J.Quondam
CR 1/8
I always thought of "funnel" in the sense of something that directs a flow, as in "funnel the hapless newb adventurers to unexpected new careers as chunky salsa."Why in blazes are we calling these things funnels? You know, the adventures where you take a bunch of utterly unqualified characters and shove them through a dangerous situation until most of them die (often hilariously) and then the survivors get to be real PCs from then on? Essentially a winnowing process for aspiring adventurers, most popular in the more DCC-flavored parts of the OSR community.
That's not how a funnel works. If I pour thirty ounces of a substance into my funnel I'd better get thirty ounces out of it, not four with rest being eaten by monsters. It's not even a meat grinder, where I still expect to get about two pounds of ground beef out if I shove two pounds of chuck in. The terminology is all wrong.
This is really alluvial mining here. You're panning for player characters. The dungeon isn't a funnel, it's a mining sluice, disposing of the hopeless sand and unlucky gravel and leaving you a precious handful of viable PCs. It's just using the blood of its victims instead of water to do the job, which is a mental image I'm sure funnel-lovers would appreciate.
So no more funnels. Let's start seeing modules like "Blood Sluice of the Gore Mages" and debates about whether sluices are a terrible idea or not and whether the whole concept is truly Old School or modern parody based on faux nostalgia.
That said, "Blood Sluice of the Gore Mages" is clearly the superior terminology, and also I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
