I got this module I'm pretty sure for a Christmas present in 1985 -- I'd only been playing D&D for about a year at that point and hadn't read or played Village of Hommlet (and in fact it wasn't until much later that I actually got a separately bound copy of VoH). I really fell in love with the module, which seemed to me the closest any module had come to "what D&D should be" (i.e. the single mega-dungeon as the focus of an entire campaign). I first attempted to run it in the summer of 86 as a single marathon session with 1 other player who was visiting from out of town -- obviously we didn't finish the whole thing in 1 session, but we did play through all of Hommlet and the moathouse.
I next ran it about a year later (summer of 1987) as the start of a new campaign with 3 new players (whom I'd met when I went from elementary school to jr. high). The module was in play with this group for over a year, including a TPK and reboot (after the entire party succombed to choking fumes in the Air Temple), lots of miscellaneous PC deaths (one player in particular went through about a half dozen characters), progress so slow that the temple was 'restocking' itself way faster than they were cleaning it out, and several incidents of players obviously having read the module behind my back (which was always met with me changing things in their disfavor -- not only hiding treasures in different places, but removing them entirely; I remember one famous incident of a PC almost dying from fire damage while digging in the firepit in the Fire Temple looking for the +3 sword he KNEW was supposed to be there!). The players generally seemed way more interested in running the trading post in Hommlet (which they'd 'inherited' from the traders) than actually adventuring -- one player drew a detailed floorplan including various additions and renovations, made detailed invenory and stock lists, etc.
Eventually, after well over a year and the PCs not even having cleared the 2nd level (I think they bypassed the 3rd level entirely, and had ventured onto level 4 only once, with predicatbly disastrous results), I took a cue from Gygax's original campaign write-up and had a pair of high-level PCs from my previous campaign raid the place and get all the bad-guys riled up, and then finished it up with a big table-top skirmish (I'm not sure if I used the Battlesystem rules or, more likely, just ran it as a 'free kriegspiel' with no fixed rules). After that the PCs went on to other adventures, but they still maintained the trading post in Hommlet as a home base -- I had a map of Hommlet including a finished keep and several additional buildings, plus all the additions they themselves made to the shop.
A year or two later, one of the players re-read the module and learned about Prince Thrommel and decided he wanted to go back and rescue him. I was annoyed at the player for acting on info he'd gained from reading the module so I put a pair of real vampires into the tomb along with the prince -- the PC and henchman who went after the prince were level-drained from 9th and 7th to 3rd and 1st levels before they beat the vampires and even after Restoration spells and more adventuring never fully regained their former status (by the time we stopped playing this campaign a few months later I believe they were still at 7th and 5th). I punished them further by having the rescued prince stir up trouble by rashly leading an invasion of Iuz which led to a crushing defeat for Furyondy and shifted the balance of power in the World of Greyhawk significantly towards Evil.
I ran the module again (for the third time -- fourth if you count the TPK and reboot with the same set of players) a few years later with yet another set of different players. This ran more smoothly because we were older and wiser and a least a little more competent, but even so it was in play for several months and I eventually grew bored with it -- after a massive slugfest on the 4th level in which all of the friendly NPCs (Otis, Y'dey, Burne, Rufus, etc.) joined with the PCs (who were all around 5th-6th level by this point) and bulldozed into the temple in full frontal assault mode, we ended it prematurely by mutual consent with the PCs giving the Orb of Golden Death to the Good NPCs for safe-keeping and leaving the area, without ever having explored the Nodes or Zuggtmoy's Prison.
Although I know this module better than probably any other (except perhaps for the RuneQuest module Griffin Mountain, which was in play for a similar amount of time -- and with the same group of players) and for many years considered it my absolute all-time favorite, in recent years, having re-read it and learned a little more of the backstory behind it (how EGG essentially abandoned it midstream and much of the published module is actually a Gygax-pastiche by Frank Mentzer -- an author whose material I've never really liked), my opinion has soured somewhat. There are still some parts of the module I really like -- the entirety of T1, Nulb and (especially) the Upper Ruins, and certain encounters in the main dungeon -- but I think the whole Nodes section was very poorly developed and anticlimactic and taints the entire thing by association. I'd be much more interested in seeing how EGG would've developed it himself had circumstances been different.
I've never so much as looked at Monte's "Return to" module or the recent CRPG version, and have no desire to.
