Five Children & It

A camping trip on the edge of the Norfolk Broads and the edge of the Norfolk Loop leads to a strange encounter late at night. A pulse of energy in the sky over the Loop appears to open a rift and something flies through it and over the Kid viewing it, bathing him in a strange, purple light. Then it flies away. In the following days there is a surge of activity at the Norfolk Loop, one of the United Kingdom’s leading scientific and technological centres of study and development, its staff disrupted through a change of management and the new management scouring the area around the Loop, including the nearby seaside resort of Great Yarmouth. The Kid who saw the event and was bathed in the light is drawn to a site that a team from the Norfolk Loop is investigating. There he and his friends make an amazing discovery—an egg. A strange, translucent, purple egg-shaped object. Could this have been left behind by the thing that flew out of the rift? Why is the Kid drawn to it? If it is an egg, what is going to hatch out of it? This is the set-up for They Grow Up So Fast.

They Grow Up So Fast is the second campaign for Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the ’80s That Never Was, the roleplaying game of childhood in an alternate 1980s in which young teenagers explore rural small-town Sweden, but a rural small-town Sweden in which its streets, woods and fields, and skies and seas are populated by robots, gravitic tractors and freighters, strange sensor devices, and even creatures from the long past. To the inhabitants of this landscape, this is all perfectly normal—at least to the adults. To the children of this landscape, this technology is a thing of fascination, of wonderment, and of the strangeness that often only they can see. In Tales from the Loop, it is often this technology that is the cause of the adventures that the children—the Player Characters—will have away from their mundane, often difficult lives at home and at school. Published by Free League Publishing, the Ennie-award winning Tales from the Loop is not solely a Swedish-based setting. By default, it is set on Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren, which lies to the west of Stockholm. This is the site of the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics—or ‘The Loop’—the world’s largest particle accelerator, constructed and run by the government agency, Riksenergi. There is another Loop however, an American counterpart to The Loop, this time located under Boulder City in the Mojave Desert in Nevada, near the Hoover Dam. Here the particle accelerator is operated by the Department of Advanced Research into Technology and there is an extensive exchange programme in terms of personnel and knowledge between the staff of both ‘Loops’. With the publication of Our Friends the Machines & Other Mysteries, a third Loop was introduced. This is ‘The Broads Loop’, located under the Norfolk Broads in the East of England and built and operated by MAFF, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food. It is in and about ‘The Norfolk Broads Loop’ that They Grow Up So Fast is set.

They Grow Up So Fast is a short, four-part campaign set in 1988, with its four scenarios divided between the four seasons. It opens in the Spring with ‘Easter Egg Hunt’, in which one of the Kids will have a strange encounter on a campaign trip and together with his friends, come into possession of a strange alien that together they will feel drawn to hide and protect. A few weeks later in the Summer and ‘The Best of What Might Be’, the egg hatches and the Kids bond with the oddly cow-like creature that is revealed. As school begins in the Autumn and ‘The Year’s Last, Loveliest Smile’, the Kids will have to move the surprisingly cute lain and find it a better hiding place. The campaign comes to close with ‘You can’t Get Too Much…’ with a race to find the creature once again and get it home… All of this whilst facing school bullies, news interest about UFO sightings, staff upheaval at the nearby Loop and its consequences as a new government organisation—ReGIS or ‘Regional Geomagnetic Information Sciences’, part of the Ministry of Defence—takes over, protests at the Loop, and a highly qualified, but very new and very inexperienced science teacher who takes a deep interest in their activities. Each scenario is intended to run in roughly four hours or so, perhaps two sessions at most, that They Grow Up So Fast really is very short campaign.

To help the Game Master set the scene for the campaign, there is a solid primer on the United Kingdom and the Norfolk Broads of the late eighties. This covers activities that Kids might engage in, what they might listen to, and what they might watch. There is even a discussion of the politics of the period. Altogether, there is enough here for the Game Master to provide a picture of the eighties for her players, although no doubt there is plenty more to draw on elsewhere and so set further set the background. Nevertheless, there is genuine sense of nostalgia in the description given here and any Game Master or player of certain age, who grew up during this period in the United Kingdom, will recognise it. Further, as with other supplements for Tales from the Loop, there are notes and suggestions on how to run They Grow Up So Fast in either the Swedish or the American setting, including maps of the appropriate locations around their respective Loops. Each of the four scenarios is well organised and follow the pattern set in the core rules by being divided into five phases—‘Introducing the Kids’, ‘Introducing the Mystery’, ‘Solving the Mystery’, ‘Showdown’, ‘Aftermath’, and ‘Change’. Details of countdown events are given to push each Mystery along as well as suggested scenes and other advice.

Physically, They Grow Up So Fast is as well presented as you would expect for a Tales from the Loop title. Of course, it highlights Simon Stålenhag’s fantastic artwork, but the writing is also good and the layout is clean, tidy, and accessible. All four scenarios follow the same format, making them easy to access and relatively easy to run.

It is great to have a campaign for Tales from the Loop set in the United Kingdom and given the fact that its four scenarios take place over the course of the year, there is scope for the Game Master to run other scenarios in between those four. However, the scenarios do rely on the extensive use of the Charm and Sneak more than the others and the plot to They Grow Up So Fast is underwhelming. This is primarily due to two factors. One is the familiarity of its plot, which feels very much like the plot of one of the films suggested as its inspiration, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. Other suggested mood setting films include Pete’s Dragon, Free Willy, and Gremlins. One effect though, of setting the campaign in the United Kingdom, is to give They Grow Up So Fast certain shabbiness as if the Children’s Film Foundation made E.T. The Extra Terrestrial on a very much reduced budget! The other factor is that as written the ending does not feel quite as climatic as it should, it can also end in an even more underwhelming failure, but that will probably be different in play and the Game Master will need to up the pace depending upon the flow of events.

They Grow Up So Fast is a solid enough campaign, but not on par with other releases for Tales from the Loop. Ultimately, this is due to the familiarity of the plot, but if the Game Master is looking for a Tales from the Loop campaign in the style of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, then They Grow Up So Fast is exactly what she is looking for.