My birthday, my new book, and a nostalgia monster
Saved by the Morph is here, but can you escape its time trap?
As someone who still loves a lot of stuff from my childhood, I think about nostalgia a lot. For my own peace of mind, I’m pretty big on the idea that folks should feel unashamed about whatever interests and good feelings they use to get through the day, so long as they’ve got the emotional maturity to cope with the demands of the present.
And so it is with the utmost emotional maturity that I’m here to say my latest book is now available. Say hello to Saved by the Morph: A Tabletop RPG Handbook for Turning Your Favorite Teen Sitcom into Sentai.
Saved by the Morph was born from a mash-up of Power Rangers and Saved by the Bell I ran as a stream last year powered by Renegade’s new Power Rangers RPG — though the book itself is system-agnostic.
The Power Rangers RPG is my current favorite game to run — at least the way I play it. Full of puns, bits, goofy monsters, and teen dramedy, it’s a low-health, speedy system that brings a table the energy I’m always looking for in a TTRPG.
And so I decided to run a Saved by the Morph game for some of my close pals as a birthday celebration last weekend. And, as a fun way to try to find some meta emotional angle on the proceedings, I asked for book artist Brandon Kirkman’s help creating a new monster for the game.
This is the Time Trapper, inspired by the Saved by the Bell episode “The Time Capsule,” the penultimate ep of the original series. Although the Time Trapper didn’t exist until after Saved by the Morph went to print, here’s what his entry in the book would have looked like:
As someone who, as of today, is 39 years old and is running Power Rangers games for his friends, I found this monster to be a handy conduit for some compelling questions. What are the limits and pitfalls of nostalgia? How do we balance the things we loved and the person we used to be with our present responsibilities and the person we’ve yet to become?
Ultimately I think Power Rangers is such a satisfying canvas for an RPG because it’s just wildly fun to take a monster based on your emotional fears and anxieties and beat the heck out of it until it explodes in a pile of sparks. Of course you can’t literally do that in real life, but maybe sometimes, emotionally, you can.
That’s the whole bit of Saved by the Morph — turning teenage anxieties into literal monsters for your tabletop players to outsmart, outplay, and beat up on with giant robots. It was such a blast to put together and PDFs are available now for $8 on my website as well as DriveThruRPG. Physical copies are arriving next week and I have like five that are unclaimed, so if you really want one, let me know and I can probably make that happen!
Meanwhile, I’m gonna go spend my day at my adult job, then go get dinner with my adult friends, after which we’ll play a few rounds of my favorite party game of all time, and then I’m gonna go see Spider-Man. That seems like a pretty healthy level of nostalgic celebration to me.
PS - if anybody reading this plays Renegade’s Essence20 system, I’m happy to share my stats for the Time Trapper as well. Just give me a shout!