I was in fact joking.  The only thing it really reminded me of was The Authority as Jenny Sparks was the Spirit of the 20th Century.

Well done, then. Train nuts are so obsessive that I'd have expected to find some actual references, but the Lionel coincidence got me.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalI was in fact joking.  The only thing it really reminded me of was The Authority as Jenny Sparks was the Spirit of the 20th Century.

In jest, you find the truth.  

Were I not bound by respect for intellectual property, it would be no great stretch to call this the Axel Brass RPG, which is to say that characters like Jenny Sparks, Elijah Snow, Axel brass and company are the inspiration for the model.  For those unfamiliar with Planetary or The Authority, these are characters who are tied to some important idea that shapes the century for good or ill.

This is a very lightly placed element of the setting and rules, but the idea was a strong enough influence on our design and on the sort of thing we wanted to see that it's both a reflection of some of our ideas about what pulp means (the birth of the 20th century, a time of optimism, progress and change) and an homage to the ideas that inspired us.

To answer another question, SOTC is designed with pulp weirdness (Zap guns, jet packs, Aztec zombies and lost worlds) in mind.  Most of the weirdness is weird science, with a smattering of magic, but there are rules for tweaking each of those up and down to taste.  It's not quite as well suited to grit (though it can serviceably swing past it into noir) and probably would stumble over high (think Nobilis) weirdness as written.

-Rob D.

Quote from: Rob DonoghueThis is a very lightly placed element of the setting and rules, but the idea was a strong enough influence on our design and on the sort of thing we wanted to see that it's both a reflection of some of our ideas about what pulp means (the birth of the 20th century, a time of optimism, progress and change) and an homage to the ideas that inspired us.

  But does that not introduce into the room a 500ibs Gorilla of Lovecraftian proportions?

  I mean that one of the most interesting features of the Pulp era is that it's completely of its time and it fails completely as speculative fiction because the future they saw as coming never came and instead what we got was a century in which the principles of mechanisation and industrialisation were applied to mass-murder and genocide.

  So I wonder if this doesn't mean that SOTC has a certain Lovecraftian downer built into it because regardless of the good the characters might do, ultimately it's the bad guys who are going to capture the Spirit of the Century.

I had thought the "Spirit of the Century" was a translation of "Zeitgeist" but your explanation makes sense.

I'm liking weird science plus magic. Ok. Hmmm.....

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalBut does that not introduce into the room a 500ibs Gorilla of Lovecraftian proportions?

  I mean that one of the most interesting features of the Pulp era is that it's completely of its time and it fails completely as speculative fiction because the future they saw as coming never came and instead what we got was a century in which the principles of mechanisation and industrialisation were applied to mass-murder and genocide.

Mr. A, maybe it's because I just woke up, but for some reason this paragraph reminded me of the "Now we see the brutality inherent in the system!" scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail"

Regardless of my own sleep-drugged perceptions, you've written a pretty good analysis of the simultaneous appeal and repulsion of the Roaring 20's flavor of pulp fiction.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalSo I wonder if this doesn't mean that SOTC has a certain Lovecraftian downer built into it because regardless of the good the characters might do, ultimately it's the bad guys who are going to capture the Spirit of the Century.

       Funny you should mention that.  That's part of the game background.  Each PC represents a Spirit of the Century rather akin to an Avatar or godwalker in Unknown Armies.  There are also *Shadows* of the Century.  These are the insane cult leaders, villains, mad scientists, et al who represent either negative values or "inverted" versions of a Spirit.  As well, one particular bit of GM advice speaks about playing Spirit characters further into the century, when pulp darkens to noir.

Andrew

Quote from: SamarkandFunny you should mention that.  That's part of the game background.  Each PC represents a Spirit of the Century rather akin to an Avatar or godwalker in Unknown Armies.  There are also *Shadows* of the Century.  These are the insane cult leaders, villains, mad scientists, et al who represent either negative values or "inverted" versions of a Spirit.  As well, one particular bit of GM advice speaks about playing Spirit characters further into the century, when pulp darkens to noir.

Andrew

Er.. that's kind of off-putting.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalBut does that not introduce into the room a 500ibs Gorilla of Lovecraftian proportions?

  I mean that one of the most interesting features of the Pulp era is that it's completely of its time and it fails completely as speculative fiction because the future they saw as coming never came and instead what we got was a century in which the principles of mechanisation and industrialisation were applied to mass-murder and genocide.

  So I wonder if this doesn't mean that SOTC has a certain Lovecraftian downer built into it because regardless of the good the characters might do, ultimately it's the bad guys who are going to capture the Spirit of the Century.

This is a pretty deep question, and it cuts right to the heart of a lot of what makes spirit what it is, so it's probably going to need two answers.

The first is that, purely by the text of the game, you'd really have to look for it to find it.  In the text, this is an interesting dramatic framing mechanism and a source for idea, but it (and all the setting material) is only lightly layered on top of the rules engine, and the game goes on just fine without it.  If it were weighted more heavily in the text  then it'd be a bit more of a gorilla, but as it stands, it's meaning is far more fluid.

As far as real answers go, that's it.  You can stop now, and have all you need to know.

