The Spartan Way / Tabletop Games

• Inquisitors, especially the High ones (those that have supernatural powers) in Anima: Beyond Fantasy, are said to suffer since childhood a training so hard, including of course religious indoctrination, that few survive the ordeal — those less worthy end up as guards of the place.
• Clan Trueborn in BattleTech are Designer Babies grown in batches of a hundred using Uterine Replicators. They are grown to a specific branch of the Clans' military (infantry, mecha, aerospace) and then repeatedly pitted against each other in live-fire training to determine their fitness. Finally, they are tested against full-blown warriors in a live-fire Trial of Position in order to graduate. On average, twenty Trueborn every batch graduate and become members of the Warrior Caste. Around fifty wash out and are reassigned to another caste for life. The remaining thirty wash out feet-first. Given that Clan society is built on Asskicking Leads to Leadership where a Warrior's shelf life is twenty years at best before they either enter Clan politics or get assigned to a solahma unit, it is seen as entirely natural for Trueborn to learn how this works from early childhood. 'Nicer' Clans like the Ghost Bears and Hell's Horses are known for offering someone who failed to graduate a chance to transfer to a different branch of Warrior training and try again. For example, someone who fails to meet the requirements to be a mechwarrior could go into tank or aerospace fighter training and try again. Failing the second time still sees them reassigned, though.
  • Clan Freeborn (i.e. natural births) from any Caste are also technically allowed to test in as Warriors... Technically. While having to go through the same training they suffer Fantastic Racism (though how much depends on the Clan), tend to get stuck with the worst instructors and the oldest equipment, have to play catch up to their Trueborn peers since they haven't been trained from birth (and the Trueborn never go easy on them; rather the opposite), and even if they successfully graduate they can never be Bloodnamed and as such never obtain officer rank.
• Dark Sun, a setting for Dungeons & Dragons, is so ridiculously harsh that simply living there has effectively indoctrinated every living creature on the planet, sentient and otherwise, in The Spartan Way. Drained of life by the native version of magic, something like 90% of the planet is desert — even the seas have been boiled dry and their beds filled with silt, and a given locale is lucky to see a meager shower of rain once a year. Metal is so rare that bone, rock and chitin are the accepted standard for weapons and armor (not that anyone wears armor, it's just too hot). Temperatures range from 110 degrees in the morning to 150 degrees by late afternoon. Just about everything smarter than a rock has some degree of psychic power, and every plant and animal, even the ones that don't eat flesh, is capable of killing you. The Githyanki, a xenophobic, egotistical, psychic Proud Warrior Race that happily crosses blades with every nasty the multiverse has to offer, invaded Athas once. And promptly ran away with their tails tucked between their legs, then sealed up the portal and told everybody else to stay the hell away from this crazy place. "God made Athas to test the faithful" would be a good analogy if Athas had any deities (in AD&D it was unknown whether it'd ever had any, while in 4th edition they'd been killed or driven away by elemental spirits known as primordials), with the closest thing its priests serve being elemental powers. Or to put it succinctly, during the AD&D era, Dark Sun was the only published setting to start characters at 3rd level, while "encouraging" players to have back-up characters ready.
• The GURPS: Black Ops sourcebook has the Academy, the hidden training center where the Company sends it's recruits to make Black Ops out of them. The training program is ridiculously intensive, requires the equivalent of at least two doctorate degrees in book learning, learning at least two additional languages, mastery of martial arts, qualification with virtually every known weapon (the combat specialists are required to learn everything up to and including nuclear weapons engineering) as well as expert social and infiltration skills. The physical drills include the standard "dropped naked in the wilderness" test (nicknamed "Summer Camp"), exercises (simulated torture, and occasionally not-so-simulated torture) to test a cadet's resistance to mental stress, and a team-building exercise in which a squad of cadets are attached to a six-foot log via a steel chain, which they must learn to maneuver around hallway corners, through doorways, and up and down stairwells while being fired at with live ammo. There's also things like spending six days escorting around a poorly-sealed box full of poisonous spiders while dodging robot snipers, or being forced to stage a firefight with live ammo in a warehouse, without being told that all the crates are full of glass bottles full of benzene and rolled-up newspapers. (And you're not allowed to leave the warehouse until you've finished the exercise... even if it is on fire.) Usually, only about half of the recruits make it through all five years of training with their lives and sanity intact. The general effect of this is that most Black Ops can face impossible challenges and unspeakable horrors, and go "I've been through worse."
