As a PDF, it's a bit primitive, and the scan is a bit better than fax quality. As a game, this has long been one of my favorites -- I bought it in hard copy when it first appeared, and recently purchased the PDF for an extra copy while running the game. Some of the other reviewers seem not to know that this game is 13 years old and thus does not benefit from the continued evolution of the Storytelling game system (the version used here and in the other Aeon games is a bit simplified from oWoD), but it's easy enough to come up with a few house-rules compromises if it's important to you to use a different version of the rules. Or you could wait for the revised version Onyx Path is supposed to do soon, I guess.

The big innovation for the rules here is Dramatic Editing, the players' use of the power stat (Inspiration) to gain a little control over the story and narrate the kinds of improbable conveniences that benefit heroes of the pulp genre -- I've seen other, later games use a similar mechanic (like Pulp Hero and Spirit of the Century). It's also a way for them to get out of cliffhangers: let the players pool their points and narrate their way out whatever bind you've left them in from last time.

The character types range from peak human Daredevils through psychics to the super-powered Stalwarts (on their way to becoming the Aberrants of the two other Aeon games), and the rules let players build starting characters that could plausibly be world-class heroes right out of the gate. The setting allows for everything from mad scientists with airships to lost jungle civilizations to mole-men from the Hollow Earth, and it's rather simple to tweak the setting for the 30s rather than the 20s if your players are itching to punch Nazis, too.

The book features a LOT of fiction and background, and it's all front-loaded, so if you hate that sort of thing, you'll hate this, but it's generally of good quality and excellent for bringing you into the pulp mindset and the setting: the idea seems to be that you've bought the book because you are a fan of pulp stories, and the rules are just there to help you tell your own.

In short: there are lots of good pulp games out there, but if you have a player-base that's used to the Storytelling game system, this one will serve you well.

I give the game 5 stars and the PDF 3, for an average of 4.