Everything that follows here is just my lens, and while it colored the game, it is only a perspective the game _allows_, not one it imposes, or even suggests, so if you don't dig what follows, don't hold it against the game, hold it against me (and me only - I'm not pretending to speak for Fred of Lenny here)

The second, and more involved answer, is in my head, and you are damn close to the mark - that possibility (or something like it) _must_ exist.  But what that means takes a little bit of framing.  .

To my mind, the most important question in SOTC, and this comes up very early in the text, is why characters do this. Characters in SOTC do not start out as scrotes and level up.  You start out awesome. Rich, successful, well respected and well connects.  If there is some concrete thing that you want, like wealth or power, it's not hard for you to get.  So given that, given that you already have everything you want, why are you putting yourself in danger? Why are you doing these crazy things and not just quietly cutting checks for causes you support? Why aren't you doing the pragmatic thing?

This is, to my mind, a pretty hefty moral question.  From a modern perspective, there is an instinct to cast decisions from the past, especially from idealized periods, as naive and unsophisticated, lacking the true comprehension of the world that we have now. That the evils they have seen are not as dark as the evils we now see, and that the choices they made then were more foolish than the ones we make now.

SOTC rejects that instinct, and much pulp handwaving, with the assumption that these are complex, sophisticated, moral people who are _more willing_ to make decisions because they have embraced a principle - that one person can make a difference.  That's a powerful idea, but also a double edged one.

This is still the 20s, and a lot of those moral decisions will be things we will consider barbaric, especially in regards to race, sex and politics, but these decisions will be _made_.  Decision motivates action, not paralysis.  Paralysis in the face of decision is, in this context, a hallmark of cowardice.

Now, it's not like a given SOTC game is going to need to explore these things.  First and foremost, it's a game of punching out the Croc-men of the Amazon and other such crazy pursuits.  It's possible the game never goes any further than this, and on some level, there's no reason it should.

But sometimes, when the GM or Player pulls back the lens a bit and looks at the shape of history and at the horrors (and, to be fair, wonders) yet to come in the 20th century, it's easy to fall back into some of those same assumptions, and dismiss World War I, and genocides that occurred before there was a word for it.  Without keeping that context, heroism seems like an aberration - a freak event destined to be ground down by the wheel of history.  And given that perspective, the future is, indeed, positively Lovecraftian.

But if you give this era credit as being the _emergence_ from a time of horror, and acts of heroism and action as a denial of that soul-crushing force, the question is very different indeed.  The question might well be "Can that spirit survive what is to come?"

And there we have gone furthest from the book, and have no answer to be found, because that, like every other moral question, is really a question to the reader.  Has this idea that one man can make a difference, this denial of the principals of thermodynamics, really become irrelevant in this world, or is the change in us?  Do we even _want_ heroes any more?

The answer to that is the answer to what the fact that SOTC exists in the context of the century really means.  Is it a past which, while noble, can never be returned to?  Is it an argument that heroism becomes purer as the obstacles grow greater still?  Or is is just a tossing up of the hands and going back to shooting proto-nazis because these questions just don't interest you?  I dunno. They're all good answers. Go with the one that works.

I'm not going to go so far as to say this is an application of post-modern thinking to pulp, because that would be wrong and, to be frank, kind of snotty of me.  But to be equally snotty, a lot of pulp is pretty vapid, and sometimes that's a strength, but I don't think it's a necessity.  The option needs to exist for it to be something more.

There's a reason pulp keeps bubbling to the top of so many designer's minds despite being quite often based on really appallingly bad source material.  Sometimes it's out of a desire to capture what that source material was all about, but sometimes, especially more recently, it's much more about what we see pulp to be.  Spirit is in that model, maybe misguidedly so, but I think that's where the real mojo is.

There's a vision that SOTC allows, and that makes me happy, but it does not mandate it, and that also makes me happy, because it allows for other visions, many of which are more interesting than mine.  These moral questions are important to me, but they don't _need_ to be important to the game.  That seems right.  But hell, the line between writing from the heart and preaching can be thin, and while I think we erred on the side of "Dear Sweet God No Preaching" maybe someone will come along and tell me otherwise, and I'll have to roll with that.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this has been a useful peek into my brain or not.  I worry that, even with all the disclaimers that this isn't written into the text, this is the sort of thing that gets a book labeled pretentious.  Such arrogance! Such judgement! Burn him!

But it was a good question.  A really, really good question.  And I don't think I could have really dealt with not giving the real answer, so I hope that, at the very least, it answered your question.

-Rob D.

Quote from: Rob DonoghueThat help at all?

-Rob D.

(Just now back online.)

Yes, helps a bunch.  I'll have to speak to my accountant about whether we can get it.

Quote from: SamarkandEach PC represents a Spirit of the Century rather akin to an Avatar or godwalker in Unknown Armies.  There are also *Shadows* of the Century.  These are the insane cult leaders, villains, mad scientists, et al who represent either negative values or "inverted" versions of a Spirit.

Hmm... You know, that doesn't sound completely unlike a low-key version of Nobilis, only with the emphasis on the struggle between the Light (the triumph of humanity) and the Dark (the self-destruction of the species) instead of the more cosmic matters.