First Impressions:
This is a game that's bonkers, in a good way. PCs are members of FIST, an independent mercenary organization dealing with anomalous, alien, supernatural and occult situations - imagine, say, Sam And Max: Freelance Police meets Hellboy, The Doom Patrol, and The Mystery Men at Area 51. The system is an adaptation of Powered By The Apocalypse with a 2d6 roll for failure, partial success, or full success, but no Moves or Playbooks. Characters can be normal humans, enhanced/Changed humans (like Liminal Horror Fallout), alien beings, dimensional travelers, cyborgs, or anything else - and so can be their opposition.
IMO the best thing is the last third or so of the book which is about 60 pages of tables for everything a GM could hope for - missions, twists, equipment, weapons, NPCs, locations, even a d100 table of songs that could be found on cassette tapes (and a hell of a great musical selection!). Easter eggs abound showing an affection for spy/weird media (spies named Solo or Smart, scientists named Forrester, Daystrom, or Freeman).
Explicitly anti-canonical, FIST can be whatever one decides; Bureau 13, an SCP Foundation MTF, The X-FIles, or the BPRD, and there's a massive selection of supplements and enhancements available to mix and match to your heart's content. Very highly recommended!
Great from the very start (Forum rules: No bigots. No tolerance for the intolerant. As Karl Popper said, move to the center with fash, cut your own throat.)
The pdf is replete with Tutorial Town / dungeon-character-creator and an opening hex crawl for said new characters. There are tables and text and encounter charts for other areas. There's a dungeon-flowchart for throwing in a surprise dungeon wherever the players look - in a gas station, in a forgotten cavern, underneath the apartment complex, on a floating island. Snippets of the world's lore and mechanics are scattered throughout the text in a way I find captivating - abandoned accounts become fungoids and live near the opening hex crawl, benevolent and trolling factions, zombies spawning whenever a player's character dies and respawns.
The die mechanics are cool. Player Character stats each get a die assigned, and NPCs have a die (or several) that they can roll in opposition. No NPC? The environment gets dice. "This storm cloud hurls lightening bolts with a d20; the ravine's walls are crumbling and give you a d10 difficulty). Dream Jellies roll a d8 and can learn spells! There's an item (Dream Jar) to capture them, roll your RNG + Dream vs their d8! When vanquished a Dream Jelly splits in half, forming two d6-wielding Dream Jellies. Throwing a Dream Jar is the new lantern oil plus torch! There's a Meta stat for players - I'd love to see someone use to say they studied a speed runner's glitch-exploiting platforming and try to hand off bonus dice to characters good with their character's Build and thus good at platforming...
So there is a new Kickstarter for .dungeon and I'm backing it, just to keep that clear. This is not quite that - the rules are gonna be the same, as I understand it, but there will be some moar things, and tweaks in the kickstarter vs here. The kickstarter now is Patch 3 of .dungeon, this is Patch 2? And the other one is release candidate 1? Either way, it's all good things in here and in all the other patches of the game. Cannot wait to see what Snow and Company do with it next.