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Spirit of the Century, from Evil Hat Productions, bills itself as a "Pulp pick-up roleplaying game." It's a fun, well-executed pulp game with innovative mechanics, although the amount of rules means it may only be "pick-up" with already experienced players.
Style
The book is fat. Let’s get that out of the way first. It’s softcover, 411 black and white pages not including the ads in the back. It’s well laid out and copyedited. On the one hand, art is very occasional, leading to many, many pages of pure text. On the other hand, the fontography and layout make it readable and largely broken up into bite-size chunks. I’d call it "highly serviceable" if not quite "pretty."
Substance
As I started to grind through the book, I was surprised at how much rules content there was – I guess I’ve gotten used to indie games (including others from Evil Hat like Don’t Rest Your Head) being very, very rules light. Though the core tagging mechanic the game uses is simple at its heart, there is a good bit of cognitive complexity in using it right.
The Mechanics
Spirit of the Century uses a FUDGE variant called FATE. FATE is OGL and you can go check out the ruleset for yourself in the free online SRD. My one gripe with this is and always has been the "FUDGE dice" required - weird custom dice normal people don't have marked with +, 0, and -. Even game stores seldom carry these, as FUDGE isn't exactly in their top 10 product list. You can use d6es in a somewhat cumbersome conversion. Why this system hasn't been reengineered to use a simple +/-d6 is beyond me. OK, rant over. Anyway, if you roll well you get "shifts" for each point above the target number and multiple "shifts" become "spin." There's a mess of other special cases here and they're spread across the book a bit too much - I prefer it when all the cases of the dice mechanic are explained in one place.
The actual meat of the game system is "aspects." Aspects are tags in the Web 2.0 sense of the word. Characters, scenes, etc. are assigned aspects, and it's by exercising these aspects that you interact with them. A character might have the pulpy aspects of "Nick of Time," "Man of Steel," or "Sucker for the Ladies." A scene might have the aspects "Shadowy," "On Fire!" or "Smells like the Floor of a Taxicab." In a fight, attacks and maneuvers can put various levels of wounds on a character as aspects, or special conditions like "Blinded" (or on scenes, like the On Fire! example above).
In general, invoking an aspect works about the same. To invoke one of yours, you spend a Fate Point. You can reroll or add 2 to a roll plausibly related to one of your aspects, or declare some fact related to them, like "I declare the Starry Order of Esoteric Wisdom has a chapter here in town" as a use of the "Fruity Occultist" aspect. You can similarly spend a Fate Point to invoke someone else's aspect, called tagging. The GM can invoke negative interpretations of an aspect by giving the player a Fate Point. This is called "compelling," and an example is saying a character is believing the obvious load of horse hockey the villainess is laying down because he has the "Sucker for the Ladies" aspect. In general the player can refuse the compel by paying a Fate Point, but that's for the weak.
Aspects are a nice, elegant way to run a game; they provide near-infinite flexibility and are fairly simple to use. I say "fairly" because there's dozens of pages worth of special cases which made my head spin to read them - escalating compels! Temporary aspects! Concessions! They come together into a coherent whole after a couple rereads, but in my opinion the first time you play this game it'll be anything but "pick-up." It definitely needs a convenient rules summary/screen.
Characters
Character generation is nice. Characters are generally assumed to be "Centurions" (special people, in the PC sense, all born on Jan 1, 1901) that are members of the "Century Club" (a generic fraternal organization of pulp derring-do'ers). You start with a childhood background, then explain what they did in the War (WWI for those of questionable history skills). Then, and this is the cool part, the next bit of their background is stated in the form of pulp novels. You come up with a title like "Dirk Granite and the Beasts of Mars!" (assuming you're Dirk Granite) and a short summary, with some of the other PCs as costars. Then, you do two more but as a co-star in the other PCs' novels. Each of these five phases should generate two aspects each for your character, ending up with ten. You then pick 15 skills and 5 stunts. The way skill levels work is that you get a "pyramid" of them - one skill at Superb, two at Great, and on down the ladder until you get five at Average. Skills are pretty generic, there's a list of 28 that are meant to be comprehensive, from Engineering to Weapons to Academics. Each skill has "trappings," or specific rules for a given use. Engineering, for example, has trappings of "Building Stuff," "Fixing Stuff," and "Breaking Stuff."
Stunts are 90 pages worth of "skill-linked feats," to bastardize d20 terminology. They're special tricks or abilities. So the skill Drive has several trappings, but Stunts under Drive include having a prototype car (you know, KITT from Knight Rider) and "One Hand On The Wheel," allowing you to multitask while driving with no penalty. Stunts are mostly about having something - a gizmo, special weapon, special vehicle - or being able to perform a special combat or skill trick.
There's a small chapter on Gadgets and Gizmos, explaining how you put together a Jet Pack or Ray Gun using these rules.
The Game
Believe it or not, but the book's only half over by now. The bulk of the remainder, more than 110 pages, is essentially GM advice on how to run the game. I really like this. Your average indie game version of SotC would have been about 40 pages long. "Here's a cool new aspect mechanic! OK, here's a couple pages hinting at a pulp setting! OK, go forth and be kewl!" It means many indie games you read, think are neat, and wonder how you'd really run them, especially for more than a one-shot shallowly designed to show off the cool new mechanic and cool setting idea and then get out before the hard work starts. SotC does the hard work. There's a section on "Running the Game" which talks at length about how to set difficulties for each skill (an Achilles heel of a lot of "roll to hit the difficulty" systems; the advice is very welcome). Then there's an even longer section on "Tips and Tricks" explaining how to (minimally) plan, how to effectively improvise, and how to make your game fun. It definitely shows that this game was built to play, not just to read and put on the shelf.
A short sample scenario, "The Nether Agenda," is provided, followed by a section of "secrets" about the setting. The setting is very, very lightly described so you can take or leave these. The rest is a bunch of appendices not called appendices - sample character packages, bibliography, and NPCs.
Summary
This book is a fun read. The method of generating characters and assigning them aspects is very, very flavorful and cool. But the book is dense. My main challenge in getting my gaming group to play SotC is that it's not so rules light that you can give a 5 minute rules intro and "just go." I would say it's about as much effort to read/grasp as the average White Wolf game in terms of learning curve. However, the rules seem fun, the pulp metaphor is carried well throughout, and the copious examples, GM tips, etc. mean that the running of the game itself should be fairly easy.
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