For contrast, I'm going to share the setting I came up with for the Star
Trek game that I (briefly) contemplated working on last summer. Apologies
in advance if this comes of as rambling or unfocused but I'm working with 4
hours of sleep and my 3rd Red Bull of the day hasn't fully kicked in yet
(or, if it has, it ain't doing shit).
My idea for a Star Trek game was to set the players in an area known as The
Triangle, which is a neutral region of space located at the point where the
territories of the Federation, Klingons and Romulans come the closest
together (http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Triangle). Players would be
either crew of one of the various ships patrolling the region, or civilians
living on the Orion-owned station (which would be the main hub) or one of
the planets in the area. These patrol ships wouldn't be just UFP, there
would be Romulan, Klingon, Orion and possibly others as well, and they
needn't all be warships, either. A science or merchant ship would fit right
in.
This setting would allow us to do all sorts of things that not normally be
possible on your typical UFP-centric TrekMUSH. I think that the most
important of these is, players would be allowed to have non-Federation
characters, and would allow those characters to fully interact with the rest
of the player base. There's nothing worse than rolling, say, a Cardasssian
character only to find out that you're one of 3 Cardassian players and the
only one in your TZ. Wandering around Cardassia Prime by yourself gets
pretty old after a while no matter how cool the room descs are and it's not
like you can just up and go play with the cool UFP kids because the UFP
doesn't accept Cardassian characters.
It would allow for meaningful civilian characters. Most Trek games are
strictly made up of Starfleet characters (or, in the case of multi-faction
games, their Klingon, Romulan, etc equivalents), which means dealing with
taking orders, having to obey lots of rules, and similar things that some
people would rather not have to deal with.
There would be no end to the (hopefully fun and RP-spawning) drama that
would arise from having so many mutually antagonistic races living and
'working' in such close proximity. Want your Bajoran science officer to
turn some heads when she walks around the Promenade hand-in-hand with her
Cardassian girlfriend? You could do that! Want to play an Orion Slave
girl? Go for it! Dishonored Klingon trying to hide his shame by living
with aliens in the middle of nowhere? Ditto! Tal Shiar agent trying to
disrupt Federation activities in the area? Sure, why not. The sky really
would be the limit. Players that want a more typical experience (ie, being crew of a Starfleet vessel) could do that, too.