Moormist Manor

I drew the picture below in 1984, in Mr. Griffin's 3rd-period American History class. It started as errant scribbling, but by the end I had created an image that would occupy my mental space for nearly four decades.

A couple years prior, my DM had run our party through several forays into Judges Guild's "Tegel Manor," and I have fond memories of that affair: attending ghostly tea parties, being chased through darkened hallways by a wight (we were 2nd level), befriending an animated troll claw (which became a front-line fighter named "Thing"), fighting haunted kitchen implements, navigating the dungeon via giant rat tunnels...meeting the various Rumps!

It was all glorious fun, and that dungeon, along with this drawing and several tours of the nearby Biltmore Estate, inspired me to create my own haunted funhouse dungeon, which I dubbed "Moormist Manor." 

I don't recall how that name came to me, but it was nearly immediate. The names of the residents have changed over time, but the name of the house has always been thus. I've looked online to see if I accidentally cribbed the name from some other source, but have found nothing so far. There appear to be several adventures called "Mistmoor Manor," but they came much later than my name to have inspired it. However I came up with it, the name hit all the right buttons for me (alliteration, bold consonants, rhyming phonemes at the start and finish) and it stuck fast.

For the next few years, I recreated the basic design of my sketch onto graph paper, drew even more levels below the manor, and then began populating the dungeon with all sorts of crazy concepts. At the time, I was enamored with a lot of Dave Hargrave's Arduin material, including weirdo off-shoots like All the World's Monsters, Grimtooth's Traps, the Tome of Mighty Magic, the Dragon Tree Spellbook, etc. The crazier the better...

I threw in lots of really silly stuff of my own, too, like a clay golem named Gumby with multiple personalities (one was the Claymation version, the other was Eddie Murphy's "I'm Gumby, dammit!" persona), a mini-dungeon based on a treasure map off a Captain Crunch cereal box, a beholder named Jeffery whose eyestalk beams were annoying rather than deadly (sleep, random cantrip, create food and water, etc.), and who would start sobbing and fly away if struck.

I had really enjoyed playing Bushido, and when I picked up the superlative (for the time) Oriental Adventures book, I was eager to incorporate that material as well, so I created an entire demi-plane which the PCs could visit if they entered a certain Asian-themed room and messed with a certain fortress model. The manor was full of ideas like these.

My work continued until at least April, 1987 (the last notation in my notebooks), but memory tells me I didn't finish everything until maybe 1990-ish. [EDIT: I found a later notation at the end of my key for dungeon level 2 dated 7/2/89. I did more work after this on levels 3 and 4, so I think this note bolsters my estimate of 1990 for completion.] 

Despite all that hard work, however, I never ended up using it. I began a low-fantasy, highly thematic campaign and MM just didn't fit into the setting. I had no stomach for reworking it to fit the setting, either, as it would be a TON of work and much of the original charm would be lost. So, over the years I just plundered the material for the less-zany ideas and adapted them for other adventures.

MM remained an unused treasure in my gaming materials that I always regretted never finding a place for in my campaign. My low-fantasy campaign world lasted for 20 years or so, but when I started looking at the D&D Next playtest, thoughts of starting a new campaign began to percolate. When one of my long-time players died irl, it felt like an appropriate time to end the old campaign and start fresh.

With the intention of using MM in my new 5e campaign, I pulled my files out of storage and scanned all the hand-drawn maps and two 5-subject notebooks full of meticulously penciled pages, two lines of text per college-ruled line (my poor fingers!) I've subsequently run a 5-year-long campaign and three mini-campaigns since then, but still haven't found a place to use the damn dungeon!

Since the conclusion of my last campaign, one of my Tuesday-night regulars has taken over the DMing reins for awhile, while I take a break to recharge my creative batteries and mull over what to do next. I've been circling all my old MM materials, much of which I now find absolutely cringe-worthy; but there's also lots of good stuff that I've never used in other dungeons and still holds up well all these years later. MM really requires its own campaign, however, and playing Darkest Dungeon sort of showed me how it could work (although less Gothic horror, more D&D-friendly with a touch of Tegel humor).

I've decided that I want to turn my magnum opus into some sort of shape that better reflects who I am now and what kind of game I want to run. Even if I don't end up running it, I can eventually share it with others who might enjoy it or borrow ideas for themselves.

I'm considering creating this for OSRIC or BXE, as I want to recapture that old-school/OSR style, but my players really like and understand 5e. I'm hesitant to upset that apple cart when everyone is firing on (nearly) all cylinders, because I don't think they want to relearn a game they haven't played in 30 years or so (we switched from 2e to Arcanum sometime around '88, and then moved into a homebrew system based on that engine). 

If nothing else, I will strip out all the WotC gobbledygook and retain just the basic game engine with core classes only. I do like the basic 5e system, but the broader game has gone totally off the rails for me, conceptually.

Anyway, as I rework this adventure, I intend to post updates, map comparisons, and various conceptual thoughts on (re)creating a funhouse megadungeon. My goal is to eventually put the entire dungeon out a room or so at a time (a la Zenopus Archives' excellent Forgotten Smugglers' Cave level for the dungeon under Zenopus' Tower.)