Squeezing a 100-person online gauntlet into a DCC funnel
The VALLEY 100 gains a new lease of life
The Baron’s Sport is a 0-level funnel adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC).
Designed for roughly 20 0-level characters, this is an approachable take on DCC's famous funnel format, where players start with a handful of characters each, expecting most to perish to a fantasy meatgrinder.
Game designer Alfred Valley (Lay On Hands, Thousand Empty Light) has teamed up with the board game review channel Shut Up and Sit Down to release a video breaking down Dungeon Crawl Classics through its unique use of the funnel.
Valley describes DCC as "late night D&D, when our usual programming shifts into something wild and raw and strangely familiar."
The funnel speaks of a game that understands how truly messed up a dungeon is and decides to lean into it.
Released to coincide with this video explainer, The Baron's Sport is an adaptation of a 100 person gauntlet Valley ran exclusively over Bluesky in February this year. Named the #VALLEY100, this sprawling and ambitious social experiment involved hundreds of interactions and resulted in some 25,000 words of action, with many characters meeting their demise in sudden and silly ways.
“I died in an instant. Satisfactorily, gloriously, stupidly.” – Johan Nohr (MÖRK BORG)
In The Baron's Sport, the players’ unlucky characters have been unceremoniously ‘arrested’ by the Baron’s lackeys and imprisoned in his castle. To begin his personal gauntlet they will be released from their cells, only to be faced with a series of weird and devious challenges.
The Baron's Sport releases 31st July 2025. It includes a free, barebones version to allow potential GMs to get the feel for it.
