The year is 1906, and while Britannia rules the waves, at home things are not as they should be. There are rumours of curious malaises affecting people from all walks of life, and nowhere is safe. Even as our plucky heroes take tea at Fortnums, they find themselves subject to the most strange and unnerving sensations.
What starts as a simple enquiry into a 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 find themselves being drawn into a web of conspiracy. 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 Core system. 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.