Swashbucklers (CFH)

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The Swashbucklers campaign is for players who want characters with a lot of style adventuring in a sophisticated setting. The Musketeers novels of Alexandre Dumas are a perfect source for character types, adventure ideas, and settings for such a campaign.
In the Swashbucklers campaign, the player-characters are elegant heroes, experts with the rapier, making their way in a huge city. They tend to live hand-to-mouth, gaining large treasures one day and spending through them in a very short time, so they may be rich and generous one day and stealing their food the next. This is not a campaign devoted to honest and hard-working heroes. The PCs may be as honorable as their players want, but they're still charming rakes who like to get by on as little effort as necessary.
However, when danger looms, they'll gladly throw themselves into an adventure, one which may lead them on a desperate horseback race across the land or into the dark catacombs under the city, where monsters dwell. Adventures may lead them from the court of their king, to the barracks of the nation's army (as they briefly become soldiers or commissioned officers), to the front lines of the ongoing war with a neighboring power, to desperate missions behind enemy lines, to secret forays into the capital city's prison (so that they might rescue the king's secret twin or their friend who's been imprisoned for knowing too much).
The heroes are in a constant competition to out-style the other. In combat, each tries to be the flashiest. In romance, each tries to be the most witty, most courteous, most gallant. Also, they're in similar competition with rival NPC swashbucklers, who are often members of a competing military force or fencing academy.
In all, it's a campaign of great style and showmanship.