(As I mentioned in part I, I’m reverse engineering the rules to the RPG from the Tom Hanks blockbuster Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters.)

Here’s the first scene where we see a Mazes and Monsters game being played! And, as we’d expect in this film, which is so steeped in RPG rules that it is practically a Mazes and Monsters manual, we can get a lot of rules information from just the first frame of this scene.

First of all, we can see that this game is played on a board. (I think? It could also be just an awesome coffee table that happens to have a dungeon-like pattern.) Second, we see that there are candles. Lots and lots of candles. Finally, we see what looks like a GM’s screen, shaped like a sweet castle!

Notable for their absence: dice. None of the players have any dice sitting in front of them. What kind of game is this? What do the players stack when they are bored? The only possible answer is NOTHING, because IN MAZES AND MONSTERS YOU DO NOT GET BORED!!!

If anyone had any lingering doubts about Mazes and Monsters being an entirely separate game from D&D, those doubts should be dispelled. Most editions of D&D have some sentence that is a variation on the following: All you need to play this game is a few friends, this book, dice — and imagination!

Imagine that sentence as it would appear in the Mazes and Monsters rulebook:

All you need to play this game is at least three friends, this book, NO dice, a board (or possibly a coffee table), and some personal problems you want to work out. Hundreds of candles are optional but highly recommended.

OK, let’s get to some dialogue!
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