REVIEW: Tales from the Loop, the tabletop roleplaying game
This is a reprint an article about playing games as a way to grieve, first published on HTML Giant in 2020. I made some edits to it and added some notes to the end.
Hi. It’s okay. It’s just me.
Matthew. I used to write for this site.
Hey, I’ve given up on writing books in order to spend my free time focusing on table top role-playing games!
(Maybe actually I’ve given up on writing books in order to be a dad, but anyway whatever.)
So, yeah. I have the dice and everything. I have two shelves full of TTRPG books now. It’s a pretty nice-looking couple of shelves. I read interesting indie modules in my spare time and try to think about what makes them work and what makes them not work, sort of like I used to do for short stories and novels. I get together with friends online one night every week and play games with them, now that we are all stuck at home almost all of the time. And sometimes I run games, too.
Like: In February, when people could still gather together in groups, I ran a game of Tales from the Loop for my players.
Tales from the Loop is an RPG inspired by those consciously retro sci-fi paintings by Simon Stålenhag that became popular five or six years ago, the ones depict an alternate 1980s. In the game, the players are the young adults living in those paintings—a world of dimensional rifts, AIs, big cell phones, Huffy bicycles, robots, boom boxes, Trapper Keepers, vehicles that float on massive magnetic drives, and adults who don’t listen to them.
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My first roleplaying game was, like most people, Dungeons & Dragons. My parents bought me the Basic and Expert boxed sets when we first moved to Upper Michigan in the mid-’80s. For a while, I didn’t have anyone else to play with—my brother was older than me and not interested, and I didn’t have a lot of friends yet—so the only person who would play with me was my dad. We played once. He was pretty nice about it, but I could tell he wasn’t interested. When we had had family game nights before then, he never participated.
It wasn’t really his thing. But he tried once, anyway, with me, because he knew I was upset that I didn’t have anyone else to play with.
Once I got to high school, I found a group of people my age to play with. And then a couple of folks to play with in college, too. Semi-regular sessions in high school. Rare little get togethers as a freshman in college. Not much. Not often.
Then I stopped for many years, until I was given the opportunity to collaborate on a novel for the RPG company Wizards of the Coast.
That got me playing again. And I have been pretty regularly ever since.
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In contrast to a lot of the better known tabletop roleplaying games, Tales is very simple, mechanically, involving only a few numbers and pools of six-sided dice thrown to succeed at overcoming obstacles. Like this: A character must convince someone to not beat them up, hop a fence, hack a computer, or escape an inter-dimensional monster. The player grabs a couple of six-sided dice—the number of which is determined by their natural abilities (represented by ability scores), skills (which they can spend points on during character creation), and circumstances. They role, try to get at least one six, and succeed if they do. If they fail, the story gets complicated. The game is less focused on charts and numbers and bonuses and balanced mechanics than the roleplaying games one might already be familiar with. It’s in the family of story roleplaying games, heavier on scene building and collaboration than on crunch and tactics.
None of the kids die in Tales from the Loop. The characters are the protagonists in a story that is told in scenes, everyone at the table collaborating to make a story reminiscent of a movie, so like an ’80s kid sci-fi movie, there is peril and pathos, and kids can be broken, but they don’t get killed. The rulebook is more focused on storycraft than rules, and in places reads more like a book on screenplay writing than on wargaming. Some roleplaying games drill down on rules, looking to end arguments at the table over rules by codifying everything. Tales minimizes rules to minimize things over which to disagree.
In our group, I run Tales from the Loop. I’m the gamemaster. Instead of playing one of the kids, I write the skeleton of a scenario, create the setting, populate it with characters for the players to interact with, and then set up the win condition. Like: Here’s the place where you live, here’s the problem, here are some people who can maybe either help or hinder you as you try to solve the problem, here’s the countdown clock and the pace at which you should go, and here’s what happens if you do or don’t solve it. And then I walk everyone through the game, play the characters that the players interact with, improvise when they go in an unexpected direction.
It’s nice, during a time when I don’t write much on my own anymore, to have a place to collaborate with others to tell stories.
