Substitute Souls

In comparison to Tales from the Loop, there is relatively little support for its sequel, Things from the Flood. Both share a setting in Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren, east of Stockholm, first in the 1980s and then in 1990s, 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. Both are settings drawn from Simon Stålenhag’s artwork, Tales from the Loop contrasting an almost pastoral idyll against a hi-tech world of the Loop, robots, and skies filled with ‘magnetrine vessels’, freighters and slow liners whose engines repel against the Earth’s magnetic field, an effect only possible in northern latitudes. In Things from the Flood, the pastoral idyll has been spoiled, the lands around the Loop spoiled by a hot, brown liquid bubbling up out of the ground, Riksenergi being shut down and the Loop being sold off, robots suffering from a strange cancer, and the resulting economic crisis would lead to depression, personality changes, divorces, gambling disorders, and more… Where Tales from the Loop is positive in tone and has a fascination with technology, Things from the Flood is darker and has a fear of technology.

Thankfully for fans of Things from the Flood—and other titles from Free League Publishing, there is the Free League Workshop. Much like the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons, this is a platform for creators to publish and distribute their own original content, which means that they also have a space to showcase their creativity and their inventiveness, to do something different, and perhaps even surprise us. So it is with Somethings are Better Left Unsaid.

Somethings are Better Left Unsaid is a scenario for Things from the Flood, and whilst it does involve things, it does not involve either floods, Loops, or even Sweden. It is still set in the 1990s though, but Australia, rather than Sweden, and the Teens are still teenagers. It is the second in a series of adventures—the first being Shakespeare’s Monkeys—involving the efforts of the research company, Northstar R&D, led by its founding CEO, Jeremy Longstaff, which wants to bring some of the technological and scientific benefits, in particular, the magic of magnetite, from the Loops in Sweden and Boulder City, Nevada, to the Southern Hemisphere. It is a short, one or two session scenario set in the lakeside town of Jindabyne, a small tourist resort in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, Australia.

Despite sharing the same location and being set in Australia, Somethings are Better Left Unsaid is a little different in comparison to Shakespeare’s Monkeys. In a way, it feels less Australian because it does not involve an intelligent creature a la the series, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (which in Shakespeare’s Monkeys manages to feel simultaneously appropriate and inappropriate). However, because it forgoes this obvious potential for parody, it allows the authors to bring in something which is genuinely Australian and so brings colour into the scenario which was not present in Shakespeare’s Monkeys. This is Behind the News, a long-running news programme broadcast on Australia’s ABC TV and aimed at upper primary and lower secondary students to help them understand issues and events outside their own lives. Show the players an episode of this—especially those from the nineties and perhaps worked into scenes earlier in Shakespeare’s Monkeys and that would go towards adding colour to the four scenarios.

The other difference between the two scenarios is that Somethings are Better Left Unsaid brings the threat at its heart closer to home—or at least closer to school. The Teens of Jindabyne begin to have the weirder feelings than the norm—that they almost know what others are thinking and of floating just above their bodies as they fall asleep at night, just as radios keep squawking static and the sound of voices begging. Could these be connected? The one day at school, just as they are about to watch the latest episode of Behind the News, their science teacher, along with a fellow student,  faints in class. If they go to check on either of them in hospital the next day, they discover that the local doctors are both perplexed and worried, but a strange old man, accompanied by bodyguards no less, seems to be taking an interest in them. Things take a really weird turn the next day when the substitute the science teacher who is sick, Doctor Matianov, is actually the strange old man who was seen at the hospital the day before. This is not just weird, for it gets worse when it becomes obvious that Doctor Matianov is actually a terrible teacher! Just what is going on and just what does it have to do with Doctor Matianov? Is he really a teacher? Has he joined the staff at the school for reasons of his own?

Somethings are Better Left Unsaid is creepy and weird and ties into our fears—and those of the Teens—of conspiracies (Doctor Matianov is actually Russian), loss (in particular of important mentors and friends), and the supernatural (the weird voices heard over the radio, at the very least). It is darker in tone than the earlier Shakespeare’s Monkeys and is more focused and confined to just the school and the hospital, rather than being more open in terms of its play area. The result is that Somethings are Better Left Unsaid is shorter and more likely to played through in a single, intense session (though it could stretch to two). Similarly, just as with Shakespeare’s Monkeys, the decently explained plot is easily adapted to other settings—even back to Mälaröarna or Boulder City! There is however one issue with Somethings are Better Left Unsaid which it shared with Shakespeare’s Monkeys. It leaves the connections to Northstar R&D undeveloped and unexplored, and perhaps it would have been better for this scenario and the previous one to have dropped some hints or foreshadowed at the corporation’s involvement.

