I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

I was going to take the kids to the waterpark, but I’m feeling overwhelmed by screaming, whining and household chores so instead I’m locking myself in my bedroom, turning off the lights, popping an endone and reading Knave, 2nd Edition.

Knave 2nd Edition is the 81-page expansion of a 20-page game that introduced a lot of excellent ideas into the world of DIY elfgames, and served as a chassis on which a lot of excellent games — Cairn, A Rasp of Sand, Mausritter — are built. My preconceptions up front: I find it really hard to believe that Knave can be improved with such a huge expansion to the rules, as so much of the original’s elegance is in its simplicity. I haven’t listened or watched or read much from Ben Milton, the author, about the second edition, so I’m not sure what his goal with this is. I’m interested to see what it implies about Ben’s changing approach to game design.

Up front, this is much wordier than the first edition. It’s written in a dry conversational style, and honestly as with most people who’ve undoubtedly watched many hours of Ben’s hand-guy reviews over the years, I can hear his voice as I read it. It’s clear, simple, and tiktok punchy at times. Despite the length of the book, it feels as targeted at those with short attention spans as the original Knave was. To be clear, I mean this as praise: This is punchily and memorably written, and that behooves a ruleset that, when all pushes come to all shoves, is not only just another elfgame among thousands, but is one that has already before its release been adapted countless times.

The principles are a good example of the punchy writing. The titles themselves were clearly laboured over, to the point where the explication is unnecessary: “Reward smart plans”, “Edit the rules”, “Apply tactical infinity”, and “Prepare to die” really speak for themselves as principles to play by.

Knave is an Ability Check first system, it becomes apparent, reminding me a lot of the approach that Five Torches Deep took five years ago in that it tries to make all ability scores equally important. It eschews saving throws altogether, which makes it a system that leans subtly away from player expertise and towards fictional expertise, and leans away from risk management and towards risk taking, unlike more save forward systems such as Cairn and Into the Odd. I think I prefer save forward systems personally, but this is an approach far more familiar to the majority of players who might make their way to Knave 2nd Edition from Shadowdark or D&D 5th Edition.

A significant addition to 2nd Edition is the travelling and weather rules, which utilises a classic hazard roll and the first of the random tables that were pushed so hard in the marketing for Knave 2nd Edition. I was lukewarm on the pitch of “full of random tables”, because honestly I can ask KTrey for a d100 table any day for free. If all Knave 2nd Edition was going to be was 1st Edition plus random tables, my interest was muted, particularly as I look for specificity in random tables, as I discussed at length in this episode of Dice Exploder. However (if you couldn’t sense this coming), these first few weather tables that accompany a well-described hazard die, are quite exceptional for travel on the fly, reminding me of a generic take on Atop the Wailing Dunes. The same goes for the dungeon tables that accompany the dungeon’s hazard die. The only question I have is the purpose of the entirety of the tables, which seem to overlap between generating locations and spontaneously experiencing travel. The impression I get is that Ben intends for a quantum world, because generation is folded in with exploration. That’s not a playstyle I personally would adopt, and if it’s not the intent, I feel like a few lines of explication added would have gone a long way.

I’ll rush through a little: I like the specific reaction roll, I like the encounter activities table, but the random spell generator I could look past. I like the three unique types of magic you can choose to engage in, all of which are meaningfully different (spells, alchemy, and relic magic). I find the buildings rules anemic to what they’d be used for and superfluous in what they achieve; a page in diagetic advancement, why one would build a church of guildhall, anything would be useful here. The wee warfare rules seem a less neat version of the Into the Odd rules, and don’t echo the elegance of the the larger system. We have a two page bestiary, a few pages on recruits. Pages and pages of tables that more and more seem thrown in without explanation or organisation than those earlier disorganised wilderness and dungeon tables. The entire back end of the ruleset seems strapped on with little forethought, compared to the front end which feels elegant and well thought out. The tables are often useful (the chimeric monster generator is fun), but not included with any guidance or any real reason for them to be located where they are: Why is the city generation where it is? How would I locate it in a pinch? Why is there a two page bestiary without illustrations, when you hired Peter Mullen to do the art? Inexplicable design decisions to me.

The back of the book have two excellent maps by Kyle Latino which…why? They’re unkeyed, are they supposed to be examples? Are they for me, the referee, to fill out? They lead me to the larger question I have about Knave 2nd Edition: Who is it for? Because the experienced referee doesn’t need the beautiful maps: a lot of the anaemic back half won’t provide enough support for the complexity of downtime, domain or warfare when it occurs in a campaign. The front half, aside from the elegant additions, isn’t a considerable leap from the first edition. The elegant principles are lovely aimed at newcomers, but those same newcomers I’d expect to be overwhelmed by ten pages of random tables. The experienced referee knows these principles already, irregardless of how well they’re stated. And back to the maps: Who are they for? An experienced referee who has run countless dungeons and hexcrawls, or the newcomer who hasn’t built them and for whom it doesn’t provide any guidance to fill them — except perhaps those poorly labelled tables that accompany the hazard dice.

So, I’m left with the impression of a game that doesn’t have a design goal, to be honest. It doesn’t have an audience in mind, except perhaps Ben Milton himself. It pitches itself as a complete edition of Knave, but it leaves itself incomplete. I could have (and in fact long have) patched Knave with hazard dice for travel myself, and added better downtime and domain rules from Mazirian’s Garden and Paper & Pencils. This doesn’t add much, except half a book of undercooked rules and random tables, and another half book of elegant incorporations of longstanding innovations.

I have very mixed feelings, coming chronologically: It opens strong, with elegant improvements on Knave 1st Edition, and tables that feel largely complementary albeit haphazardly organised. It ends a mess of haphazard tables and undercooked rules that are overly simplistic rather than elegant. I opened this read with some hope that this might supplant Cairn as my current go-to-simplified Knave-like; but as it looks, I suspect I’ll be waiting for the upcoming Cairn Second Edition to see if it instead supplants the crown.

My tl;dr: I’m disappointed. I really was hopeful after the first few pages that my expectations would be upended. This 80-page version of Knave remains something that I still need to hack. I already had that in the 10-page version. I might borrow those weather tables, though, next I run a hex crawl.

Idle Cartulary