Game Review: Knave 2E
A small hardcover tome with OSR game worlds erupting forth.
Welcome to the Glyph and Grok - A “weekly” blog-letter exploring topics in the tabletop gaming arena. We explore design, execution, and culture relating to anything played on a tabletop.
Introduction
I recently received my Kickstarter backer physical materials from the Knave 2E Kickstarter and I've been enjoying them to a degree I did not predict. These two small books by Ben Milton, of Question Best fame, pack a ton of great game inside. If you havn't, check out my last entry which is a review of the other game: Maze Rats.
When I backed Knave, I honestly wasn't expecting to want to run it. I figured I like the stuff Ben puts out, but it likely won't be some revolution of my gameplay. I now think between Maze Rats and Knave I've got an awesome option for introducing these kinds of games to my younger kiddos and a fantastic ruleset option for running one-shots and short run campaign stories.
Knave the Book
A small and elegant hardcover package at just under 80 pages. A nice artwork by Mr. Mullen depicting a group of adventurers fleeing from some evil entity being summon on the back cover of the book. A short 3 sentence blurb on the back describes what you can expect within: a toolkit for creating an entire world, a classless ruleset geared to get your players exploring your fantasy world, and a heck of an old-school game with modern sentiments.
As an engineer by day, I derive euphoric pleasure from design that maximizes utility and simply works. The inside front cover of this book has a quick reference that quickly defines what is important in a game of Knave and provides it to the GM in the same two-page spread with care taken to make it easy on the the eye and mind to parse the information at a glance. Larger headers, bolded important words, bullets, brackets, everything you could want in an information delivery system. Things mostly for the GM and not every player are in the rear two-page spread in the same fashion.
In four pages, Author Ben Milton has already given you everything an experienced player would need, so what's in the rest of the 70 some-odd pages of this book?
Knave The Game
Let’s run through the things I find definitive, fun, and exciting about this game:
The first thing coming to mind is the OSR styling of this game. Early in the book is a GM/Player duties section that clearly lays out the vision of the game and tells the players their default target difficulty target is a 16 (rather high for any D20 game) but taking action to give yourself some advantage in the situation will result in a -5, moving the target to 11, which is reasonable - even at level 1. Then the better your character gets, the more likely they are to come ahead in situations that are dicey.
The intent is clear, rolling dice means you’re in a bad situation. Get some advantage, work together with the other players, if you want to have a chance at surviving. You’re not a super-hero, you’re a Knave. This GM/Player section could be presented for any TTRPG in any game and it would have weight and merit - It also is a league above the info you’ll find in both the 5E Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide combined.
For the GM, Don’t rely on dice rolls to tell the story for you all the time. Setup a situation, telegraph danger, let the players do what they will, and call for rolls when there’s an chance of failure with consequences. I probably game mastered for a 7 years before I figured this out. Once you do this, there’s no going back. This is not the first book to state this, but it was not obvious for me starting to GM. This has been my modus operandi even in modern 5E type games and it is 1000% better than what I was doing before.
Something I love about this gameplay is the players are incentivized to treat the situation their character is in as real and do be cunning in angling for advantages and using everything at their disposal. This mini-game within the game just feels good and is a satisfying game loop.
Making Player Characters
Knaves are classless paper dolls waiting for their background, your actions, and the items you can outfit them to define what they can do.
The game doesn’t have you rolling for stats but rather adding 3 points across your six stats (default is zero): Strength | Dexterity | Constitution | Intelligence | Wisdom | Charisma. You add whatever value you have to the rolls so you’re basically giving yourself an add to modifier without worrying about a secondary value that doesn’t get used. Standard stuff, but there’s a couple bends and no such thing as a dump stat.
Dexterity is not the ranged attack attribute, Wisdom is!
Charisma is your “Cleric” stat that effects your ability to be a spell effect wielding holy roller, and it’s about your force of personality and now that it’s been said I cannot get over how much sense it makes.
