Paper Dungeon Mazes

May 29, 2024

I really loved Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy series of books back in the 90s. They were like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, but with RPG elements like an inventory system and dice-driven combat.

I was reminded of these when I came across some books by Gordon Little. He’s published two books, Paper Dungeon Mazes and Paper Dungeon Mazes 2. Both are top-down, dice-driven dungeon crawling adventures. The first is pretty straightforward, but the second adds some light story and an extra mechanic. They’re available as PDFs from itch.io, but also as physical books through Amazon at reasonable prices.

Nostalgia aside, I was drawn to these books by the idea of self-publishing. Amazon has its Kindle Direct Publishing service for print and digital production. My print version of Paper Dungeon Mazes is listed as being “Manufactured by Amazon.ca — Bolton, ON”. It’s exciting to know there are services for printing this sort of thing on demand, and I’m quite happy with the end product.

I ended up buying a few more physical copies around Christmas as gifts for some geeky friends, and they went over well. I really wish these had’ve been around in the 90s, as they would have been perfect for long car trips.