Quoting the wise Sage Yoda

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Since darkness is traditionally liked to evil the “Dark side” is so aligned to. And Fear is thus the path to Evil leading to the conclusion that Fear, and being filled by Fear, is aligning, or being aligned to, Evil. So on the Good-Evil axis Fear of Spiders is aligned to Evil. Fear being an emotion have no intrinsic aligned towards Order or Chaos, how it affects the person is individual.

Therefore Fear of Spiders (arachnophobia) is Neutral Evil.

If there are three players present I’ll run. Unless there is something big upcoming, then we’ll discuss if we want to postpone. I usually say “I want four players, so I’ll recruit to five, and run with three”.

I’m in a similar boat. According to steam haven’t opened EUIV since 2017 and now I have a huge relearning curve. And new DLC to get. While I would love to get back into it I have better (path) things (of) things (exile) to (two) do.

Inkscape enjoyer here. The vector based tech makes it not that limited to my skill at drawing but rather how I can manipulate the vectors and points. Make things thinner or wider, change a curvature etc. And nothing is set in stone. I’m using it for everything. World maps, region maps, settlements, dungeons. You name it. For dungeons (and inside locations) I gathered all my most used assets to save time.

Some examples

Most recognizable trigger from said image - Reinstalling EUIV

Sigh… here I go again…

A bit of preface. The games I run, the games I play in and the groups I enjoy all are very open with discussing meta. From story beats to encounter critiques and where we the players want to see the game go.

what do you do when the players go off-script?

We are honest and appreciate the time the GMs put into running the games. Several times either I or another GM have stated “that direction is not prepared” and the group have a chat from there. Perhaps calling it early or we zoom in on character daily life (or their projects). The amount of times a “forgotten” villain have reappeared for revenge in these situation is kinda high.

on railroading

Why play a game about characters, their decisions and their reaction to adversary when their decisions won’t matter? When the roads they travel all lead to Rome? This is very much also something that is part of the game’s setup. How directed the game will be. A wide open sandbox will strain much more against being directed than a more tightly focused narrative. Heck, I don’t actually mind being directed in a game with a focused narrative or having the GM drawing the game back to it’s story.

It’s a complex topic where advice will differ depending on the specifics of each game.

“New to me” it may technically be but I’m going to start up something with Ironsworn: Starforged: Sundered Isles (yes I’m calling it that, fight me). Have used both Ironsworn and Starforged before but not Sundered Isles.

What actually would be new to me is Fey Borg as I’ve yet to run anything Borg. Barely anything OSR at all.

Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn series. Delve I regularly use for setting up point crawls. Ironsworn/Starforged/Sundered Isles have great collections of random tables, I use the book thematically most fitting for the situation at hand. The core tables of Action, Theme, Descriptor and Focus all get heavy use.

Kevin Crawford’s [SOMETHING] Without Number series have awesome tables as well. These however get more use when I need more detail. Prep stuff. Again most thematic book is picked first but I do have used Cites (cyberpunk) for fantasy cities.

When I want to create background for “medieval fantasy” characters I pick up Burning Wheel and burn something up. Through that I get a good selection of relevant skills to sue (for flavor)

Anything related to cosmos and mythology I say HELLO! to my growing collection of Glorantha material. From cult books to magic tomes and Atlases.

26+6=1

Damn I’m feeling you. I’m in the fall process (solidly down 15kg/33lb, approaching 20kg/44lb) with about 10-15kg to go. When my belly stops flapping I’m good I think. But I fear the rebound… Currently lots of my evening snacking have disappeared because of evening gym classes, so late home and even later dinner. So I don’t have time anymore to get snacky. Or if I do it’s almost bedtime anyway so I’ll just go to bed instead.

But once I’ve hit my goal and don’t need to hit gym that hard anymore… That frightens me. A little bit at least. Made some good connections there and got a routine going so i can probably keep it up.

Anything compared to Duskvol is sunny. That city and its atmosphere is so oppresivley dark and dreary. The sun literally doesn’t shine and no stars illuminate the night sky.

I don’t find Cthulhu horror that dark. Damp and misty sure. With the cosmic/existential horror being rooted in ones insignificance and the ungraspness of the infinite existence there is little explicit need for darkness. It can be dark yes, just doesn’t need to be.

On DrivethroughRPG.com you can browse by rule system
https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/browse?ruleSystem=100226

Itch.io has a Forged in the Dark tag
https://itch.io/physical-games/tag-forged-in-the-dark

And I found a list of fan creations on the blades webpage. Not sure how maintained that is but it is there.
https://bladesinthedark.com/fan-creations

The setting of blades is while well crafted utterly dark and dreary. Personally I cannot stand it. So anything that is forged in the dark (what the generic mechanics are called) but with a bit more sun is in my opinion pretty much an upgrade. So if you are interested in the forged family of systems and you find CO’s setting/premise go for it.

Can also recommend you to have a look at the larger FitD ecosystem as there are plenty of goodies.

Pretty much yes. From the Blades’ SRD

Tier

Each notable faction is ranked by Tier—a measure of wealth, influence, and scale. At the highest level are the Tier V and VI factions, the true powers of the city. Your crew begins at Tier 0.

You’ll use your Tier rating to roll dice when you acquire an asset, as well as for any fortune roll for which your crew’s overall power level and influence is the primary trait. Most importantly, your Tier determines the quality level of your items as well as the quality and scale of the gangs your crew employs—and thereby what size of enemy you can expect to handle.

What the SRD doesn’t mention in that part is that when there is a tier difference between your crew (your tools etc) and your opposition you get more/less effect. Generally how I run it if there is a +/- 1 tier difference I change the effect. Larger difference I either set up a clock or let the player’s know they don’t have what it takes (impossible task within certain parameters), that is if the opposition is higher tier. Flipped if the Crew overpower the opposition by that much there is no need to roll, they just do it.

https://app.diagrams.net/ I use this for all my mapping needs. From dungeons to quests and relations.

For this I used

• Line width 5 for direct relations
• Line width 3 for direct relation to their relation
• Dashed line width 2 between factions twice separated from the crew and put these lines behind everything else

And arranged factions is a somewhat pleasing manner.

The roman numerals is the tier of that faction, Bluecoats being tier 3 and Fog Hounds tier 1 for example. And the double line to Circle is that the crew have +2 relations to them, only +1 to the rest. Missed to explain this.

I run only online so that flavors my methods

1. I’ve run all my games the last five or so years on the same discord server. When games have ended some have left it while others have stayed. So I have a base pool of players already vetted once and are (was) available when I run my games.

2. Generic group finding communities. The LFG here for example, but also various discords.

3. System specific Discord/forums. Here there are folks already invested in the strange system I want to run, only need to find those available.

4. VTT specific channels