Relic of the Disciplines of Geography

Not for the first time, I find myself making an unexpected cartography-related post in response to another gamebook blog. Deathtraps and Dungeons has just reached Fighting Fantasy book 40, Dead of Night, and it raised an issue I thought worth addressing. It says of the tiresome teleporting maze through which you must pass in the build-up to the endgame, "because you teleport you can not map it like a physical map".

While I agree that a conventional map would not work, I know that it is still possible to map the maze, because I was enough of a nerd to work out how to do so over 20 years ago. And here is that map:

Some explanation may be required. Almost every room in the maze is painted the colour of the lines indicating its walls on the map. The dark grey room in the top right corner is just said to be 'bleak', so I went with the grey. I realise that the indigo and violet are a bit tricky to tell apart, but those are the colours that were given - and as there's no actual need to pass through either of those rooms, it's not that big a deal.

The pale grey doors at the top and bottom of the middle rooms are the exit and entrance. Every other door has been given the colour of the room to which it leads. Thus, the white door leading from the red room leads not to the adjacent-as-depicted green room but to the white room on the far left. And as the corresponding door from the green room is not red but pink, it leads to the pink room on the lower right.

Once you understand the map, getting through the maze is actually quite simple - it can be done in just four moves. The maze is still one of the weaker aspects of the book, but it becomes a good deal less frustrating and time-consuming once you know the trick.