Yes, I know about "no story connection" - I was talking more about player experience - later games in similar series offer more.

Simple example: Dungeon Hack has build-in automap feature. Playing it before any Eye of the Beholder title could spoil some players bad enough so they could not play EOTB after DH or they will feel this as badly degrade even when EOTB are wonderful games themselves. :)

On the other hand, a newer game might convince a new player who happens to like it to be more forgiving toward older ones. I know I woudn't have put up with letters in Radiance / Curse / Queen if I hadn't played DKK first.

Pool of Radiance is tempting, but I don't wanna deal with a mapper tool just yet, so I think i'll start with Eye of the Beholder. Yes, for some odd reason I didn't need a mapper tool when playing the SNES port years ago. I guess there were enough "landmarks" for me that I never got lost in that game.

You probably won't need a mapper for them. There are no features in the first-person view itself, and travel is very fast, so it costs next to nothing to get a proper "feel" of the maze. If you can deal with instant 90 degree turns at all, these games shouldn't be a problem.
(Also, some of the dungeons have in-game maps, just really bad ones, more useful as symbolic reference than actual maps with passages and stuff.)
You can press highlighted letters to select options directly. But you will need diagonal movement for combat, and I don't think QEZC will do. So remap keys via dosbox.

Going to continue my pool of radiance game and move into curse of the azure bonds... Then I might start downloading the titles from gog.

None
As i recall DH was a lot like Grimrock... except with one person and it's randomly generated and tailored to your taste...

Of course, you could use WINE to extract the files and your distro's DOSBox package to run the game in the mean time, right?

The dungeons are randomized, but IIRC there's no permadeath, you can save and load whenever you want to.

The last I tried was EOB2 on Android using SCUMMVM. Unfortunately right-clicking was a chore.

There is an option (enabled on Hard difficulty) that causes the game to delete your saves if you die. You can create a custom difficulty that's like hard but without the option (called "Death Real") enabled, or you can have a difficulty like easy but with the option enabled.

A couple of things I had almost forgotten of PoR

1. The combat it pretty slow, as you need to watch the enemy move, even back and forth two spaces if they're blocked, as they don't skip moves to guard.

2. How delightfully punishing it is. I went to a bar, after purchasing myself some gear, and was pickpocketed. Suddenly I was in a fight against 6 (that's a lot of pick pockets if you ask me), who quickly decimated my party despite city guards were fighting by my side. In the end I had only one dude alive and I went to a temple to ask resurrection: 5500 gold pieces. Yikes. Restart.

Oh, that's cool! I'm not keen on permadeath, but I love options. :)

Not at all, apparantly. I only just read about something like that happening here in a Berlin party zone, to the companion of a famous singer. Two kids tried to take their stuff and when he tried to run after them to get it back, he was assaulted by three adults and attacked with a knife. In the same spot, same week, when two tourists spotted an attempt at pickpocketing and caught the perpetrator, a group of 15(!) thugs came to his rescue, beat the tourists down and kicked them while they were on the ground. So sadly, that's not too far removed from reality. :/