Finally, we present the first-place winner of the Wild Homebrew Jam! This is Vader’s “New Race: Guardian Scout“!
With Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity fresh in everyone’s minds, Vader came out of nowhere with a write-up for a playable Guardian Scout race – and grabbed the hearts (and votes!) of the community, much as the adorable egg-shaped Guardian did in the game’s trailers.
More than ‘just a robot’, as one might be able to make with a suite of Talking Animal features, this Guardian Scout race allows a Hero to feel like they’re truly made from the same stuff as the Guardians that terrorized Link throughout the original Breath of the Wild – not only the Scouts and their anxiety-inducing lasers, but the Blights that infest the Divine Beasts, as well.
Speaking with Vader, he shared this about his thought process:
So I had a couple things I kept in mind when making my contest entry. One of them was having good presentation, which I won’t get into too much since that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual homebrew content itself, it just makes it more easily digestible and appealing to look at. This is mostly relevant when you’re giving it to other people to use, or when you’re trying to garner support in a contest setting.
Regarding the Guardian race itself, for me it was very important that I make something with a ‘mechanical draw’. That is, a mechanic that is unique to this race and makes you want to play it over other races. And this is easy enough to do if you’re just looking at the bestiary entry and translating that over to a player race (which I did with a couple of the Scout’s techs and spells), or you just think about it long enough for something not represented in the bestiary.
But just translating a bestiary entry is kind-of boring. I wanted to go above and beyond that to make something truly unique (and to serve as my ace-in-the-hole for the contest). So, I thought more deeply about what constitutes a Guardian and realized that the Scourges are basically Guardians themselves, and I could base a series of feats, techniques, and spells off of them. It was an inspired choice, and one that I feel adds a lot of flavor, mechanical depth, and even replayability to what would otherwise be a one-note race entry. I can imagine someone reading my homebrew and thinking “huh, I hadn’t thought about that before, but that makes sense,” and having their own imagination sparked, for both the character and mechanical possibilities.
If you’d like to see a Guardian Scout Hero in your next Reclaim the Wild game, be sure to check out the race here.