Your stats directly effect things that make sense for that archetype of character. Strength for dishing out punishment, intelligence increases number of spell effectiveness and quantity (also is your lock-picking stat), Dexterity is not the god-stat and just works for things that make sense like sneaking, dodging, picking pockets, sleight of hand… Every stat is steeped in a direction that feels right.
Staying Alive…Or Not
Player Characters have both hit points AND item slots in this game. Once a character runs out of HP, they start losing slots and what was held in those slots. Making it a constant game of players pushing their luck to see how far they can take it and how much they can get away with. And since it’s the player’s choice, if they die it seems like it won’t ever be “rocks fall, ur dead” unless they are running without looking and trigger a trap they forgot about.
Playing to the PC’s benefit is reaction rolls systems and a morale system. Each monster/NPC has a morale stat and they will have to roll to see if they break when nasty things happen to them, so the players don’t always have to fight to the death and can instead get them to not think it’s worth it. This is more OSR stuff and hardly a new concept, but included here, it adds to this grey space that the player characters live where the game supports explorative play and gives you enough rope to hang yourself, but also leaves the GM from having to be a bad guy if things go awry.
Last bit on this topic - Armor is simple and adds a point to damage reduction per piece of armor equipped. More intricate, yet also simpler.
What Else?
Contention between the power of spellcasters (magic users) and martial player characters is always something to think about in these tabletop games. Balance between the power of players at the table can become an unwanted focus if it is noticeably askew. Knave handles this in a couple ways:
Maneuvers are any non-damaging action that is like a physical special move in melee combat. Disarm, push, stun, blind, and basically anything you can come up with in the context of the situation can be a maneuver. If you score 21+ on a melee attack, you get to perform a free maneuver. Focusing on this makes is happen often enough to be worth it.
Power attacks - break your weapons but do double damage with it.
Magic is first and foremost a utility and focuses on effects rather than damage. PCs are also limited to needing to read from a spellbook to cast (requiring both hands) and each book can only be used once per day AND you can only cast a number of spells equal to your intelligence modifier. (Upping your INT of course makes all of this easier and more effective)
Anything Else?
This book is jam packed with D100 tables. Room Themes, Weather, Food, Goals, Professions, Archetypes, and on and on. Colors, tastes, smells, I struggle to think of a table that’s NOT in there that would be useful to have.
There’s no “knowledge checks” which I also really like. Plenty of games I’ve pulled some exposition out or waited to based on a PC rolling poorly on a History check. The characters know what would be reasonably known by their PC in the situation they’re in. Maybe some leaning with the background. But otherwise you find the answers in play through action, not randomly rolling to see what your character remembers.
Conclusion
I have been so thoroughly pleased reading through this book and seeing what others have to say about it. I had low expectations of adding it to my collection but never being compelled to run it. Now I am excited to make a dungeon and run it for my friends at Gencon in a couple weeks. I plan to post some write ups here on what comes out.
If anything here peaked your interest, get the game and play it!
What I Am Up To
TTRPG Reading: Tome of Adventure Design by Matt Finch
TTRPG Production: Giathos Aetherpunk Campaign Setting - Catastros Region
Other Learning: Vote in the ENNIES! The TTRPG “Oscars”
Audiobook: The Daughter’s War - By Christopher Buehlman
Useful Things For Your Games
Spotify Playlist Add - Role: Mysterious and Meloncholy
Knave 2.0 is very cool. Linking stats to basic clssses makes huge sense. Putting equipment in slots and having to drop gear when you take major wounds is also a brilliant idea. Encumbrance is finally simple and relevant! Distinguishing between hp and more serious wounds and defining healing times simply is also a place most games miss the boat. Morale for monsters, breaking weapons, easy leveling up rules. The more I read, the more I love this. I will be using it to play with my young kids. Finally a system that NAILS so many shortcomings and does so with simplicity and elegance!!!
> PCs are also limited to needing to read from a spellbook to cast (requiring both hands)
Nowhere in the book mentioned that spellbooks must be read to cast. The first edition did mention that, though.