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My dad was diagnosed with Stage IV prostate cancer on December 5, 2018. He had been unwell even before then, with serious mobility issues, spinal stenosis, a tremor that we thought might have been Parkinson’s. He hated doctors and had to see them all them time over the years previous to the cancer diagnosis, and apparently had a worrying blood test in 2016—elevated Prostate-specific antigen levels—that he just didn’t follow up on. And then he slipped when my mother was trying to get him out of bed, and found that one of his legs had stopped working. My mom couldn’t lift him. An ambulance was called. He resisted a trip to the ER, but they took him anyway. They did some X-rays and some bloodwork.
A doctor talked to my mom that night and told her that my dad’s PSA levels were really high. She didn’t know what that meant and the doctor didn’t explain. The next day, a nurse mentioned my dad’s prostate cancer, and that’s when she found out what a PSA level was and why it was bad when it was a bit elevated. Or high. Or at 4500, like my dad’s was.
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My Tales from the Loop setting is Marquette, Michigan, the college town an hour north of my folks’ place in Gladstone, Michigan.
I had written a short scenario that involved the kids at a school assembly watching a botched space shuttle launch, a secret message transmitted to an Artificially Intelligent spy satellite, a school friend being the target of a bunch of rogue servant robots and home automata, and a missing dad who, it turned out, had died in the shuttle explosion. He had sent a final message to his son, and the message had evolved and warped the AI satellite. It started to believe it was the boy’s father and took over all the robots in town to get the goodbye message to the son.
The players saw robots go haywire. They followed clues to try to discover why. Eventually, they found that their school friend had been kidnapped, and they went looking for him.
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The angriest my dad ever got with me was over a boardgame. I was playing something—Monopoly, possibly—with my brother, my mom, and my grandmother. My dad’s mother.
I had a bad turn or a bad roll. I was little, elementary school. I was mad. I threw the dice. They flew across the table at the person opposite me. It was my grandmother.
My dad ran after me. He chased me up to my room.
He wasn’t a physical guy, my dad. Not on either end of the spectrum. Didn’t hit me at all. Didn’t really hug all that often. Not angry and volatile. Not cold and withholding, either. He was just Dad.
But that day he grabbed me and I ended up on the floor with him kneeling over me, holding me down. He was yelling, furious.
A little bit of spit came out of his mouth involuntarily. It landed on my lips. I can still taste it. It was probably four decades ago now.
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Final showdown: the kids on their bikes, in the woods to meet the AI who has kidnapped the boy. Town robots are building the boy a rocket out of garbage, technological detritus, kipple, to send him into space to reunite him with dad. The players have to convince the AI to stop—sending the boy into space on a makeshift rocket would kill him. How would they reason with the AI? That was up to them. I hadn’t given them an answer—I didn’t have one myself. I had left it up to them. It was their story, too.
And what they did was: Convince the kidnapped boy to connect with Dad/AI. Have the boy say goodbye to Dad. As I was running the game and AI and kid were both played by me in this scenario, that’s what I did. Play both.
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So in January 2020, my dad died. He’d been sick for quite some time. It was not a surprise, but I wasn’t home for it. The illness was prolonged but the final days were quick. I was in a meeting at work, in fact, and leaving the meeting, I checked my phone to see I had a call and an all-caps text from my mom. MATT CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN.
My mom doesn’t remember that she used all-caps in the text.
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I went home in November 2019, after having been home in May 2019 with my family, to see what I could do to help out around the house. There was nothing I could do to help out around the house, so mostly I sat in the living room with my dad and watched TV with him. I watched; he mostly slept.
His stomach made the loudest noises that week. Like rattling, empty pipes in an old house. Mine does that, too, sometimes, though not as loud, but in work meetings it is difficult to concentrate because I’m convinced it’s loud and distracting to everyone. He barely noticed it. I would point it out to him and he would turn his head to me in slow motion. Everything was in slow motion that week. He smiled at me about it, but probably he wasn’t smiling about it. He was smiling because he noticed I was looking at him. I don’t think he heard me and I didn’t repeat myself.
He sat, shaving. He shaved with an electric razor, slow swipes across his face. He gave up, almost done. He said the electric shaver had stopped working. I asked him if it needed to be plugged in. He didn’t answer. Dying is boring.
There was a MASH marathon on. The wifi was out, so we unplugged the router, and then plugged the router back in. I asked for the password and my folks gave me the password. It didn’t work. I asked again for the password, and they gave me the same password. “That’s the password,” they said. I tried the password again, but it didn’t work.
“Nothing works today,” he said.
“What else doesn’t work,” Mom said.
“The shaver,” he said, pointing to the electric shaver on the table.
