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| Art credit: Hal Foster |
Brave is a hack of Ben Milton's Knave, an old-school
adventure game toolkit without classes and a lot more emphasis on equipment.
The earliest changes I made were miscellaneous tweaks and houserules I added
as I would run Knave, but at this point I've bolted on several
advanced play procedures. While Knave is optimized for a DIY
"rulings over rules" style of play, I still felt it was valuable to write down
many of those rulings that I've made over the years and codify them. One of
the best parts of the original Knave were the designer's
notes, but I've taken them out because I needed to make room for new stuff and
I assume that anyone playing my game would already be familiar with the
original version anyway. Instead, you get my blog.
These notes are written for version 1.9, which you can find on the sidebar of
this blog or by clicking here. It may also be valuable to see the character sheet, which you can find two copies of here.
Various Rules
There are lots of these to go through, and many of them interact with each
other. I'll try to talk about each one as a discrete topic in roughly the
order they're introduced throughout the document.
This is a subject I rarely see addressed in RPGs even though I think it
should be. I think it's vital to state, for both the PCs' benefit and the
referee's, that 1) "Time moves at the speed of narration and passes fully at
the referee’s discretion," and 2) "The referee fluidly changes the timescale
as they need." Years of pain I've endured while gaming would have been saved
had I or my various DMs just had that idea in our heads.
However, I also find it valuable to have committed timescales, which you can
build your procedures around. Nowadays, the last place you usually find such
a thing is for combat, in which the flow of time is restructured in turns
and rounds and actions, with each round being 6 seconds. The same thing can
be done for other situations. It's good to have a name for timescales so you
can help players mentally frame their action economy. If you say, "we're in
active time" then they know that whatever actions they ask to perform,
they're dealing with about 10 minutes of activity, versus 1 hour or 6
seconds. From there, these timescales can be directly built into different
procedures and their rules for activity.
Thus, the rules for dungeoncrawling are built around active time, and should be compatible with any other procedures that also use active
time, such as certain scales of warfare, cave-crawling, some activities
while in urban areas, and so on. Likewise, there'll eventually be multiple
procedures set in urgent time, steady time, and calendrical time.
2. The Funnel
This is adapted from the RPG Dungeon Crawl Classics by
Goodman Games. This is one of the most popular rules of that system, and so
I like using it on other games sometimes too. I usually use it to introduce
people to OSR play, or even to tabletop RPGs themselves. This version is not
as thoroughly integrated with the character creation process as in DCC, but
it's an easy enough thing to just say, "everyone make 3 characters instead
of 1" and then have them die at 0 HP and call that a funnel.
This is a popular houserule originally introduced in The Black Hack by David Black. It's a bit contentious, but part of that comes from
people widely misinterpreting how to use it properly. I'll explain my
version here and why it makes sense and is useful.
Personally, I don't think it's a great or reasonable tool for "creating
tension" surrounding certain consumables (yes, in direct contradiction with David's own thoughts). I do not use it
for things like rations or light supply, which I think players can and should be
able to carefully track and plan around. Rather, I think that it's a
useful approximation tool, from a simulationist point of view. It makes it
easier to track stuff that would normally be hard or inconvenient to
measure. For example, if you use something like glue or chalk or oil or
caltrops, then the precise supply consumed by each use is tricky to measure.
You could just say, "you can use a piece of chalk 3 times
before it runs out" or something, but my players have always raised the
interesting and important question of "what counts as 'a time' in that
context?" If I write an entire epic poem out on the wall of the dungeon and
then go draw an arrow on the floor of another room of the dungeon, then
that's technically two instances of "using" the chalk. But surely they're
not equal, right? And sure, you might just say, "the referee can just make a ruling and use their common sense." But any time you find yourself making an ad-hoc ruling on the same issue again and again and again and again then maybe it's worth writing down a rule for it finally, yeah?
Consumables like these can be tracked with a bit of abstraction, where the
player doesn't know exactly how much supply they'll use on
any given usage ("let's spill some oil until we've coated the floor of this
hall"), but they have a rough idea of how much they have
left.
This would not be fitting for something like rations,
which is easy to track in discrete amounts per usage. 1 meal = 1 ration, and
you consume 1 ration per day. No abstraction needed or wanted, thank you
very much. If the dungeon is 3 days away then my players want to buy rations
for the journey and know that they aren't suddenly going to starve one day
because their character couldn't count to 6.
Likewise, I wouldn't use it for light supply because candles are actually pretty precise in how long they last, and as long as we're in the dungeon then we're counting every 10 minute turn already anyway. No reason not to tie candle lifespan to precise time as long as it's being tracked.
The other, weird use for Usage Dice is ammunition. I will admit, you could
totally count each discrete shot you fire and that'd be pretty simple. Most
people do. But instead the Usage Die is used here to save you the burden of
remembering each turn. Instead, you roll the die once, at
the end of the combat. You do it while wrapping things up like
looting the bodies and drinking potions of healing. It's done as part of the
post-combat ritual rather than repeatedly throughout the heat of the moment.
