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I realize that this doesn't fit the thread title, but the previous posts reminded me of a few things from Sweden in the 80s.

Elementary school was divided into the "low stadium (age 7-9), middle stadium (10-12), and high stadium (13-15)". Those terms are directly translated from Swedish, so they look a bit strange in English. In the middle stadium, we started having discos either within the class or with all classes of the same age. They were very awkward affairs, at least for me and my friends, with the bravest dancing with opposite sex (with the slow dance being the most exciting variant) and the shyest standing by the walls eating popcorn. The most iconic middle-stadium disco slow-dance song for me was Scorpion's Wind of Change.

In the middle stadium you would also ask for "a chance" on someone from the opposite sex which was a very light version of being a couple. The problem was that no one knew what it meant to be a couple, and you would typically have a chance on a lot of people at the same time, sometimes cancelling it, and so on. Some people didn't have the courage to ask themselves so they sent a friend, or the friends asked without first consulting the person which led to some "hilarious" (read soul-crushing) experiences if the proposal was shot down.

I realize that this doesn't fit the thread title, but the previous posts reminded me of a few things from Sweden in the 80s.

Elementary school was divided into the "low stadium (age 7-9), middle stadium (10-12), and high stadium (13-15)". Those terms are directly translated from Swedish, so they look a bit strange in English. In the middle stadium, we started having discos either within the class or with all classes of the same age. They were very awkward affairs, at least for me and my friends, with the bravest dancing with opposite sex (with the slow dance being the most exciting variant) and the shyest standing by the walls eating popcorn. The most iconic middle-stadium disco slow-dance song for me was Scorpion's Wind of Change.

In the middle stadium you would also ask for "a chance" on someone from the opposite sex which was a very light version of being a couple. The problem was that no one knew what it meant to be a couple, and you would typically have a chance on a lot of people at the same time, sometimes cancelling it, and so on. Some people didn't have the courage to ask themselves so they sent a friend, or the friends asked without first consulting the person which led to some "hilarious" (read soul-crushing) experiences if the proposal was shot down.

This brings back memories, thanks!  
I would definately want to play in the community where I grew up, in Bjuv, an industrial society in the north western parts of Skåne (southern Sweden). To re-live those horrible "Disco-nights" again, this time I would have the courage to ask for a dance!  

Aagh, teenage angst! Trying to impress girls by hunting dinosaurs in the woods near the Loop...

Aagh, teenage angst! Trying to impress girls by hunting dinosaurs in the woods near the Loop...

I heard the Swedish singer Håkan Hellström say that he has never felt more strange and alone than when he, as a kid, was wearing his spiderman costume, hiding in some bushes when the cool guys in his class walked by, smoking and talking about sex. I think it paints a nice picture of being young and slightly different. 

As for you, @aka_fatman, I'm interested in the Swedish setting most of all. But to give a short answer to your "Are there other places people want to explore? And how will that affect the nature of the games?", I would say that :
-the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is also interesting (even it is a modern one) : http://www.elitereaders.com/wp-content/ ... cation.jpg
-we could imagine disfunctionning particle accelerator that connect with each other over time..

As for you, @aka_fatman, I'm interested in the Swedish setting most of all. But to give a short answer to your "Are there other places people want to explore? And how will that affect the nature of the games?", I would say that :
-the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is also interesting (even it is a modern one),
-we could imagine disfunctionning particle accelerator that connect with each other over time..

Well, we can plonk a particle accelerator in whatever settings we choose, I guess. That's what the Hometown Hacks are for. But the nature of how the 80's affect us is a totally different feel depending on where we are. What would a "Tales From The Loop" feel like from the point-of-view of a Russian community? Or a Japanese one? How different a role would governments take in these places? Could these other particle accelerators be linked? Do they all have different "personalities"?

I grew up in the 70's in rural England, and then in about 78 (aged 10) I moved to the very edge of a small city.

In the countryside our neighbours on both sides had children about the same age as my brother and I. During the summer we would spend the days out on our bikes (Raleigh Chopper, Chipper or Grifter or that style). We stayed off the main roads, but would cycle for miles, visiting the canal, a ford and the local level crossing. If we weren't cycling we would be making dens in the surrounding orchards and corn fields. There was an ancient gypsy horse box, and an abandoned chicken coop. We dug (totally unsafe) tunnels, and made (totally unsafe) tree houses. In the autumn we would burrow into haystacks, Our territory on foot was bounded by a curve of the M5 motorway. We would occasionally trek to the edge of our territory where for some reason people always dumped bottles and other glass in a tiny copse and spend an hour throwing stones at the bottles. Since I went to school in the local city and caught the bus home, I was the arms dealer, providing the gang with (toy) bows and arrows and cap guns from the local toy shop. We occasionally had access to our older neighbour's air rifle. There was a complete lack of parental supervision, but we were all terrified of my neighbour's father.

