A strange plant is growing in Tom Hanks’ heart… and its name is love. In a story repeated at so many gaming tables, the tank (Kate) is falling in love with the healer (Hanks).

I have to pause here. Mazes and Monsters has never got the recognition it deserved as one of Hanks’ most emotionally powerful love stories. Tom Hanks has been in a lot of movies – imdb lists 60, with another 15 in production – but Mazes and Monsters is one of the warmest and most romantic films he’s ever been in. I’d seriously put it in the top 3 Hanks love stories. Let’s go through some of his biggest roles:

• Dragnet: A buddy movie; the other buddy gets the romantic subplot.
• Big: Child in an adult body.
• Turner & Hooch: A love story between a guy and a dog.
• A League of Their Own: A baseball coach has a team of female players and doesn’t have a romance with any of them.
• Sleepless in Seattle: A romantic comedy in which Hanks and the girl don’t actually spend any time in the same city.
• Philadelphia: Antonia Banderas is presumably Hanks’ boyfriend, but they act like roommates.
• Forrest Gump: OK, Forrest loves Jennay. So far, this is the only Hanks movie I’d put in the romantic class of Mazes and Monsters.
• Apollo 13: Hanks spends the movie 205,500 miles away from his wife.
• Saving Private Ryan: Hanks’ love for Private Ryan is never made explicit.
• You’ve Got Mail: I haven’t seen this but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt: maybe, unlike in Sleepless in Seattle, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan actually meet and don’t JUST email each other.
• Cast Away: Love story between a man and a volleyball.
• The Polar Express: Love story between a Hanks and a Hanks.
• The Da Vinci Code: The idea of anyone loving a man with that hair is clearly preposterous. Besides, *SPOILERS REDACTED* Jesus Hanks.

All I’m saying is, it’s unusual for a Hollywood leading man to be so asexual. Hanks’ heart will forever be barren and inhospitable to love, as if he left the Mazes and Monsters set with +3 bracers vs. Cupid’s arrow. Why? Could it be that he never forgot Kate? or could it be that his Mazes and Monsters obsession left him warped – a child in a man’s body (an echo of which we can see in Big)? Remember, not everyone is able to play at the Ninth Level. Perhaps Hanks was not ready for the demands Jaffe put upon him.

But that’s all in the future. Here, today, at this gaming session, Tom Hanks’ heart is very much alive. We see a montage of his eyes locking with Kate’s over the gaming table… him ducking under her umbrella… them jogging together. Sexy stuff! But for our purposes, the most important scene is the two of them working on their character sheets together.. We get screenshots!
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There have been a lot of open-source old-school game clones: OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, etc, letting people legally produce content compatible with older games. One game that has been sadly neglected is Mazes and Monsters. Who among us doesn’t have fond childhood memories of spelunking in costume until our friend Tom Hanks went crazy?

Well, not me, because I was never lucky enough to find a M&M group – I had to make do with Dungeons and Dragons. Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters sure made M&M look intriguing though. Evil creatures! Traps! Descent into madness! Hats!

It’s been suggested that there never was a M&M game – that the Mazes and Monsters movie is an excoriating criticism of a fictionalized version of D&D. If so, it is a dismal failure, because as we can see from the movie, MAZES AND MONSTERS IS NOTHING LIKE DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS. Therefore, unless we are to assume that Rona Jaffe and everyone involved in the movie are total idiots who didn’t bother to do the most trivial speck of research, we must assume that the movie is an excoriating criticism of a real game called Mazes and Monsters that I have just never heard of.

Rulebooks of Mazes and Monsters are hard to come by; luckily Rona Jaffe’s movie contains a wealth of gaming detail – enough, I think, to make a workable retro-clone. I volunteer to watch the movie and glean any rules details. The M&M community will have to help fill in any rules gaps with memories and speculation!

My first question for the community: Since the name “Mazes and Monsters” is undoubtedly under copyright, what should we call our retro clone? The suggestions that come to my mind are

• Mazes and Hanksters
• Mazes and MOSRIC
• Rona Jaffe’s Dungeons and Dragons

Vote or leave suggestions in the comments!

Let’s start watching the movie!

Media Uproar

The movie begins with wailing police sirens and a be-trenchcoated reporter doing a story about a Mazes and Monsters-related disappearance. Even in his media fearmongering, though, we can find good material for our game:

REPORTER: Mazes and Monsters is a fantasy role-playing game in which players create imaginary characters. These characters are then plunged into a fantasy world of imagined terrors. The point of the game is to amass a fortune without being killed. It’s kind of a psychodrama, you might say, where these people deal with problems in their lives by acting them out.

This is good stuff! Let’s use it for page 1 of our game!
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