Well, I have an idea. The story is rough, and will be chiefly backgroundy so that you can largely forge out a story for yourself.
I've been playing too much Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners and reading too much Chandler and Hammett to do anything other than a 1930s noir setting. It'll be an alternate 1930, set in some sprawling metropolis (though obviously you can leave this behind if you'd like), and will encompass a range of tropes - gangsterism, police procedural, Lovecraftian horror, pseudo-Nazism, espionage, mysticism, superhero capery (these were the years that birthed Superman, after all) and so on.
Players will have some choice in deciding where there character starts off, which ought to dictate what - at least to start with - their gameplay will be like. You could start as an officer of the law, a 'troubled individual' (with burgeoning 'psychic' powers and a loose grip of sanity), a gangster in a turf war, a government spook, a regular business joe who finds himself embroiled in trouble from overseas (Eric Ambler style), a private dick, and so on.
Characters will feel more personal than in past games. Injuries will stick with you longer, unless you get them check out (being in a city gives you less excuse not to get a broken leg sorted out than when you're in a fantasy Olde Englande). There will be more focus on currency, with the chance to pick up a wage. Sanity will be an issue for some - those with 'psychic powers' and who are involved with the more Lovecraft horrors - and hallucinatory experiences will be presented as more and more legitimate if you delve too deeply without a life line. All the usual vices of the 30s will sometimes harrass your progress - alcoholism, smoking, and worse.
There will be vehicles and firepower fitting to an alternate noir setting.
Commercial careerism is rife, obviously. If you have employment in the law, the government, or something more tedious, you can rise and fall along the career ladder if you choose to. Conversely, if you follow in organised crime, there are heirarchies there as well.
So, an urban environ with psychic powers if you choose them, very character-based story and improvement, and so on. Does this. Sound. Appealing?
I was thinking about calling it something like. The Quiet Conspiracy. Art Deco. Cabaret. Something like that.
The 'alternate noir' setting is likely to be either a generic 'slightly different' America, or a world in which Germany and the Central Powers won the Great War and have some sembalence of control and German-culture orientation over the former Allies, and then the rise of Nazism occurring in the poverty stricken America or Britain looking the unify the broken nation (and possibly setting a second war in motion).
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