• One of the (many) reasons the 3E Ravenloft supplement Champions of Darkness is the object of massive fan derision is that it claimed Strahd von Zarovich trains his spellcasting minions this way, by trapping them in a hellish prison surrounded by toxic vapors, and leaving them there until they either die or gain enough levels to teleport out.
• The Maduri caste of Rocket Age's Mars traditionally form its entire military force. They live incredibly hard lives from a very young age and continue to do so, despite being one of the higher castes in traditional society.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The training of Space Marines would almost take this to the point of parody, if it did not portray it so chillingly. Aspirants, pre- or barely post-pubescent children, must run a gauntlet of lethal physical and mental challenges, then survive a series of brutal physical, mental and spiritual tests before they're even considered. While they're still undergoing physical augmentation, neophytes take to the field as part of the chapter's Scout Company, infiltrating behind enemy lines or supporting their brothers in battle as light infantry. If they survive their first couple decades of war, maybe one in a hundred of the original aspirants will don the Powered Armor of a full-fledged Space Marine. The training never stops, either; Marines not on campaign spend their days in live-fire exercises, tactical indoctrination and prayer, with a whopping four hours of sleep (and fifteen minutes of free time, if the Chapter Master is feeling generous). The only reason they can actually keep their numbers up is the sheer scale of the Imperium- four potential recruits from a single planet is an exceptionally good haul, but multiply that by billions of planets housing trillions of angry, sociopathic fighters and you can see how some Chapters have problems keeping themselves under the prescribed 1000-man limit (and some don't even use it). Some examples include:
    • The Blood Angels initiation involves the stunted inhabitants of Baal trekking across a radioactive desert and climbing a mountain in a bulky rad-suit, surviving a gladiatorial tournament, and immediately meditating for three days without food or water, with any who fall sleep being executed. Then they're put in a coma and spend a year in a blood-filled coffin while transforming into a Space Marine; a majority of applicants will suffer fatal mutations as their bodies reject these changes, while others will awaken prematurely and go insane from the experience. The flaws in this methodology are put on full display when a bloody civil war leaves the Blood Angels near extinction because they can't replace their losses fast enough, forcing them to beg or order their successor chapters to give them some recruits.
    • For the Space Wolves, dying is actually a prerequisite for joining. Their homeworld of Fenris is kept in a primitive state, encouraging inter-tribal warfare among its Viking-like societies. Sufficiently valorous young warriors who fall in battle are taken from the field, revived, and subjected to the usual Space Marine testing process. On top of this, the would-be Space Wolf must also learn to master his inner beast, lest he degenerate into a lupine abomination.
    • Unlike other chapters, the Space Wolves group their newest members into fully-armored Blood Claw and Sky Claw packs (equivalent to the Assault Bikes or jetpack-wearing Assault Marines respectively), headstrong young glory hounds seeking to distinguish themselves and earn promotion. Their scout equivalents are actually older, more experienced warriors. This also continues all the way through their career; Space Wolf packs are set in stone at the Bloodclaw stage and they can never replace lost squad members. This is why Bloodclaws usually number 15-20, Grey Hunters (the next step) having from 10-5, and the eldest Longfangs having just barely 5 man squads; centuries of war prune the weaker members of the pack, leaving only the exceptionally strong. Lone Wolves are those who lost their entire pack to a random disaster, and have gone insane from the experience (and, along with Wolf Guards, are the only exceptions) and isolation, and are Death Seekers to the point where if they aren't killed in battle the enemy gets Victory Points.
    • The Ultramarines version includes a Secret Test of Character; an aspirant is taken to a world completely unlike the one they were recruited from (a Feral World from a Hive World, for instance) and given an impossible task; the real goal isn't to complete it, but to adapt as a Jack of All Stats Space Marine would. A second test involves a duel with a full-fledged Space Marine, to see how the aspirant handles defeat.
    • Upon his resurrection, Roboute Guilliman (Primarch of the Ultramarines) expresses his distaste for these methods on two levels: on the macro level he finds it pointlessly cruel to deliberately leave citizens of the Imperium in a hostile, practically destitute state for the comparatively small number of recruits gained that actually become Space Marines (and he also points out that this makes such worlds ripe fodder for Chaos worshipers because many of the people would turn to anything that offered a better life), while on the micro level he points out that considering just how difficult actually converting a baseline human into a superhuman Space Marine is (including, among other things, multiple surgeries to implant the various additional organs), any "benefits" gained from the applicant's harsh upbringing simply aren't worth it. Considering his Ultramarines are some of the best the Imperium has and their domain of Ultramar is actually the nicest part of the Imperium to live in, and it's hard to argue his point.
