Tegel Manor (1977) was Judges Guild’s follow-up to City-State and the next installment in their subscription series. This copy consists of a cover sheet, a short booklet, an overland map, a dizzyingly detailed map of the manor and smaller, blank player maps – it was revised many times over the course of JG’s history, however. While the main adventure site is the manor, there is a nearby town, a monastery and a large wilderness to explore, stamping out the template later adventures like Keep on the Borderlands (1979) and Temple of Elemental Evil (1985) would follow.

The interior of the manor is weirder than anything in those adventure modules! And sillier. The party is hired by Sir Runic the Rump (Judges Guild specialized in this sort of humor), who wants to rid his ancestral home (why is he not named Runic Tegel? The module never offers an explanation of this or anything else, really.) of generations of his undead family members. It probably surprises no one that all 100 of them have first names beginning with R.  

The manor is fascinating despite (or maybe because) it is described so tersely. Each room gets about a sentence, part of which is devoted to statistics so abbreviated that I have no idea how to translate them. There are haunted paintings. A ki-rin is fighting an intellect devourer in the barn. The butler is the ghost of a balrog. The house makes less sense (and has more rooms) than Winchester House. If this isn’t a fun house, I don’t know what is.

Like City-State, the brevity and ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. I have a copy of the revised and expanded Tegel Manor (2019), from Frog God Games, and…less is more.