7.1.salmiak-win.zip Windows Zip (download)

FrogComPosBand

FrogComposband: https://github.com/sulkasormi/frogcomposband/releases

And Frogcomposband is still very much being maintained. It's just that there's one guy working on it, and so things take time. If you look at github: https://github.com/sulkasormi/frogcomposband/tree/46db75f898189beeb49d64d735cc3a39e9a843e8 then you can see that commits were last pushed about 4 months ago, which really isn't a long time when it's a lone developer.