I think that the genre is the most important thing.  At the moment it seems to be unanimous that we're going to be straying away from magic (at least in this one game; as you said Haibane, this group is meant to act as a<strong>think-tank</strong>for multiple plots, not necessarily one giant one).<br/><br/>So for now, we should decide if we want this to be more in the past or more in the future.  I definitely will second Corvus's love of the Firefly universe, though it needn't actually take place in that setting.  If we do decide on near-future as opposed to an alternate past, we would need to decide whether space travel and colonization is possible, or if the plot will remain Earth-based, what the level of technology is, etcetera.  Awhile back I played a short-lived one-on-one where there were such things as virtually (and even artificially intelligent) sex "dolls", which would certainly provide a level of smut in a more futuristic city.