Tales from the Loop Our Friends the Machines

The landscape was full of machines and scrap metal connected to the facility in one way or another. Always present on the horizon were the colossal cooling towers, with their green obstruction lights. If you put your ear to the ground, you could hear the heartbeat of the Loop - the purring of the Gravitron, the central piece of engineering magic that was the focus of the Loop’s experiments. The facility was the largest of its kind in the world, and it was said that its forces could bend space-time itself.Scifi artist Simon Stålenhag’s paintings of Swedish 1980s suburbia, populated by fantastic machines and strange beasts, have won global acclaim. Now, you can step into the amazing world of the Loop.In this roleplaying game in the vein of E.T. and Stranger Things, you'll play teenagers solving mysteries connected to the Loop. The Mysteries let the characters encounter the strange machines and weird creatures that have come to haunt the countryside after the Loop was built. The kids get to escape their everyday problems and be part of something meaningful and magical - but also dangerous.The core rulebook contains several complete Mysteries to play and a complete campaign setting, based on the Mälaröarna islands outside of Stockholm. In addition, the core rulebook includes an alternative campaign setting in a US location, based on Boulder City, Nevada. The US setting text is written by the award-winning game writer and author Matt Forbeck.Game MechanicsTales from the Loop uses a d6 dice pool mechanic. Tests to overcome challenges are made using a pool generated from the relevant Stat and Skill for the action.Rolling a 6 on a dice is a success. Normally only a single success is needed (there are cases where it may be 2 or 3 if things are difficult), and multiple 6’s will allow the character to pick Bonus Effects based on the Skill used. If you don't roll any 6's there are a few things that can be used to mitigate that before the roll becomes a straight failure. A Luck mechanic (resource) allows spending of Luck points to re-roll non 6's or you could use the Push mechanic to Push your roll, in which case you take on a condition as a cost to make the same re-roll of non 6's (Conditions make for good roleplay opportunities so are not as negative as they might seem at first) Finally you can invoke your Pride. Each character has a pride, something they are known for- like being the smart kid-which if they can apply that to the situation (called invoking) it will gain an automatic success.If after all that you still fail to generate any successes, then the action does indeed fail. The GM will decide what happens. There is some good advice in the rules for how to do this while not causing the mystery to stall (which is very useful)(The game rules are based on Mutant Year Zero, which was awarded with a Silver ENnie for Best Rules at Gencon 2015.)