Knave (11/15/2025)

GM: Sean Nittner
Players: Alex Zisch, Nathaniel Bowers, Zachary Paul, Joe Bruna, Helen Brubeck
System: Knave 2E

Knave is renowned for it’s many tables (which helped figure out the intro for the adventure), simple system (stats, careers, gear, go!) and clever damage mechanic (after the tissue paper of your HP are gone, damage is done to gear slots). As I’ve been on an OSR kick for a while, I wanted to try out Knave and the best way to do that is offer to run it at a con, because then I have to learn it!

Here was my pitch for the game originally.

Welcome to Amaranth Isle.

You are fugitives who have escaped the goblin prison camp Grix. Your only potential refuge from your captors and chance to find weapons to use against them are to be found in the depths of the lightless dungeons.

Knave 2e is an exploration-driven fantasy RPG and worldbuilding toolkit, inspired by the best elements of the Old-School DnD movement.

After rolling up some setting elements from the tables in Knave, I expanded that to give a more urgent and specific situation:

After escaping the Grix prison camp (with guidance from an artifact called the Voice of Ramlatt), you haven’t had a moment of rest. Search patrols have been relentlessly chasing you down, night and day.

As you flee the jungle of Amaranth abruptly thins out to a mud flat where ages ago some society gave up on building train tracks. There is a two story signal tower, an abandoned surveyors camp, and a set of tracks that unceremoniously ends in front of a sinkhole. Giant bars of rusting metal slowly settle into the mud beside it.

A war horn sounds from the jungle and the ground shifts. One of you slips into the hole. It is pitch black, and you hear something hungry growling at you. Which one of you is it?

Everyone else, you can see that your captors have not broken the jungle line yet, but there is rustling in the bushes so they can’t be far.

Setup

Much like Out of the Odd, I started with a checklist of getting started items:

• Welcome. Thanking everyone for coming to play with me and trying out Knave. Letting them know this was my first time running and that I was excited to learn more about it.
• Last time you got stuck. Asking everyone about a time they got stuck. I offered up when we checked into our room the day before and the battery on the lock was dead, so we were stuck in the hall for 20 minutes waiting for an engineer to come by. Every time we heard the rattle of keys or people talking down the hall, we perked up hoping it was someone who could let us in. We also got stories of being stuck in an airport, stuck in New Jersey (and getting out by splitting the cost of a rental with someone else who got the last rental car), stuck in traffic, stuck in the rain, and stuck on BART. These all felt just right for characters who were about to be stuck in the mud.
• Safety Talk. This probably isn’t 100% what I said, but I want to record it here to see how I might change it over time: “Thanks for playing Knave with me. For the next few hours can we all agree to treat each other with love and respect? [Wait for agreement]. Great, our enjoyment of the game is more important than anything that happens in the game. so if anything comes up in the game that makes it unfun or uncomfortable for you, let us know and we’ll change it. There are plenty of safety tools you can use, (X-card, Lines and Veils, etc) but they’re all optional. If I introduce phase spiders and you don’t like spiders, they can be phase slugs. Similarly, if this game leans on real world issues you don’t want to play with, let us know and we’ll back off from those.” Again, not verbatim, but I think that’s about what I said.
• Expectations. I told everyone I excited us to spend around 3.5 hours trying to escape their hobgoblin captors but wasn’t sure if we’d make it. I’d be excited to see what they get up to regardless.
• Player Roles. I asked everyone to take on a player role. Since we only had three players, I excepted Caller, as it’s usually not needed.
  • Cartographer: draws dungeon maps to any level of detail you desire. (Alex)
  • Notetaker: Records events of the adventure at any level of detail you desire. (Zach)
  • Photographer: Takes pictures of the game and sends them to me afterwards. (Joe)
  • Caller: Conveys the actions to the GM when the group is acting in unison (Nate)
• Pitch. Then I gave the pitch for the session (which I generated from rolling on tables in Knave!). Helen said she stole the scull so I handed it to her. Joe elected to fall in the hole.
• Character Creation. We rolled up characters. Most folks randomly distributed their 3 attributes points (by rolling 3d6 to see where they went) and then we rolled randomly for HP, careers, and in some cases grimoires. Delightfully, character creation took about 10 minutes!

Our cast of fugitives

• Dale the Miner (Zach)
• Sorcha the Mason (Helen)
• Godwin the Alchemist (Nate)
• Alaric the Poet (Joe)
• Jaundiced Jilrik the Jeweler (Alex)

The play is the thing

Thanks to Zach for the notes. I’ve added my own additions in [brackets].

Horth vs. Five Nations

Isle of Amaranth if Poland

Grix Prison Camp POWs

Voice of Ramlatt (Skull)

Escape -> Hunted

Surveyors Camp: Hold in the ground / tracks end, signal tower, end of tracks.

<Character Generattion>

Place of refuge? [The hole that Alaric fell into. It indeed was]. Run into the dungeon.

Bittermort Mannor. No BitterMOLD manner.

[Start of play]

Sorcha lowers a rope [an old line they used for hanging pots, still knotted with pots hanging from it, they clattered down on Alaric].

Dale used it to climb down [Before Sorcha had tied it off, but she quickly grabbed a railroad spike and hammered it into the track to brace him!]

