What You Cloned

This project is the complete rules text of Knave 1st edition rebuilt as working data: every rule, table, price, and spell as a record the game can read, write, and reason about. The first promise of the original text is that "adding, subtracting and modifying rules is both expected and encouraged" — so this manual is not a warning label. It is a map of where things go, so your changes land where they belong.

The layers

Each layer answers a different question:

• Rules/ answers what do the rules say? It is the book itself, chaptered, with Ben Milton's designer's notes preserved throughout. Players may read all of it; nothing operational hides here.
• The file types answer what is stored, and what is derived? Characters, weapons, armor, items, spellbooks, monsters, random tables, and abilities each have a schema that encodes the game's arithmetic — the character sheet alone derives a dozen values from six stored bonuses (chapter 2).
• GM/ answers what does the referee actually do? One always-on core instruction plus a set of trigger-named instructions — the runtime, as opposed to the reference (chapter 4).
• Random Tables/ answer when do dice decide? Each table carries the die it is rolled with and a usage line naming the moment to roll it.

Content records — Equipment/, Spellbooks/, Monsters/ — are the nouns. Campaigns/ holds per-table state, and Lore/ holds setting material layered on top of the system.

A real rule change usually touches a pair: the rule text players read, and the schema or GM instruction that makes it true in play. Change how criticals degrade gear and you edit the Combat rule and the attack instruction — one without the other gives you a game that says one thing and does another.

The license, precisely

The rules text is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: share and adapt it for any purpose, including commercially, with attribution. Three things the license does not cover: the Knave name as a product identifier, the original book's artwork, and any implication of endorsement. That is why this project ships no original art, and why @Missing file spells out the changes made. If you build on this and publish: keep that file, updated with an honest list of your own changes, credit Ben Milton, and don't lead with the Knave name as your title. The original acknowledgements survive in @Missing file.

The load-bearing numbers

Knave's headline feature is compatibility with the whole OSR shelf, and that compatibility rests on a handful of constants: every d20 roll is d20 + bonus against 15 or a defense; a defense is always its bonus + 10; all hit dice are d8s; prices are copper pennies at roughly real medieval rates; item slots equal Constitution defense; ability bonuses run +1 to +10 across ten levels. You can bend any of them — deliberately. The chapters ahead point out what leans on what, so nothing snaps by accident.