The Pick Up Pile. Pondering Tales From The Loop.

This instalment of the Pick Up Pile is on a book that’s been out for a while, but is new to me (as I got it for Christmas). Free League’s Tales from the Loop, the game of kids and mysteries in the 80s based on the art of Simon Stålenhag. Available in physical form from most FLGSs and in digital from Drivethru RPG here.

Physically this is a nice solid hardcover book with obvious high production values, as one can expect from Free League if you’re familiar with any of their products. It’s 192 pages, and thick pages they are too. To give an idea, this volume is about the same thickness as my Alien Colonial Marines book which is 350+ pages. Each page is off white with easy to read, well spaced, good sized text. Artwork is of a high standard, as you’d expect from the inspiration, and scattered throughout.

There are 12 chapters in the book, the first 5 being for everyone playing, covering background, setting, character creation, and rules. The last 7 are for the Game Master only covering mystery structures and sandboxes, and four adventure that can be strung together into a campaign with one adventure per season of a year.

First up is the usual “What is a roleplaying game?” and “What’s this game about?” sections. The usual fare that anyone reading this has probably seen a million times. Also covered here are the Principles of the Loop:

January 2022: Character Creation Challenge. Part Five

Day five, and it’s a Wednesday which means it’s Free League’s Aliens RPG today. Also there’s going to be a change to the original daily plan from today, just to Wednesdays and Thursdays which I’ll detail below. But before anything else here’s today’s character; Eriksson, a Company Agent.

Whilst the character sheet is great for the numbers side of the game, there’s not much room for anything personality related beyond the key words/phrases/names so I’ll add a bit of that below.:

“I’m who the company sends in when they want someone to get the job done. No emotional attachments, that’s the instruction every time, and they know that’s what they’ll get from me. You don’t want someone taking months to get here on a ship and then taking the employees’ side.

The others? Derrick’s a good solid worker, does what he’s contracted to do. Having someone like him close is a good way to gauge the mood in the general workforce, to see which way the wind’s blowing. Then if I need to change something, well, he’s a good avenue of influence.

Pike on the other hand… lets just say I find those vat grown bios difficult to read and understand, and they tend to be unpredictable. I have half a sneaking suspicion they were intended to replace us. Still, it’s not like the company thinks much of them either, After all we’re still being produced and they’re not.”

Well, this was a pleasant surprise. The sheet’s clear and fairly minimal yet still covers everything you need. The system for character creation is great, put 10 points here (plus a few more if synthetic), stick point 14 here, pick a couple of things over there, give ’em a name.. done. And there you have a character that feels like they fit in the Alien universe.

Eriksson was a product of a quick flick through the book and the thought of how could I make someone like Burke worse, and the answer was to combine him with Ash. The ultimate company man.

The others mentioned in the passage above and on the buddy/rival part of the sheet are characters for later in the month where I’ll be returning to this game. I’ve already got them planned out and they’re relationships with each other.

Oh and his name? Well the films’ androids were Ash, Bishop, Call, David… (Until Covenant fucked the pattern with Walter) so I went with an E name. And Sony Ericsson made Android phones.

As for the change to the planned days that I mentioned. Originally I was going to split Wednesdays between Alien and Blades in the Dark. However both of those systems having things that link the characters (buddy/rival in Alien, Crew in BitD) I thought they needed more than two characters each to explore this. So Wednesdays will be Alien, Thursdays will be BitD, and Friday’s will be a mix of the throwback stuff I’d planned for Thursdays originally and the free games I’d always planned for that day.