Just stumbled across Light Crawl (on git as dtsund-crawl-mod), a variant off .8 with some QoL off newer versions. Also from some digging here and there, there seems to be a fair number of variants/ forks only hosted online to later have that host die off. Simply wondering what other versions have been lost to time, might have a version lying around somewhere. In particular, it would be nice to have this all on Roguebasin as the defacto source of all things Rogue… although I’m sure this problem isn’t unique to Crawl by any means.
And to be completely forthwidth, I’m looking for in particular something that has derailed from the original Crawl/ DCSS development direction. I don’t really mind ofcourse, where DCSS develops, but rather if a version exists I’d have more fun with I’d like to be informed. I’m a newer player, and found as I have been going back versions I’ve been having more fun. Likely, due to me hard refusing to shift toward anything slightly resembling a meta, or rather strong looking options.
To be clear winning means nothing to me, I’d rather die spectacularly to regale in the endless entwined webs for bragging.
WebTiles - Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has some variants on it that you might be interested in trying.
ETA
DCSS Circus Animals (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint
HellCrawl (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint
GnollCrawl (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint
B-Crawl (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint | Seeded
BloatCrawl 2 (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint | Seeded
GoonCrawl (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint
X-Crawl (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint
Stoat Soup (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint
BcadrenCrawl (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint | Seeded
KimchiCrawl (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint | Seeded
AddedCrawl (edit rc) | Tutorial | Sprint | Seeded
I believe all the variants can be found here: Forks · crawl/crawl · GitHub
I’m pretty sure even the variants that had their host die are still archived on the github.
Trouble is, you’re looking for the needles in the haystack, with 1600 branches to search through, most of which weren’t developed as a proper “variant”. But if you find a gem in there, I’d love to know 
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I wrote Variants - CrawlWiki a while ago, so it lists some older variants - some of which I think are no longer playable online with the loss of xom.montres.org.uk, but there are links to github repositories for most of them.
I think petercordia’s “haystack” is not too hard to search, since most of the forks there say (eg) “This branch is [2213 commits behind] crawl/crawl:master”. One that’s actually a variant will look more like ours, saying “This branch is [2291 commits ahead of], [16771 commits behind] crawl/crawl:master.” Still take an afternoon to look at them all, mind.
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