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"You have your own personal Backrooms/Carcosa"

When people learn to play RPGs from the book, without wider context, sometimes they make odd assumptions. Amaranth M had a particularly unusual experience with their first game group: The Inevitable Shopping Mall. Bsky link should work for unregistered users, but I've transcribed it below the fold just in case.

I would do that "your first TTRPGs prompt that is going around but all it's going to do is remind me again that I can never escape the shopping mall no matter how far I go

for those of you who don't know the Shopping Mall loremy first RPG was Heroes Unlimited (1E) and the group that introduced me played the intro scenario which is a nice standard "supervillains are threatening the shopping mall and the A-List heroes are unavailable, HELP". It's fine. Decent intro. So we get to the end of the session, the day is saved, see you next weekNext week arrives and the supervillains are threatening the shopping mall and the A-List heroes are unavailable, HELPSo we get to the end of the session, the day is saved, see you next weekNext week arrives and the supervi this goes on for about 6 weeks before I, a kid, feel confident enough to speak up about "isn't this weird?" and I'm told that no, this is the game, the book tells us that this is the game, so we play the game in the book! The book says we go to save the shopping mall and there's so many things there Now, this isn't a time loop. We level up. We face different supervillains. The mall "changes" and there's different traps and gimmicks and one time there's sharks swimming under the floor and another time tanks take over the go-kart track and...but it's always the mall They take turns DM'ing and so eventually, I've played with them enough, they're like, let's give the new kid a chance, and I get into the rotation and I'm like FINALLY, I HAVE THESE IDEAS and I start off with the mall and just like always, we end with the villains fleeing into the distance and then next week I start off with "and you're in pursuit as we approach their hideout"and there's just. Dead silence around the table.Dead.Silence.For.A while.Until someone speaks up confusedly "...that's...not how you play the game...take us back..."I was ejected from the group. HOWEVERSince that day, I cannot escape the shopping mall. It keeps coming back to haunt me. It appears in media out of nowhere. It accosts me in the MMO I'm playing. It shows up in TTRPGs without warning.I will never escape the shopping mall. LEST YOU THINK I'M JOKING ABOUT THE MMOI PLAY FINAL FANTASY THE FOURTEENTH FOR YEARSI THINK I'M SAFEOPEN AIR MARKETS ARE NOT THE SAME AS THE SHOPPING MALLEVEN THE CRYSTARIUM DOESN'T HAVE A MALLAND THEN FUCKING DAWNTRAILI WENT TO BAT FOR YOU, DAWNTRAIL, I LIKE YOUBUT YOU BETRAY ME Decades later, while we were taking a break from Lancer for between season prep break, our DM ran us through a Beacon miniseries that would end up kicking off our so-called Mall Crawl fun-setting No one understood why I had to go AFK for like, an hour when she told us the quest hook (on destroying the mall, and continuity OK BUT THE THING ISTHAT HAPPENEDSEVERAL TIMESBOTH VILLAINS AND PLAYER CHARACTERS DESTROYED THE WHOLE MALL MORE THAN ONCE, INCLUDING SMUGGLED ATOM BOMBS AND AT LEAST ONCE CRASHING JUPITER INTO ITAND THENNEXT WEEK"HEY THE A-LIST HEROES ARE BUSY AND THE MALL IS..." I wonder if the same thing happened if they ever tried other gamesI wonder what would happen if they tried a game that had more than one published scenarioI wonder what would happen if they tried a game that had no scenarios in the core book

Title courtesy of the thread.
posted by Lorc on Oct 25, 2026 at 1:29 AM

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Gamers are sometimes too literal, and game designers sometimes don't anticipate everything someone might not understand.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:27 AM

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This was hilarious, now I'm curious what it would be like to do it on purpose, playing the same scenario with the same group month after month year after year.
posted by Nea Imagista at 3:03 AM

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To be fair, this was an easy trap to fall into with Dungeons & Dragons. "Of course we have to be in a dungeon, it's in the name!" It took me years to start developing scenarios that didn't involve dungeons. Then again, I was in grammar school at the time.
posted by rikschell at 4:22 AM

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To be fair, this was an easy trap to fall into with Dungeons & Dragons

Not only this, but D&D commandeered the meaning of the word "dungeon" and drove it to a very specific place. Natural caves, underground temples, catacombs: dungeons. Mines: dungeons. Castles? Yeah, sure, why not, sometimes dungeons. Outside? No, that is a Wilderness Adventure, which is something you need to endure to get to the place you are going, which is a dungeon.
posted by phooky at 5:33 AM

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Heck, time and distance, healing and rest, even the very limits of magic itself were different depending on whether you were "in a dungeon" or not.

