The Bottled Sea, Session 0 & Hewcrawl XP

Avast, me swabbies, bilge-rats, scallywags, and salty dogs of every stripe! A new campaign has appeared on the horizon.

The System: Knave 2e

Session 0

Everyone made a starting character, a backup character who is somewhere out there in the Bottled Sea already, and an NPC that had some sort of relationship to their starter character. Characters could be from anywhere in time and space, even from different realities. And because this is a nautical hexcrawl (a "saltbox"), I asked everyone to come up with short-, medium-, and long-term goals to drive their explorations.

Knave characters are very light and quick to create, although I screwed up the character generation session by letting everyone work on their own and create their characters independently. This resulted in some people finishing very quickly and then getting bored, while others got caught in creative blocks and never entirely finished. Next time, I'll as everyone to go around in a circle and generate each aspect one at a time, so they're all building their characters together, and aware of each other's characters as they go. I also made all the random generation possibilities that Knave offers optional. Next time, I'll ask people to roll the random gen stuff first, and then give them the choice of accepting it or not. That should prevent a lot of creative paralysis.

The Crew

Danny Milke, WWII sailor with a baseball bat
Heloise Cobblebury, 1885 librarian/folklorist/spy
Jacqueline "Jack" Faircroft, 1960's archealogist, searching after an ancestor's legend
Rem the Custodian, elemental servitor of the Bottled Sea itself
Jerimiah "Buck" Buckthorpe, Bounty Hunter from the Wild West

Knave awards XP based on gold hauled up from the Underworld. There won't be a lot of that in a setting that is both aqueous and barter-intensive, so I cobbled together an alternate system.

The Bottled Sea Advancement

XP are granted for exploring new Hexes. Hexes increase in value by 100 XP over the previous Hex until the party takes a Rest.

1st Hex	100
2nd Hex	200
3rd Hex	300

XP are granted for the resolution of Goals. After a goal is resolved, the player should create a new one.

Short-Term Goal	250
Medium-Term Goal	1000
Long-Term Goal	10,000

NOTE: I have no idea if the above values are right or not. They're a starting point, and I'll adjust as I discover what seems like the right pace of progression as we go on.

At the end of each session, the GM will tally up all XP earned and divide them among the players present for that session.

Level	XP Total	HP	Title
1	0	1d6	Wretch
2	2000	2d6	Bilge Rat
3	4000	3d6	Groggy
4	8000	4d6	Rascal
5	16000	5d6	Scallywag
6	32,000	6d6	Swabbie
7	64,000	7d6	Rigger
8	125,000	8d6	Sea Dog
9	250,000	9d6	Tar
10	500,000	10d6	Old Salt

New Characters

A new character replacing a dead, missing, or retired character begins with half the XP of the previous character.

NOTE: Because Knave's advancement sequence is a simple geometric progression, a new character starting with half the XP means they'll be one level below the old one. That feels right.

The NPCs the players generated included a U-Boat full of necromantic Nazis, and gentleman thief called the Silk Sapphire, and quite a few members of a faction called the Collectors, including a romantic interest in the son of the Collector's head of security.

Between these characters and the player's goals, I have a smidge of world-building to do before the first session, but not so much as to get in the way of the Bottled Sea's intended roll-it-and-react style of play.

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch

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In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S

Jonathan LinnemanAugust 6, 2024 at 4:16 PM
"Next time, I'll as everyone to go around in a circle and generate each aspect one at a time, so they're all building their characters together, and aware of each other's characters as they go."

Why have I never done this before? Love it!

An Abominable Fancy

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