The Lady of Leisure takes place in the steampunk world of the 17th-18th century Carribean Sea. The assumption of this world is that most people live their lives as someone of the late 1700′s does, but exceptional people have access to advanced technology and unexplained wonders: airships, sniper matchlocks, and exceptional martial arts abilities are all possible here. Clockwork airplanes fight dogfights against lightning-throwing hot air balloons while piston-enhanced muscle wrestles with cultists of the all-seeing crystal skull.

In the universe, there are five “factions” amongst the isles, who represent a very stripped down geopolitical map: Monarchists, who support the Old World nobility, Republicans, seeking to create a more democratic system, Bolsheviks, who follow a marxist ideal of overthrowing the current capitalist system, Pirates, (who just wanna be free,) and those few unaligned Bohemians just trying to make a place in the world for art’s sake. The islands are governed by various Old World nations, and governors tend to be scheming members of some faction or another seeking to push their agenda through the power they have as governors of an island.

The Lady of Leisure, meanwhile, is an airship harem, a floating garden of delights. The Player Characters are all people connected to the Lady: clients, sky pirate fighters, crew, prostitute, scholar, etc. The ship cruises from island to island, plying its wares while the characters engage in derring-do, exploration and adventure, from foiling a Bolshevik plot to blow up the ship to serving as the secret detail to the Queen’s service. The Player Characters should represent a Pulp sort of mentality: excellent people in a situation far beyond what the average man might dream: Adventure!, Shadowrun, or Spirit of the Century might all be good candidates for the engine, but anything could really work.

The trick to character creation is to focus on three elements of the setting:

1) Political upheaval and struggle as the nobility is dying out, the colonies seek independence, and the bolsheviks struggle against imperialism throughout the isles and Victorian sensibilities place the bohemians in a complicated situation. Characters feel strongly about their allegiances, and should be able to discuss them cogently.

2) Advanced technology and the unexplained: want cyberware? Great? Cool inventions? Go for it, just explain that your plasma thrower’s got a clockwork key on the back of it. Player Characters in this setting are outrageous compared to the standard agrarian life of an 18th century colonial, and this serves to set them apart as great heroes, or villains. On this note, while natural sciences are starting to catalogue all of the unusual phenomenon of the world, that isn’t to say that it’s there, yet, so there’s also elements of magic and the supernatural lurking beyond the lighted fortresses.

3) A willingness towards camaraderie and adventure: While political motivations and differing views on the role of technology in the world, the Lady of Leisure is a place of friendship and esprit de corps. Build characters who WANT to help each other. This one is a common pitfall that Player Characters do not consider very often.

A group of the fallen have overtaken bodies on the mortal realm. What better place to have the soul sapped out of you but a high-income highschool in California’s suburb? The player characters, depending on the personality of the demon, take over the body of: a young asian whose parents pressure him to work hard at school, athletics, and a prestigious part-time job, a black girl with weight problems and friends who abuse her, a guy who has surrounded himself with the best in stuff all of his life, even his girlfriend is based on what looks good on his arm, and a teenaged mom who has turned to drugs to maintain her stressful life.

The first few games are about the PCs becoming adjusted to life in high school, where conformity is the watchword. After a while, the team learns that an Earthbound has an interest in the high school. (Earthbound are demons without a human consciousness, or conscience, to reign them in. They tend to to eat Fallen.) The high school was built by a Satanist, it turns out, and incorporates a lot of evil sorcery in its structure. A thrall (ordinary human servant) of the Earthbound, masquerading as the Guidance Counseller after killing the real one, sneaks about only to be discovered investigating the basement.

There is an altar in the sub-basement, and the Player Characters discover it. You access it through a hidden door, follow 616 steps downstairs to reach it. And inscribed on the Altar underneath a giant rose is “Whoever controls me at the End of the World shall be rewarded with their fondest wish.” Any time a PC fights for the altar and demonstrates some dominance over the others, they get a Faith point back. (Precious resource amongst the Fallen.) More importantly, they gain bonuses to rolls, mundane good luck happens to them, it’s all great.

The year continues with many oppurtunities for the Player Characters to attempt to seize power over the altar. Meanwhile, the Earthbound continues to seek the altar, draw the Fallen into battles that they cannot win individually, putting an emphasis on competition within the team. Finally, on graduation day (the Satanist’s prophecised end of the world), the Player Characters are drawn to the subbasement in their dreams. And upon arriving there during the graduation ceremony, they discover it is glowing. When all are assembled, the Altlar reveals itself as the Earthbound they’ve been fighting all this time. Their belief in the Altar, matched with their fear of the Earthbound, has fed this Earthbound, and now it’s ready to awaken. It thanks the PCs and begins to consume them.

The kids are found next September by the janitorial staff in what appears to be a bizarre murder suicide cult. The Earthbound, fueled by so much belief, is gone. Escaped into the world. Cue “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones.

It’s a metaphor for growing up, that the challenges and obstacles we face in high school are ultimately meaningless, that the things we’re willing to destroy our souls for are, in retrospect, dumb ideals. Our sense of superiority comes from being the big fish in the little pond, and we have to leave these things behind in order to truly grow up and get past our childhood. Sure, leaving the high school is scary. You might get eaten by something big and powerful. But at least you’re free.

Then Vallmarks opens up a tower in Dark Harbour, litterally overnight with the help of magic. Vallmarks is an association of wizards, sorcerors, artificers, enchanters and adventurers that provides their services at a very competitive price because they’re so large, and they can supply ANYTHING that the Player Characters can do at a cost much lower than the PCs can charge and live comfortably. They are here to drive the adventurers in Dark Harbour out of business so that they can perform their dread deeds.

