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”.

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