Jay Jay is throwing a Halloween party! Jay Jay is dressed as Noel Coward. Blondie is a naval officer. Kate is, uh, the naval officer’s girlfriend? (I forgot to mention, Blondie and Kate hooked up at the end of the last scene.)

The party also contains Frankensteins, maids, Darth Vaders, and pirates. (No mummies. Too bad. A mummy is, like, the easiest Halloween costume. All you need is gauze, or, in a pinch, toilet paper.) Everyone is bopping to generic 80s party music, except Tom Hanks, who is stalking through the party with the spooky asceticism of one who has been visited by the Great Hall. Hanks is dressed like a Holy Man. But it’s NOT A COSTUME.

Hanks leaves the party and closes the door. He lays his hand on the door in a mystic gesture.

This peculiar gesture is undoubtedly some Holy Man spell, meant to prevent his friends from following him.

Spells

Lock Portal: By laying his hand on a door, a Holy Man can lock it for a few hours. Anyone who tries to force the door or open it with a key must succeed on a RONA based on the Holy Man’s level.

At this point in my notes from the first time I watched the movie, I have the following puzzling scrawl:

“mazes and hankersaurs”
hankersaur is a hypno with hanks head. holy man gon mad lives in mind like she said

I can’t quite figure out what I meant. Was a “hankersaur” some sort of theoretical Mazes and Monsters monster, maybe a dinosaur with Tom Hanks’ head? Or was this some sort of rap gone wrong? Or was the movie putting me into the Mazed state of a Mazes and Monsters player who is playing above his level? I’m lucky I escaped with my sanity. But I have to assume that my ravings were based on fleeting contact with some cosmic truth too terrible for Man to know, so I’ll put “Hankersaur” in the bestiary.

Bestiary

Hankersaur: A terrible undead monster with the body of an ancient lizard and Tom Hanks’ head, hankersaurs roam dungeons looking for spells to devour. It is said that in life, Hankersaurs were Holy Men who were driven mad by the terrible truths of the Maze.

Hankersaurs fight as Level 9 monsters. When they hit, they do no damage, but permanently consume the target’s highest level spell.

Hanks Bunks

In the middle of the night, Hanks is visited again by the Great Hall, who tells him that he is Ready. Hanks gets up, changes into his regular clothes (not his Holy Man costume for some reason) and leaves campus, wearing the glassy-eyed stare of a hypnotism subject and shuffling like a zombie, or maybe a mummy. Parents, this is what madness looks like. Examine your kids daily for mental illness. It looks like being a mummy.

The next day, Hanks’ friends notice he is missing and search his room. They discover that he has left his wallet behind, and – more significant – he has drawn a FOREIGN MAP.

BLONDIE: Hey, this isn’t our maze!
JJ: Do you think Robbie was involved in another game?
KATE: No no, if he’d been playing with another group we would have known.

The group compares the map to Pequod Caverns. When it doesn’t match, they’re puzzled (forgetting that before their latest campaign, every previous maze was invented out of whole cloth). Kate takes the imaginary map as further evidence of Hanks’ madness. “Holy men are supposed to see things that aren’t there, remember?”

Holy men see things that aren’t there.

The group suspects that Hanks got lost in the caves. They want to go to the police, but they know that if they admit exploring the caves, they will be expelled from school. So they clear their stuff out of the cavern, and then lie to the police, claiming that Hanks was “fascinated with the caves”.

They go farther: they also deny playing Mazes and Monsters together. I’m not sure why they do this. It’s not illegal, is it?

Or is it?

Next time: A scary detective grills the three friends. His goal: to wring from them an admission that they play Mazes and Monsters. Will they stay strong? Or will they confess, which will get them in trouble for some reason?

Series Navigation

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Tags: mazesandmonsters

This entry was posted on Monday, October 25th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under game design, legacy D&D, news, other systems, RPG Hub. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.