Globalisation represents a very powerful force: entire communities becoming dependent on an unsustainable and economically damaging business. Vallmarks isn’t evil, and shouldn’t be presented as such, but people are stupid and lazy, and willing to sell their futures short for the sake of convenience. The Player Characters could just leave, sure, but it is their home: Dark Harbour should be presented in such a way as to highlight to the Player Characters that it may be full of stupid and naive people, but Vallmarks threatens their communities in a far more insidious way than any half-demonic ogre mage’s ever-burning army of vampiric centaurs.

Vallmarks’ ultimate agenda is to make itself indispensible to the community, and then engineer tensions between the two countries that Dark Harbor sits on the borders of. As the drumbeat of war begins, Vallmarks solidifies their control of the town by driving everyone out of business and forcing them to accept jobs working for Vallmarks, then uses this captivated labor force to mass produce weapons that will be used by either side, meanwhile opening supercentres in the castles of both sides.

It’s up to the Player Characters to avert a war for profit, and reveal the insidious plot of Vallmarks once and for all.

Have each player create a character, making sure that they all work well in a group, with niches that will be fun and interesting to play. Then, before sitting down to the first game, take each player aside, seperately, and explain to each them that their character isn’t ACTUALLY a thief, but a government agent trying to bust the other players after the diamond is stolen. Use email to handle the characters’ double agent stuff, outside of game. Impress upon them the requirement of secrecy, and tell them that you’ll allow the others to kill his character if they slip up. In the opening, their mysterious contact informs them that they have been infiltrated, but has no idea who it is. Offer a reward for anyone whose role as a mole is discovered in the form of XP or whatever reward Player Characters receive in your campaign

Then, sit back and watch the fun.

In the years post-Dominion War, the Federation takes a beating. A lot of resources have been lost during the war, and Starfleet becomes strained trying to deal with policing a lot of systems with fewer ships. A beat-up forward recon vessel, in service for nearly a century, has been policing a couple of interesting locations in a star cluster. Old ruins from a lost civilization, a failed colony, a couple of pirate moons, a techno-utopia, a swath of contested space, some alien race under Federation protection, any idea you want, but roughly twelve interesting locations. The ship has been on assignment here in a sort of “stop-loss” situation, with the fleet pressing them into a new tour of duty above and beyond what was expected of the assignment. Some of the crew has been forced to accept a longer tour of duty than has been signed on for. It isn’t ideal, but a lot of rhetoric regarding the sacrifices everyone in the Federation is making has been thrown around so no one’s mutinous.

The player characters are the typical away team complement, which pretty much allows them to be a mix of whoever: third shift doctor, alien security chief, space marine, interpreter, second in command, whatever.

During the first session, where they stop a rogue Romulan plot to blow the fuck up out of some lawless pirate planets in Federation space, there’s a firefight and the Romulans fight to the death. Afterwards, one of the security detail is surprised by a dead Romulan while searching the body, and has his throat ripped out before the Romulan is disintegrated by another teammate. Everything is beamed back up for continued investigation.

Later that night, the security guard and one of the Romulans who died have risen in the morgue attached to the sickbay, and bitten the doctor, who has now also turned. An intruder alert goes up, but before anybody has a handle on anything, the main security team is bitten as well. After dealing with this mess, the captain responds to distress calls that grow in magnitude: This is happening across the Federation. Across the Universe. The remainder of the game is a zombie story with a Star Trek twist.

Zombie games are in some ways at their best when the Player Characters have no understanding that they’re about to enter a zombie story. Survival horror in Star Trek is a contradiction, a beautiful dichotomy: an optimistic utopia faced with a hard stop. Here, the true characteristics of Star Trek’s morality can be tested. It’s not enough to simply survive. You have to earn it.

As to the rules of the campaign: At first, zombies are limited to anyone who has been bitten, but the virus quickly adapts to infect anyone who dies, anywhere, and the bites simply become a gauranteed death sentence. To kill a zombie, you either remove the head or disintegrate them, which in turn requires expending a serious share of a phaser’s energy, reducing what used to be a limitless weapon into a more appropriate one for a zombie flick. Zombies are undetectable to mind readers and the advanced sensor equipment common to Starfleet vessels (no simply beaming them off into space). There are force fields and replicators, but zombies are patient fucks and will exploit unexpected openings.

While there are several theories across Starfleet regarding these event,: (temporal cold war shenanigans, the Q-Continuum is dead and caused the plague, some sort of subspace glitch,) the cause and cure are not within the scope of the game.

The City Cab Company is then purchased by a bizarre millionaire, who has lost his wife and daughter to a predator who kidnapped the two in exchange for a hefty ransom, killed the both of them and escaped. Now, he has dedicated himself to a new purpose with his 216 million a year dollar publishing and housewares empire: revenge!

All of the Player Characters have lost somone to the increasing violence that surrounds society on all fronts. And now, using the City Cab Company as their cover, they’ve been given the chance to strike back at the predators that stalk the streets. The taxi company is supplied with serious firepower: pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, Gulf War-era military tech, a full autobody shop for remodelling the cars, a room underground that’s nice and soundproof, and a coffee machine.

This is an excellent mortals story, because it establishes a strong mission from the get go (revenge and justice) while at the same time it leaves the players struggling with their own chewy moral centre. Is it possible to stare into the abyss? It also has strong potential to turn into any sort of supernaturals game, as the Player Characters are nabbed by ghoulies or vampires or what-have-you, by dint of running afoul of a supernatural’s plans.