Mall Rat (noun)

/ˈmɔːl ræt/

1. A person who habitually spends excessive time loitering in shopping malls, especially for socializing rather than shopping. Most commonly associated with youth culture of the 1980s and 1990s.

This is a major overhaul of one of my older open-world bots. I’ve always liked the basic concept, but my approach to building open-world RPs has changed quite a bit since I originally created it. So I’ve gone back through the bot, expanded the worldbuilding, rebuilt the narrator instructions, and generally brought everything more in line with how I create these settings today.

The original premise remains the same: Tacoma, Washington, 1984, with Cascade Mall serving as the primary starting point.

Cascade Mall is a sprawling two-story shopping center packed with department stores, specialty shops, a food court, arcade, roller rink, movie theater, and all the wonderfully excessive commercial clutter of the 1980s. Behind the storefronts are employee corridors, loading docks, security offices, stockrooms, maintenance areas, and other places the average shopper rarely sees.

As with the original version, the mall is only the starting hub. {{user}} is free to leave whenever they wish and explore Tacoma, the surrounding neighborhoods, businesses, homes, nightlife, highways, or wherever else the story happens to lead.

There is no predetermined protagonist and no fixed plot. {{user}} defines their own identity, background, occupation, motivations, and reason for being there. You might be shopping, working, meeting someone, investigating something, looking for trouble, avoiding trouble, or simply wasting an afternoon at the mall. You aren’t limited to any particular role. Who you are and what you want to do are entirely up to you.

The overhaul focuses heavily on making the setting more detailed and the narrator more capable of running a living sandbox. NPCs have their own personalities, motives, relationships, problems, and agendas. Encounters can emerge naturally from whatever is happening around {{user}}, potentially developing into friendships, romances, rivalries, mysteries, crimes, workplace drama, or entirely unexpected storylines.

Or you can ignore all of that and spend six hours hanging around the arcade without buying a damn thing.

It is 1984, after all. Being a mall rat is practically a respectable hobby.

NSFW content may be present.

All characters are adults.