When the hosts of Enter The Nerdom approached me to run them through a game of “Old School style” Dungeons & Dragons, I knew I needed a lightweight ruleset to get us through what was likely to be a pretty fast one-shot scenario. It turned into two sessions, but we all agreed that the setup and “learning” time needed to be at a minimum to keep the podcast playthrough very fast and energetic. I turned to Ben Milton’s Knave to get what I needed!
I’d already worked on some hacks for Knave‘s 1st edition, so I just compiled those into a doc, stripped out some of Knave‘s more “lowlife, dirty bastards” stylings and replaced those with classic Gygaxian and Arnesonian flourishes: non-human PC ancestries, quick-playing dungeon and wilderness crawling rules, and a simple modification to make spellcasters a bit more of a thing via spellbook rules layered on top of the “anyone can use a scroll” magic rules. I topped it off with some Feat-like abilities to replace class abilities, and give the players their own little niche protection.
Here’s the final document I used, as a PDF formatted to be printed “Booklet” style in Adobe Acrobat, and stapled together. I used cardstock for the first page, to give it a sort of “cover” quality, and referenced it during play. Especially when the PCs started dropping to 0 hit points, or scoring critical hits and fumbles. (There were a lot more fumbles than hits, as I recall!)
Keep an eye on Enter The Nerdom to listen to our actual play of Directsun Games’ Puzzle Dungeon: The Seer’s Sanctum using these rules!
