Good morning! After a 10-hour sleep, I (Alex here) feel refreshed enough to write about the launch of our Knave 2e one-shot, The Abbey, yesterday evening. We created the one-shot for the Knave 2e Jam. It’s been super fun so far, and a lot of the entries are absolutely bonkers!

As for the adventure, we’re so happy we managed to finish it on time! It was a rough but fun ride. A special thanks to Bardify for letting us use his music, and to Estra, our artist, for the awesome character artwork. The original adventure was created by Maddin. It was story-focused and featured seven NPCs representing the seven deadly sins. We changed it to be more of a sandbox experience and removed some of the NPCs to keep the adventure from running too long. We're really pleased with the final one-shot, and we also plan to port it to the DnD 5e (2014) version.

Some Developer Rambling

Maddin and I created the map, and this was our first time making any kind of artwork! We switched roles several times throughout the process. I absolutely love the tree Maddin painted. He handled a lot of the finer details, while I focused on painting the ground and its textures. One of my favorite items in the adventure is the Slippers of Teleportation in the bedchamber—slippers that only teleport themselves, though the players don’t know that!

The stairs in the upper area lead to the roof of the Abbey, and we considered drawing it as well. On the roof, players face the Bell Tower Gargoyle, a boss fight inspired by the iconic boss battle from Dark Souls 1, which is one of my favorite fights in the series. The main reason we didn’t include the roof and bell tower on the map was due to limited page space. We had to fit everything onto eight A4 pages, and with all the text, there wasn’t enough room for the roof—so we just described it in the adventure.

One of my favorite pieces of artwork that Estra created is the Ghost Knight Fellehar. Maddin came up with the idea to give the knight an axe, which sets him apart from the paladin Roland, a side character in the one-shot. Our friend surprised us with an incredible, wild piece of artwork for Fellehar, and I absolutely love the madness it captures. I even adjusted his stat block to reflect more of that craziness. I definitely need to reuse him in a future adventure. It’s amazing how much impact artwork can have!

Thats it! Check it out yourself here, the Abbey, if you want. Until next time.