For those that enter here, only a few may leave alive. Tired of coming up with new characters? Try throwing a bunch of characters into a gauntlet and see what sticks.

But what is a gauntlet I hear you ask?

Originally it probably originated from running the gauntlet a form of corporal punishment. One had to run between two rows of soldiers, that swung with weapons against you. If you made it out alive, you were lucky.

Surviving a difficult trial or challenging situation.

The closest example today we have is Takeshi's Castle (or for those born after 2000, you are probably more familiar with Fall Guys). You take a bunch of people and throw them against a series of challenges and only a few will come out at the end and are allowed to fight the big bad.

How does this relate to RPGs?

We take a bunch of low level characters (best is level 0) and put them into a dungeon. Everything in that dungeon is quite deadly, so only a few (if any) will survive. Natural Selection if you will.

I've originally heard the term (in conjunction with RPGs) from Shadowdark RPG. Other roleplaying systems (for example Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC)) have a similar concept (DCC calls it funnel).

More appropriate would be maybe sieve.

Why a Gauntlet?

There are some reasons to run a gauntlet.

First, is a way to very quickly get playing. Instead of spending some hours creating a new character, you directly go ahead and start playing. In most cases you just roll for abilities, put a stick or something in their hands and off they go.

This removes the pressure of studying all the different options at character creation. Which class? What is my background? Which features should I take? All these questions are irrelevant. You just roll, and let randomness decide your fate.

It is also nice in introducing players to either a new system or to roleplaying in general. I made the experience, that if I let new players create their own characters, they are just to overwhelmed with options and if you have no idea on how this game plays, you can't make good decisions. This most often leads to me giving them pregenerated characters. But even then, the amount of text is just overwhelming.

It also fits quite nicely in the themes of Shadowdark (or other old-school RPGs): You are just one of many. A farmer that was (stupid) enough to pick up that whole adventuring thing. You have no experience whatsoever, so death is lurking around every corner. It is not your skills that count, but how you approach situation and what ideas you have to get out of it. A gauntlet is capturing that pretty well. You can't just fight your way out of everything.

Second, you immediately have a reason why your group of characters will be adventuring further. There is a common background that is shared between all of you. You survived something gruesome and that binds you together. You don't have to come up with some convoluted way on why you are adventuring together (more often then not, this is just glossed over - without this implicit bond there wouldn't be a game after all).

Thirdly: It's different. Instead of creating one more character, were you have to come up with something, you can just go ahead and play. Not mulling over new character concepts and page-long backstories. Just someone that was at the wrong place at the wrong time. It also let's you try out new thing you might not have considered before. Instead of going for the hundredth time with a rogue, you get stuck with that high INT wizard. Make the best of it. Getting out of that comfort zone.

You shouldn't run a gauntlet every time (and of course not the same). Especially if you just want to run a one-shot (except if the one-shot is the gauntlet). But for a start of the new 5-year long campaign, why not?

How to Gauntlet?

A gauntlet is nothing more than just a dungeon. In theory you could use any dungeon and use it as the place of a gauntlet. But there are specially crafted dungeons for it. They need to be deliberately deadly. Something a normal dungeon might not be. And it is okay that there's a trap that just outright kills a character. There's no attachment yet and for all the players it is expected that their characters will die. So it doesn't look unfair. If the players make bad decisions, they face the consequences.

In Shadowdark, there are 0-level characters. No class, no special talents nothing. Just their ability scores and one or two equipment. Most of these characters will have one or two HP. So any stiff breeze will kill them. That's is why it is common for players to have 4 of these characters at the ready. If one dies, the next one takes over. If necessary you can roll a new one on the fly as well. There's also Shadowdarklings that has a handy button to create 4 such characters.

In Cursed Scroll #3 you can find a premade gauntlet for Shadowdark. I wanted to create my own gauntlet however. But this is a good start as well.

Premise

Since I want to use this gauntlet for introducing new players into Shadowdark and RPGs in general in the future, I have some requirements for the gauntlet. I want to create a situation for every core class (Fighter, Rogue, Wizard and Priest) and the two bonus classes (Bard and Ranger).

The reasoning behind this is twofold. You can play this gauntlet and then a normal game with the free rules and you get to preview on what you could expect from these classes. Kind of an advertisement for the game and the possibilities.

The other thing I want to adapt is a concept I've read on another blog: Before the end of the gauntlet, the characters level up and then fight a big bad. So the players have some time to get to know the game and the classes and then they can immediately try them out.

But how do the characters get to the dungeon (and their inevitable demise)?

The premise of the adventure is, that all the characters are chased by a raiding party of orcs. They have been pillaging all over the region and finally arrived at the village of the characters. Not all characters were born or live in that village. They could've been just travellers. Nonetheless they had to flee and finally they managed to arrive at a small temple atop a hill.

The orcs are close and could arrive at any moment. Maybe there's another way out. Stairs beckon to go below...

The twist here is, that at one point the orcs will arrive and will chase the characters through this dungeon. So there is an element of time pressure (which is important in Shadowdark and old-school games). You can't just wait around and wait for better times. Some action is needed.

Creating the dungeon

There are procedures for generating dungeons in the core book of Shadowdark. I take this as an entry point to design the initial layout of the dungeon. I choose a big dungeon so I roll 12d10 onto a white sheet of paper (hitting that is not so easy as it turns out).

Where they land, there is a room, so I mark that and put the appropriate number I rolled in it's place.

Each number actually represents a specific type of room. But before I continue, I try to come up with some sort of layout on how these currently disconnected rooms are fitting together.

For every room, I also rolled some more dice (d6's in most cases, noted in parentheses next to the numbers). This provides some more details about the room (more on that later). I've also gave each of these rooms a unique number (green circle), so I can identify them.

Next I went to Dungeon Scrawl and created a rough sketch of the dungeon to make more sense of the mess above.

As mentioned, each die roll for a room corresponds to a specific type of a room (or encounter). For example a 4 means "Empty Room". For some rooms, you can roll on additional tables to give more details. So for example a 10 means "Boss Monster" and I rolled a 3 on a d6, which means "Guarded By Minions".

So I ended up with the following rooms:

Room	Type	Detail
1	Empty
2	Empty
3	Empty
4	Empty
5	NPC	Captive
6	Solo Monster	Mutated Spellcaster
7	Treasure	Guarded by Monster
8	Major Hazard	Long Fall
9	Treasure	Protected by Trap
10	Boss Monster	Guarded by Minions
11	Solo Monster	Sneaky Brute
12	Major Hazard	Entrapping Terrain

What is not yet in this list, is a room 13 and 14. These will be rooms, where the players will level up to level 1 and then fight the big bad - the showdown. I concentrate first on the main gauntlet.

You can also see, that the dungeon is roughly separated into two parts, but each part is reachable from each other. And within each part there's a loop. This is important, since the characters will be chased by the orcs at one point, they need to have a way to escape. If there are too many dead-ends, the characters would just die.

So now I have to come up with specific details for these rooms and how to form some cohesive dungeon out of this.