Back in the 80s, that was definitely true of malls as well.
posted by straight at 7:24 AM

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Appreciate the transcript - that was great.

Living out in the boonies it wouldn't even occur to us to check for some common approach to these hobbies like role playing, sports cards or marbles. We just came up with our own. So many lunches were spent chasing around some marbles out in the grass or playing sports cards.
posted by zenon at 8:27 AM

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To be fair, this was an easy trap to fall into with Dungeons & Dragons.

ISWYDT
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:57 AM

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Very appropriate post title. Malls are 100% modern archetypal spaces. I don't know how common it is now, but back in the proverbial day, I and lots of other people I knew had dreams in empty malls. There were all these people walking around blank faced and totally unaware, but you could kind of break out of that (creepy and decidedly backrooms-esque) space, and then go adventuring, flying out into space, etc.

I remember someone first talking about it at one point and I was like, I've had that dream, and other people were like oh yeah, me too. It really struck me. So after that, any time people were talking about dreams, I would bring it up, and quite frequently people would say oh yeah, I know what you're talking about, for sure.

So yeah, not at all surprising to me that they pop up in all these video games and rpgs.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 10:21 AM

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Now I'm imagining the scenario where Our Heroes have to stop the Blues Brothers who are driving around inside the mall causing chaos and admiring the incredible selection of stores.
posted by indexy at 10:32 AM

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Yeah, the idea of a weird space inside the mall somehow just flowed naturally from the mall itself. I remember a kid in my early teens claiming he went through an employees-only door at the mall and ended up in a tunnel system with laser tripwires. I knew it was a crazy exaggeration but it was a vivid image that immediately resonated.

Maybe it came from being in a building with so many individual subspaces with their own visual identities, music, etc.? Your mind naturally played with the idea of there being more, hidden places.

I honestly don't get that vibe now when I'm in malls, though. I think it's because the stores have less merchandise and decor than they used to, and a lot don't seem to have aisles anymore, just merchandise along the periphery, so it just feels like one big mall instead of a constellation of unique stores that you can disappear into.
posted by smelendez at 11:11 AM

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If you like the idea of malls as terrifying empty spaces, check out The Oldest View by KanePixels (of backrooms fame).
posted by Lorc at 11:25 AM

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To be fair, these gamers are the target audience of Hasbro, I would like nothing better than to cultivate a population of people who cannot imagine writing their own adventures, but just buy and play what the company puts out.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:08 PM

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I learned how roleplaying games worked at the turn of the millennium by joining an existing university society. I've always found it interesting how much divergence there is between discrete pre-internet roleplaying communities emerging from the same source text -- it's like a low-stakes simulation of religious schism, I guess.

Mostly this applies to broad unwritten conventions, like whether first-person dialogue is normal and obvious or something cringy that only nerds do, but every now and then you come across a group that's legitimately the equivalent of an uncontacted tribe -- who misread something in a book one time and then codified the misunderstanding into an absolute and unquestioned law -- and this is one of those examples. My own (third- or fourth-hand) anecdote is kind of similar, but weirdly both smaller and larger in scale.

If you're unfamiliar with Ars Magica, it's a medieval fantasy game mostly about wizards. An NPC (or semi-PC; players have two characters each and sometimes temporarily play other characters) who is a retainer in a wizard household is called a "grog" in the sourcebooks. During character creation you pick a selection of virtues and flaws (advantages and disadvantages that have some system effect) for each character.

So... a friend of a friend of a friend once GMed a once-off Ars Magica game for a mixed group of people at a convention, and introduced some random grog NPC to get the plot going. This sparked off a really weird argument in which one of the players kept insisting that the grog couldn't possibly be speaking to them, because all grogs were mute. The book said so!

What the table eventually figured out was that in the main sourcebook there was an example grog character with example system stats, one of which was the muteness flaw, and this person's entire Ars Magica group back home had interpreted all the example stats in the book as The Stats for that type of character. I don't remember if follow-up questions were asked, and if the entire rich and complex tapestry of possibilities for the wizard characters was also collapsed to One Of Each Type Only.

I think that this kind of thing doesn't happen anymore because of the proliferation of "actual play" videos and podcasts, but I worry that it's been replaced by a different problem (unrealistic expectations of how slick and cinematic an actual game is, because of course those shows are edited, and I believe that many are scripted to some extent).
posted by confluency at 5:01 PM

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