I have so many great white whales that it’s a wonder that I have any limbs left.
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I think the one that has been eluding me longest is to set some high adventure and glamorous intrigue on a version of the habitable Mars we believed in from Lowell until Mariner, the Mars described in my grandmothers’ Handbook and Atlas of Astronomy and further elaborated by Burroughs, Heinlein, and S.M. Stirling. I have sent PCs there by guncotton rocket in 1896. I have had them transported by a malfunctioning secret weapon from Flanders in 1917. I have had them stumble through mystical portals in the rainforest of western Brazil. But they keep having TPKs, or the technology and timetable for international PBVC doesn’t work out, or driving to Newcastle every month ends up to much of a chore. I really don’t think that there is anything wrong with the idea.
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I have a plan for a campaign consisting of the munchhausenades of a group of elderly professors emeriti who occupy the best corner of the faculty club at Walpurgis University. The idea is that each adventure should start with a frame story in which an NPC rushes into the faculty club to relate a bizarre experience, and that the PCs, in their nonagenarian phase, should try topping that with a reminiscence of past adventure until the group settles on one that everyone wants to play, and that that should then be played out as a flashback. There would be a convention that the PCs were students before WWI, assistant and associate professors in the the Cliffhangers era, and full departmental chairs after WWII. This campaign would feature negative continuity, and might be best suited for one of those newfangled narrative games that young people seem so fond of these days — but I have always backed myself to run it in ForeSight.
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My original idea for my usual SF RPG setting (Flat Black) was always that it was meant for groups of PCs visiting the various planets-of-the-week on private business, and therefore confronting the bizarre societies and malignant governments on a personal level. But I have somehow fallen into the habit of almost always running campaigns for Imperial servants going about official business. I’d rather like to run a campaign in which the PCs were, rather, a team of clandestine effectives of some interstellar non-government organisation, and I really hanker to run a campaign for a group of unscrupulous “artifact acquisition agents” striving to make sure that all the things that belong in a museum end up in a well-funded collection on some wealthy planet, for an appropriate fee.
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I have an elaborate plan to do “Star Trek done right” in my usual SF setting Flat Black, which involves four or five players each playing four or five characters — one each in the ship’s naval crew, the marines contingent, the diplomatic party, the Survey team of first-contact experts, and the senior-officers group that advises the captain. The idea is that every player gets a part to play in every phase of a first-contact story, and that everyone gets a voice in the decision-making while still able to play a lowly something-or-other sometimes.