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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SWBaxter" data-source="post: 2980364" data-attributes="member: 27926">Six years later (1985 for the big book, T1 was 1979). Note that T2-T4 didn't exist as separate published entities, so any haphazardness is almost certainly a function of the writing rather than the editing.At the time, my reaction to T1-4 was "it took six years to get me THIS pile of... stuff?!" I'd run T1 multiple times and written my own sequels by that point, so maybe the actual Temple was just disappointing because I felt it was no better than what I'd already done. It just struck me as a mishmash of a dungeon crawl, rather than a confrontation with a secret cult looking to take over the region.Much later, when I played the ToEE computer game (2003), I found the dungeon itself was decent enough, taken in isolation it's not that badly designed. Still not that fond of the whole package, though.Judging whether something is well-designed is kind of hard, because you first have to sit down and work out what the design criteria are then see if the product meets those criteria. T1-4 strikes me as such a Frankenstein product that it's hard for me to list what the design goals were. I think T1 is decently designed as a starting village with hidden evil nearby, and I'll grudgingly grant that the ToEE itself is an OK dungeon crawl, but the parts don't really mesh to create a coherent whole, IMHO.</blockquote>