It's finally time to look into this game properly. I've had the book sitting on my desk for a while now and have meant to play it since I got it.
Knave is an OSR-style game and with the help of a newly updated set of Solo Gaming Sheets, I'm planning to do a bit of a test of both Knave's second edition, and these new and slightly improved Solo Gaming Sheets.
Now, when you're playing Knave usually, there are some 'Player Duties' in the rulebook that give you an idea of how things should go. This is a group-oriented page, but it works just as well as a reminder for soloists.
The three Player Duties we care about today are:
Scheme. Think laterally, not linearly. Avoid risky plans that require you to roll
dice and instead create plans so bulletproof that success is certain. Use psychology, magic, allies, equipment, and the environment to overcome obstacles rather than relying on ability checks.
Fight Dirty. Try to win fights before they begin by rigging the situation in your favor and avoid conflicts where you don’t have the upper hand. Combat in Knave is neither balanced nor fair, so assume that your character’s life is at stake any time swords are drawn.
Prepare To Die. Embrace your PC’s death when it happens and roll up a new character to take their place. Losing a PC can be painful, but it also makes for great stories, lets you try out new character concepts, and can thrust the party into unexpected situations. Remember that ultimately an RPG campaign tells the story of a whole world, not a single character or even a single party. As the campaign continues, it’s enriched by the stories of the characters that came before.
Since we are going to be attempting to run a single Knave at first, this is particularly important. Should combat break out, I will need to do everything I can to stack the deck in my favour and to fight as dirty as possible... because otherwise, I'm probably going to die. Knave is not D&D, and we do not play mighty heroes by default.
So, for Knave, while we have 6 stats, we only initially put a single point into each stat we roll To illustrate that, let's roll some dice. I'm doing this setup online for now, so Google's built-in dice roller will be our tool of choice tonight.
2, 5, and 6.
If we take that across our stat spread we get one point in Dex, one in Wisdom, and one in Charisma.
Dexterity is the favoured stat for Thieves. Wisdom is a Ranger ability, and Charisma is a Cleric ability. We've got an even spread across those so currently, there's no "clear path" for our Knave. That's okay.
The next thing we want to mark down is how many Item slots we have. That is determined by 10 + our CON value, which is 0. So we get the default 10 item slots. For HP we start with a simple d6 max HP.
In this case, that's 4 HP for us. Not bad, not great. Which is on-point for a Knave.
Our next item is to roll up some prior careers:
record careers: Roll or pick two careers from the list on the next page. You gain those careers’ items, as well as any of the following that you can carry: 3d6×10 coins, 2 rations, a 50’ rope, 2 torches, any armor pieces or weapons (p. 38) and a quiver of 20 arrows. If the PC has any points in INT, they may receive a random spell book (pp. 22-25) for each point.
There are 100 Careers on the table, so I will simply roll for two and record what they were. These backgrounds do include Items that we can add to our inventory, but I don't think we have to take them
First roll:
91 spy: caltrops, poison, forged papers
Second roll:
11 bandit: mask, manacles, caltrops
Having simply tossed out some dice, that's hilariously on-point for our character so far.
At this point, I also realized I've been using a Knave 1e version of the character sheet. I popped to Itch and found a neat Knave 2e Character Sheet by JodTheCod.
I added Rations and Torches, and then it was time to snag a weapon or two with my last slots. I knew I wanted a Sling so I could toss rocks, but I wasn't sure what else to pick. I ended up rolling for it and got 47: Kukri, which is a neat little blade that looks like this:
Which puts our total character as Paschal Brightfry - the Wretch.
And with this, we've got a fully-created Knave, ready to toss into the world.
Next time, I'll actually start rolling some hexes! Until then, as always, Happy Gaming!