Physically, Somethings are Better Left Unsaid is a decently laid out document and follows the format for Things from the Flood. Some of the artwork is decent too, and the maps are nicely done. The darker turn of Somethings are Better Left Unsaid is not unwelcome scenario in what is another likeable enough affair that offers the chance to explore the world of Things from the Flood from a different perspective. It feels as if it is laying the foundation for something larger, but not telling the Game Master what it is yet, and that really needs to come through in the next scenarios to be released.

Monkey Island

In comparison to Tales from the Loop, there is relatively little support for its sequel, Things from the Flood. Both share a setting in Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren, east of Stockholm, first in the 1980s and then in 1990s, 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. Both are settings drawn from Simon Stålenhag’s artwork, Tales from the Loop contrasting an almost pastoral idyll against a hi-tech world of the Loop, robots, and skies filled with ‘magnetrine vessels’, freighters and slow liners whose engines repel against the Earth’s magnetic field, an effect only possible in northern latitudes. In Things from the Flood, the pastoral idyll has been spoiled, the lands around the Loop spoiled by a hot, brown liquid bubbling up out of the ground, Riksenergi being shut down and the Loop being sold off, robots suffering from a strange cancer, and the resulting economic crisis would lead to depression, personality changes, divorces, gambling disorders, and more… Where Tales from the Loop is positive in tone and has a fascination with technology, Things from the Flood is darker and has a fear of technology.

Thankfully for fans of Things from the Flood—and other titles from Free League Publishing, there is the Free League Workshop. Much like the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons, this is a platform for creators to publish and distribute their own original content, which means that they also have a space to showcase their creativity and their inventiveness, to do something different, and perhaps even surprise us. So it is with Shakespeare’s Monkeys.

Shakespeare’s Monkeys is a scenario for Things from the Flood, and whilst it does involve things, it does not involve either floods, Loops, or even Sweden. It is still set in the 1990s though, but Australia, rather than Sweden, and the Teens are still teenagers. It is the first in a series of adventures involving the efforts of the research company, Northstar R&D, led by its founding CEO, Jeremy Longstaff, which wants to bring some of the technological and scientific benefits, in particular, the magic of magnetite, from the Loops in Sweden and Boulder City, Nevada, to the Southern Hemisphere. It is a short, one or two session scenario set in the lakeside town of Jindabyne, a small tourist resort in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, Australia.

As the title suggests, the scenario concerns a monkey—or rather a troop of monkeys, or rather it starts with one monkey and then involves a whole lot of them. Perhaps one of the Teen finds out he has a really smart possum breaking into the garden shed for food, but it turns out to be a monkey or the Teens hear about (or encounter) some weird, hippy American asking questions about the new buildings on the island out in the lake or they even hear about monkey sightings round the town. Either way, the Teens will soon encounter a troop of monkeys about town and in particular, one monkey who appears to have been modified with an antenna and ultimately wants to make friends. However, the Teens will not be only ones interested in the monkeys, or rather the one monkey, and when they investigate further, they will discover the presence of the strange American in town and his interest in the buildings on the island on the lake. Ultimately, they will follow the clues out to the island and discover not only what is going on there, but also how it affects the monkey who has befriended them, as well as the other monkeys.

Shakespeare’s Monkeys is the first in a series of adventures for Things from the Flood and a fairly sad one at that. It is short, playable in a session or two, and in general, its well-explained plot is easily adapted to other settings—even back to Mälaröarna or Boulder City! This may be a solution to a problem which the author of the scenario fails to address, and that is its setting. In Things from the Flood—and before that, Tales from the Loop—there is background information on both the Sweden and the USA of the nineties and eighties, but Shakespeare’s Monkeys has none. Just as American culture and Swedish culture are different, so is that of Australia. Whilst there is a map of Jindabyne, there is no background given either. Which leaves the Game Master with a lot of information to research to get the setting right, unless both players and Game Master want to rely upon soap operas for their knowledge of Australia, or given the fact thatShakespeare’s Monkeys involves an intelligent animal, episodes of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (which manages to feel simultaneously appropriate and inappropriate). Now to some extent, the players and their Game Master will construct some of the elements of the setting of Jindabyne around their characters, that is built into Things from the Flood, but to shift the roleplaying game to somewhere else and not provide this is an oversight.

