Linley's Dungeon Crawl
.------.
| D:1 |
| @ |
'---+--'
|
.---+---.
| ORB |
'---+---'
|
+----+-----+
| |
.--+--. .--+--.
| LAIR| | ORC |
'-----' '-----'
| |
... ...
ASCII illustration
The other great dungeon family.
1997: original Dungeon Crawl.
By Linley Henzell and later contributors.
Linley Henzell’s Dungeon Crawl appeared in 1997. It established the game from which Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup would later grow, but the two names describe different stages of development.
Crawl’s branching dungeon, varied character choices and religious allegiances made for a different expedition from Angband’s town-and-depth cycle or NetHack’s dense object interactions. Choosing a character meant choosing limits as well as strengths. A route that suited one adventurer could be a poor fit for another.
After Henzell stepped away, development passed through other hands. By the middle of the following decade, contributors were struggling to turn changes into a dependable shared release. Stone Soup began in 2006 from the 4.0 beta 26 codebase, incorporating selected work from the 4.1 alphas.
That history is why the archive gives the original Crawl and Stone Soup separate entries. Stone Soup inherited a working game and a community. It then developed its own sustained approach to clarity, balance and removing tedious play.
Sources
The Dawn of Stone Soup, by a founding developer
DCSS project survey: original Crawl and release chronology
Official Crawl repository and history