You’ve heard of Dungeons and Dragons. Right?
It’s been around for 45 year and been in everything from Simpsons to Stranger things.
What is it?
It’s a pen and paper Roleplaying game. A set of rules to tell a shared story with friends and family with a backdrop of classic sword and sorcery in the vein of The Lord of the Rings.
Pretty simple right? Well that’s what Tales from the Loop is. A very rules-simple pen and paper Roleplaying Game! Only it ditches the old tropes of Dwarves, Elves, Dragons, and Goblins for a more contemporary setting.
You and your friends play as teens living in a town. Small, but not tiny. Home to a high-science facility knowing as The Loop. Much in the vein of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, but unlike the LHC, strange things have been happening since they started running it a few years back. Also… There are robots and fairly advanced AI (because YES!)
So you’re a teen, in a boring small town, and strange things have begun to crop up. Obviously it is up to you and your friends to figure out what is going on! However, don’t expect those placid and unobservant parents/adults to be any help. This is your adventure, and no meddling adults are going to be able to keep you from the truth! Whether it be trans-dimensional slugs, a rogue AI bent on controlling all the radio waves, or a friendly alien that The Loop wants to recapture to study. It’s up to your crew to put things right!
You’ll notice this is a very familiar trope. From the Goonies of the 80’s to Stranger Things of today, this a step back to a simpler time, where the fate of the world could rest on your 15 year old shoulders.
“But Andrew, I’ve never played an RPG, and that’s a big book.” You may say. Well I answer that it is big. I won’t lie about that. It’s also one of the easiest and rules light systems of rules I’ve seen! Most of the book is dedicated to world building, another good chunk is pre-generated adventures, which means you’ve only got a semi-complex piece of flat-pack furniture’s worth of instructions to get through before you start the game! And believe me, you’re going to get a lot more mileage out of Tales From The Loop than you did that office desk from Ikea.
So go ahead and place a hold on it, pick it up, and treat your friends/family to a fantastic adventure as you recapture some of that awe and mystery of being a kid.