Godwin jumps [down]

Jilrik has guilt for harm he caused [selling fakes to the Horth and getting captured, leaving his family without him and earning the ire of the Horth for all of them. He channeled that remorse to fire his sling, but still missed the one scout that broke through the bushes and alerted the others]

[Inside, once a torch was list]

Lord Reginald Bittermold statue – seeping stone

Sir Mygal is the spirit in the skull [He was colleague of Bittermold]

Sorcha was imprisoned for making a garden wall from stone [which the Horth took to mean she was building defenses for the Five Nations. Wrong place, wrong time.]

Dale – those weren’t even his pants!

Mumbling busts [in the wall]

I’m Dale: Sorla the Halfling [How Dale introduced himself to two halflings who were trying to wrestle a mutant catfish (Blebelblorg) so they could have him for dinner. Dale through his voice distract them, which allowed the catfish to escape but angered Sorla and her companion]

The Howlers call us an an enemy [The halflings were all bunch of toughs who called themselves the Howlers. Sorla would have just attacked Dale for his trickery, but she believed him when he said he had two wizards with him so she retreated down the hall to worn the other Howlers]

[Behind one of the busts they found a secret doo that led into an organ room] and inside were two rather clammy looking humans:] Emila and Treslan Bittermold [who worshipped] “The Dissolved” and the leader Mugdulblub.

[Alaric played a jaunty tune on the organ, which caused poisonous gas to start seeping down. They he played a funeral dirge, which unlocked the secret door and gave him the blessing of House Bittermold. They heard Howlers investigating on the other side of the door. Meanwhile Jilrik fed acid to her little brother and he turned to a puddle of ooze]

Emila distracts the Howlers by running into the dungeon.

[Dale meets] Graff, the smart Howler who invites them into their camp [and they invent a chant/password] “Howlers! Rule!” [Sorla had not back it back to tell the others that the characters were enemies yet]

Gordock in the Howlers Boss

Runes have Ruins. [Sorcha reads them and gains +1 Charisma and summons Hexlings to take back the magic she stole]

Gordock shares [psychedelic] moss with Dale [and tries to convince him not to speak about Mugdulblub to hid it from the other Howlers, but Dale takes that to mean he doesn’t like the Great Dissolver… but who can be in the presence of such an elder being and not worship it. This later broke Dale’s heart].

Sorcha summons a 30′ Lord Bittermold statue that goes through the ceiling [causing it to start crashing down on the fugitives, the Howlers, and the Hexlings. Chaos!!!]

Gordock lied! He’s a cultist! I’m not mad, just disappointed. Break his jaw to stop his chanting [This was all done by Dale]

Fight under a falling ceiling! [Sorcha got everyone out, plus Graff and another Howler]

Escape!

Sorcha create an done of earth blocks to trap the hobgoblins inside.

Escape! [Again]

Dance party among the Howlers and Hexlings [From Godwin’s spell]

Thoughts on the game

Wow, that was a fun ride. I loved that Sorcha pulled the rip cord at the end by summoning her 30′ stone idol to burst through the ceiling and escape. She was the brains of the operation. However Dale was certainly the heart. His quotes of “My dad always said” were delightful and generally endearing (except to Solra, who blamed him for stealing her dinner). I loved that Godwin fed acid to the cultist of Dissolution, it was just what he’d want…and then it was fun to realized that Emilia didn’t quite want to end her solid state just yet. Alaric the Poet playing the jaunty tune and funeral dirge that swept through the halls was awesome. Sorcha pretty much saved everyone with her earthen works, first collapsing the entrance, then creating a new exit, then trapping the hobgoblins in dirt. Her mason skills and two summoning spells were clutch. I loved how Jilrick looked at everything through his jewelers loop, identified the various objects (an obsidian stone stuck in the mouth of a stone bust) and was able to use his tweezers to extract Treslan’s signet ring after he turned to goop! And Alaric befriended the good mutt who was trapped in the pit at the start by offering his only rations. I’m a sucker for a good doggo companion. Finally a huge hats off for Alex for his cartography. I LOVED those maps! Just a wonderful group all around.

Mechanics-wise, here’s some things I liked

• The random tables helped a lot during prep (thought I didn’t use them during game as the outcomes require enough thought to interpret that I didn’t want to slow things down by first rolling and then thinking about how it made sense).
• Inventory slots as health is brilliant. Alaric to 10 points of damage from falling rocks and timber. After chewing through his three HP, that meant filling 7 slots with the inventory “concussion”. Really smart design.
• The suggested difficulty to complete most tasks (16) was pretty brutal considering most people were rolling +0 to +2 on their rolls. Adding +5 from your career made a huge difference.
• The additions I added to the character sheets (motivation, vulnerability, and crime) worked about the same way as they did in Shadowdark, which is to say people grabbed for them in moments of need. I did like folks asking each other about their time in the prison camp however, that created some character bonding moments. I just need to rephrase the benefits (pronouns can be hard when you’re not sure who “you” and “they” are in writing).
• I didn’t call for too many checks (as Knave suggests you just follow the fiction) but I noticed that because of that there were several times the characters got hurt (touching acid, falling rocks, etc) where their armor didn’t do them any good.