Fria Ligans forum

I might set my adventures in a Loop in northern Minnesota. The landscape there more closely matches the landscape in the artwork, and Lake Superior is right there for the "large body of water" that all the Loops seem to be near and... more interestingly... given that much of the population of the area is descended from Swedish immigrants, one could use the original names and they not seem all that out of place! 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Americans

Cool!

Welcome to Silver Bay, Minnesota!

This little town 60 miles northeast of Duluth on the shores of Lake Superior seems to have it all. It even has... MYSTERY!

https://www.topozone.com/minnesota/lake ... ver-bay-2/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Bay,_Minnesota

It's a bit small for the suggested town size, but I think it'll work. Perhaps we can assume that the town is a bit bigger than the map shows, given the additional population required to work at the DART facility.

BACKGROUND
In "the 80s that never were" the taconite mining facilities were never built. Instead, the town was created in the 50s specifically because of the Loop. The facility is located on what in our world is the taconite tailing ponds, and the industrial buildings nearby are the DART lab(s). The hills in the area contain some other element useful to DARPA and the DART project, and the tiny little community of Silver Bay joined the ranks of the Malaren Islands, the Norfolk Broads of England, and Boulder City, Nevada (and perhaps other places) in being the location of the technological marvel that is the Loop.

Northern Minnesota has the Tower Soudan Mine projects from the High Energy Physics Department at the U of MN.  I can assure you that it was active in the 80s having had my own very weird adventure 25 levels or so underground. 

Not to mention the ties to a facility deep under a mountain in France that comprise the other end of the detectors!

Note that you don't have to remove the mines, you just have the physicists move in to the useful and mostly abandoned underground facilities as they actually did.  You just need to crank up the weird science from 9 to 11.

The first task when retrieving data collected at the Tower Soudan mine was to remove all of the dead bats that had crawled into the notebooks and computer hardware. These and other dead bats would be swept up and then swept down the seemingly bottomless elevator shaft.

Oh, and don't fall down the shaft while you're doing that...

Underground Lair Really. A link to google maps.

And that doesn't even touch on the weirdness that was the U of MN Minneapolis campus's Tate Physics Labs building in the 80s. They still had an Atom Smasher and a discarded NASA satellite control station in the sub-sub basement. And three unassembled bombers that were procured for their titanium content.  And the helium reclamation system...

Oh, and one of the Professors order facilities to cut a large (10 foot x 10 foot) hole from the sub-sub basement through the floor and foundation because the building sway in the wind was interfering with one of the experiments in his lab.

It is a wonder that I turned out anywhere near normal after my childhood. There's a whole source book for Tales from the Loop lurking in my younger years.