01 Nov

Join the 2nd Annual Wild Homebrew Jam!

Artist: Nintendo

It’s that time of the year, once again !

Last year, we organized a fun event to celebrate both the then-newly-available GitHub Wiki, and the growth of the Reclaim the Wild community as a whole : the Wild Homebrew Jam !

For those unaware of what a “Jam” consists of, it’s a celebration of creation and content created by people, as a showlight of their creativity. Our last year’s example is still standing : The Global Game Jam is one of the biggest game design events of the year, dedicated to the creation of games in less than 3 days, around a specific thematic unknown to everyone before the Jam begins. We of course don’t expect people to work that quickly, so our own Jam lasts during all of November, from the 1st, to the 30th.

And as our domain isn’t exactly video games, but tabletop ones, we’re looking for homebrew content of any kind! It can go from new gameplay options (like new Races, Feats, Techniques, or Spells), to new adventures (like modules and encounters), to completely new rules or even systems! We’re open to mostly anything, with the sole conditions that your content must be original, safe for work, and wholly made by you withing the month of November!

Last year gave us multiple new adventures and dungeons, rules for grand-scale battles, multiples techniques, monsters and races, and even a complete Metroid conversion of the system!

As with last year, the developers and moderators are offering prizes for a select few high-quality submissions! Your content can get special recognition, be featured on the website, and even earn you a Nintendo eShop gift card!

This year, we even add a new twist with a theme ! While it’s completely optional for you to follow it, so people can still submit anything they created with their blossoming creativity, we hope it will give some inspiration boost !

Check out the rules below for more information, and we hope to see you hang out in our Discord, submitting some new homebrew!!

Rules

Submitting Homebrew

Submissions are open from November 1st to November 30th. We’ll announce the winners no later than December 15th on the main Reclaim the Wild website.

Submissions are made in the #jam-submissions channel of the Reclaim the Wild Discord server. The homebrewed content can be provided in any medium, be it a Discord Message, a GitHub Wiki submission, a Google Drive file, or even a YouTube video if you’re crazy enough. The only rule related to your submission is that you must have begun working on it in November. (The idea can be something you had before, but as a an agreement between ladies, gentlemen, and scholars of all stripes, please don’t use homebrew content you had begun work on before the jam.)

Theme

This year, we’re also introducing an optional theme. It’s our hope that providing this theme will help kickstart your creativity and provide some inspiration.

This year’s optional theme is… STEAM.

You may ask, “what do you mean by ‘steam’? That could mean any number of things!” And you would be correct! In fact, we hope to see lots of different interpretations of that theme. Just for some examples, you could make…

  • Rules for building steam-engine trains!
  • A new ‘Sauna’ building!
  • An adventure centered around food ingredients that grant a ‘Steamed’ benefit!
  • An article about romance in Hyrulean cultures!
  • A steam-powered robot boss fight!
  • Or even write up a guild full of NPCs, dedicated to teaching young would-be Heroes the power of science, technology, engineering, art, and math!

All of the above would qualify as fitting the theme of “STEAM”.

Remember, the theme is optional. Your Homebrew entry does not have to fit this theme at all – it is totally optional. However, all Homebrew entries that fit the theme will be eligible for an additional prize this year – the “Steamiest Homebrew” award!

Feedback & Collaboration

An important part of making homebrewed content is getting feedback on it, and collaborating on it with other community members. And we want to encourage that in the Wild Homebrew Jam! However, we also want it to be fair, and not impact the judging of submitted homebrew.

We encourage you to request feedback and iteration on your homebrew content, in our #resource-revue and #resource-discussion Discord channels. It’s a good way to make your homebrew stronger! As part of that, you may also obtain feedback from Developers and Moderators. We’ll do our best to provide good feedback, but Developers and Moderators won’t be collaborating with you, or doing significant work on your homebrew. Their feedback is available to everyone as a resource.

When submitting, please confirm if you decided to use the theme or not.

You can submit content as a team or group, but please keep in mind that the prizes won’t be multiplied by the number of individuals who worked on the submission.

Voting

Voting will take place from December 1st through December 10th.

During the voting phase, every homebrew will be added (by moderators or developers) to the new Homebrew Wiki, in their own “Homebrew Jam Submissions” category, and each of them will be linked in a #jam-votes channel. Members of the Discord will be able to vote for their favorite Homebrews through a special “upvote” emote added for the occasion. Users can vote for as many homebrews as they want.

(Please do not use sock puppet accounts, vote-brigading from other servers, or other unscrupulous activities to manipulate the votes – the moderators and developers reserve the right to remove submissions from prize consideration and/or from the wiki if we detect these behaviors, or other negative behavior, at our sole discretion.)

You’re welcome to make multiple submissions throughout the month, but any individual community member will only win a single prize. If you would win multiple prizes, we’ll gladly celebrate your accomplishments, but whatever other prizes you would’ve won will instead go to those next in line.

Prizes

We’ll be providing the following prizes for some of the most impressive, coolest, and most fun homebrew content submitted during the Wild Homebrew Jam!

  • First, every homebrew will receive a “Homebrew Jam” tag for their entry on the Wiki, and every homebrewer will receive a “Homebrew Jam Participant” role on our Discord.
  • The top three homebrew (as measured by Discord vote count) will receive a $20 Nintendo eShop gift card code. They will also receive a “Homebrew Jam Winner” label on the Wiki.
  • One homebrew (that was not one of the top three voted) will be labeled “Developer’s Choice,” as chosen by Elemental Knight, May, and Milly. This Developer’s Choice homebrew will receive a $20 Nintendo eShop gift card code, and a “Developer’s Choice” label on the Wiki.
  • Last, but not least, we will also reward the “Steamiest” entry! It might not have been a community favorite, it might not even be strictly speaking the best Steam-themed homenbrew submitted, but it sure was the most thematic! This Homebrew, too, will receive a $20 Nintendo eShop gift card code, and a “Steamiest” label on the WIki.

Finally, the top three voted homebrew, and the Developer’s Choice homebrew, will be featured on the main website over the course of December and January.

(Winners may instead opt for a different gift card, e.g. Amazon, Sony, XBox, etc.; or we can donate the money to a recognized charity of your choice, e.g. the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, etc.. Values provided are USD.)

The Developers of Reclaim the Wild and its Discord community Moderators are not eligible for these prizes, excepting the “Homebrew Jam” tag for their homebrew entries on the Wiki.