Knave
A downloadable RPG
Looking for an adventure for Knave? Try The Waking of Willowby Hall or Summer's End. The second edition of Knave is also now available.
"Knave brilliantly streamlines Old-School D&D into a lean, mean, seven-page package that eliminates all need for charts and flipping. It's intuitive, fast and accessible to novices." -Professor Dungeon Master, Dungeon Craft
"Knave is a stark seven pages of incredibly thought-out, innovative, and compact game design, punctuated by random tables and spells that show off an amazing creative flair . . . If I were asked to run a game completely by the seat of my pants, Knave would be my go-to game." - Brian C. Rideout, Welcome to the Deathtrap
KNAVE is a rules toolkit for running old school fantasy RPGs without classes. Features include:
- High compatibility with OSR games. If you have a library of OSR bestiaries, adventure and spell books, little or no conversion is needed to use them with Knave.
- Fast to teach, easy to run. If you are introducing a group of new players to OSR games, Knave allows them to make characters and understand all the rules in minutes.
- No classes. Every PC is a Knave, a tomb-raiding, adventure-seeking ne’er-do-well who wields a spell book just as easily as a blade. This is an ideal system for players who like to switch up their character’s focus from time to time and don’t like being pigeonholed. A PC’s role in the party is determined largely by the equipment they carry.
- Abilities are king. All d20 rolls use the six standard abilities. The way that ability scores and bonuses work has also been cleaned up, rationalized, and made consistent with how other systems like armor work.
- Optional player-facing rolls. Knave easily accommodates referees who want the players to do all the rolling. Switching between the traditional shared-rolling model and players-only rolling can be done effortlessly on the fly.
- Copper standard. Knave assumes that the common unit of currency is the copper penny. All item prices use this denomination and approximate actual medieval prices.
- A list of 100 level-less spells.
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License: You are free to share and adapt this material for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you give attribution.
- Designer commentary. The rules include designer comments explaining why rules were written the way they were, to aid in hacking the game.
- Source text. When you purchase this game, you also get a copy of the Word document I used to make it. Edit it to create your own custom Knave ruleset! (You will need the free fonts Crimson Text and Sebaldus-Gotisch to display it properly).
Purchase
In order to download this RPG you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $2.99 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Comments
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Any thoughts/suggestions on running Knave 2e co-op/GMless? Probably looking at 2-3 players initially.
Use Mythic GM Emulator and share the responsibility of answering questions!
Thank you kindly, for your amazing work and for published it under the Creative Commons license. I’ve translated the Knave 1.0 into Simplified Chinese(简体中文) translation and posted it for free (CC-BY 4.0) on itch.io, hope you like it.
Hello,
I've created a Supplement for Knave. It's a group of NPC to be introduced in a Dark Fantasy World: The Parakeets
Hope you like it, feel free to give me any feedback :)
I missed the kickstarter for Knave 2e. Is there any way to late pledge? Would love to get a physical copy of Knave 2e and the Maze Rats book, among the rest of the available content! Looks amazing!
I'm working on a retro dungeon crawler video game. I just wanted to thank you for the rules being CC licensed. I'm using Knave as the core mechanic with some house rules thrown in. You can see the test of the character creation here.
Thanks again.this looks cool, how's it going? is it turn-based? realtime combat turned me off the Aeons of Sand and i still think about that game
Thanks. Yes, I'm still working on it. It has changed a lot since I published that video. The combat is turned based and now it has a more of a Wizardry 6 look and feel rather than the original Bard's Tale/Dragon Wars. But it is still moving along. I'd like to get it completed by the end of this year.
wow it's a whole new look!
what flavours / kinds of pixel are feel best for you? Do you have any public devlogs / community outlets?
I googled Wizardry 6, it has a pretty distinctive look to it, though i'm not very fluent in pixel art of 20th century and can't tell if it ever looked like the other games.
Visually, i love Curious Expedition, Into the Breach, Caves of Qud and DCSS and adore Aeons of Sand. From these 5 only Aeons of Sand went for the look of older gen games instead of using pixel art as just a tool, and it was the only game that wasn't a hit. Though DCSS is FOSS has a long history and was retiled afaik.
Telwynium by Powerhoof games here on itch also went for a retro look, though, unlike CoQ, DCSS, AoS or Duskbringer it's not a dungeon crawler.
