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ASOIAF is exactly the type of thing I'd use Ironsworn for, especially if you have a small group (2-3 or players), and really want to lean in on the intrigue / relationship side of things. Using the base Ironsworn rules with the campaign guide you just picked up sounds pretty sweet, actually.

Radiance RPG is a steampunk love child of D&D 4e and 3e. Core rules PDF can be had for the price of free. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/105102/Radiance-Players-Guide-A-Complete-Roleplaying-Game-in-the-Age-of-Electrotech

From our FFG Star Wars - Edge of the Empire campaign in 2022 --- PCs get hired to go into a communications center in a backwater, outer rim planet to basically shut off / jam a spectrum of frequencies that allow their patron to complete some other objective that the PCs aren't directly...

There are all kinds of things we can rationally/intelligently determine or surmise in context that we are not even remotely prepared, educated, or trained to address. Nearly anyone with basic knowledge of electrical wiring can walk through a house and figure out how wire in an additional outlet...

One alternative I tried once with decent success was to create color printouts of monster pictures in 1-inch circles on a page, then use a 1-inch circle craft punch to carefully punch them out. Once punched out, get a bottle of clear craft glue finish and then glue the circular prints face up...

First off, the sentence you've expressed here is an oxymoron, a paradoxical state. The only reason to create and maintain a "continuous," "growing and evolving," "fully realized living world" is to involve PCs in the goings on within it. But 95% of the time those things are only made concerns...

Just picked up a copy of Tales of Xadia from an FLGS. Had been hoping to find a hard copy of Cortex Prime out in the wild, but those are exceedingly rare these days. Tales of Xadia should be pretty close to the next best thing, and my kids love the cartoon series. I figure I can pick up...

Best thrift store find was my wife finding a near-perfect condition WEG d6 Star Wars 2e Revised, but that was about the only time I can recall finding anything even remotely interesting over the years. Second hand book stores have never been all that great for me, except for one. The Black and...

The answer is both "quite enough" and "not nearly enough" at the same time.

The One Ring, as already mentioned. The art for the Interface Zero 2.0 setting book for Savage Worlds is next level. Not all of it is truly "great," but there's a consistency and level of detail throughout that holds the book together in a way that the OP describes---it's evocative and compelling.

Animal companions are the one and only non-negotiable banned items in any campaign I run. I've just been burned too many times by getting into rules-lawyer-y battles over their mechanics---what are they allowed to do, when do they act in turn, what are the limits of the master's control/hold...

So I'm of two minds on this. One -- by any measure, the "open source" movement across intellectual property contexts (software, books, games, music) is a huge boon to the public at large. The internet as it exists in its current form would bear little resemblance to what it would otherwise...

I can definitely confirm that Ironsworn and Ironsworn: Starforged have mechanics that either explicitly or implicitly ask players and GM to prioritize intent over "hidden backstory." That once agreed-upon stakes and fictional positioning align with the result of invoking the mechanics, that the...

Sure. But that's you choosing to prioritize your own desires over the players'. "I totally made up this fictional thing 6 hours / days / weeks / years ago, and somehow just because I totally made it up 6 hours / days / weeks / years ago, I cannot possibly change it. My version of this totally...

Very much this. But man oh man, was I extrapolating to keep the "living world" alive and running. I was a darn good extrapolator. I could extrapolate upon extrapolated extrapolations, then extrapolate some more on the extrapolated extrapolated extrapolations. And for a long while -- well over a...

I was never a tyrant GM even when I was running Savage Worlds for 9 years in about as "trad" a fashion as possible. But neither was I, as GM, really giving weight to character stakes and intentions during my GM play. It simply didn't occur to me that I should be, because nothing about the...

See, this is one of those things that until you give narrative mechanics an honest try, feels like it should be the absolute right move. Before I really, truly embraced what Ironsworn had to offer, I was just as terrified of "breaking the plausibility of the living world" as the most traddiest...

That's all fine and good. But the point of mechanics that point to fiction-first, non-"diegetic" conflict resolution in games like Ironsworn are to keep the character stakes relevant. So, the player is ambivalent to the fate of the princess. Okay, so, why is the player putting so much at stake...

I don't own Blades in the Dark, but I do own a hack of it called Court of Blades, so if the answer isn't one-to-one with BitD, bear with me. But when I look at the Court of Blades character sheet, I see stats, a spot for gear, the name of a general profession/playbook, a list of possible...

As far as I can tell, you've sort of broken the first paradigm of "narrative" style games, which is that you weren't bringing thematic character intentions and stakes to the table. Like, real, meaty stakes that slot into your character's real sense of self within the fictional world.