Plus, you never have players asking to go retrieve arrows they fired because
the entire supply of ammunition is abstracted anyway.
I've also laid the groundwork for Usage Dice to be used for other purposes here and there as I may think to add. For example, a magic item that can cast a spell Ud8 times is, I think, a great way to implement the handily-uncertain Usage Die in a game object. I've used them for several items throughout the Enchiridion of Fates and Fortunes as well.
The more important change here is the implementation of my favorite
houserule, Advanced Darkness. You can read my original post about that here, but in summary:
To make the role of darkness more meaningful and threatening, as well as to
make light sources easier to implement, the solution is to pull back on the power of light.
Firstly, this is supported by realism (for whatever that's worth). In
pre-industrial Europe, the standard kerosene or whale-oil lantern you see in
fantasy fiction did not exist. Instead, people relied on candles (sometimes
set into a lantern) and maybe torches, both of which are
extremely weak in their range and duration of light.
Secondly, this is supported by the needs of feasibility in gaming. By having
all light ranges be so small, it's really easy to mentally visualize it on the grid. If the range is something like 40 ft or 65 ft then
it's hard to glance at a mini on the grid and mentally picture how many
squares of light that is. You'll want to pull out a ruler or draw it onto
the grid or make one of those pre-cut cardboard/plastic circles, and all of
those options suck. But 10 ft of light is really easy to
visualize, because that's just "everything within 2 squares of the mini."
You never need to draw the radius because you can always see it in your
brain. Instead, you can just place a token under the miniature with the
light source.
Thirdly, this is supported by its effect on challenge and gamification. The
penalties of being in darkness (heavy obscurity + the added detriment of
disadvantage on attack rolls) are pretty severe, but they can't be made
relevant as a meaningful challenge in a combat scenario if the entire room
is always lit up. The majority of a medium sized room should be in darkness,
so that the players' options for where they can take the fight are limited
to small islands of light. It forces players to cluster up and it gives
better mobility to Underworld monsters/NPCs with darkvision.
It may be tempting to occasionally throw in a powerful magic lantern with a
greater range of light. Do not do this. It's important to note
that all three of these strengths are completely undermined if you ever
introduce an exception. It's crucial to standardize the range of all light
sources, lest you 1) disrupt the realism of the fiction (not super important
I'll admit but it's there), 2) completely undo the convenience of
feasibility and mentally visualizing things, and 3) nullify the challenge of
darkness entirely. A lantern or magic spell with a 30' range of light is
functionally a "light the entire room" spell. It's good for players to have
resources and abilities at their disposal which make challenges easier, but
it's bad if they trivialize challenges entirely. That's a
gameplay killer. If you want cool magic lanterns, give them interesting
properties instead.
An interesting side effect of making light weaker is that it simultaneously
becomes more valuable. Since darkness is a more pervasive and threatening
challenge in a dungeoncrawl, it becomes that much more important to have
those little islands of light to hide in. You stop taking it for granted.
5. Exhaustion
This is a popular houserule for Knave that I don't think
has one, single original source. I keep it pretty basic, but add in some
specifics about how an overabundance of exhaustion can lead to death. I've
always liked using exhaustion as an alternative negative consequence to HP
loss, because not everything that "harms" you in an adventure is
necessarily injuring you. It creates a secondary route to
death, and a secondary metric you need to keep an eye on to stay alive.
And by having a secondary "health" meter like this, you can tie other
mechanics into it as well. I've always wanted the threat of starvation to be
important in my game, and I realized that tying it into the exhaustion
system is the simplest way to do that.
And then, because both excess exhaustion can cause you to pass out (with
recovery being pretty slow), and a lack of food and water
will add levels of exhaustion, it naturally creates the effect of
starvation/dehydration leading to death, as a mere consequence of these two
mechanics interacting. If you don't drink water for long enough, you'll gain
enough exhaustion to pass out, and if no one feeds you water while you're
unconscious, then the rate of gaining more exhaustion exceeds the rate of
recovery from exhaustion, which is a death spiral. Just like in real life!
I like elegant mechanics like that. And best of all, even though these rules
are always "on," they're only going to be relevant in the situations where
it makes sense, like if you're on a desert island or in the Underworld. I used to have rules for starvation taking from Veins of the Earth in my game, but I like having lots of different game effects all tie into one resource like this. It allows them to interact with each other. You have to be pretty dehydrated to die of thirst, and you have to be pretty hot to die of heat stroke, and you have to be pretty beat up to die from physical strain and lifting, but any of those three can exacerbate the other two pretty quickly when in combination.
You can find the original post I made about this here, but it's slightly out of date.
