Moria

A shared dungeon, drawn in wireframe

The PLATO Moria — not to be confused with the 1983 Tolkien-named roguelike that helped spawn Angband — was a first-person, multiplayer dungeon crawler developed by Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin and refined across the late 1970s into the early 1980s.

It rendered the dungeon as a small first-person line-drawn viewport framed by text, a layout that would later define commercial crawlers from Wizardry to Eye of the Beholder. Up to ten players could share the same world at once, banding together into parties to survive deeper levels — group play that pointed directly at the online RPGs to come.

Moria models Dungeons & Dragons characters, classes, and combat without any license, the common thread that runs through every PLATO RPG and the reason they live here rather than in the licensed catalog.