Recently, I watched the Gangster Squad trailer and thought, "that looks like a fun setting for an RPG campaign - but what it's really missing is magic."

It was a stupid idea, but exactly the kind of stupid idea that could eventually lead to something awesome. Somewhere in the back of my head, the part of my brain that stores silly ideas noticed that the plastic brick that contained my idea for a game based on Harry Potter snapped together with the plastic brick of the Gangster Squad idea and made an airplane. The kind of airplane made up of two bricks snapped together crosswise, sure, but with enough imagination it flies.

The spot at which the round bumps of one brick fit into the backside of the other brick was the idea of secret police. Gangster Squad reminded me of The Untouchables with its FBI agents, and Harry Potter has its aurors, a squad of wizard-busting badasses. It wasn't a great leap to having an American agency responsible for policing magical crimes in the US and bam, I had a synopsis for my next campaign -

American Auror - the PC's are aurors working for the magical equivalent of the FBI. They'll deal with magical organized crime, magical terrorism, and the occasional dark wizard. There will be lots of combat.

I've been mulling that over for the last few weeks since I came up with the idea. I floated the synopsis out to my regular group and everyone was pretty enthused about the idea. As we talked about it, I came up with a few ideas and worked up a document for the agency based on some stuff I'd found on the FBI's website. It gave the players some good ideas for their characters and they started rolling them up before I'd even written a word of plot.

So, since I've been asked, here's that original agency document I created, as well as the campaign template I plan on handing out for the next step of setting design.