After moving to the edge of the city our life was more sanitised. The corn fields were replaced by school playing fields but there was a local wood. There were more children, but we were outsiders because we didn't go to the same schools. Our bikes became "racers" and we would cycle as far as 20 miles. I went to an all boys school so discos weren't really a thing, but there were 3 all girls schools in the city and there was some fraternisation. We had access to my friends real bow and arrows, and I was familiar with rifles from hunting rabbits with the farmer when we went on holiday, and through the cadet force at school, but we didn't really have access to them. My school had a rifle range and some very old .22 Lee Enfield rifles, Gun laws were not as strict in the UK then as they are now, but they were still pretty strict. Drinking age was 18, but most of us could get away with drinking in pubs in the city from the age of 16.

Depending on what the rules are like you might be able to reskin either settings to fit where you would like it to. The Swedish setting reminds me of my home town in NY quite a bit so I've been thinking about just changing some names to make it your typical area in the east coast of the united states. I have a feeling this will also make it easier for my players to get into character as it'll feel like a familiar setting since we're all from relatively small east coast US towns 

American here.  Was definitely in the right age range (turned 10 in 1986).  Sweden apparently looks enough like Ohio that Stålenhag's artwork resembles the world of my dreams as a kid.  Literally, the first time I saw his paintings, my first thought was "Who is this man, and why is he painting the world of my dreams?"

American school generally starts with kindergarten, for 5-6 year olds, and then 1st to 12th grade (The abbreviation "K-12" is common).  TftL characters would likely be in fifth through ninth grade.  When I was in sixth grade (age 11-12), that grade was part of elementary school, seventh through ninth were part of junior high, and tenth through twelfth were high school, but a year later, they re-arranged everything so that sixth through eighth were "middle school" and ninth through twelfth were high school.  At any rate, most TftL characters will be in junior high/middle school.  Kids may walk to school or ride a bike, be dropped off by parents, or take a bus.  These are the iconic yellow "School buses" that I don't think that they have anywhere outside of the US and Canada.  They have them pretty much everywhere--even places with no other form of public transport, including rural areas.  The legal age for driving cars is 16, so nobody in the TftL age range will be able to legally drive, but (at least back then) every kid under 16 looked forward to when they would be old enough to drive, and getting a drivers license was pretty much a rite of passage.  Teens who had a license, and had a car (and every teen would try their best to get one, even if it was a junker that barely ran) could drive to school if they wanted to.

It is not uncommon for elementary school kids who are unusually intelligent to be bused for one day out of the week to a central location for special classes.  In my case (this would have been 4th through 6th grade) this was to a handful of rooms attached to an old gym that was used by one of the city's junior high schools.  Something like this would be a good reason for smart elementary school kids to be in the same building as junior high kids for at least one day out of the week.  The building was also interesting in that it was quite old, still had its old steam radiator heating, and was connected to a network of steam tunnels that ran under a good chunk of the downtown area (it is a small downtown, for a small city).  Many places in the US, especially older ones (college campuses are known for this) have tunnels of this type--they are somewhat dangerous, but there are lots of stories of stuff being hidden down there, and they'd make a great location in a game.

School had the usual "3 R's" of "Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic", plus Science, a mix of various social sciences called "Social Studies".  It was generally assumed that students would not have calculators, and those who did were not permitted to use them in school, rather than assuming that they had them and allowing students without to borrow one.  Most schools had at least a few computers--these were almost always Apple II's of some sort, and if they weren't they were Commodore 64's.  Most kids didn't have computers at home, unless they were really nerdy (like me) or rich, or their parents used one for work (most jobs still didn't need a computer).  Video game consoles, though, were very common--any group of kids would likely have at least one or probably more consoles.  Almost invariably, this would be an NES (generally called simply a "Nintendo"), and it was common for kids to trade cartridges, borrow them from friends, or bring them to friends' houses to play on the Nintendo there.  A "Computer Geek" kid might have a more advanced computer--I got an Amiga 500 when I was 13, and spent much time playing games on it, or programming simple computer games of my own.

