"All in the Mall": An RPG Mall Crawl where Saved by the Bell meets the Power Rangers
It's alright, cuz you're saved by the Zord
Last spring, after Renegade released their Power Rangers RPG, I ran a 5-week series of streams on Twitch with some of my comedian friends called Saved by the Zord, which used plots from Saved by the Bell as springboards to launch into hormonal superhero action (because, let’s face it, Saved by the Bell and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are basically the same show already). I had a ton of fun playing in that world, but one of the modules in particular felt like it had legs outside of a comedy stream context, “All in the Mall,” based on a Saved by the Bell episode with the following synopsis:
After a failed attempt to buy tickets to the U2 concert, Zack and the gang find $5,000 abandoned at the mall, but things do not work out when the gang are chased by "mobsters" around the mall, until they found out the truth.
I combined the premise of the Bayside gang trying to outrun some dangerous-looking goons while hiding out in a shopping mall with the classic TTRPG mode of the dungeon crawl and made a 1990s suburban shopping mall crawl. It was… really fun.
Since that stream, I’ve run “All in the Mall” for friends and at conventions, and folks seem to have enjoyed it! So I’ve formalized my notes for the module into a PDF which I’ve attached to this post for free! (It’s at the very bottom.) Please note this uses Renegade’s Essence20 system, their engine for each of their Hasbro properties — and despite a couple ticky-tacky rules I tend to ignore when I run it, I really like it! (Last month I published a piece for their Transformers game as well.) I’ve also attached pregenerated character sheets to this post that mash up Saved by the Bell and Power Rangers characters, which were a lot of fun to make!
Hope you enjoy this retro mashup. If you do, I’ve got a few more plans for the space where 90s teen dramedy meets Super Sentai that I’ll be sharing early next year!
Also: I don’t want to post some silly Power Rangers thing without saying something about Jason David Frank. I definitely dressed as the Green Ranger for Halloween in fourth grade; like lots of kids, I wanted to be Tommy Oliver, despite not at all having the physique for it, lol. My friend Clint wrote a really excellent tribute to Jason over at Polygon. What a sad, sad thing.