Mom gave me a book filled with passwords. I looked through it and see that they were giving me the email password. I found the router password. Everything was fine.
An hour later, he’d been blowing hair from the shaver, a little at a time. He stopped. He looked around some. He remembered the shaver. He blew more hair out of it. And then after an hour, he started to shave again, finishing up his neck. He stopped for five minutes, looked at the shaver, started up again.
Boring.
I spent a lot of time in our basement, going through boxes of my old things. I have a big box of roleplaying games there. I put a few of them in my suitcase and added them to my RPG shelf when I got home.
*
Where were we? Oh, right. The game.
So, there we were, finishing the game. There I was playing out the final conversation for the players in my group as they had planned. They had rolled well and convinced the kidnapped boy to help them. So, a boy and his “father,” saying goodbye to one another. I took on both roles to play out the final scene in the game. A boy, who hadn’t gotten a chance to say goodbye to his dad, because he wasn’t there when his dad died. And an AI, twisted to think it was a dad, going through the motions of responding.
And then, quite suddenly, in the middle of talking to myself, and playing a game with a group of friends on a random Tuesday night, I realized that I was saying goodbye to my dad.
A thing I hadn’t gotten a chance to do. A thing I hadn’t tried to do after the fact, either. My dad was gone, and I hadn’t said goodbye, but because of the story I had created for a game, and the choices my players had made in the game, I was doing it then.
Kid/Me had a brief conversation with Dad/AI/Me as a proxy conversation for Me/Me and Real Dad/Me.
I didn’t cry on January 20, the day my dad died. And not after, either, not really. Maybe a little something here or there. But I had avoided thinking about it. I had avoided sitting down and really thinking about it.
Dad was sick for a long time. Long enough that the grief played out in slow motion. It didn’t hit sharp and quick. It lingered. It was boring. The grief was boring. Too slow. Never interesting enough for me to pay it my full attention. Just always happening without urgency. Background noise. And then dad was gone.
MATT CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN.
But, then, unexpectedly I got to say goodbye, sort of. And pretend to be him saying goodbye to me. In a manner of speaking. It was something, anyway. Something quicker, more urgent, more immediate. Because if I didn’t properly say goodbye to my dad, then the robots would’ve taken the pretend boy into space, and my players would’ve failed the thing they were doing in the game. And they’d rolled so well, they had to succeed. A good dice roll necessitated a success catharsis. Nothing I could do about it. The six sided dice had spoken.
Games are important in ways that we sometimes don’t even realize. That’s what I wanted to get to.
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So, Tales from the Loop, the tabletop roleplaying game. Four out of five stars.
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Addendum
The Echo Sphere
They made a TV series out of Tales from the Loop. It’s slow moving, pretty to look at, not terrible.
One of my favorite moments from the show occurs in an episode called “The Echo Sphere.” In it, a boy and his grandfather find a rusted husk of a metal sphere in a field.
The grandfather tells the boy to lean his head into the sphere and say hello. The boy does so, and it echoes, but the voice shifts, sounds older, with each instance of the echoed word.
The grandfather tells the boy that the echoes are his future selves, and because there are so many echoes, he has a long lif ahead of him.
The boy tells the grandfather to say hello next. The grandfather hesitates. The boy insists. The grandfather relents.
He says hello, and no echo responds.
Earlier in the episode, we had seen the grandfather get a call from a doctor. We only hear a bit of his side, his measured reaction to whatever news he is receiving.
What we may have assumed was said in the call is verified by the sphere.
The boy doesn’t understand at first. But it dawns on him, eventually.
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Sometimes you write a story with characters who have trouble communicating with each other. One of my writing instructors told his students that if characters are having trouble talking to one another, put them together somewhere that traps them, that forces them to talk.
A good idea, indeed. I wrote a story wherein two people refused to talk to one another, so I shoved them into a church bathroom together, and wouldn’t let them out until they did.
Might I suggest, also, an echo sphere? Might I suggest an object that admits something that a person won’t?
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Over the last few months, I’ve been running a new game with my players, one that I spent years slowly creating after my dad died.
The game is ongoing, and some of my players read this newsletter, so I will refrain from discussing in detail how this post is related to it, but at some point, when the campaign has come to its conclusion, I’ll do so.
But I will say: it remains interesting to me that when someone passes, there are so many different ways that a person needs to say goodbye.