Every kid I knew had a bike, and it was common to just go out and ride them around the neighborhood--I remember doing this when I was as young as 8, with no parents around.  Some kids had guns--generally because one or more of there parents were avid hunters, and they took after them--but they weren't something that a kid would just carry around with themselves unless they were specifically going hunting.  The late 80s were probably the golden age of shopping mall culture in the US, and kids living in even a small city would likely have one around, and spend a lot of time there.  Often, they would go there with parents, but go off to more kid-friendly establishments (toy stores, book stores, video arcades, etc) while the parents shopped for clothes and other boring things.

As for the landscape in which the kids lived, this would depend greatly on where you lived--the US is enormous compared to European countries, and has vast diversity of climate, terrain, and culture.  I grew up in central Ohio, which is part of what is called the "Midwest."  It is a sort of in-between part of the country, with hills and flat land, forests and farms, and cities of various sizes.  There are a lot of what people would call "small towns" but are really more like small cities, with distinct neighborhoods, shopping malls, hospitals, college campuses, and such.  In Ohio at least, these often dated back to the early-to-mid 19th century, and a lot of buildings in the center of town would be from that era.  Newer parts of town would have the more mid-20th century modern architecture like you'd see in a Stålenhag painting.  These places are separated enough from other cities to be self-contained locations (you could easily have a whole campaign in a place like Newark Ohio) but are not so remote as to be unrealistic to have a facility like the Loop there.  Newark was home to a campus of the Ohio State University--my mom worked there, and I spent a lot of time there.  At the time, it was made up mostly of Brutalist concrete structures that would not be at all out of place in a Stålenhag painting, and it would make a lot of sense to have at least one of them connected to something like an underground science complex.  I myself often imagined this exact thing, along with pretending that other places I spent a lot of time also had connections to this facility, and in TftL game, something like this would probably be real.

I'll likely be using the Sweden setting though I'm from the UK (Northern Ireland specifically). 

1985-1986, I was a little older (13-14) and that year I went to the USA for 6 weeks as part of a programme to help local kids see that there were very little differences between catholics and protestants because, of course, this was the midst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In June of that year a bomb went off in my hometown, 100 yards from the swimming pool where I was, killing six soldiers in an unmarked van. I remember standing on the diving boards and seeing the debris strewn across the street. You could barely tell what was wrecked van and what was wrecked people. I was really into Van Halen that year. We went on holiday to Majorca. I was picking my subjects for important exams. I got my first girlfriend and had my heart broken for the first time. My friends were experimenting with alcohol - I didn't (and didn't drink until Summer 2015) but because I was tall, I would be sent into the off license to buy vodka or cider. One of my friends smoked, most didn't. Nearly every girl smoked though. And every girl my age (13-14) had a boyfriend who could drive (17+). There was virtually no chance of a girlfriend the same age or older (I managed because I was tall and pretended I was 16 at the local youth club disco.) and younger girls were children. We felt like we were adults. 

My town had a biker gang that we all treated with fear -  but in hindsight, they were actually really nice guys. Sure, they smoked and had long hair and scary images on their jackets but I got to know some of them when they were older. They were counterculture rebels  -  rebels against a divided state that wanted to pit catholics and protestants against each other. These bikers were metal heads and bike enthusiasts from both sides of the community. 

We didn't treat people from the other half of the community with suspicion. I was actually from a mixed (Catholic / Protestant) marriage and therefore I kinda treated both sides with suspicion. There were just jokes you would never understand and of course there were people being killed every couple of weeks (http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/chron/1986.html) and a lot of punishment beatings and shootings. Everyone knew someone who had lost a relative to one side or the other. Walking down the street late at night and passing two lads who you knew to be from the other side of the community was the scariest thing that could happen. We were suspicious of the police, the Army, anyone asking a lot of questions. We had both admiration for America (due to cultural conditioning and movies) and resentment (due to the money given by Americans to the terrorists). 

I cycled everywhere despite there being no provision for cycle paths or even lights on our bikes or helmets. And where we didn't cycle, we walked. We had video games but we didn't play them a lot. Summers we would go to the video games arcades at the seaside towns. We had incredible autonomy -  came and went at home as we pleased. Which is horrendous considering the link above where people were just disappearing off the streets. 

In the terms of the setting: the introduction of the Loop strangeness would be really unsettling. As the Army would be slowly replaced with robots, as the overhead spy helicopters with their constant thrumming were replaced with hovering silent eyes. As a fringe terror group would sneak in a weapon (an implosion device? A bomb that only affected organic matter?) and you might be the witness to something.