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Books are important resources for gaming. You can get a game idea out of almost any book you care to name. Fiction books are pretty straightforward - you just take elements of the story, tweak them a bit to obfuscate the source, and integrate them into your game plot. But non-fiction can be equally as inspiring. Some books are fairly straightforward, while others require some imaginative interpretation:
- Krakatoa, by Simon Winchester. Your band of pirates is preying on ships in the East Indies when a nearby island explodes!
- Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945, by Leo Marks. You are an elite team of cryptographers in the Second World War. In between making and breaking codes, you have to run field missions to brief soldiers in new code techniques, often behind enemy lines!
- PC Technician Street Smarts: A Real World Guide to CompTIA A+ Skills, by James Pyles. You run a small business on the streets of Tokyo, troubleshooting for desperate netrunners whose hardware develops dangerous malfunctions due to running into insidious corporate black ice in cyberspace!
- The Elements of Style, by Strunk & White. You work for a cutting edge design firm using exotic matter to terraform asteroids into artistic statements for the gigawealthy and must face the sabotage and plots of rival designers, not to mention maintain your own media presence!
- Victoria's Secret Catalogue, by Victoria's Secret. Your group of steampunk adventurers stumbles across a mind-blowing conspiracy in a seamy underworld bordello of shameless ankle-exposing clockwork courtesans that might destroy the very fabric of the British Empire... if you live long enough to tell it!
Transcript
Obi-Wan: Hi everyone.
R2-D2: Hi Ben, Sally.
Yoda: Pete! I brought you a book this time!
R2-D2: You did? You didn't...
Yoda: While I read The Prince, you can read The Little Prince!
Padmé: Hah ha ha!
R2-D2: What?
Padmé: Oh, nothing.
Yoda: It's cool, it teaches you all about how to be nice to people.
R2-D2: Much the same as my book, then.