Knave — An ultra-light, classless OSR toolkit

"Your inventory is your build."

Diced20 roll-over

Players3–6

Prep~15 min

Foundry VTTCommunity

Complexity

What is this system

Knave is Ben Milton's (Questing Beast) ultra-light OSR game. Characters are classless — defined by their attributes and the items in their inventory slots. Its 80 pages are mostly generators (NPCs, monsters, spells, dungeons, hexes) that turn prep into rolling a couple of tables. The perfect hackable frame for your own campaign.

Setting

Setting-agnostic classic fantasy. Knave imposes nothing — no setting, no classes, no long skill lists. The spirit is old-school dungeon- and hex-crawling where player cunning beats stat blocks. A blank canvas with a powerhouse set of tables to fill it on the fly.

What it looks like at the table

The burglar reaches for a lever in the wall. The GM sets the difficulty at 14. Roll d20 + Dexterity bonus, need 14 or higher. A 16 — the lever gives, the portcullis grinds upward. But the inventory slots are nearly full: torch, rope, the looted idol... something has to be dropped to free your hands. In Knave, weight and space matter as much as combat.

Playstyle

Exploration Combat Sandbox Fantasy

Key mechanics

Classless via inventory

No classes: who you are is defined by attributes and items. Inventory is measured in slots (by Strength), and what you carry literally sets what you can do.

Roll-over d20

A test is d20 + attribute bonus against a difficulty. One mechanic for everything: attacks, saves, skills. Learned in a minute, played instantly.

Generators for everything

The heart of the book is its tables: NPCs, monsters, spells, dungeons, hexes, hooks. Whole chunks of the world come together on a die roll. Prep nearly vanishes.