Yeah in fact if you try to use graph paper to map out the areas in Zork you'll get immensely frustrated at its non-Euclidean geometry. The game designers seemed to be quite fond of having your character change compass directions between locations, so heading south and then immediately north will often leave you in a different location than you started!
The better way to map Zork is to treat it like a non-planar graph and use graph paper to build an adjacency matrix [1]. Since Z-machine is a bytecode VM that often ran on 8-bit computers it's a pretty safe assumption that the game likely has 256 or fewer vertices in the graph. So if you give every area you visit a 2-digit hex ID you can make the matrix small enough to be manageable.
Just started playing a few days ago... I've been able to draw out most of it as planar 'areas' with curved arrows for paths. Even for some of the easier 'maze' type areas it works, but I'm about to cave in and build an adjacency matrix for one of the difficult areas. (pun not intended?)
No, but I'd imagine a lot of people were like myself. I already had a ton of graph paper and was used to using that to draw maps for D&D and more grid based games.
