Ye Olde Staging Point

Several years ago, White Wolf published a sourcebook for their Hunter RPG written in part by Greg Stolze (who happens to be one of my favorite RPG writers--in addition to Hunter, he's worked on the equally excellent Godlike and Unknown Armies). The book was a sort of guide to the game's Redeemer faction (in Hunter, you play a human tasked with ridding the world of monsters; followers of the Redeemer creed believe that monsters can repent of their crimes and be restored to some semblance of humanity).

At any rate, the book contained an encrypted message purportedly intercepted by a group of hunters. Neither a translation nor a decryption key were provided with the coded message, and Stolze instituted a sort of open call for online codebreakers to take a shot at deciphering it. For two years nobody has been able to crack it, despite several clues posted by Stolze to get people going in the right direction. Here's a sample piece of the code (which I won't reproduce in full for copyright reasons; I'm assuming I'm allowed to quote from it, even though it's encrypted--lemme know if I'm out of line there):

I pulled out more than a few hairs trying to crack this myself once I heard about the author's open challenge, but failed. Apparently satisfied that nobody has been able to break the code, Stolze has now posted a translation.

Somehow, although I know I was never going to be able to crack this thing, I'm mildly disappointed that the answer is out there--would've been kinda fun to have an "unsolved RPG mystery" to ponder over the years. But I'm also glad to read the translation.

Pretty fun little diversion, I thought.