I don't have a dev log yet. I probably should put one up.
I'm sure the purest pixel artists out there will quickly say that my stuff is not technically pixel art. I tend to mix in low resolution digital painting for the backgrounds and use pixel art for characters and some interface elements. I find it gives it a nice combination.
I grew up on games like SSI's AD&D series, Bard's tale, Ultima Underground, Eye of the Beholder, Lands of Lore and some early versions of Wizardry 6/7 and Might and Magic 3-5. Some of the early ones only had art in 16 colours similar to Telwynium. Monitors couldn't display more than that in those days. But I liked the 256 colour era that came shortly after that. That's when EOB and M&M appeared. The artwork for those was a hybrid of the cartoonish 16 colours and a more realistic style and it gave them a certain charm. That's what I'm aiming for. :)
I searched for the games you mention and i love how visually striking they are! And also readable and somehow balanced.
So you have been around for the 80s dungeon crawlers and rpgs and now are making one of them or a modern take? I bet there are people who would like to hear your story, and maybe even take part in it.
And please don't be intimidated by the devlogs, these doesn't necessarily have to be a works of literary art and R&D like the ones Lucas Pope does for the Mars after Midnight.
https://dukope.itch.io/mars-after-midnight/devlog
Devlogs might as well be just a facetimes exploring a specific topic devs themselves really want to revise. Here's one where Dave from Powerhoof talks about their schedule for a half an hour. He apologises for the how boring this subject seems about 3 times during the video and once in the description, but then he talked about all the subjects I personally struggled with, so this video was a godsend to me.
Talking about people coming together to share a story, are you, by any chance, into the open source scene? I am fascinated by the decades of the communities around playing and developing games like Nethack, DCSS and CD:DA that are cultivated by the very nature of these games. Lifespans of these games are unprecedented.
It's interesting to see some people embracing the the idea of letting go of the complete creative control and exploring the pitfalls and joys of collaboration and possibility of their projects evolving into something they couldn't imagine and accomplish alone.
I wish you the best luck with the game ) Seeing other people reacting even to the mockup screenshots page i believe more people will dig it over time
Any updates on Knave v2?
It's been 3 months since you asked, and there's currently an active Kickstarter for 2e.
Thank you so much for putting this out under a creative commons license! That is so generous. I used some of your spells (with attribution!) for a Bard class I wrote for The Black Hack 2e. I love that so many of the spells are built as interesting tools rather than magical weapons.
Hello there!
My name is Ferenc and I am having a small publisher company in Hungary, and we are publishing indie RPGs in Hungarian. Is there any chance to translate and publish Knave?:)
Here is my email: rollinspublisher@gmail.com
All the best,
Ferenc
Knave is published under a Creative Commons license, so you are free to do anything you want with the text, including translating and selling it, as long as you give attribution to me.
Thank you very much for your reply! :)
Hello!
My name is Rogério and I have a small publisher in Brazil, and we publish independent RPGs in Portuguese. And I would like to know if we could make a translation for Brazil. :)
Here is my email: editorialhuginnemuninn@gmail.com
Best regards,
Rogério Lobo
Any suggestions for a good OSR Bestiary? Preferably one that I can buy a physical copy of. Thanks!
CC1: Creature Compendium from Lulu. You can also get the PDF free from DTRPG.
https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/richard-leblanc/old-school-adventurestm-accessor...
Basic Fantasy also has a large bestiary spread across the core book and both field guides. Due to the quantity across these 3 books, there is also an index to download from their page. You can order physical copies from either Amazon or Lulu, with the exception of Field Guide Volume 2. Do note that the Field Guide Volume 1 print release is much more behind the pdf.
https://basicfantasy.org/downloads.html
For all of these, you could also print the pages out and put them in a binder.
Thanks for the info!
In Character Creation, under 2, you say "armor comes with an armor defense value." I can't find a reference anywhere else to "armor defense value." There are four results listed under Starting Gear - Armor, but no numbers associated with them. Where do I find the value?
I found it. On the Item Costs page under Armor. Search doesn't work when using the wrong term. :|
Thank you for including the .docx file. I've run a few Knave sessions now and am excited to tinker with adding house rules, my own commentary, etc., directly into the file.