A New Role-Playing Experience
The Kniraven TTRPG is designed from the ground up to offer fast-paced action, structured decision-making, customizable progression, and consistent integration between character development and gameplay. It draws from well known classic systems while addressing their mechanical limitations and inefficiencies.
Why We’re Creating Our Own System
The system prioritizes player agency, momentum, objectivity, and clear narrative resolution. It was developed in response to issues observed in other systems, including broken or inconsistent mechanics, stalled play, and restrictions on player creativity based on outdated assumptions.
Design Question:
How can a TTRPG provide players with tools to act dynamically, grow consistently, and resolve actions objectively without stalled turns and unnecessary gameplay delays?
The Kniraven system is structured to be fast-paced, consistent, scalable, and adaptable across varied play environments or settings.
What Can You Expect?
🛡️ Armor That Protects, Not Evades
Armor reduces incoming damage rather than preventing successful hits. This model rewards tactical equipment choices and planning your armor for your encounters.
❤️ Healing That Rewards Timing and Prevention
Healing and defensive abilities are designed for proactive use. Maintaining consciousness during combat is critical, and support actions must be timed to maximize effectiveness and prevent incapacitation. It will not do to just heal your party members after they have fallen.
💀 Structured Death Mechanics
When a character does fall, there is a structured opportunity for continued action before loss of consciousness and death. This allows for additional tactical and narrative outcomes rather than the player's immediate removal from play, and more satisfying character deaths complete with closure.
🌱 Objective Class Progression System
Experience gain is consistent and transparent, with advancement based on player-driven choices rather than preset thresholds or subjective awards. Players earn experience regularly and can spend it directly as they choose on skills, abilities, and specializations, creating a custom path for character development.
⚔️ Fast-Paced and Tactical Combat
Combat is structured for quick player turns and consistent engagement. The system includes intuitive mechanics that allow players to react during others' turns, maintaining involvement throughout each round. Actions resolve efficiently without reducing tactical options, supporting a dynamic and strategic play environment that is easy to learn and apply.
🧠 PvP and Community Play, By Design
In addition to standard games, the system supports balanced player-vs-player mechanics and multi-group campaigns; supporting both collaborative and competitive player interaction.
Core Mechanics & Themes
🎲 Dual d12s: The Shapes of Quintessence
Difficulty checks use a dual-d12 system. Players roll two twelve-sided dice — one representing Radiance and one representing Rot — corresponding to opposing forces of Aether: order and entropy, light and darkness.
Using two d12s provides a balanced and consistent probability curve compared to single-die systems. When advantage or disadvantage applies, a third d12 is rolled, and the highest or lowest two dice are selected. This creates a moderate probability shift, avoiding extreme variability.
🔺 Platonic Solid Dice Philosophy
All dice used in the Kniraven system are Platonic solids — the only five regular convex polyhedra in three-dimensional space. Platonic solids have identical faces, edges, and vertices, making them the only truly fair dice under geometric principles.
Non-Platonic dice lack this uniformity. Their faces and vertices vary in size and angle, which can introduce imbalances over repeated rolls. By using only Platonic solids, the system ensures both mathematical fairness and thematic consistency with the concepts of balance and structure.
For example, the d10 is a pentagonal trapezohedron. Its faces are kite-shaped rather than regular polygons, and its vertices are not uniform, which can affect roll fairness.
🔷 The Shape of the Elements
Plato assigned each of his geometric solids to an element:
- Tetrahedron: Fire
- Cube: Earth
- Octahedron: Air
- Dodecahedron: Aether
- Icosahedron: Water
Building upon this, each die in the Kniraven system is linked to a specific state of matter:
- Tetrahedron (d4): Plasma
- Cube (d6): Solid
- Octahedron (d8): Gas
- Dodecahedron (d12): Aether
- Icosahedron (d20): Liquid
Plato wrote in Timaeus that the shape of the dodecahedron, being the most complex of the solids, was used in the delineation of the universe.
The dodecahedron — representing Aether or quintessence — is central to Kniraven’s mechanics and cosmology. The opposing forces of Radiance and Rot shape outcomes, reality, and chance.
☄️ Elemental Damage Types
Combat incorporates twelve distinct damage types, each with different tactical considerations:
- Piercing
- Slashing
- Crushing
- Thunder
- Fire
- Frost
- Acid
- Lightning
- Psychic
- Poison
- Radiant
- Rot
Each damage type interacts uniquely with armor, resistances, and environmental conditions.
🔢 Twelve Core Abilities
Characters possess twelve ability scores, grouped into four categories:
- Resource Pools: Health, Mana, Spirit
- Physical Abilities: Strength, Speed, Agility
- Mental Abilities: Will, Cognition, Knowledge
- Social Abilities: Physicality, Intuition, Tact
These abilities also fit into three mechanical archetypes:
- Force: Health, Strength, Will, Physicality
- Velocity: Mana, Speed, Cognition, Intuition
- Control: Spirit, Agility, Knowledge, Tact
This structure enables a range of distinct character builds and specializations.
Flexible Across Worlds
The Kniraven TTRPG is designed to be setting-agnostic, supporting a wide range of genres and campaign styles. Whether you're running sword and sorcery, urban fantasy, science fiction, survival horror, or something entirely original, the system provides the structure needed for Game Masters to adapt it to their own worldbuilding and creative direction.
Official Settings
While fully open to custom settings, the Kniraven system will launch with two official worlds. Both settings will include integrated mechanics, lore, and modules compatible with the core system while remaining optional for groups who wish to design their own worlds.
🌍 Earth
An alternate version of modern-day Earth where occult organizations investigate underground secrets — including vampire covens, psychic phenomena, ghost activity, and magically gifted individuals. These groups operate in secret, evading modern surveillance, government forces, and specialized hunter organizations as they navigate the hidden realities beneath the surface of everyday life.
🪐 Nibiru
A magical world inhabited by isolated and often conflicted sentient species. Nibiru is shaped by elemental goddesses, wandering spirits, and ancient magical forces. Cultural tensions, and divine influences create a constantly shifting balance of power in a setting where survival often depends on knowledge, adaptation, and magical affinity.
Part of a Bigger Vision
The Kniraven TTRPG is integrated into a broader platform, connected to a digital ecosystem and our Real-Life RPG (RLRPG) system. Characters and campaigns can influence canon storylines and unlock platform features.
Modules, player-generated content, and platform integrations are planned to expand the system's capabilities over time.