Full Circle: The Creation of Loreloop
By Ashley Warren
In 2016, I rolled a 20-sided dice onto my kitchen table, surrounded by some of my closest friends, and my life changed forever. This was my first time playing Dungeons & Dragons, a game I had wanted to play since I was a child looking at the early versions of the Monster Manual at the public library.
I was hooked from that first dice roll and immediately dove into writing my own stories for tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs). As a lifelong lover of stories in all of their glorious mediums, this one especially enticed me because it was so open-ended. A TRPG is defined as a collaborative storytelling experience in which the participants, or “players,” embody fictional characters and make choices that affect the outcome of the story.
Game night at the Atomic Museum. Photo by Matt Malinowski.
This year, I’ve had the immense privilege of designing Loreloop: The World We Live In, The World We Create with Nevada Humanities. Loreloop is an original tabletop roleplaying game inspired by Nevada’s past, present, and future. Its development is supported by United We Stand: Connecting Through Culture, a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts to foster creative projects that address anti-hate efforts in communities across the United States.
Kathleen Kuo, Loreloop’s co-developer who also runs the Humanities At Play program through her role as Nevada Humanities’ Program Manager, thought a TRPG would be a great project for United We Stand. TRPGs are collaborative and interactive, requiring that participants are active in the stories they tell. Development began in earnest earlier this year, and we have had countless discussions to determine…what kind of game is Loreloop? What themes and topics should we cover? What genre is it? Who are the many people we need to talk with and include in the research process?
In our game, players embody fictional researchers who live in Nevada 100 years from now who travel through time and space to repair the Loreloop: a Twilight Zone-esque creation composed of everyone’s contributions to our cultures and communities.
Game night at the Atomic Musuem. Photo by Ashley Warren.
Recently, it was fortunate that I was included as part of Game Night at the National Atomic Testing Museum, facilitating a session of Loreloop for new players. The amazing team at the Atomic Museum in Las Vegas has been instrumental to the game’s development from the beginning. Joe Kent, the museum’s deputy director and curator, was the first subject matter expert I interviewed for the project, and his enthusiasm and knowledge were invaluable when developing Loreloop’s first “mission” called The Big Boom. In this story, players encounter parallel history in a ghost town once established for the mining boom and later reclaimed for atomic testing.
It is so rewarding to play Loreloop in person, especially in an immersive atmosphere like the Atomic Museum, where we set up our game tables amongst recreations of underground testing vaults. During our game session, the power went out in the museum and down the whole block, but the unexpected plunge into darkness just added to the eeriness of the game. In TRPGs, one must always be prepared because you never know what will happen!
To learn more about Loreloop and be a part of its development, visit here to access early material. Like the Loreloop itself, our project is made stronger by the diverse, vibrant array of voices representing those who call Nevada home.
Ashley Warren, M.A. is a storyteller, narrative designer, and the director of the Storytelling Collective. She is the designer of Loreloop: The World We Live In, The World We Create with Nevada Humanities, and she has also authored and produced numerous award-winning books for Dungeons & Dragons including Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden; Legendlore; Heckna!; and the Uncaged anthology series.
Photo courtesy of Ashley Warren.