Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Growing Vines Dungeon

Next in our series featuring the winners of the Wild Homebrew Jam is Dethnite007’s “Growing Vines Dungeon“!

As mentioned in the previous winner’s article, we always wanted Reclaim the Wild to have some easily-accessible homebrew modules. Dethnite007’s module looks to serve that purpose by giving us a “puzzle-box” dungeon – that is, a dungeon much like one might find in a typical Zelda title.

Dethnite’s module is unique in that it reimagines a location we know from the original game, back in the time following the first Calamity. As a proper Zelda Dungeon, it offers puzzles both subtle (growing and burning vines to access new areas of the dungeon) and obvious (such as a classic sliding block puzzle). The variety of puzzles involved is solid, and should appeal to different types of problem-solving players – though of course, as this is a tabletop game, don’t be surprised if your players come up with some truly ‘out of the box’ solutions!

Speaking with Dethnite, they had this to share:

Honestly I just did this to see how hard it actually is to make a Zelda style puzzle box. I guess the process was just a lot of trial and error to make the player pathing connect properly while there still being a reason to shift the dungeon layout.

If there’s anything I learned from this, it’s that a lot of time goes into making the dungeons we play in Legend of Zelda games and having more than one Link in the dungeon really does break the whole thing, as my players have taught me. Of course, now that I’ve built a rudimentary version of one, I’m gonna have to go bigger and better for my players next time.

And they relayed this, from the adventure’s artist, StarNightGazer:

It was fun imagining a big baddie for players to go against at the end of their trial. Zelda bosses are memorable and I wanted to create one just like them and bring it to life as best as I could and keep a theme to its respective dungeon.

If you’d like to put your players’ wits to the test, remember to check out the Growing Vines dungeon here.