REVIEW: Knave (Second Edition)

By the mid-1990s, I'd had regular access to the Internet for a number of years and it was great. Forums and websites dedicated to RPGs of every kind were available at the click of a mouse button, offering all manner of interesting and useful content. While most of this content was dedicated to existing roleplaying games, some of it offered up new roleplaying games – the original creations of enthusiastic designers who recognized that they could use the Internet to get their own games to a vastly larger audience than would have ever been possible in the pre-digital age.

While Marcus Rowland's scientific romance RPG, Forgotten Futures is, for me, one of the best examples of these 1990s Internet-distributed games, I think it's fair to say that Steffan O'Sullivan's FUDGE is the most well-known and influential. I first became aware of FUDGE through a dear friend of mine, who felt that its loose, freeform mechanics provided would-be game designers the tools they needed to achieve their goals. At the time, he and I were hoping to put together our own science fiction RPG and so we took a lot of interest in FUDGE, whose "legal notice" was an early example of an open gaming license of the sort that would later propel the d20 System to prominence.

I found myself thinking about FUDGE recently as I read through the second edition of Ben Milton's Knave. Billed as "an exploration-driven fantasy RPG and worldbuilding toolkit, inspired by the best elements of the Old-School D&D movement.," Knave seemed, to my aged eyes, to have a lot in common with FUDGE. Whether one views that comparison as a good thing or a bad thing will, I think, determine your opinion of Knave. Before delving more deeply into this, though, I should explain that, prior to reading this new edition of the game, I wasn't all that familiar with Knave. Aside from Mörk Borg and Electric Bastionland, my knowledge of "ultra-light" RPGs was fairly limited and that no doubt colors what I have to say in this review.

The second edition of Knave is an 80-page digest-sized hardcover book available in both standard and premium formats, the main difference between the two (aside from price) being the cover design. Speaking of presentation, I should note that all of the book's artwork comes courtesy of Peter Mullen, whose artwork is well known (and loved) in the old school community. Their presence is quite welcome, since Knave's layout is otherwise simple and unpretentious, which, while a boon to clarity, tends toward the monotonous, especially in the many sections devoted to random tables. The book also includes a couple of two-page maps by Kyle Latino, which don't connect directly to anything in the text, so they serve more or less as artwork, too. 

As a set of rules, Knave is short and quite simple – so short that summaries of nearly everything needed to play fit on the four "pages" inside the front and back covers. I've seen plenty of other RPGs attempt to do this, but Knave is the first I can recall that succeeds. Indeed, I'm pretty sure it'd be possible to run the game using just these four pages and nothing else. That's no small feat, though, as I've already stated, it's only possible because the rules are short and simple. Most actions in Knave – called checks – are handled by a d20 roll modified by a character's appropriate ability score and any relevant modifiers and then compared against a target number (usually 16). Understand this basic mechanic and you understand Knave, with nearly everything else being an embellishment.

In his designer's commentary at the back of the book, Milton explains that he created Knave as "a hack of Basic D&D that [he] created for an after-school gaming club for 5th graders" and his "goal was to streamline and rationalize the rules so that players could learn the rules and create characters in just a few minutes and jump right into playing." Consequently, Knave's rules, while similar to those of D&D, differ from them in a number of respects. For example, there are still the usual six ability score, but they range in score 0–10 rather than 3–18. Further, the use of some of the abilities differs from their usual D&D association, such as Wisdom being used to modify ranged attacks and Constitution playing a role in encumbrance.

Combined with the lack of character classes, Knave thus occupies an odd middle ground for longtime D&D players between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Fortunately, the rules are so uncomplicated that I don't imagine any of the game's deviations from "standard" old school conventions should prove an impediment to a veteran's ability to pick them up. Meanwhile, a complete neophyte, who knows little or nothing about D&D, would probably find them fairly intuitive, which seems to have been the goal. In the aforementioned designer's commentary – one of my favorite sections of the book – Milton regularly uses words like "straightforward," "quick," and "easy" to explain the thought process behind Knave's rules. 

This philosophy suffuses the game, where everything associated with dungeon delving and wilderness travel – the core activities of old school Dungeons & Dragons – is pared down to quick, reasonably easy to use and understand procedures, with lots of room for individual expansion and experimentation. Combat, for instance, includes the possibility of initiating "maneuvers," like disarming or stunning, that is self-admittedly inspired by the "mighty deeds of arms" from Dungeon Crawl Classics, but without the same mechanical complexity. Magic, whether in the form of spells or relics, is similarly open-ended, with plenty of scope for creativity in their execution. This approach holds for most of the activities associated with classic play, like leveling up, encounters, and even equipment.

This open-ended toolkit approach might be off-putting to some, especially those looking for a more "full bodied" fantasy roleplaying game – but that's not what Knave is or was intended to be. Certainly, you could play Knave "straight" and have a satisfying experience with it. However, it's pretty clear from the way the game is written and presented that Milton expects that the rules of Knave will mutate and change with regular play, as each group adds to and subtracts from what he has put on offer in the rulebook. "Altering rules and writing your own is a time-honored part of the hobby," as he explains in Knave's introduction.

An important key to understanding Knave, I think, is that, in addition to its simple, concise mechanics, the rulebook also contains numerous random tables throughout its pages, all of them with 100 results. These tables cover careers to wizard names to disasters and more. Like everything else in Knave, they're laconic and intended to serve as jumping off points for one's imagination rather than the final word. More than that, they're clearly intended to be used in play, when the player or referee needs to come up something quickly. As a big fan of random tables and the effect they can have on play, I applaud the inclusion of these tables, as I know firsthand just how useful they can be. 

In the end, Knave is a pleasant surprise. Reading it made me think more seriously about the relationship between the complexities of rules and play, as well as my own preferences with regard to each of them. While I'm not completely sold on some of Knave's mechanical deviations from classic play, like the lack of classes, I nevertheless appreciate the way Milton's own choices made me ponder what I like and why, which I think will strengthen my own design work in the future. I also appreciate that, while Knave made think about such matters, its primary purpose is not philosophy but rather presenting "a framework that makes playing old-school RPGs straightforward, intuitive, easy to prep, and easy to run" – a laudable goal at which I believe it succeeded.