The Level-0 Funnel

Version 0.10 · not yet playtested

Jon Mayo. PUBLIC DOMAIN (CC0-1.0)

The Level-0 Funnel

Most campaigns begin with heroes. A funnel begins with a crowd of people who are about to become heroes, or to die trying. Each player runs a handful of ordinary villagers, fragile and untrained, through one deadly opening, a raid, a cave-in, a thing loose in the dark, and whoever crawls out the far side picks up a playbook and stands as a level-1 hero. It is a session-zero with stakes, and it hands the table a party already bound by what they survived together.

This is advanced play, an optional opening that sits outside the core loop. A funnel asks each player to juggle a fistful of characters, asks everyone to spend most of them, and asks the GM to pitch lethal encounters by feel; none of that is the gentlest way to meet the rules. A table new to the game is better served building level-1 heroes from playbooks and starting there. But for a group that knows the dice and wants a campaign with roots, the funnel is a fine first act of the campaign-frame module (the West Marches hub and its growing base): the founding disaster that sends the survivors out to the frontier in the first place.

1 The villagers

A level-0 character is a villager swept into adventure, set below the level-1 grant budget. Every one of them starts the same fragile chassis:

Hit Points 6, no toughness (half a level-1’s base).

One attribute at +1, a knack from the old trade; the other three at +0. No signature +2 yet.

One skill (+1), from that trade.

No Advanced Actions, and so no stress-fueled tricks, though the stress track (4 + Presence) is there to Push a roll or Resist a blow.

Speed 2, a simple or improvised weapon, at most light armor.

A felled villager does not get the hero’s death save: a drop to 0 HP is simply out, the GM’s call on dead or dying. That is the point of the form.

Make them in a minute. Hand each player two to four villagers and roll each on the trade table; it grants the one skill, says which attribute is the +1, and arms them with whatever was in reach. Names and faces take longer than the numbers.

d6 | You were | +1 | Skill | In your hands
1 | a farmhand or laborer | Might | Athletics | a hayfork or cudgel (improvised, 2)
2 | a hunter or trapper | Agility | Tracking | a sling or long knife (light, 3)
3 | a smith or woodcutter | Might | Mechanics | a hammer or hatchet (light, 3), an apron (armor 1)
4 | a fisher or boatman | Agility | Seafaring | a gaff or net (improvised, 2)
5 | a healer or midwife | Wits | Medicine | a sickle (light, 3)
6 | a pedlar or hedge-scholar | Wits | Old Lore | a walking staff or knife (improvised, 2)

The stress track and Push are the only lever a villager has over the dice; teach them to spend it, because they will not survive on numbers alone.

2 Running the funnel

The funnel’s danger lives in the opposition, not the villagers’ frailty. A band of a dozen weak bodies wins by swarming, so changing their Hit Points barely moves the survival rate; what decides who lives is how many foes you set against them and how hard those foes hit. Tune there:

Throw at the band | What happens | Use it for
A few vermin (rats, a stray cur) | A one-round rout. | Teaching the dice, a warm-up.
A weak pack near the band’s own number (goblins, raiders, the restless dead) | About half the villagers fall; the band still wins. | The funnel’s main course.
A lone tough beast (an ogre, a cave-thing) | Slow but safe: the swarm grinds it down over several rounds, losing only the one or two it reaches. | A climactic monster that costs a name or two.
A large trained warband, more than the band can mob | A wipe. | Only if you mean to end the funnel here.

Keep the fights short and the bodies cheap. Two to four scenes is a whole funnel: the disaster, a flight or a search, the thing at the heart of it. Play the losses for stakes but name them lightly, the funnel earns its heroes by spending the rest.

Six players, three villagers each: eighteen souls in a burning waystation as something climbs out of the well. The first room is a handful of giant rats, a rout that teaches the table how a Strike works and costs no one. The yard is a pack of nine ghouls, the main course: the villagers swarm them down over three rounds, but eight of the eighteen go under, dragged off or torn open. Ten reach the well, where the well-thing waits, a lone horror with thick hide. It is slow work, four rounds of pitchforks, and it fells two more before a fisher’s gaff finds its eye. Eight survivors climb out into the dark, no longer villagers.

3 From villager to hero

A survivor who reaches the end of the funnel chooses a playbook and takes its full level-1 grant budget, the trial just played becoming that character’s lifepath: the playbook’s origin and motivation questions are already answered in the fiction, so a player who wants to may skip the lifepath tables and keep what the funnel wrote. The villager’s one trade-skill folds into the playbook’s grant where it fits, or carries over as a sixth.

The bonds are the real prize. Whoever a survivor stood beside, dragged from the fire, or watched die, is the seed of the party-binding beat: point each new hero at another and ask what the funnel made between them. A party that met in a funnel never needs to explain why it travels together.