The year is 1906 and while Britannia rules the waves, at home something unthinkable has happened – people have been drugged while taking tea at Fortnum’s ! United by this common experience, a disparate group of plucky Britons band put aside differences of politics and class and unite to investigate the source of this outrage.
What starts as a simple enquiry into an sub-standard pot of tea becomes first a murder investigation and then something yet more frightening.
From society balls and stately homes to the slums and dockyards of Limehouse, the investigators race against time to uncover a conspiracy of monstrous proportions. As a mysterious epidemic of lethargy and indolence spreads across London, only they can stand against the sinister foreign forces which threaten to strike at the very foundations of the British Empire.
“Stiff Upper Lip” is my own variant of the popular FATE system made famous by “Spirit Of The Century”. “Stiff Upper Lip” takes FATE and gets it to stand up straight, stop slouching and generally become a game system of which Nanny would be proud. It adapts FATE for the genre of British Empire fiction, made famous by writers such as W.E. Johns, Rider Haggard and Sax Rohmer. A golden age in which bold heroes and plucky heroines confront dastardly foreigners, discover lost worlds and ancient treasures, and thwart devilish schemes for world domination.