First impressions - Tales from the Loop: Our Friends the Machines & Other Mysteries

Our Friends the Machines - the first mystery collection for Tales from the Loop.

TL;DR: A mixed anthology. The full length mysteries are strong, especially the first two. The mixtape mysteries are ideas I'd approach carefully. The blueprints give some nice ideas for scenarios, whilst the hacking the Loop chapter is a useful checklist of things to consider. As ever, this looks gorgeous with Stålenhag's art set in a clean, attractive layout. Recommended on the strength of the longer mysteries.

Our Friends the Machines & Other Mysteries is the first anthology of mysteries and background material for the Tales from the Loop RPG. It is an attractive 104 page hardcover book that matches the style of the core book. There are three fully developed adventures, a 'mixtape' of mystery ideas, blueprints of machines and some guidance on how to hack the look to your location. The book is a compilation of all the stretch goals into print.

It looks gorgeous; the end papers include the same map of a version of the Loop in the Norfolk Broads. Along with the map in the section on hacking the loop, this is presented three times.

The first two mysteries are much stronger scenarios than those presented in the core book; both of them set off the GM in me thinking about 'how do I run this'? The first - Our Friends the Machines -  riffs on a popular product line in the 1980s and the implications of machine intelligence. The second - Horror Movie Mayhem - touches on one of the same themes that one of the core book mysteries covered but more successfully. It's a classic SF trope; the players may well guess what's going on, but that's half the fun.

The third scenario - the Mummy in the Mist - is different to mysteries that have been presented before. There's an element of a bait-and-switch in the plot (or a flip) as the reality of the scenario is revealed, showing an element which hasn't been addressed in previous work. The scenario should work well, but is very much a sandbox with things going on in the background.

The mixtape collection is pretty dark; the mystery ideas presented are in some cases nastier than those developed into full scenarios elsewhere. There's opportunity to be mined here, but I'm not certain I'd want to draw deeply on these. Indeed, it's interesting to read these in the light of the issues that happened at UK Games Expo 2019 with the Things from the Flood game. I'd definitely tread warily with some of these scenarios (especially 'Girls just wanna have fun' and 'Every Breath you Take').

The blueprints selection presents two robots and two magnetrine vessels with some ideas for mysteries which could involve them.

The final section talks through how to hack the Loop into your home town, using the Norfolk Broads as an example. It's very top level, being effectively a list of bullet points to consider, but would help a beginning GM through the process. Personally, I'd have placed a UK Loop in Cumbria or Scotland, but the Broads works better than I expected.

All in all, this is a mixed collection. The full length mysteries are strong, especially the first two. The mixtape mysteries are ideas I'd approach carefully. The blueprints give some nice ideas for scenarios, whilst the hacking the Loop chapter is a useful checklist of things to consider. As ever, this looks gorgeous with Stålenhag's art set in a clean, attractive layout. Recommended on the strength of the longer mysteries.

17 April 2020