Knave RPG: Backpack instead of class

I’ve been following Ben Milton for quite some time. He is one of the most prominent figures in the Old School Renaissance (OSR) movement within tabletop role-playing games. He is primarily known as an excellent game designer, a respected reviewer, and a tireless promoter of indie creations. Ben is a primary school teacher by trade, and it was his daily pedagogical practice that had a fundamental influence on his career as a game creator and storyteller.

The Questing Beast Project

Under the Questing Beast brand, Ben runs a highly successful YouTube channel, a blog, and the popular The Glatisant newsletter. His influencer career started completely by accident—when he drew a fantasy map out of boredom during a staff meeting and uploaded it to Reddit. After a huge response, he began making map-drawing tutorials and later added his popular flip-throughs and reviews of indie rulebooks. These have become an invaluable source of information on current indie RPG production.

From a school club to gaming hits

Ben created his first well-known game primarily to play it with his fifth-grade students in a school club. He needed an extremely simple system with lightning-fast character creation and understandable mechanics that kids would grasp immediately. That’s how Maze Rats was born (which we published in our Mytago publishing house under the title Kobky).

However, his next game—Knave (also published in Czech by Mytago)—gained even greater popularity. It offers a very elegant way to play all sorts of original and modern D&D modules, as it is fully compatible with most games based on those rules. Knave came with a revolutionary idea: it scrapped classic classes and abilities, and defined a character's role in the party solely by what equipment they are carrying in their inventory.

Knave - Second Edition is coming!

Right now, we are preparing the release of the second edition of Knave at Mytago. This game saw massive success on the Kickstarter platform (raising over $420,000). While it retains its elegant mechanical core, it takes the game to a whole new level. While the first edition was focused almost exclusively on traditional dungeon crawling, the second edition is a comprehensive rulebook. What can you look forward to?

• Wilderness rules: Robust yet very fluid rules for wilderness exploration and mapping (hexcrawl), travel, and the effects of weather.
• Life outside the dungeon: Detailed mechanics for character activities between adventures (downtime).
• Freeform magic: A significantly reworked magic system allows for much freer spell creation based on combining randomly generated magical syllables, words, and symbols.
• Tools for the Game Master: The book contains a huge number of random generators and tables for world-building and smooth game management.
• Collector's visuals: What was once a purely utilitarian set of rules has become a beautiful artifact. The book features stunning and atmospheric illustrations by the acclaimed artist Peter Mullen.

Knave - Second Edition is no longer just a slim rulebook; it has become a comprehensive and visually appealing source of inspiration that should not be missing from the shelf of any fantasy RPG fan.