My Wednesday night campaign remains on temporary hiatus. We're hoping to get an extended weekend session sometime this month. I intended to use the hiatus to catch up these reports to the current timeline (Session 43), but that plan never quite materialized. This session occurred on 06/17/20.
The party defeated a goblin ambush and found a hidden trail to their lair, a pair of cave openings into a hillside deep in the woods.
There's a lot of moving parts to this monster. After figuring out the shade's original statistics in life, the DM then has to consult two separate tables in the monster's description to calculate its current scores and powers, which can be altered mid-battle as light conditions change.
Typical of late-1e and 2e materials, the shade's description suffers from a "wall-of-text" that hides an interesting monster concept behind a lot of superfluous, often-contradictory detail. I'm using this monster in Moormist Manor, but I want to break the original shade down to its core components and then rebuild it into a more-interesting monster for AD&D (plus a 5e version because I haven't decided which ruleset I'm using yet).
Work continues apace on restoring Moormist Manor—my 80s-era mega-dungeon. As the weather turns cooler and I spend more of my time indoors, I've been experiencing a lot of creative energy around this project and I'm having a (mostly) good time revisiting my past self through the pages of my old notebooks.
Despite this dungeon being a tribute to Tegel Manor, I stupidly decided not to emulate the Judges Guild module's sparse style and concise descriptions. By this point in the late 80s, 2e's storytelling mode was in high gear and, like many would-be authors, I decided this adventure had to be BIG. It couldn't just be a mysterious haunted house on the hill; it needed HISTORY! I wrote a ridiculous amount of background lore in college-ruled notebooks, squeezing two mechanical pencil lines per page line. The text got so dense that the pages became permanently rippled.
This ultimately created a situation in which actually playing the adventure required its own campaign to do justice to the epic scope. My manor wasn't built to drop into and out of like Tegel Manor was; it needed to be THE focus of the campaign. On top of that, I felt like the entire thing had to be scrupulously complete before I was comfortable running it. The idea of creating the manor in broad strokes and then winging the details seemed like madness, and I lacked the confidence in my DMing skills to pull the trigger.
By the time the manor felt "complete" enough to play in the early 90s, it just didn't fit the tone of the low-fantasy, feudal European-style campaign I was running then (and ran until 2012-ish). That campaign was heavily influenced by Arthurian fables, Templar legends, and the cultural friction between early Christianity and pre-European paganism. The manor, on the other hand, was a wonderfully-creative mix of Hammer horror, Saturday morning cartoons, Arduin-style weirdness, and Monty Python-style humor. The two things just didn't work together, so the manor notebooks got tossed into a box (but never forgotten).
As I move forward with updating the material and getting it ready for my Tuesday-night players (perhaps sometime later next year when I resume DM duties), I want to make use of the lessons I've learned over the years since "finishing" it initially, and I want to apply the lessons of the OSR's analysis of early dungeon-building techniques. To help me order my thoughts and keep my work focused and consistent, I've established some goals for myself as I go through this design process.
