Here, have a Zelda-like Knave hack: Octave

Yes, I'm still working on Iron Halberd. Writing posts about Iron Halberd is harder than writing the actual game, so I'm just late on those blog posts. But while I was doing that, I got distracted by another project, and while that's usually bad, this time it resulted in an actually fully finished, playable, complete game!

Here's Octave, a Zelda-like sword-and-song style Knave hack. 

A short rundown of what's changed from Knave to make it suit Zelda's lighthearted heroic fantasy more, as opposed to Knave's gritty sword-n-sorcery:

• Dying is replaced with a slightly more storygame-y system, where dropping to 0HP doesn't kill you but recovering from it moves the bad guys' plans forward. What would be a TPK instead means the bad guy wins and you have to deal with the fallout. Death mostly only comes from an opt-in heroic sacrifice mechanic where players can give their character a dramatic death to hold off enemies or make one last stand against a villain. Starting HP is also increased.

• Characters are randomly rolled but still equally competent, so you can't end up with a crazy overpowered or useless hero. The random starting gear is tweaked to include iconic zelda stuff like bombs & boomerangs, and XP is replaced with finding heart containers to increase your stats.

• The Stamina system from Grave is adapted here for combat maneuvers & spellcasting. It fits well. Spells are also split into "Songs" cast with instruments for heroes, and "Dark magic" for villains (and less scrupulous heroes who risk being corrupted into a villain).

• A mechanic for villains' evil plans to give the losing-moves-the-bad-guys-plans-forward thing some structure. The game requiring an explicit capital-b Bad Guy isn't super fitting for the old-school playstyle, but it fits right in with the type of stories zelda games tell, so it works here.

• Lots of other slight tweaks for the zelda vibe. You play explicitly heroic characters, some of the random backgrounds you can roll are things like 'royalty' or 'prophesied hero', and the PCs are a bit more special than the peasant nobodies you roll in Knave, which changes the feel of the game quite a bit.

Is this even technically still OSR anymore now that it feels more like heroic fantasy? I have no idea. But it's done and it's zelda-y and I'm proud of it, so here it is. It's also pay-what-you-want, so checking it out costs only your time.