As for the campaign, the idea is that the world is sort of like the world in the "Indiana Jones" movies, and not only is their weird stuff in archaeology, but there is also weird stuff in physics (alternate dimensions, time warps, etc.), chemistry, biology (giant wasps), palaeontology (the Lost World) etc. etc. The Cthulhu Mythos cycle, "Herbert West: Reanimator", "Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde", "Them", "It", "The Thing", grey aliens—all that sort of stuff is true. But it isn't common, you can't prove it, and you can't publish in peer-reviewed journals. Scientists and academics all over the world encounter this stuff, and most of them a clever enough to keep quiet about it. The ones who aren't discreet enough can't get tenure anywhere except Walpurgis University.
Walpurgis U. is this quaint little university in the Connecticut Valley, with a modest endowment and a ruinous reputation for eccentricity. Not all, but a good proportion of the faculty there could overthrow the foundations of science in everything from anthropology to zoology, if only they had funding. But they don't have funding, they have tenure at Wal. U. instead. Meanwhile, Dr. Alenberg reanimated a corpse in the medical basement in 1922, and one of the squash courts has been out of commission since 1927 because Prof. Farmer built an atomic pile there in a successful but uneconomic attempt to transmute mercury into gold. There is a pterandon in formalin in the basement of Darwin Hall (collected in Maple White Land in 1917), and an electro-mechanical AI computer in the Physics attic (had to be unplugged when it tried to take over the world in 1936).
The frame story for the campaign is set in the Senior Common Room of the Faculty Club at Walpurgis University. The PCs are these incredibly ancient emeritus professors who hang out permanently in wing-backed chairs near the window in the south-east corner. They've been there forever, apparently. Certainly their anecdotes, if true, would suggest that they were on campus in 1920 and still teaching as late as 1963.
Each adventure begins with an NPC telling the crowd in the common room about some modern marvel. The PCs then offer tags for stories that the modern incident or discovery reminds them of. When two players start reminiscing about the same past event we flash back to the era of that anecdote and start playing out, not perhaps what really happened, but the story that these old men tell, which might be exaggerated, or at least improved, but is near enough to the truth that none of the tenured staff at Wal. U. would dare to risk contradicting it. Because the old boys have probably got something in a jar somewhere that proves that, even if it didn't happen quite the way they said, /somebody/ built a time machine and went back to the Cretaceous.
As you see, the campaign is set up so that I won't know until we start what adventure I'll be running, where it will be set, or even which decade it is set in. We plan to make up for that by making the character-players more responsible for the story than is usual. The goal is to head off my tendency to over-prepare adventures. Aspects and Fate Points in "Spirit of the Century" ought to be ideal for these purposes, and they will be very more important than usual for this campaign. That's why I'm so keen to have a really convenient way to handle them.
I'm in Kempsey, NSW. One, maybe in the future two, of the players are in Newcastle, which is 300 km away. Two players (maybe three, later) are in Canberra, which is 800 km away. That's why I'm keen to have an InterNet virtual gaming room. I hate RP in text chat, which is why I'm keen to have video chat.