This is my fun little rule for drinking alcohol. Most games would make it
something simple like "when you drink alcohol, you acquire
the poisoned condition and have disadvantage on all checks"
or something. That's perfectly serviceable, but I thought that this weird
trade-off mechanic was more fun to use. Gambling mechanics are usually very
fun for players, especially in a game you don't take too seriously. I just
really love the image of a bunch of scared, injured knaves frantically
drinking a bunch of booze in the third level of a dungeon in a desperate
gamble for temporary HP.
And naturally, I found it to be a robust enough little mechanic to rework
into other variables than HP and WIS. There are tons of
tradeoff potables you can acquire while adventuring! I listed a few common
ones in the equipment pages that players should consider buying before an
adventure and referees should consider planting in their treasure hoards.
You never know when a little bit of bimbo juice will save the day.
7. Language and Lore
You can find the original post I made about this here. I think that languages are a great ingredient not for contained adventure
challenges like dungeons, but rather for campaign-level challenges like
politics and warfare and exploring an open world area. It's true: when
you're six layers deep in the Mines of Moria and you come across a door with
an Elvish inscription on it, then the language choices you made at character
creation aren't really that helpful. But it does help shape
your actions and options in navigating the campaign as a whole. The
languages you chose when you made your character will determine which
dungeons you'll even go to at all, and which NPCs and communities you'll
form relationships with. The choice to know the language of the fish people
at character creation is choosing to tell your referee, "we're spending part
of this campaign at sea, so prepare some fishman quests for me." If you're
playing D&D set in the Crusades, then the difference between knowing
Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or something European like French will be the
difference between which sides you can ally with, trade with, or even just visit and pass
through easily.
There's always the tricky balance of A) players shouldn't
know too many languages, and illiteracy should be common in
a world of lowly, wretched knaves, but B) there's
an insane diversity of languages out there in the lands of
adventure, any of which would be useful to know. Thus, I introduce the idea
of "related" languages. Not out of realism (dear god no), but out of
practicality in play. So even if your character doesn't know Elvish, if they
know at least one language that the referee says
is related to Elvish ("Oh, you speak Sylvan? That's close
enough") then you can still get the basic gist of conversations and texts.
There are no "degrees" of related-ness like in real life. Two languages are
either related or they're not. It's an easy enough worldbuilding task for
the referee to create a simple language tree in, like, a few minutes. Here's
an example:
At character creation, show the players a chart like this one and tell them
to pick from here. When you pick a language, you can also (sorta) understand
every other language connected to it by 1 line segment. Simple, right?
This was always implied in Knave but not really expanded
on. I've spelled out some details. The original game already alluded to
Charisma determining your number of followers, but I've codified that in the
form of "follower slots" which are put directly on the character sheet and
are referenced in miscellaneous rules and features
throughout Brave materials.
I reviewed the various definitions of "hirelings," "henchmen," "retainers,"
"followers," etc. in different editions of D&D and other old-school
games, and I decided to use these versions here. I also think that according
an entire column of the rules to the subject will reinforce its importance
in the minds of the players. Every player I've had who came from 5E and the
new school tradition never ends up using followers even though it would be
super helpful. The reason is that is usually doesn't even occur to them
because they don't think of it as being a "main" part of the game. But when
I put rules like this in front of players who've never played an RPG before,
they instantly catch on and make use of followers in every session.
I explored the option of defining a list of default combatant hirelings to
choose from (e.g. knight, man-at-arms, artillerist, hobilar, etc.) but I
found there to be way too much variation, so I decided it
would be better to just allow players to sort of "customize your own
sandwich." Pick the features you want and can afford, and take a small
gamble on how powerful/expensive the resulting hireling is (randomized HD).
A bunch of level 1 knaves might hire an archer or two, but some level 5
knaves can probably afford a guy with some armor and a horse (i.e. a
knight).
And of course, a henchman is essentially just a PC who hasn't become a PC
yet, and is still partially under the referee's control. If they stay with
the party for a while then it's only a matter of time before they replace a
dead party member. This way, when a PC dies, they don't have to stop and
roll a new character and wait for the referee to find an opportunity to
introduce them. Instead, your backup character is already present.
9. Magic
You'll notice that the spell list is half the length of Knave's
and has many spells that it doesn't. The main reason for this is that I'll
be releasing 300+ spells (including all the Knave ones) in
their own supplement book, along with many other magic and
spellcasting-related topics (once again, see this post for the progress on that). I wanted to contain the default list to
something less than 100 because of that, and separating them into 6 themes
is a fun way of characterizing the implied setting a little bit. I added
some combat spells but tried not to go overboard with it. I also laid the groundwork for more non-spellbook magic items to be added in future materials, talking a bit about wands and scrolls and stuff here.
Conclusion
I put these all up front because they're both the simplest and easiest things to steal from Brave but also the least special and interesting. That said, they're also the ones that most easily came from playing the game and seeing where some changes would be in order. For a long time, I thought that rules like these would be the full extent of my Knave hack. As you'll see in the coming posts, at some point I got more ambitious.
-Dwiz
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