Another consequence of the lack of background, is that the consequences to the scenario—not the conclusion—is underwritten. Again, the Game Master will need to work out what these are, but again that will be derived from whatever she and her players develop in terms of their setting.

Physically, Shakespeare’s Monkeys is a decently laid out document and follows the format for Things from the Flood. Some of the artwork is decent too, and the maps are nicely done. Ultimately, when coming to run and play Shakespeare’s Monkeys, the issue that both Game Master and players will have address is the fact that it is set in Australia and it does involve an animal, so that may lead to some humour around the table. The issues with the background and lack of it aside, Shakespeare’s Monkeys is a likeable enough scenario that offers the chance to explore the world of Things from the Flood from a different perspective.

From Tales to Things

Out of Time is the first campaign for Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the ’80s That Never Was –and quite possibly the last. With Out of Time, Free League Publishing brings the award-winning roleplaying game based on the paintings of Simon Stålenhag to a close. Throughout this alternate childhood of the 1980s, young teenagers have explored 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. Taking place at the end of the decade, Out of Time takes place over the course of year, but has potential to be something more—and all because the campaign involves time travel…

Out of Time begins with a rash of pets and farm animals going missing, followed by flyers asking for information about lost pets going up across the neighbourhood, then rumours of a mechanical contraption seen roaming the fields outside the small communities of the Mälaren Islands. When the Player Characters investigate, they discover the first of many strange experiments taking place, experiments which get stranger and stranger as the campaign progresses. Later, their summer takes a decidedly strange, literally ‘Out of the Body’ turn, which reveals more of the Mystery, before the weather gets randomly worse and storms threaten to shut the region down. Ultimately, to solve the Mystery and even save the world, the Player Characters must sneak out during a lockdown and break into 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 at last they can discover what links the storms out of nowhere which bring strange mud and sand, the repeated crashes of the magnetrine ship Susi Talvi, the weird flashbacks at their summer camp, and the 1969 moon landing.

The campaigns consists of a trilogy of scenarios—‘The Animal Ark’, ‘Summer Camp’, and ‘The Storm in the Hourglass’. The first takes place just before Christmas, 1988, which only serves to heighten the fractious state of their home lives, but at the same time, there are reports of missing animals, strange devices can be found scattered throughout the area, and a magnetrine ship appears out of a rip in the sky to crash again and again. ‘The Animal Ark’ is quite a short scenario, but does a good job of setting up the campaign, whilst giving the players scope to develop their characters’ home lives. There is advice for the Game Master and suggestions as to what can be added to reflect the heightened anxiety and emotions which seem to occur at Christmas, but many players will have had experiences of their own and can make suggestions of their own too. Essentially setting the scenario at Christmas serves to strengthen the two contrasting strands of a Tales from the Loop game, one being the Game Master presenting the weirdness of its alternative setting and the Mysteries of The Loop, the other being the players exploring the emotional, but mundane complexities of their characters’ home lives.

‘Summer Camp’ moves the time on to the summer of 1989 and the tradition of children being sent to summer camp. Here the Player Characters and other local children are kept busy with a range of outdoor activities, from hut building and gymnastics to orienteering and telling ghost stories round the fire. Things get strange though, when each of the Player Characters wakes up to find that not only is he not in his own body, but he is not in his own time—it is 1969! This presents a challenge for both character and player, as he must negotiate life in an unfamiliar period and negotiate unfamiliar relationships. This is in addition to the ups and downs of life at the summer camp, a strange old man in the woods, and weird dreams… Although replacement characters are provided for the players to roleplay in 1969, one of the options is for the Game Master to create the parents of the Player Characters from back in 1989. Here is a fantastic opportunity for the players to roleplay their characters’ parents and what they were like as children. However, this will take some extra effort upon the part of the Game Master to set up and develop, but the emotional payoff, as the Player Characters realise that their parents had Mysteries of their own to solve and weirdness going on around them just as their children do in 1989, is a great piece of storytelling…

‘The Storm in the Hourglass’ brings the campaign and the 1980s to a close. Set in the autumn of 1989, the storms back in ‘The Animal Ark’ appear again and begin to escalate, forcing the authorities to declare an emergency as the weather worsens. ‘Men in Black’ are seen around the Mälaren Islands as ‘time bubbles’, which when the Player Characters investigate, turn out to be unstable, appear across the region. There are indications too that the technology which has been a fixture of the Player Characters’ childhood is malfunctioning, including the Loop itself. The climax of the campaign will see the Player Characters hopping from time bubble to time bubble and breaking into the Graviton at the heart of the Loop, there to confront their antagonist and the threat she has created.

