Necronautilus is melodic death metal spelljammer. Or maybe afterlife-punk farscape. You play as agents of the god of death, in a dead post-death galaxy, and you both carry out death's will and work against your role and fight to return to life.
The PDF is 43 pages, with a layout style that is expressive and experimental and stops just short of going full Mork Borg. There's a lot of excellent art, and sometimes the line between what is layout, what is text, and what is art gets blurry, but it all makes for a fairly cohesive effect. Also the body text is quite readable. The only page where you have to turn your head to the side to read it is a chart of words of power.
Words of power are, incidentally, the mechanical backbone of the system. Every character has them in place of skills, and they're as open-ended as you could wish. There's still dice, but you roll your dice under the value of whichever Word Of Power you're currently deploying. Succeed, and in addition to your success the word grows more specific. Fail, and the word grows more powerful. Crit, and the word loses a letter.
There's two more kinds of things you can roll on, Luck and Memories, but I've never seen anything even remotely like this in a system. It's fresh as heck.
Plus, in addition to the stuff you can roll, you also carry a secondary stockpile of non-powered words that you can use to affect the narrative, permanently world-building parts of the galaxy or bolting modules onto your party's organic ship. Creating a planet or a bank of turbolasers is as simple as spending some words.
Perhaps for this reason, lore-wise, there's a *lot* going on in Necronautilus. Apart from the trippy cosmic situation, there's bits of weird and bizzaro fantasy, as well as pulp and raygun gothic and biopunk and a whole lot else. The book sometimes tells you things in a way that hints that maybe you shouldn't believe everything the book tells you, but the general quality of the writing in book is fantastic.
I went in expecting this to be good, but even still I was caught off guard.
In fact, one area where I was not expecting a lot of innovation---and where I got completely bowled over---was the design of the character sheets.
In Necronautilus, each piece of a character corresponds to a piece of a skull, and each skull-piece has unique mechanics and plugs into the game's metaphysics in a way I wasn't expecting. For example, you have a limited number of items per mission, and those are made out of your own soul-stuff and creating one crosses off one of the skull's teeth for a mission. Or for a more lore-based example, your HP sits in the skull's right nostril, and the higher it goes, the closer you are to defecting from your mission.
Essentially, Necronautilus characters start as memoryless cats' paws of death, but as they grow so do their senses of self---expertly mirroring the way player characters grow at the gaming table.
My only real critique of the book is that I think it's worth noting that Necronautilus' intended style of play is not gritty-crunchy, blow-by-blow, tactical combat against small groups of skeletons. It wants big situations that resolve slowly. So, think Shadow Of The Colossus, or the God Of War boss fights, and make those what a typical combat looks like. Each fight significantly mutates the players' stat blocks during the course of it, so small speedbump or placeholder fights are strongly disincentivized. Death is also not much of a mechanical threat (you just get back up after being killed,) so the real tension is more in how you change than in what you die for. This also means that you have to rely on the GM and the group to build atmosphere, because the complexity and risk in combat isn't really the game's sell.
In terms of GM resources, there's a *lot* that are provided, with everything from random tables to advice on how to run and adventure and listen to your group. Someone who's GM'd a bit before, no matter what they've GM'd, should be able to pick this up no problem. However someone totally new to rpgs might get a bit overwhelmed if they were hoping for more complex math and computer-game-style structure.
Still, this is a heck of a book, and if you like fresh dice systems, weird-but-grounded fever-dreamy settings, doom-y tones that are somehow philosophical rather than oppressive, and a lot of creative freedom to tell wild stories using mechanics that emphasize change and self-examination, Necronautilus is for you.
Minor Issues:
-Page 16, Words Of Power and Words in Collection are two separate things, right? Words Of Power don't get used up when deployed? I had to read this section several times to figure this out, and the similarity of the terms makes it tough to understand.
-Page 17, Memories, this says that there's more information on page 24, but it's 25
-Page 25, Memories, Are these expended when you use them? What happens if you overflow the character sheet?