Dead Mall (Dystopian Publishing)
$5 on Exalted Funeral (print+PDF)
What it is: Dead Mall is a tri-fold RPG in two double sided pages. It's the most minimalist RPG I've got in the review list, and is easily the shortest RPG I've ever attempted playing in terms of word count. There may be shorter RPGs out there (such as Dead Mall's inspiration, Tunnel Goons) but I've generally avoided them. Even the GURPS Ultra Lite rules may still be longer!
Dead Mall provides the core rules for running adventures of urban explorers who go to an abandoned mall to explore it. While they are there strange things happen. Maybe a zombie invasion takes place! Maybe a serial killer is hiding in the abandoned mall. Maybe its rabid dogs, or the mothman's lair. Who knows! The Dead Mall tri-fold actually doesn't tell you what it is, just that there will be something, and the GM (called the Mall Master here) should let their creative muse go wild.
The System: You roll for Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence, ranging from 0 to +2. You have a Health of 10 and Carrying Capacity of 6 items for your inventory. You get three useful or interesting pieces of equipment typical of urban explorers, so no AR-15s or other gear....you're playing a dude who does not expect to get into a brutal gun fight with Paul Blart, Mall Cop. You can get better over time. Whenever you do something, you roll 2D6 plus your ability modifier, plus an extra point if you have a useful item. All "things that cause problems" are just difficulty checks: long jump, spike trap, rotting floor, zombie, serial killer....all are difficulty roll 8, 10 or 12. Suuuuper simple.
Here's an example character:
Percy Walters, Gopro fanatic and aspiring Twitch Streamer
STR 0, Dex +1, Intelligence 0; Health 10, Inventory 6
Equipment: one gopro (headstrap style), flashlight, spirit box recorder
Done! That's all there is to it.
I forged a group on playrole.com where Dead Mall has support. There's something rather visceral and fun about a game with such a tight focus and such essential rules: find some lovely scenery online to stich together an abandoned mall, find a nice mall map, some muzak to play in the background punctuated by horror music for when the monster shows up, and walla! Watch your players fret over the best three things to take exploring with them, knowing it can't include actual weapons, so they have to get creative.
The Setting: Dead Mall's setting is the whole point, an abandoned mall. It provides exactly two useful items for the Mall Master to figure out their Dead Mall adventure: about four paragraphs on one side suggesting some ideas for the sinister threat, and on the other side is a lengthy chart you can roll on to populate your mall with 100 different mall-appropriate businesses. Though it doesn't suggest it, I think watching some videos on Youtube of urban decay explorers will help set mood and context (I recommend The Proper People, Dan Bell and Shiey from my own playlists).
Support Material (and a Word About Tunnel Goons): There's an itch.io page which you can visit, and linked there is a cool random dead mall encounter generator that can prove to be a fine Mall Master tool for running the game. Beyond that, Tunnel Goons exists, and you can see what the fantasy (?) version of this looks like. It's the same dirt simple mechanic, but appears to be about exploring a world of tunnels, with goons, in some sort of simulacra of a fantasy experience. Or scifi. Or modern, it's not really that important to the concept, I think....genre is just a trapping to the descriptions for effect.
The main reason I am reviewing Dead Mall and not Tunnel Goons is that Dead Mall is a simple concept I can see needing no more or less than the rules given, whereas Tunnel Goons doesn't really provide any guidance, and the tables provided to flesh out your goon imply some sort of "medieval decay with tunnels" setting, even as it also suggests laser wielding robots. I guess the point is: let your imagination go wild. But Dead Mall is just enough refinement for me to visualize a game scenario, I suppose.
Who Should Get This? I think anyone who likes the idea of a pick-up-and-play game and also groks the idea of urban explorers and modern decay, mixed with the suspense of something sinister stalking said explorers, will see the merits of a fun 2-3 hour beer and pretzels experience. I don't think it would be good for more than the occasional "substitution game"...but as a side note, if you ran a more "full featured" RPG and wanted a convenient random mall location generator, the chart in this book would work quite well!
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