Two stories from RPG books stick in my mind.
The first one is from Cyberpunk 2020. It's most easily found in the Deep Space supplement, but I think it briefly appears in the corebook as well. It's a story about how a netrunner performed a run out to the Voyager 2 probe outside of our solar system. And... that's about it. Oh yeah, the hacker planted an image of a camel and then a camel exploding along with the message of "Look at how far I went to smoke a camel," but that's really the whole story.
I suppose it helps that I was a big space buff in my youth, and the mission of the Voyager probes fascinated me. The fictional concept of netrunning is exciting to me as well, so the idea of combining the two and "walking" out into deep space to visit that lonely explorer at the edge of our solar neighborhood is a very appealling idea.
The next one is from the original Rifts corebook. I have no idea why it was cut from the Ultimate Edition, because it was one of the coolest things about the original Rifts. The historian Erin Tarn is telling of her visit to south Texas in her quest to find out more about the rumored vampire menace. A stranger asks to talk with her and tells her a story of vast kingdoms of undead bent upon conquest of the world. She asks him how he knows these things and he responds by informing her that he is one of the vampires, and tries to kill her. She is saved by her companion cyber-knight, who later decides that mankind must know whether the tales of the destroyed vampire are true. So, he rides off to explore south of the Rio Grande, and is never heard from again.
I first read that bit in a very dimly lit room in near total silence, and it creeped the heck out of me. The thought that those brave heroes had met some hideous and unknown fate captured my imagination. That story is the sole reason I've been captivated on Rifts all these years.
Anyone else have any strange bits from RPG books which you just can't forget?
Tags: Rifts Cyberpunk Fiction
