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The Berlin Club is a Victorian Hero game. Starting on the date of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, it is the tale of a number of characters who stand head and shoulders above (or beneath) the world they live in. Similar ideas to this genre would be The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or the Open Conspiracy in Planetary. This is not a black and white campaign; the characters are not necessarily heroes. They're the extraordinary, with everything that implies.
The Berlin Club is the invention of Wolfgang von Hammer, a renowned adventurer and explorer. Realizing that the world is filled with strange occurrences that quietly shape the landscape, he has determined to gather together a group of the most extraordinary individuals from all over the world. The Berlin Club is intended to be a society based on both mutual protection and mutual suspicion. Each character involved is possessed of nation-shaking authority or sheer power in his own right, and their motivations are not always black and white.
Some Caveats: While this game doesn't require a deep knowledge of the Victorian era, it'd be helpful to at least be familiar with Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle's works.
In addition, this game will be played out in genre. People of that era were thoughtlessly racist and misogynist, by today's standards. One musn't trust the yellow Oriental, nor expect too much thought from the dark African. Women are prone to emotional outbursts, and can't be expected to be very intelligent. That said, characters in the game may (and probably will) buck these conventions of the era.
Areas of Operation: The game will travel all over the globe, but the base of operations is in Berlin. Please be aware that Berlin is the capital of Prussia, at this point — there is no larger Germany to encompass it.
Tone: This game is one of very grey morality. The characters are in a world for might and intelligence means you're better than others. The Victorian world is struggling between hard rationalism and passionate mysticism. The same age that produced electricity and the telephone also produced the Theosophic Society and was the height of Masonic mysticism and conspiracies.
The player characters are expected to have their own agendas.
Plots: The plots will be based on dealing with threats to the world, but there will also be subplots based on the private agendas of the player characters. Player character conflict is expected in this game.
Power Level: Though characters in this game will be based on as many points as a standard superhero game, they will likely not be as straight-on powerful as a modern superhero. Victorian heroes and anti-heroes tended to be quite well-rounded — for example, Frankenstein's monster learned to speak in a matter of days, and was quoting philosophy within weeks, despite his pure brutish power.
Compared to most people in the world, the characters will be giants striding the landscape, however.