  • Fabius Bile, premier Apothecary for the Chaos Space Marine legions, has devised training and recruitment programs that put loyalist practices to shame — he's whittled his success rate to 0.1% and is working hard to make the odds longer.
  • Grey Knights' training, on the other hand, would make even him proud. On top of all the physical training a normal Space Marine goes through, and on top of all the extra mental training a Space Marine psyker goes through, they must endure 666 mental and spiritual tortures to ensure that the survivors are utterly incorruptible daemon hunters.
    • The Exorcists are a successor Chapter of the Grey Knights who get an extra step to their initiation: the recruit gets a denizen of the Warp summoned into their body which is then exorcized. Despite the What Could Possibly Go Wrong? premise, it actually works often enough that it's maintained, as the resulting process makes Exorcists invisible to all but the strongest of daemons.
  • The Catachan Jungle Fighters of the Imperial Guard have a pretty straightforward initiation: survive to adulthood on Catachan.
  • The Last Chancers are a penal legion that undergoes training comparable to that of Space Marines. Colonel Schaeffer takes the best of the best from the worst of the worst (thousands upon thousands of military criminals who he thinks might be useful for whatever mission might be handed him), ending up with what in any other setting would amount to Surprisingly Elite Cannon Fodder. Then he takes them through one hellish battlefield after another to separate the "elite" from the "fodder." The survivors get to join him in undertaking really important suicide missions given by the Inquisition which any sane commander would have sent Death Watch or Grey Knights to do instead.
  • The Eldar take on this trope is slightly different: they don't have the numbers to take a pool of untried applicants and kill off the incapable, so they use psychic training to produce the same result with just as much pain and suffering, but no casualties.
  • Drukhari, also called the Dark Eldar, have a surprisingly civilian version of this. They're known to artificially inflate their numbers and have these souls join the civilian population, believing that the cream of the crop will rise up and will then make the best recruits of the kabals, wych cults, or haemonculus covens. In their city, where madness, death, pain, murder, torture, and slavery are all so commonplace as to be banal, and even a cornerstone of their society, the most meritorious Drukhari is synonymous with the most murderous and devious.
  • The Tau Fire Caste is composed entirely of soldiers inducted into the Tau military, given basic training, and sent into combat. After four years of active duty they're eligible for a variable Trial By Fire, which they'll either fail and remain at the current standing, fail and die, or pass and become battlesuit pilots. Another four years and another Trial earns them a spot as unit leader, and after their third Trial they're considered a general-in-training. Only a full Shas'O is allowed to retire from the Tau military and become a teacher or advisor, everyone else serves until death. However, it's heavily downplayed compared to other examples here. In contrast to the Imperium, the Tau control a spec of galactic space and can't afford to throw bodies into a grinder to sort the wheat from the chaff; consequently, their training is more comprehensive and their equipment much better. Pound for pound, a green Fire Warrior strike team will walk all over a green Imperial Guard regiment, and they have the numbers advantage enough to give a Marine Scout squad a run for their money.
  • Averted with orks, who are genetically engineered to be the ultimate warriors- they don't need training, just more fighting (which their fellow orks are happy to provide).
  • Similarly to the Orks, the Tyranids are all designed to slaughter and devour (at least all the Tyranids that have been seen) and are also fully united under a single Hive Mind. However, the Hive Mind will occasionally invoke this trope by making parts of the Hive Fleets go to war against each other. In-universe, the explanation is that the Hive Mind is culling weak elements out of its swarms and strengthening those that survive (out of universe, this is just to give players an excuse to have Tyranid vs Tyranid battles).
• This trope applies to the Black Guard of the Dark Elves in Warhammer fantasy. They are taken from their mothers at birth so they don't form any attachment to their families, then as soon as they are old enough, they are forced to fight each other to the death so that only the strongest survive. Those who live are somewhat prone to murdering one another, this being a recognised way of rising through the ranks. If they make it through two hundred years of service — and it is implied many don't — they can look forward to a high position at the Witch King's court, not that such a position increases one's life expectancy. They're an interesting lot.
• The Get of Fenris in Werewolf: The Apocalypse are this trope to a T. They actively terrorize young cubs and deliberately push them past their breaking point to force them to overcome their weaknesses. Very notably it is the tribe that probably has the most washouts who fail and join another tribe. The Blood Talons in Werewolf: The Forsaken aren't quite as bad, but their initiation rites are deliberately designed to leave you badly scarred.