Episode Details

How to play Tales From The Loop

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Tales From The Loop. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Tales From The Loop game.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into five sections.

1. Game category

2. Combat rules

3. The “broken” condition

4. Attributes and skills

5. Building an example character

Game category. Tales From The Loop is a game where the players role play as ten to fifteen year old kids solving a mystery in an alternative history version of the late 1980’s. The town you live in has an advanced science facility whose adult employee researchers are investigating a powerful phenomenon. What the scientists have learned is out of reach from the kids, and the parents don’t talk about their work with their children. Effects from the artifact they are working on have spilled out into the town, though, including escaped robots, gravity distortions, and time loops. You and your friends seek to escape the never ending homework and nagging parents of your dull everyday life to take part in something meaningful, magical, and possibly a little bit dangerous. You risk being injured, imprisoned, broken-hearted, or changed by the troubles you overcome to solve the mysteries that have captured your fascination. But in general, although the land of the loop is dangerous, kids cannot die in this game.

Combat in Tales From The Loop involves describing your what you’re trying to do and then rolling multiple six sided dice, also called d6, to see if any of the rolled numbers were a six. If one or more of the dice show a six, that’s a success at normal difficulty. You rolled a six, so you accomplished what you were trying to do. If none of the dice show a six, that’s a failure. If you fail, you don’t accomplish what you were trying to do and you might get hurt or scared. The more dice you roll, the better your odds of getting a six. For example, you are more likely to succeed when rolling five dice than when rolling only two dice.

Troubles can be normal difficulty, which requires one six to succeed, or extreme difficulty, which require rolling two sixes to succeed, or almost impossible difficulty, which require getting three sixes to succeed. Your game master will tell you the trouble difficulty during your roll.

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