Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Tales from the Loop
English
Rules-light
Sci-fi
Tales from the Loop is a tabletop roleplaying game of childhood mystery and quiet sci-fi wonder, designed by Nils Hintze and published by Free League Publishing in 2017, built directly on Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag's narrative art book of the same name. It swept five Gold ENnie Awards in 2017, including Best Game and Product of the Year, and remains one of the clearest examples of a TTRPG built to capture a single, specific visual mood - Stålenhag's paintings of enormous, quietly abandoned machinery looming over ordinary Scandinavian suburbs.
Description
Players take on Kids - ordinary ten-to-fifteen-year-olds, built from archetypes like the Bookworm, the Jock, the Popular Kid, or the Weirdo - growing up in an alternate 1980s where a massive particle accelerator called the Loop hums beneath the countryside, filling the neighborhood with strange machines and stranger creatures nobody adult seems able to explain.
The Game Master runs Mysteries, TV-episode-style adventures staged scene by scene, where the actual danger from the Loop's technology sits right alongside completely mundane teenage Trouble - being grounded, a bully at school, a parent who won't listen. The game states its central promise plainly: Kids in this setting cannot die, which keeps stakes high through fear, loss, and consequence rather than mortality, and lets the tone stay closer to Stranger Things or E.T. than to horror.