Unfinished

On economical game design

One of my favorite authors is Donald Westlake. He wrote mostly crime novels and comedic capers, and his books are always a delight. They can be enjoyed in a couple of ways. If you like crime stories, or even if you’re just not sure that you do, you can pick up a Westlake novel, read it over a weekend and come away with a good story and a good idea if this kind of thing is for you. He’s the perfect entry point into the genre.

But there’s another side to Westlake. The more of a reader you are, the more you come to appreciate him. His writing is economical, his characters sharply drawn, and his story moves. If you ever get into writing yourself, your appreciation and admiration grows. You start to see the tightness of his sentences, the way he paints characters with just a bit of dialogue, his evocative descriptions of place. He’s good at so many things that I’ve heard him called ‘a writer’s writer’s writer.’ I’m not a writer myself, save in the academic fashion, but I agree.

This brings me, in an admittedly roundabout way, to a post put up recently by Realm Builder Guy. I really enjoy Realm Builder’s YouTube channel and his Substack and I encourage you to subscribe to both. In this particular post, Realm Builder detailed his continuing fascination and frustration with Knave, and his attempts to fill in the gaps he sees in the Knave ruleset and develop a setting around it. He provides some of the rules hacks he’s developed and asks if there’s still momentum behind the game. As a thoroughly converted member of the church of Knave, I feel a duty to respond. I’ve been running the game weekly since it came out, so while I am not tapped into online discourse (whatever that is) sufficiently to say anything about vibes, I can tell you what a long term campaign looks like at my table.

And this is where Westlake comes in, because I’m going to take issue with Realm Builder’s characterization of the game being unfinished. When I first got the game and read through it, I would have agreed with him. But now with years of play under my belt, I would argue that instead the game is perfectly calibrated for two different audiences: new players and rules-as-setting junkies. Let me take each in turn.

Messing Around

One of my absolute favorite kinds of RPG play is what I call ‘Boys Messing Around.’ If you can remember endless summer afternoons building forts with old bits of junk, or exploring the woods behind your house and creating elaborate games and domains, you know exactly what I mean: ‘From that rock to the stream is Trevor-landia. You have to know the password to enter.’ ‘I was going to be a wizard, but Dad says I can’t get his bathrobe dirty again. So today I am a knight! Have at thee!’

This is Knave. Classes? Who needs them? If you want to be a wizard, grab a spell book. Want to be a fighter? Put a sword and some armor in your inventory. Want to serve the spirit of the woods? Good thing you just found this awesome stick that is clearly a relic of the forest goddess. My players spend a bunch of time just wandering around, picking things up, poking their noses into things, and generally causing trouble. Knave just lets them do that. No oaths to fulfill, churches to disappoint, or liege lords to let down.

And this extends to the Game Master role as well. I have spent many a lazy afternoon with my notebook and a set of dice coming up with weird potions and strange creatures. It reminds me of all those monster books I checked out of the library as a kid and the exercises I’ve led grade-schoolers through in let’s-make-a-monster activities. If you want to see some of my own results, you can look up some of the earliest posts in this blog, but why don’t you just try it yourself? Go roll on the potion tables (p. 36-37), and see what crazy potion you can come up with. Keep Wikipedia open: it helps with identifying the nature and folklore on the ingredients table.

Knave is, from the Boys Messing Around point of view, an absolute success. You can make crazy things and then your players can go try crazy things, and the rules never say no. They just ask you to make choices. My son’s first significant game was Knave, and he absolutely loves it. I wish I could go back in time and give it to my twelve year-old self. It’s let’s-play-pretend with the best toy box in the world.

Knaving Around

But let’s say you’re not a kid. Let’s say you have a refined, or perhaps merely jaded, palate from years of playing RPGs. You want something with a certain distinct quality to it. But maybe you don’t want to buy a hundred-page lore book or wait a year for whatever is the brand-new hotness on crowdfunding to actually deliver. Again, let’s look at Knave, because it’s doing all its storytelling inside that little book.

Let’s start with the title: Knave. You’re all knaves. Actually, at level 1 your title is Wretch. You’re a common person who just happened to go on an adventure. Note that you start with two professions: you’ve already washed out of a career twice. Jumping in dangerous holes in the ground is pretty much all you’ve got left. You’ve got the stuff in your backpack and a song in your heart. Good luck storming the castle.

What about spell casting? Do you have to study for years at a wizard school? Nope. Just turn that book you stole to the last page and mumble the last little bit. To quote a great Knave from cinema: “I said your stupid words. I may not have said every single syllable…” Knaves are wizards in the same way that Ash with his boom-stick is a wizard: when it suits, and not all that well.

Alchemy? Same story. Put a bunch of monster parts in a pot and hope for the best. Relics? You grabbed an old skull from that last tomb and now it wants you to bed a distant relation just to ruin a wedding to that other clan it hated a century ago. But if you do it, hey, maybe you’ll get the ability to talk to other spirits too…

What is this? The genre is called the picaresque, and it has a grand and glorious history from Reynard the Fox to Don Juan to Tom Sawyer. In genre fiction we can see it in Cugel the Clever, the Stainless Steel Rat, and everything Fritz Leiber wrote. It’s unconcerned with glorious battle, saving the princess, or being the good guy. Knaves don’t have time for that. They never fight unless they can cheat, never save the princess when they can seduce and rob her, and only ever play the good guy when there’s money in it. Remember: there’s no alignment system.

Knave is the perfect picaresque game: it gives you all the tools you need to get in, get the treasure, and get out.

Porque No Los Dos?

So whether you’re messing around or knaving around, this is the game for it. Realm Builder wants to add more material for downtime and for making spells and I think that’s awesome. If he puts something out for Knave, I will absolutely pick it up. And certainly I’ve done my own building out of the ruleset, including developing treasure tables and weapon forging rules. You can find those here on my Substack.

But at its core, I think Knave is about being a knave: a common-man half-hero/half-scoundrel just trying to make it to the next paycheck in a world that’s trying to kill him. But it’s also about exploring and imagining and drawing monsters on the front cover of your Pee-Chee folder. And it can do both because Ben Milton is the Donald Westlake of game design. Some games are unfinished, but this game is unencumbered.

As any good knave should be.