A few weeks ago I listened to Mike Shea talk about running a Ravenloft “funnel” for Halloween. And around the same time one of the players in my newly started Drakkenheim campaign had written up an elaborate backstory which had his character escaping from Drakkenheim as the meteor hit the city. As with peanut butter and chocolate, these two should go together quite well.

So first I need a way to generate a bunch of level 0 A5E characters. I have done some searching, but have not found anything yet. I may end up writing a tool, stay tuned.

I will do more research but it seems that it would go like this: have a pile of pregenerated characters, hand out one to each player. Roll initiative, the entire thing will be done in rounds (much like Shadowdark).

I am still trying to decide if I should have just one giant table, or split it apart into a table of encounters and a table of scenery. I am leaning towards the former in the interests of simplicity: one roll each round. But regardless, roll d100 plus the number of rounds played. The encounter table will be laid out to escalate, more difficult encounters are located at the end of the table, which will obviously go well past 100. Paint the scene, and run the encounter.

If a character dies, the player will grab a new one, and play proceeds.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

I was thinking of various ways to track progress towards a goal, but I have concluded the best way to do this is to set a real world timer. When that timer goes off, finish the current encounter, you have reached the city gates and have gotten to safety! You could measure the “success” of the game by counting how many rounds it took, the body count, or how many rounds each character survived.

I have a spreadsheet I am using to collect ideas for the encounter table. Suggestions welcome!