Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Reclaim the Bounty

Next in our series featuring the winners of the Wild Homebrew Jam is Maddie’s total conversion mod, “Reclaim the Bounty“!

I’ve been told multiple times that Reclaim the Wild could be used to run a tabletop RPG in “any Nintendo franchise”. I usually demurred, saying that each franchise had enough quirks and gameplay differences that you’d be better off making a whole-new RPG from scratch.

So of course Maddie had to go and prove me wrong with her Reclaim the Bounty homebrew! These races, items, and rules allow you to play a Metroid game using Reclaim the Wild. Races from all over the galaxy, classic Metroid items, even the notion of “rolling into a ball to maneuver through tight spaces”, it’s all here.

I spoke with Maddie at length about this project; the full interview is below.

I started off with a simple question: “Why Metroid, of all things?”

I got into TTRPGs around the release of Metroid Prime Hunters, and the setting and theme was super neat to me, and when you have a game with multiple playable races, or at least the representatives of them, that makes a pretty great fit, yeah? As for Metroid as a whole, I feel like the setting has a lot of potential! You have exploration, lore, puzzles, a slow growth in ability and power! Seems like a pretty good framework to me! And then there’s the factor of all the mechanics in RtW that loan themselves particularly well to the system. Readily usable elemental attacks that don’t have to be spells, lore analysis of enemies, and even curling up into a ball! And RtW is super well made for modification and adaptation! Seems natural to me.

I also asked her about her design process:

I typically try to either use a formula where possible or just… go with what feels best. For example, I know exactly how much damage the Missile Launcher or Battlehammer (Kinetic Beam in the module) does from Metroid Prime Hunters multiplayer mode, or the Dark Beam from Echoes, but how hard does the Shinespark burst hit, or the Ice Beam charge combo in Super? Well, we have an idea about what that’s supposed to kill or how many uses it takes to kill certain qualities of enemy.

There’s also the fantasy aspect, what would we want to do if we were making our own Hunters? And what sorts of challenges or exploits does one expect to have or do by the merit of the setting, what aspects of the original games do we want to see? And from that I just… try to intuit it the best I can, try to picture how I’d want it to feel or seem if I was playing.

I apply that approach to most of my work, generally. I try to make the things I’d want to play, so I can play them and to share them with others!