Monsters, Murder & a Mushroom — Book One
Paladin 404 Welcome to the Dungeon
The Dungeon has rules. Alf has questions. Neither is proving especially helpful.
Book One is live on Amazon Kindle. Paladin 404: Welcome to the Dungeon is published and available to buy now.
The paperback should follow within 72 hours — the cover updates are with Amazon for review and approval.
Out now on Kindle
The Book
A murder mystery in a dungeon that keeps receipts
Alf didn't ask to find himself in a fantasy dungeon.
He certainly didn't ask for the homemade spear, the suspiciously useful notebook, or the small mushroom creature that appears to have adopted him.
And he is absolutely, categorically, not a Paladin.
What Alf is good at is noticing when things don't make sense. Creatures appear where they shouldn't. Trade routes change. Somebody starts profiting from the chaos.
Then a Guild administrator is murdered.
Everyone else sees another dungeon death. Alf sees a pattern. Because the Dungeon isn't breaking its rules — someone is using them.
Now Alf has to learn how the Dungeon works, follow the evidence, and find the person behind it: armed with a crude spear, a notebook full of increasingly inconvenient observations, and a mushroom called Fluffy on his shoulder.
Solving the murder might even tell him why he's here. Assuming the murderer doesn't solve Alf first.
A funny, mystery-driven GameLit adventure where the clues matter, the System keeps records, and the hero would really like everyone to stop calling him a Paladin.
- Origin
- 404
- Class
- Unassigned
- Kit
- One spear (homemade)
- Party
- Fluffy, a mushroom
- Case
- Nope, Spoiler = 404
- Genre
- GameLit · comic mystery
- Length
- 32 chapters
- Status
- Published — Kindle
- Paperback
- In review, ~72 hours
Free Short Stories
Read one before you commit to a whole dungeon
Small cases from the same world. Free, no signup, no spoilers for the main mystery.
A free breakfast. A missing crate. And a favour that wasn't simple.
Mavis calls in the favour Alf agreed to before he thought about the wording. Set mid-way through Book One — some spoilers for how Alf and Mavis end up working together, none for the mystery. About fourteen minutes.
Read it free →
A missing marker. A trail of clues. And a mystery too small to stay simple.
Alf, Fluffy and Mavis, a plank of wood, and a very small case. Set during Alf's early weeks in Hartford — no spoilers at all. About seven minutes.
Read it free →Both written with ShortStoryEngine.com.
Case Closed — The Cover
The one that made the cut
Readers voted, and this is the cover on the live listing. Most people meet a cover as a fingernail-sized thumbnail in a list of forty others — press the shrink button to see it the way Amazon shows it.
The hat, the scrap-metal spear, the notebook and blue biro in his hand, the Arrival Record glowing in the corridor — and an Alf who looks properly tired of all this. It survives the thumbnail test, which is the only test that matters.
The paperback wrap uses the same art and is with Amazon for review now.
See it on Amazon →The Series
Monsters, Murder & a Mushroom
Three books planned. Each one is a self-contained case; the bigger question — why Alf is here at all — runs underneath.
- BOOK ONE Paladin 404: Welcome to the Dungeon Out now
- BOOK TWO Title to be announced Planned
- BOOK THREE Title to be announced Planned
Get Notified
One email when Book One goes live
Get a headsup when I release new short stories — and another when Book Two is published.
Prefer email? hello@blogbum.com
The Author
blogbum
blogbum writes comic GameLit about people who are not very good at fighting and quite good at noticing things. The name is borrowed from a Pokémon GO avatar, which felt like the correct level of seriousness for a series about a man being repeatedly mistaken for a Paladin.
Gaming started with Manic Miner on a ZX Spectrum 48K — still owned, still complete with its original rubber keys. Then World of Warcraft, since Vanilla, for long enough to have written an online guide to farming gold for start-ups. Which is either a misspent few decades or extensive field research, depending on how Book One sells.
Paladin 404 is the first book. There are two more planned, a mushroom with opinions, and a notebook that keeps being right.
- First boot
- Manic Miner, ZX Spectrum 48K
- Hardware
- Same Spectrum. Original rubber keys
- Main
- WoW, since Vanilla
- Published
- A gold-farming guide for start-ups
- Now playing
- Dredge · Northgard
- Streams
- Never
- Found instead
- The pub