What's an recommended playing order through DM and custom dungeons?

[MelojannLichbaro]

Hello everyone!

I'm kinda new player to Dungeon Crawlers, having been introduced to the genre by Legend of Grimrock games and then played Dark Heart of the Uukrul.

A friend of mine told me that Dungeon Master is a must-play game of the crawlers, so I decided to play it. While searching reviews and stuff about the game, I came across this forum, which I find absolutely amazing, spent like 4 or 5 hours reading different threads.

Now, I'd really like some help figuring out the play order of the games. FOr what I understand, there is DM, CSB and DM2. Also, there is RTC that contains all of the three games, is that right? So, in that case, the easier route would be downloading only RTC and playing through it to get the vanilla experience?

Also, on the custom dungeons, that is something that interests me a lot. Talking about Grimrock, after I finished the main campaign, the custom dungeons were something that still kept me hooked to the game for a long time. Speaking of the DM ones, while I GREATLY APPRECIATE the hard work that it's been done through the years (and for what I see, there are dungeons still coming up today, which is fantastic), I'm completely lost about where to start, which ones pick up first and so on.

To complicate things a little bit for a newcomer, I saw that there are sections of Custom Dungeons for different categories (like DSB, RTC and so on), so I'm really lost here. Is there some comprehensive lost which shows the most-played/finished ones and/or recommended ones? It would be of great help and I'd appreciate a lot.

And anyway, even if that's not possible, I can only thank everyone that's keeping this community alive. It really brings some comfort to my heart to see the love for DM here, a game that is almost 40 years old that new generations would probably dismiss without even trying.

[Saumun]

RTC does indeed come with all three.

But…
It is built from scratch without the original code, so it might not be the vanilla experience you want. It rather depends how close to the original you want.
CSBwin is, as I understand it, built with the original Atari ST code, so it’s probably as authentic as you’re going to get along with using an emulator.
Also, the RTC version of DM2 uses the DM1 engine, so there are notable differences (no half step and such).
The DSB versions are nice to play too. I don’t know how close to the original it is. You’d have to ask Sophia.

As far as custom dungeons go, Conflux (CSBwin) is probably the best known amongst the community. I still haven’t got around to it, but I believe it’s enormous.
For RTC, I’d recommend anything by Adamski (Tower of Champions, Underworld Dreams, and Upside Down are outstanding).

[MelojannLichbaro]

Thanks a lot for your answer!

As for the "vanilla" experience I'm looking for, I just want to play the original dungeons first, if RTC offers that without changes puzzles and such, it's all fine for me.

As for the custom dungeons, thanks for your recommendations! In fact, I read a little of the Underworld Dreams thread before and was already interested, so I'll definitely take a look. Gonna download the others you mentioned as well.

Thank you for the help!

[Ameena]

Hi, welcome to the forum . As Saumun says, RTC was built from scratch so it's not a "true" experience of the original gams - some of the mechanics are different and things such as certain types of spell damage are kind of off, meaning certain parts are way harder than they should be. I recommend CSBWin for the more "pure" original experience, as it's a port of the original Atari version. There should be a download link somewhere in its section of the forum, I believe, but let us know if you have any difficulties. CSBWin, despite the implication in the name, contains both DM and CSB, so you only need to download the one thing in order to be able to access both of them .

Also, we have a Discord - feel free to come and say hi if you want . Here is a link for you if you want - https://discord.gg/y3UGESEFkD

[MelojannLichbaro]

Hello Ameena! Thanks for being so kind and providing this useful information.

In fact, I do have a discord and I'll join the server right now, thanks for the invitation!