Of the three scenarios in Out of Time, ‘Summer Camp’ is the longest, mainly because there is a large number of camp activities and events to involve the Player Characters in before anything strange happens. Potentially, this may unbalance the tension between the ordinary and outré strands of a typical Tales from the Loop scenario. Probably the best solution would be for the Game Master to tailor the camp activities and events to the Player Characters to avoid this. As the campaign progresses though, it does grow in complexity, especially in the finale with all of the hopping from time bubble to time bubble.

As a campaign, Out of Time introduces an aspect intrinsically excluded from Tales from the Loop, and that is the potential death of a Player Character. In 1969, the Player Characters are threatened by the campaign’s antagonist with a gun—and she is not afraid to use it. Now in this sequence, it is not as much of an issue, since the Player Characters are not in their bodies, but it highlights the greater peril they face in the campaign. Of course, if the Game Master has decided to port the Player Characters back into their parents, it amplifies the peril, even threatening a Grandfather Paradox should one of the parents be shot and die… Back in 1989, there is the possibility that the Player Characters will fail and unlike in previous scenarios for Tales from the Loop, that has world-ending consequences…

The possibility of the Player Characters facing their death in Out of Time foreshadows another possible option for the campaign, which is to run it as a link between Tales from the Loop and its nineties sequel, Things from the Flood, where death for the Player Characters is a possibility. The authors suggest that the final part, ‘The Storm in the Hourglass’ be shifted forward to 1994 when the ‘Mälarö Leak’ occurred, hot, brown liquid bubbling up out of the ground, forcing an evacuation that would last for years, flooding the Loop, and precipitating to a scandal that would force the Swedish government to shut down Riksenergi and sell the Loop. The advice on this is perhaps somewhat underwritten and it does mean that there is a much longer gap between the events of ‘Summer School’ and ‘The Storm in the Hourglass’, during which time events will have moved out of the framework for Tales from the Loop. However, Out of Time does provide options which would bridge this gap.

The first option is a nonet of ‘Secret Places’, a Mystery Landscape which fits both the 1980s of Tales from the Loop and the 1990s of Things from the Flood. These range from the strange platforms, mechanical marvels, and scrap ships being seen throughout the area of ‘Castle in the Sky’ to the lone concrete foundation with a single hatch which appears having thrust up from the ground in ‘Extra Life’. All of the Mysteries come with an explanation as to the Truth, Hooks, Countdown, and the Antagonist, and can be easily slotted into a Game Master’s campaign or expanded as necessary. The second option is ‘The Mystery Machine’, a set of tables for inspiring and generating Mysteries of the Game Master’s own design, whilst the third, ‘The Mix-CD of Mysteries’ presents an octuple of Mysteries based on eight classic CD tracks from the nineties, such as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Pulp’s Common People. Again, these come with an explanation as to the Truth, Hooks, Countdown, and the Antagonist, and can be easily slotted into a Game Master’s campaign or expanded as necessary. Again, just like the Mystery Landscape of ‘Secret Places’, they will need some development upon the part of the Game Master. However, most of the tracks listed come from the mid to late nineties and so thematically, do not quite bridge the gap between Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood as well as a wider selection might do. In many cases, the mature nature of the lyrics and the Mysteries they inspire better suit the nineties and thus Things from the Flood than they do Tales from the Loop. Nevertheless, thematically they can be used to foreshadow the nineties and events of Things from the Flood and of course, inspire the Game Master to write her own using other lyrics.

Physically, Out of Time 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 three scenarios follow the same format, making them easy to access and relatively easy to run.

It is great to finally have a campaign for Tales from the Loop, even if it is bringing the decade and the roleplaying game to a close. It should be no surprise that the campaign is challenging given it involves time travel, and although the plot is given a clear diagram for the Game Master to follow, it is complex and will require her to read through the plot with some care. With that preparation, Out of Time is a fantastic campaign, presenting the Player Characters with a challenging and enjoyably complex mystery, a mystery which brings Tales from the Loop to the conclusion it deserves.